First, unions don’t prevent mass layoffs. They might help make things more manageable and help some individuals in need but layoffs are entirely at the discretion of the business.
And second, the industry is contracting because it hasn’t innovated in more than 5 years now. There is no growth vector but loads of people who aren’t producing value (not their fault, there is nothing to produce). Of course, better protection for employees is always needed, but as someone who watched an european company reduce its workforce from 110k people to 19k over the course of 3 years in early 2010s, i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.
This is what we’re seeing now: the work is simply not needed.
First, unions don’t prevent mass layoffs. They might help make things more manageable and help some individuals in need but layoffs are entirely at the discretion of the business.
"There are several ways that unionization’s impact on wages goes beyond the workers covered by collec-
tive bargaining to affect nonunion wages and labor practices. For example, in industries and occupations
where a strong core of workplaces are unionized, nonunion employers will frequently meet union
standards or, at least, improve their compensation and labor practices beyond what they would have
provided if there were no union presence. This dynamic is sometimes called the “union threat effect,”
the degree to which nonunion workers get paid more because their employers are trying to forestall
unionization.
There is a more general mechanism (without any specific “threat”) in which unions have affected
nonunion pay and practices: unions have set norms and established practices that become more generalized
throughout the economy, thereby improving pay and working conditions for the entire workforce. This has
been especially true for the 75% of workers who are not college educated. Many “fringe” benefits,
such as pensions and health insurance, were first provided in the union sector and then became more
generalized—though, as we have seen, not universal. Union grievance procedures, which provide
“due process” in the workplace, have been mimicked in many nonunion workplaces. Union wage-
setting, which has gained exposure through media coverage, has frequently established standards of
what workers generally, including many nonunion workers, expect from their employers. Until, the
mid-1980s, in fact, many sectors of the economy followed the “pattern” set in collective bargaining
agreements. As unions weakened, especially in the manufacturing sector, their ability to set broader
patterns has diminished. However, unions remain a source of innovation in work practices (e.g.,
training, worker participation) and in benefits (e.g., child care, work-time flexibility, sick leave)."
i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.
You are not a union, you cannot stop a business from doing anything, together with your fellow workers however you can dictate anything about the behavior of your company that you and your fellow workers feel sufficiently passionate about enough to fight for.
And second, the industry is contracting because it hasn’t innovated in more than 5 years now.
Why should an industry bother innovating to increase dividends to shareholders with expensive and risky new technological ventures when it can just keep slashing labor costs and crushing employees under their foot? There is no economic incentive to innovate when unions don’t have the power to make executives think about choosing other less difficult paths than trying to directly reduce the quality of life of the companies employees.
you can dictate anything about the behavior of your company that you and your fellow workers feel sufficiently passionate about enough to fight for.
no! That’s not how unions work in capitalism. A union can’t decide the business side of things. There’s a clear separation of responsibilities. There are, of course, other types of societies in which workers have this power, by then there’s not really a point in debating the role of the union in that case.
There is no economic incentive to innovate when unions don’t have the power to make executives think about choosing other less difficult paths than trying to directly reduce the quality of life of the companies employees.
Union-lead society wide innovation for the sake of the current workforce is probably the dumbest thing i’ve read in a while.
no! That’s not how unions work in capitalism. A union can’t decide the business side of things. There’s a clear separation of responsibilities
Ahahahaha right, I love how you just accept the legally defined rights of what a union can do and what it can’t as if those laws in any given country aren’t just a record of the battlefield between the working class and the ruling class. A union can do whatever the fuck a union wants to do, and the law will attempt to constrain it in favor of the ruling class and capitalists to the degree that is politically tenable in a given environment. Sometimes it will be successful, sometimes it will fail, but unions fundamentally exist outside of capitalism because they have a level of legitimacy that capitalism and the idea of owning other people’s labor will never have.
It hardly needs to be said that like libraries, if unions didn’t already exist as a concept there is no way they would be legal at all if they were developed in this day and age. Unions are only ever temporarily legal along limited contexts under capitalism.
Union-lead society wide innovation for the sake of the current workforce is probably the dumbest thing i’ve read in a while.
high five solidarity my friend, even when you insult my intelligence you are still far more my friend than my boss will ever be
Sorry, i wasn’t aware you were advocating for Anarcho-syndicalism. I thought we were having a conversation in good faith about the current situation. Good luck with your revolution
The rest of us have work to do to end the violence.
I cannot imagine a world without oppression, this is true. However, I grew up long ago in a world where oppression came from those who said they’d overthrow it last time. They were using the same ideas you flaunt around and much like you (or whomever the person I was talking to before was), they had superficial understanding of what they were advocating for.
