The New York Times reports that Amazon is involved in labor disputes in Germany, one of its biggest markets, because of Amazon’s antipathy to union labor.
Germany has strong unions.
Amazon eventually plans to bring in robots to do the work of people and fears that unions will be an obstacle.
Robots never form a union and don’t ask for higher wages, health care or pensions.
The article says:
Last year, the company spent $775 million to buy a manufacturer of robots that it plans to eventually deploy in its warehouses, though it has not said when they would come to Germany. The last thing it wants is to have to get approval from unions for such changes.
“This really isn’t about higher wages,” Mr. Clark said. “It isn’t a cost question for us. It’s about what our relationship is with our people.”
“We’re still a developing industry,” he added — despite the fact that Amazon posted revenue of $15.7 billion in the last quarter and the company is enjoying a buoyant stock price.
In the United States, Amazon successfully thwarted efforts to unionize.
Imagine that: a company with revenues of $15.7 billion claiming to be “a developing industry.”
Amazing what lengths some billionaires will go to to prevent paying low-level workers a living wage.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Boycott Amazon…shop locally….not Walmart…skip Netflix and Microsoft.
Agree!
Stay strong Deutschland
Thanks for writing this. We’d never see it anywhere else.
Ironically, Germany today is much more democratic than we are. We taught them how Democracy worked, and they now do it better than we ever did. All companies have to have a board of 50% corporate and 50% workers who need to compromise to find fair wages, benefits, etc. The Germans are clever people, and they also chased Walmart out of Germany. They saw that Walmart would destroy their mom and pop stores, and charming downtowns. This didn’t bother us a bit in America. People in Germany banded together, refused to shop there, and Walmart left and gave up. True story. America chose (without thinking) cheap plastic junk and low wages instead of quality goods and high wages. Now we are reaping what we have sown. The best life in the world right now is in Europe. Germans have six weeks of vacation, healthcare, excellent schools, amazing infrastructure (electric trains), and almost free college. What do we have? We have prisons, crumbling infrastructure, strip malls, low (slave) wages, no health insurance, few unions, Hollywood, and a big military. Nothing at all… Unless you are rich, then you can fly to Europe and see what we could have been/what we used to be.
I wish that Germany would export some of this type of democracy to the United States.
American’s have given up everything for the cheapest products. Now, we have less opportunities and weaker jobs. I saw on tv that the 1% had increased their income by 300% over 30yrs while the middle class had remained flat. American politicians are so bought out that they don’t work for common people.
Following this corporate logic, eventually no one will be able to afford their or anyone’s stuff. What about giving some up for the folks who helped make you rich.
No more buying on Amazon for me. By the way , how much is enough money?
When the people have no money , will the corporations start trying to eat each other up? Just askin’
For those weasels, there is never enough money. It’s about their fragile egoes and inure selfishness. It’s had to do with their CLUBS…in more ways than one.
This is really disgusting. Morals? What’s that.? Morality = $$$$$.
Sorry for the typos. The news bothered me.
The wages are so low for most Americans that they can’t afford to buy all the things anymore. I just heard that on the news. The corporations will go bankrupt unless they cater to the wealthy (Porsche, Rolex) or to the poor masses (Walmart, Target, Costco). I am glad that Western civilization will go on in Europe. Perhaps our children will be boarding the ocean liners to go back to Europe. History is cyclical.
If the goal is to use the most human effort possible to make and distribute goods and services, there are many changes we could make to how we produce goods. Where should we start?
“If the goal is to use the most human effort possible to make and distribute goods and services, there are many changes we could make to how we produce goods.”
True,…and your point is? More to the point is how do we create a healthy economy that allows businesses to make a reasonable return on their investments and allows employees to provide themselves and their families a good quality of life? I believe we are seeing that the current state of affairs enriches a tiny percentage of the population at the expense of the majority.
I think you are overly pessimistic about the current state of affairs, but setting too high a goal if you are looking at the relative wealth of the United States of the 50s and 60s.
In the post war years, the US economy and US worker dominated the world because we emerged from the war relatively unscathed. Much of the physical capital in Europe and Japan had been destroyed, millions killed, societies needing to be rebuilt. In Russia and Especially China, the productive potential of the economies were limited by poor policies and isolated from the rest of the world.
