Category Archives: Labor

Amazon Borrows From FedEx Playbook To Smoke Union Drive In Bessemer, by Mark Solomon

Posted on April 12, 2021 | Leave a comment

The workers just didn’t believe they were exploited. From Mark Solomon at freightwaves.com:

News Analysis: Amazon wins big by playing to well-paid workers’ logic

There is no love lost between Jeff Bezos and Fred Smith, given the unpleasant break- up of their companies’ shipping marriage in 2019. Yet in decisively thwarting efforts to organize 5,800 workers at Amazon.com Inc.’s (NASDAQ:AMZN) Bessemer, Alabama warehouse, Bezos took a page right from the FedEx Corp. (NYSE:FDX) founder’s anti-union playbook.

Other than about 5,000 unionized pilots that came over after FedEx acquired the old Flying Tiger Line cargo airline in 1988, and a smattering of workers at its FedEx Freight LTL unit, FedEx has remained non-union for its 50-year history. Smith and Co. have beaten back multiple organizing efforts by persuading FedEx workers that wages, benefits, working conditions and an open-door relationship makes third-party bargaining units irrelevant. 

Amazon followed a similar strategy in Bessemer, where the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers Union (RWDSU) made the most serious effort to organize Amazon’s workers in its 27-year history. 

Amazon, which opened the warehouse in March 2020, paid the workers more than $15 an hour to start, almost twice the minimum wage. It offered good health insurance, a 401K plan, and opportunities for advancement.

With Bessemer being its first warehouse in Alabama, Amazon sought to show, or at least convey the impression, that it considered the workers more than just disposable assets. That’s an issue that has plagued the warehouse labor relations for decades until surging demand for e-commerce fulfillment flipped the script.

Amazon’s goal was to appeal to the workers’ collective common sense. The implied message was: What would union dues give you that the status quo couldn’t? Amazon hammered home the message every chance it got. It seemed to resonate with a workforce that sees the free-market pendulum swinging in its favor as demand for warehouse workers, and the prevailing wage to keep and attract them, continues to rise. 

“This particular union can’t give us anything that Amazon does not already offer,” LaVonette Stokes, a Bessemer worker who voted against unionizing said in an NPR story published Friday. “There are a [lot] of people who never have issues.” 

In the end, the company won big. Of the 2,536 workers who voted, 1,738 cast ballots against unionizing. The wide margin was surprising in light of the union’s aggressive campaign and pro-labor momentum that had built up in recent weeks. The pro-union sentiment included support from President Joe Biden, a near-unprecedented act from a sitting president.

“I knew the union was going to lose, but I didn’t think it would lose that badly,” said Kate Bronfenbrenner, director of labor education research at Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations. That a union election of such historical significance would draw less than half the eligible voters spoke volumes about the rank-and-file’s apparent lack of energy to be organized, Bronfenbenner said. The seeming ennui, Bronfenbrenner said, “is on the union.”

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“There Are Absolutely No Job Seekers”: How Trillions In Stimulus Sparked A Historic Job Market Crisis, by Tyler Durden

Posted on April 9, 2021 | 1 comment

Has the response to Covid-19 created a class of permanent, unemployable, couch potatoes? From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Something odd is going on in the US economy.

On one hand, in the aftermath of the covid pandemic there are millions and millions of former workers who have lost their jobs and are unable to return as their job may not even exist today (while their skills atrophy and they become increasingly unemployable with every day they are unemployed). Addressing this, on Thursday Fed Chair Powell spoke at an IMF panel saying that over nine million Americans remains out of work, while a quick look at the latest BLS data shows that there are over 100 million Americans who are out of the labor force (of whom just 6.85MM want a job currently, and a record 94 million don’t want a job).

At the same time, as we pointed out last night, JPMorgan and many others have noted that when one looks at the recent JOLTS data, which showed a near record number of job openings, a clear trend is emerging: there is a big labor shortage in the US, one which could (finally) lead to higher wages in the US.