Sarcasm: Oh well, better just throw our hands up and allow right wing authoritarians to pursue their narrow minded cycles of exploitation and heirarchal domination. /s
They’ll say the work is not needed. That’s because the workload gets pushed to whoever is left. Is there a way you go from 110k employees to 20k and have no workload increase at all without some suffering some deficiencies somewhere in the product. Doubt it.
Another thing is who decides what the employees work on. “Industry hasn’t innovated in x years” okay that’s on CEO/management they decide what products to invest time in. It seems all that’s left are barbarians in these companies. Possibly the visionaries have long been layed off it seems?
because it isn’t. Product lines which were supposed to grow and bring profit have become stagnant and useless. E.g. Alexa which was supposed to help amazon convince people to buy stuff but instead plays music in the morning. Normally there would be another growing sector to relocate the more overstaffed department but there isn’t. So.
Is there a way you go from 110k employees to 20k and have no workload increase at all without some suffering some deficiencies somewhere in the product. Doubt it.
That was done through closing down branches of the company which weren’t performing and automation in the rest. It wasn’t painless, far from it, but the point was that unions couldn’t stop it, not that it was fair or nice.
Another thing is who decides what the employees work on. “Industry hasn’t innovated in x years” okay that’s on CEO/management they decide what products to invest time in. It seems all that’s left are barbarians in these companies. Possibly the visionaries have long been layed off it seems?
sure, but what difference does it make? Yes, the stagnant technology market is directly the result of bad policies and poor investment. But that doesn’t help with the layoffs. That just is.
Normally there would be another growing sector to relocate the more overstaffed department but there isn’t.
Knowing Amazon quite well, there definitely are sectors that are seriously deficient even new emerging ones within Amazon seem deficient.
It wasn’t painless, far from it, but the point was that unions couldn’t stop it, not that it was fair or nice.
I agree it wasn’t painless in fact there is a high suicide rate within the computer sciences field. In fact it probably still isn’t painless. I also agree unions are useless but some government regulation wouldn’t be.
Layoffs really need to trigger instant strikes. It boggles my mind that it’s not something they negotiate and protect. “No layoffs without prior negotiation and approval of severance terms by vote.” Break the terms… instant strike.
i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.
Sure, it can, because I’m going to blow your mind: businesses aren’t about maximizing profits. It is ultimately about power, and money is a path to power. There are sometimes conflicts between power and money, though, and when there are, you can tell what they actually care about.
None of the recent layoffs at Tesla make any sense what so ever. The Supercharger network may be the company’s best long term asset–they just got most of the industry to adopt their plug, and they have the largest existing network to support all those new EVs–yet they just canned the entire Supercharger team. The Cybertuck may be a dumb vehicle, but it’s still sold out for the next year, and shrinking the production line isn’t going to help anything. Nor would it help sell more of any other models. A $25k Tesla would be a game changer in a market that the rest of the industry hasn’t really entered yet, but they just canned development on new models.
All while the company is still churning some kind of profit, even if it’s not as high as it was. These layoffs will absolutely have a long term impact on Tesla’s ability to compete at exactly the time when the rest of the industry is catching up with them.
Does it even improve stock price? Maybe a one day jump or one week jump, but TSLA has been mostly flat for the last year and doesn’t look like it’s going to return to growth. Only bright side is that its P/E ratio now looks almost reasonable.
None of this makes sense in terms of money. Barely does anything in the short term, and the long term damage is huge. This might be the beginning of the end of Tesla.
If it doesn’t make sense in terms of money, then what else would work in that slot? Power.
Wealth (whether it be “money”, resources, or anything else) and power are one and the same. Two sides of the same coin. Either one provides access to the other. I don’t think of them as separate or distinct at all… which is why it’s problematic for the aristocratic hoarders when plebes start to pool either and work collectively.
Oh, no, they’re not exactly the same. They wouldn’t come into conflict if they were the same.
As another example, unions. Employees often see issues early on; perhaps a machine needing maintenance. A union can bring this up to management and put the pressure on to get it done. The business will save money in the long run with machines in proper maintenance.
If it doesn’t get done, best case scenario is that it fails and the whole production line is shot until it’s fixed. Worst case, it fails more catastrophically and damages other equipment, or injures workers.
Despite plenty of stories like this, companies will fight unionization efforts every time. Why? Because money doesn’t always align with power.
Maybe something is getting lost in translation, but none of the things you mentioned seem to have anything to do with the point I’m making… so your ending claim that “money doesn’t always align with power” doesn’t seem related to anything I said or the scenario you posed…?
“Wealth and power are exactly the same”. This is the claim I’m disputing. If there are places where money and power are in conflict, then they can’t be the same. Your analysis of a situation will be have holes in it if this is not considered.
If your goal was to argue semantics then I don’t know why I’m entertaining this. Yes, in an imaginary society that is 1) somehow not influenced by modern society and 2) somehow also avoids currency - power dynamics will obviously take different shapes.