Recently we have seen the reintegration of a quarter of the worlds population into the global economy. That process is nearly done with China, so we will return to a more normal pattern of production, but, short of anther devistating war, not to the level of dominance if the twenty years post WW2.
Diane, there’s a story in the NYT that will make you happy.
Atlanta built a new PUBLIC high school. Not charity from a billionaire. Not a complex tax break for billionaires pass-thru. Looks like a real building project. Citizen funded. They’re actually investing in public education instead of abandoning it.
85% of all students go to public schools, 10% go to private schools and 5% go to charter schools. No doubt there are new public schools being opened all the time in growing cities. In the past ten years the number of public schools increased by 6,800 according to the NCES.
The information can be found here:http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=84
The figures provided on that page by NCES are very misleading. I see nothing there about charter schools, including how many of the 6,800 increase were charters. There is also no information about the number of neighborhood schools closed nor data on how many closed neighborhood schools were turned into charters. One could argue about the number of charters closed as well, though in places like my city, only two charters have ever been closed and that happened for the first time this year.
This NCES chart indicates that between the 2000-01 and 2008-09 school years, charters increased by 2700: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d10/tables/dt10_100.asp?referrer=list
That data’s dated, too, considering the expanded growth of charters since Obama/Duncan took the helm in 2009.
And between those same two dates the number of regular schools increased by over 3,000 to more than 88,000, while there are less than 5,000 charter schools.
It was the best I could find. Do you have some more up to date figures?
When you compare the figures from this chart: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2012/pesschools10/tables/table_02.asp with the previous chart I posted from the 2008-09 school year (before Obama/Duncan), there’s an additional 580 charter schools by the 2010-11 school year. There were also nearly twice as many charter schools as magnet schools by that time. That chart was posted at NCES in 2012 and I don’t see more up to date numbers there yet.
We used to have that much strength here in the USA, too. I can almost date the era when I knew we were losing it. It was around 1995. I took the floor in the Chicago Teachers Union House of Delegates to oppose admitting scabs into the union without their having paid their fine and apologized. The Financial Secretary, Michael Williams, corrected me from the podium: “We don’t use the word ‘scab’ anymore,” he said. “Replacement workers.”
Around the same time, the (then) leaders of the union, under President Tom Reece, invited Paul Vallas to a union meeting, to praise the “cooperation” between the mayor and the CTU. That was after mayoral control had begun. Instead of being able to enforce class size by a union grievance, we were told that our “friends” in management had made it a “policy” (it just had become illegal for the union to negotiate class size and a dozen other important matters…).
By that time (1995 – 1997) the ruling class had a strategy, and from the union side our answer was “teams,” “cooperation” and all that stuff. Never had worked. Never would work. Never will work. Working people need rights — not privileges. Rights can be enforced. A privilege can be ripped away by whoever bestowed it.
Business is about the botton line and governments are supposed to be about the people. Somewhere in there is supposed to be a compromise. If there is one country on this planet that became efficient on the use of human beings it is Germany. Understanding engineering and measuring is their forte. They understand that humans require purpose and productivity to sustain a healthy life. Robots are
supposed to work for us, but have the potential beyond their obvious effeciency to rule us. This may well be the first clash for humankind to hold back the future from the God of efficiency for the sake of human survival. How ironic that it should take place in Germany.
Douglas D. Noble author of The Classroom Arsenal:Military Research has caught up with our times and a must read for all who want to understand the now and the tomorrow as written in the yesterday. Handwriting on the wall and now screaming from a country known for one of the most famous walls in all of history. Read the prophetic handwriting on the wall by Noble on this first international clash of humans trying to hold back the inevitable age of robots. Humans can still rule and pull the plug, the circuits, the batteries, the running mechanisms of the machines of their undoing. This is the ultimate decision of greed over human purpose and quality existence, not necessarily a more efficient existence. It is called being Human.
There is a global war between strong powerful unions and strong powerful companies and the people are the loser. Both want control and money. Apparently, Germany figured out the balance between these two. We sure can learn something. But we won’t listen because we have money stuffed into our ears.
We should not overlook Japan as well, which followed the model of American Deming –who most American companies didn’t listen to, “Deming, Japan, Germany and Continuous Improvement:”
http://www.effectivetrainers.com/deming-japan-germany-and-continuous-improvement
It’s interesting that those who lost WWII have learned so much more since then about humanely dealing with people than we have –and oh so very sad for us.