While JPMorgan did not dwell on what may be causing this unprecedented schism within the economy – after all, for normalcy to return, people must not only be employed but must want to be employed – it did suggest that the “robust” government stimulus may be keeping workers on the sidelines, a more detailed analysis from Bloomberg confirms the nightmare scenario: the trillions in Biden stimulus are now incentivizing potential workers not to seek gainful employment, but to sit back and collect the next stimmy check for doing absolutely nothing in what is becoming the world’s greatest “under the radar” experiment in Universal Basic Income.

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NY State To Give Up To $2.1 Billion To Illegal Immigrants, by Tyler Durden

Posted on April 7, 2021 | Leave a comment

New York is giving money to illegal immigrants at the same time it’s raising taxes on it’s legal population. From Tyler Durden at zerohedge.com:

Just when you thought things couldn’t get more surreal, New York State’s democratic-party-dominated legislature decides to crank the virtue-signaling ‘equity’ amplifier up to 11.

Embattled Gov. Andrew Cuomo – desperate for any news to distract from his dueling sex abuse and nursing home death scandals (“Hey, want some pot?“) – struck a deal on Tuesday with New York Lawmakers to spend $2.1 billion towards to assist jobless workers who were excluded from unemployment benefits during the pandemic – primarily undocumented immigrants and ex-convicts, after activists launched several hunger strikes.

Lawmakers justified the stunning addition to the state’s broader $212 billion budget agreement, by claiming – as Lohud.com’s Tifany Cusac-Smith and David McKay Wilson report – many undocumented immigrants have not received aid such as stimulus checks or federal unemployment benefits during the pandemic, even though studies show that they pay billions of dollars in taxes each year.

The study in question – by The Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy – appears custom-tailored to justify classifying illegal immigrants as qualifying residents, as they claim tax revenues would skyrocket if currently illegal workers were suddenly made legal and paid taxes… legally?

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Bus Driver Economics, by Jeff Thomas

Posted on April 5, 2021 | Leave a comment

To turn one job into two jobs, split it in half and have each worker work half-time. Welcome to socialist economics. From Jeff Thomas at internationalman.com:

 

Bus Driver Economics
 

Economics should not be an especially difficult subject to understand. In essence, it’s simply the study of how money functions. However, academics, theoreticians, politicians, and financial leaders all stand to benefit if they can manage to complicate the basic principles and muddy the waters of economic comprehension.

No individual has been manifestly more successful at this than the economist John Maynard Keynes. Educated at Cambridge, a bastion of Socialist thinking, Mister Keynes famously published The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money in 1936, forever changing the world’s perception of economics.

This was quite an amazing feat, especially as Mister Keynes’s goal was not to explain economics, as had traditionally been the object of the subject; his goal was to distort the study of economics—to confuse economic principles in order to promote socialist concepts.

Socialism had, since its beginnings, been unpopular with many people, as it clearly did not work economically. So, in order to make socialism more broadly acceptable, Mister Keynes, in his book, suggested essentially that, although 2 + 2 = 4, with socialism, 2 + 2 could somehow equal 5.

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The Illegal Immigration Crisis: It’s All About New Covid Lockdowns, by Brandon Smith

Posted on March 21, 2021 | Leave a comment

Have the new world order types created an immigration crisis in order to institute more lockdowns and other totalitarian measures? From Brandon Smith at alt-market.com:

In multiple articles I have published recently I outlined why an attempt at a new national covid lockdown in the US is inevitable. In my article ‘The Real Reasons Why Millions Of Americans Will Defy Covid Mandates And Vaccines’, I examined new polling numbers which show that a vast portion of the US population is refusing to comply with medical controls. The bottom line is this: Covid is a non-threat to 99.7% of the public, and the citizenry is getting wise to this fact. However, there are certain people that NEED the pandemic lockdowns to continue regardless of what the public wants.

The Biden Administration and its globalist handlers have BIG plans for the next few years, and all of it relies on pandemic fears and totalitarian restrictions.

The “Great Reset”, as Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum calls it, is never going to happen unless global populations are locked down and placed under control. Unconstitutional pieces of legislation that undermine or destroy the 2nd Amendment, like HR 127, will be impossible to enact if Americans are organized and unified to resist. Carbon taxation and “shared economy” policies will never be allowed to touch ground. Conservative Americans and many moderates will stamp out such measures like cockroaches within their own states. Law enforcement agencies in most areas would have no interest in being used as cannon fodder to enforce them.