If you’d care to dive deeper I’d like to be challenged on this; but your previous example of “maintaining things can avoid unnecessary costs later” (as I understand it) doesn’t have anything to do with “money and power can be in conflict”.
First, unions don’t prevent mass layoffs. They might help make things more manageable and help some individuals in need but layoffs are entirely at the discretion of the business.
And second, the industry is contracting because it hasn’t innovated in more than 5 years now. There is no growth vector but loads of people who aren’t producing value (not their fault, there is nothing to produce). Of course, better protection for employees is always needed, but as someone who watched an european company reduce its workforce from 110k people to 19k over the course of 3 years in early 2010s, i can guarantee that nothing can stop a business from maximizing profits.
This is what we’re seeing now: the work is simply not needed.
"There are several ways that unionization’s impact on wages goes beyond the workers covered by collec- tive bargaining to affect nonunion wages and labor practices. For example, in industries and occupations where a strong core of workplaces are unionized, nonunion employers will frequently meet union standards or, at least, improve their compensation and labor practices beyond what they would have provided if there were no union presence. This dynamic is sometimes called the “union threat effect,” the degree to which nonunion workers get paid more because their employers are trying to forestall unionization.
There is a more general mechanism (without any specific “threat”) in which unions have affected nonunion pay and practices: unions have set norms and established practices that become more generalized throughout the economy, thereby improving pay and working conditions for the entire workforce. This has been especially true for the 75% of workers who are not college educated. Many “fringe” benefits, such as pensions and health insurance, were first provided in the union sector and then became more generalized—though, as we have seen, not universal. Union grievance procedures, which provide “due process” in the workplace, have been mimicked in many nonunion workplaces. Union wage- setting, which has gained exposure through media coverage, has frequently established standards of what workers generally, including many nonunion workers, expect from their employers. Until, the mid-1980s, in fact, many sectors of the economy followed the “pattern” set in collective bargaining agreements. As unions weakened, especially in the manufacturing sector, their ability to set broader patterns has diminished. However, unions remain a source of innovation in work practices (e.g., training, worker participation) and in benefits (e.g., child care, work-time flexibility, sick leave)."
https://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp143/
https://files.epi.org/page/-/old/briefingpapers/143/bp143.pdf
You are not a union, you cannot stop a business from doing anything, together with your fellow workers however you can dictate anything about the behavior of your company that you and your fellow workers feel sufficiently passionate about enough to fight for.
Why should an industry bother innovating to increase dividends to shareholders with expensive and risky new technological ventures when it can just keep slashing labor costs and crushing employees under their foot? There is no economic incentive to innovate when unions don’t have the power to make executives think about choosing other less difficult paths than trying to directly reduce the quality of life of the companies employees.
no! That’s not how unions work in capitalism. A union can’t decide the business side of things. There’s a clear separation of responsibilities. There are, of course, other types of societies in which workers have this power, by then there’s not really a point in debating the role of the union in that case.
Union-lead society wide innovation for the sake of the current workforce is probably the dumbest thing i’ve read in a while.
Ahahahaha right, I love how you just accept the legally defined rights of what a union can do and what it can’t as if those laws in any given country aren’t just a record of the battlefield between the working class and the ruling class. A union can do whatever the fuck a union wants to do, and the law will attempt to constrain it in favor of the ruling class and capitalists to the degree that is politically tenable in a given environment. Sometimes it will be successful, sometimes it will fail, but unions fundamentally exist outside of capitalism because they have a level of legitimacy that capitalism and the idea of owning other people’s labor will never have.
It hardly needs to be said that like libraries, if unions didn’t already exist as a concept there is no way they would be legal at all if they were developed in this day and age. Unions are only ever temporarily legal along limited contexts under capitalism.
high five solidarity my friend, even when you insult my intelligence you are still far more my friend than my boss will ever be
Sorry, i wasn’t aware you were advocating for Anarcho-syndicalism. I thought we were having a conversation in good faith about the current situation. Good luck with your revolution
Thank you!
Hey bud, if you cant imagine a world without [oppression] please step aside. The rest of us have work to do to end the violence. We know it’s time.
I cannot imagine a world without oppression, this is true. However, I grew up long ago in a world where oppression came from those who said they’d overthrow it last time. They were using the same ideas you flaunt around and much like you (or whomever the person I was talking to before was), they had superficial understanding of what they were advocating for.
What a boring, tired attempt.
Sarcasm: Oh well, better just throw our hands up and allow right wing authoritarians to pursue their narrow minded cycles of exploitation and heirarchal domination. /s
In fact, organizing non-heirarchal is quite proven. Doing so on a scale we’re discussing, and Truly Breaking the Cycle of the Planetary Work Machine well, see for yourself, there’s more imagining to do.
Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Truly Breaking the Cycle of the Planetary Work Machine
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
am attempt at what? not everyone has a hidden agenda, who are you talking to?
They’ll say the work is not needed. That’s because the workload gets pushed to whoever is left. Is there a way you go from 110k employees to 20k and have no workload increase at all without some suffering some deficiencies somewhere in the product. Doubt it.
Another thing is who decides what the employees work on. “Industry hasn’t innovated in x years” okay that’s on CEO/management they decide what products to invest time in. It seems all that’s left are barbarians in these companies. Possibly the visionaries have long been layed off it seems?
because it isn’t. Product lines which were supposed to grow and bring profit have become stagnant and useless. E.g. Alexa which was supposed to help amazon convince people to buy stuff but instead plays music in the morning. Normally there would be another growing sector to relocate the more overstaffed department but there isn’t. So.
That was done through closing down branches of the company which weren’t performing and automation in the rest. It wasn’t painless, far from it, but the point was that unions couldn’t stop it, not that it was fair or nice.
sure, but what difference does it make? Yes, the stagnant technology market is directly the result of bad policies and poor investment. But that doesn’t help with the layoffs. That just is.
Knowing Amazon quite well, there definitely are sectors that are seriously deficient even new emerging ones within Amazon seem deficient.
I agree it wasn’t painless in fact there is a high suicide rate within the computer sciences field. In fact it probably still isn’t painless. I also agree unions are useless but some government regulation wouldn’t be.
Yea everything is. Until it isn’t.
Layoffs really need to trigger instant strikes. It boggles my mind that it’s not something they negotiate and protect. “No layoffs without prior negotiation and approval of severance terms by vote.” Break the terms… instant strike.
Sure, it can, because I’m going to blow your mind: businesses aren’t about maximizing profits. It is ultimately about power, and money is a path to power. There are sometimes conflicts between power and money, though, and when there are, you can tell what they actually care about.
None of the recent layoffs at Tesla make any sense what so ever. The Supercharger network may be the company’s best long term asset–they just got most of the industry to adopt their plug, and they have the largest existing network to support all those new EVs–yet they just canned the entire Supercharger team. The Cybertuck may be a dumb vehicle, but it’s still sold out for the next year, and shrinking the production line isn’t going to help anything. Nor would it help sell more of any other models. A $25k Tesla would be a game changer in a market that the rest of the industry hasn’t really entered yet, but they just canned development on new models.
All while the company is still churning some kind of profit, even if it’s not as high as it was. These layoffs will absolutely have a long term impact on Tesla’s ability to compete at exactly the time when the rest of the industry is catching up with them.
Does it even improve stock price? Maybe a one day jump or one week jump, but TSLA has been mostly flat for the last year and doesn’t look like it’s going to return to growth. Only bright side is that its P/E ratio now looks almost reasonable.
None of this makes sense in terms of money. Barely does anything in the short term, and the long term damage is huge. This might be the beginning of the end of Tesla.
If it doesn’t make sense in terms of money, then what else would work in that slot? Power.
Wealth (whether it be “money”, resources, or anything else) and power are one and the same. Two sides of the same coin. Either one provides access to the other. I don’t think of them as separate or distinct at all… which is why it’s problematic for the aristocratic hoarders when plebes start to pool either and work collectively.
Oh, no, they’re not exactly the same. They wouldn’t come into conflict if they were the same.
As another example, unions. Employees often see issues early on; perhaps a machine needing maintenance. A union can bring this up to management and put the pressure on to get it done. The business will save money in the long run with machines in proper maintenance.
If it doesn’t get done, best case scenario is that it fails and the whole production line is shot until it’s fixed. Worst case, it fails more catastrophically and damages other equipment, or injures workers.
Despite plenty of stories like this, companies will fight unionization efforts every time. Why? Because money doesn’t always align with power.
Maybe something is getting lost in translation, but none of the things you mentioned seem to have anything to do with the point I’m making… so your ending claim that “money doesn’t always align with power” doesn’t seem related to anything I said or the scenario you posed…?
“Wealth and power are exactly the same”. This is the claim I’m disputing. If there are places where money and power are in conflict, then they can’t be the same. Your analysis of a situation will be have holes in it if this is not considered.
Shortsightedness driven by greed does not, in any way, negate money equaling power.
Then let me attack it from a different direction: can you have power in a society that does not have money?
Within that isolated society? Sure.
If your goal was to argue semantics then I don’t know why I’m entertaining this. Yes, in an imaginary society that is 1) somehow not influenced by modern society and 2) somehow also avoids currency - power dynamics will obviously take different shapes.
Do you realize how meaningless that example is?
If you’d care to dive deeper I’d like to be challenged on this; but your previous example of “maintaining things can avoid unnecessary costs later” (as I understand it) doesn’t have anything to do with “money and power can be in conflict”.