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Update: A majority of workers have voted not to form a union at the Amazon Fulfillment Center in Bessemer, Alabama. The result of the NLRB's initial vote count was 1,798 votes against the union and 738 in favor. Hundreds of additional ballots were not counted because their authenticity was disputed. But the "no" side already has a majority of the 3,215 votes cast, making the issue moot.
Original story, April 8: A closely watched effort to unionize an Amazon fulfillment center in Bessemer, Alabama appears to be headed for defeat. With about half the votes counted, 1,100 workers have voted against forming a union, while only 463 voted in favor.
The National Labor Relations Board is counting the 3,215 votes that were cast by workers at the Bessemer facility. The union needs to win at least half the votes in order to become the official representative of the roughly 6,000 workers at the Bessemer facility. Counting has ended for the evening and is scheduled to resume at 8:30 am Central Time on Friday.
Also at The Washington Post, c|net, and Al Jazeera.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 13 2021, @01:09AM
Trouble is, that's a two-edged sword.
Sure, pricing is psychological, but this also extends to the pricing of things like shares, and when those are influenced by corporate metrics such as per-unit profit margins (Apple being a handy example you brought up) then yes, labour expenses immediate drive a large chunk of the retail price. I mean sure, we all know about Veblen goods and so on, but those are outliers in the general scheme of things.
What's much more significant in this case is where a higher minimum wage puts the labour element in the general calculus of other considerations. We actually don't even have to speculate, because the last fifty years of international trade has given us a few trends to consider. Higher wage levels have persistently led to increases in hiring workers who are under financial pressure, offshoring, and/or automation. It's called substitution, and when what you're doing is shifting the balance between one commodity (say, electricity) and another (labour), you will get purchasers (corporate planners) pushing for less of the more expensive one in favour of more of the cheaper.
One of the weirder results of this is a creeping rise in the measured productivity of workers - but the funny thing is that this is measuring how much is produced per worker without correcting for capital investment in the worker's environment. Go figure, one dude surrounded by twenty million dollars' worth of machinery can move mountains compared to the same dude with a shovel.
At the same time, the people who get those fancy jobs buoyed by the higher minimum wage are still seeing their purchases being nibbled at by the resulting inflation, even if inflation doesn't keep perfect pace with their pay rises. (As it is, inflation is not what people think it is, because of the politically convenient move to chained CPI - if you check the old CPI measure, you see it's a couple of percent higher than the government claims, and has been since they made the change in the '80s.)
Right now employment rates are pretty good, but it's worth pointing out that government in the USA at every level has been soaking up more and more employees, and a lot of the old skilled labour jobs have gone offshore. The fourth generation, service industry jobs aren't really all that great for many people, but they're the new factory floor in terms of employing new entrants. Even so, they're offshored as much as people can get away with. Just think of all the complaints about Comcast or Dell customer service with incomprehensible accents and shitty scripts.
In the final analysis, the ultimate minimum wage is nothing - or what you can get under the table. Raising it looks good for the headlines, but doesn't fix the problems we really have while generating new ones that we don't want.
I'd sooner see no minimum wage, and a wall-to-wall revenue tax on businesses.