The only option the globalists have at this stage is to barrel forward with the pandemic narrative despite the fact that Covid has turned out to be a hollow issue with a death rate of 0.26% outside of nursing home patients. At least half the country is ready to revolt over the mandates, and almost half the country is refusing to take the vaccines or accept medical passports. That is millions of people that are laughing in the face of the Reset agenda.

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More California cities experiment with “hero pay” leading to predictable results, by Jazz Shaw

Posted on March 14, 2021 | Leave a comment

A business can’t afford to pay its workers more than they are worth to the business. From Jazz Shaw at hotair.com:

Back in early February, we looked at a story out of Long Beach, California where the City Council passed an ordinance requiring large, chain grocery stores to provide workers with an extra four dollars per hour as “hero pay” during the pandemic. That immediately resulted in two of the biggest Kroger stores in the area closing their doors permanently, putting hundreds of people out of work. At the time, I noted that a number of other large municipalities in the Golden State were either already drafting or considering similar legislation. But having seen what happened in Long Beach, they thankfully had sufficient warning not to make the same mistake.

Or so you would have thought. But as it turns out, you’d have been wrong. Los Angeles plunged ahead and passed the same type of law, only they upped the ante and made it five dollars per hour. Try not to faint from shock when I tell you that three more Kroger stores shut down in short order. If only someone could have somehow foreseen this and avoided all of these closures. (Washington Examiner)

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The Cannibalization Is Complete: Only Inedible Zombies Remain, by Charles Hugh Smith

Posted on March 12, 2021 | Leave a comment

Our economy has become the land of the walking dead. From Charles Hugh Smith at oftwominds.com:

Poor powerless Fed, poor starving cannibals, poor zombies turning to dust. That’s the American economy once the curtains are ripped away.

Setting aside the fictional flood of zombie movies for a moment, we find the real-world horror is the cannibalization of our economy, a cannibalization that is now complete. Every organic source of prosperity and productivity has been captured and consumed, hidden behind the convenient curtains of central bank intervention, “market forces” (hahaha), financialization and fiscal stimulus.

All that’s left now are zombies feeding off the offal of stimulus. Sadly for the cannibals who’ve feasted so well for decades, zombies are inedible. So now the cannibals are starving. Poor cannibals! Once the stimulus runs out, no more zombies. Poor zombies!

The cannibals feasted on $50 trillion in earnings stripped from the bones of the workforce ( Trends in Income From 1975 to 2018, RAND Corporation) and trillions more in fraud and financial gimmickry.

And when the cannibals had consumed the bottom 90%, they moved on and devoured the next 5%. That left only the top 5%, which they needed to keep alive to maintain the curtains masking their ghoulish destruction.

But after gorging on trillions for so long, the cannibals appetites can never be sated, so they ambushed their loyal toadies, apologists, lackeys, apparatchiks and sycophants of the top 4.9% and ate them, too, but a bit more stealthily because they still needed an army of toadies to do their dirty work.

The top 4.9% have been transformed into zombies so stealthily they still believe they’re in charge and wealthy–hahaha, the jokes on you!

With nobody left to devour, the cannibals turned to their last resort: the Federal Reserve. Please print us up some more bodies to feast on, Federal Reserve. We demand it. We want it, we need it, we’re starving.

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Public Schools Refuse to Open. Give the Taxpayers Their Money Back, by Ryan McMaken

Posted on March 6, 2021 | Leave a comment

It’s galling enough that people who don’t have children in public education have to pay for people who do. What’s downright infuriating is when everyone pays for education while schools remain on lockdown due to teachers’ unions’ intransigence. From Ryan McMaken at mises.org:

In many school districts across the nation, public school teachers still don’t want to go back to work. Private sector workers have long been hard at work in kitchens, at construction sites, and in hardware and grocery stores. Meanwhile, from Seattle, to Los Angeles, and to Berkeley, California, Teachers’ Union representatives insist they simply can’t be expected to perform the on-site work in the expensive facilities that the taxpayers have long been paying for.

This week, for example, some schoolteachers in Colorado’s Jefferson County turned out to protest the district’s plan to return to limited in-person learning later this month. These protestors still insist it’s unsafe, even though the very institutions these people have long parroted in favor of endless lockdowns—the CDC and the World Health Organization, for instance—say reopening schools should be a “top priority.” Moreover, the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine have concluded “The lower risk of transmission of the virus by younger children and reported milder or moderate illness in this age group suggest the appropriateness of in-person instruction for primary and elementary grades.”

But that’s not good enough for public school teachers. So, in many cases, parents who actually want or need to send their students to an in-person school must go to the private sector instead. The government schools in these places can’t be bothered, but the private schools are racing to serve the public.

The most absurd aspect of all this is that even when public schools effectively tell parents and students to “get lost,” taxpayers still have to pony up the cash to pay for the public schools. If any private sector industry tried to function this way, it would be denounced in no uncertain terms. But it doesn’t happen this way because in the private sector—unlike the public schools—business owners and employees don’t get paid if they refuse to work. In other words, the customers can take their money and leave.

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Baltimore Student Who Failed All But Three Classes In Four Years Was Ranked In Top Half Of His Class, by Jonathan Turley

Posted on March 6, 2021 | 1 comment

One thing is certain about the coronavirus response: it’s left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths about public education, its bureaucracy, its teachers, and their unions. From Jonathan Turley at jonathanturley.org:

As teacher unions fight to keep schools closed, the true cost is being felt by students who are racking up failing grades, dropping out of virtual classes, increasing drug use, and, in rising numbers, committing suicide.  In response, some union officials like the President of the Los Angeles Teacher’s Union has labelled calls to return to class examples of white privilege despite overwhelming science supporting resumption of classes. However, for minority students, this shutdown has taken a dire situation and turned into a freefall disaster. The pandemic led to the closure of an already failing public school system, as evident in a shocking story out of Baltimore. As recently reported, a high school student almost graduated near the top half of his class after failing every class but three in four years. He has a 0.13 GPA.  His mother finally went public in exasperation with the failures in the public schools.

Tiffany France is understandably upset. She is a mother of three who works three jobs to support her family. She was never told that her son failed 22 classes and was late or absent 272 days over his first three years of high school. She was called for only one teacher-student meeting and that meeting never occurred at Augusta Fells Savage Institute of Visual Arts.

France ultimately had to pull her son out of the school and enrolled him in an accelerated program to allow him to graduate in 2023.

For decades, we have spent huge amounts of money in school districts like Washington, D.C. and Baltimore as these cities and their leaders have failed to address these failures. We have had a lost generation of kids who have neither the education nor the trained skills to succeed in society. Yet, there is no accountability for the political and educational leaders in these cities.

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Why Not Make the Minimum Wage $150 Per Hour? by PF Whalen

Posted on February 24, 2021 | Leave a comment

A real humanitarian would say why not $10,000 an hour, but we’ll start with PF Whalen’s modest proposal. From PF Whalen at bluestateconservative.com:

The periodic debate regarding raising the minimum wage has resurfaced once again, only this time the argument is connected to the larger discussion surrounding a sprawling, $1.9 trillion COVID relief bill; for some inexplicable reason. In the bill unveiled by House Democrats last Friday, if passed, the minimum wage would increase incrementally from the current $7.25 per hour to $9.50 per hour this year, and eventually escalate to $15 per hour by 2025. Prominent Democrats across the board have supported the idea, including President Joe Biden.

If we deep-dive the issue in trying to understand its full impact, we can learn a great deal about the pros and cons of increasing the minimum wage; particularly with the cons. But there are two pieces of information that are difficult to come by. How, specifically, did we arrive at the number of $15? And, based on the Democrats’ reluctance to acknowledge the negative impacts of a minimum wage increase, why don’t we just add a zero to the number and increase the minimum wage to $150 per hour?

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) was the first influential public figure to float the idea of a $15 minimum wage, having proposed the idea all the way back in 2015. Sanders’ plan pointed out his perceived benefits for those who are being paid the minimum wage. Beneficiaries would see an improved standard of living; the burden on taxpayers from food stamps and Medicaid would be reduced; and an increase in available income would spur economic growth. It sounds like a wonderful plan.

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