Primer Sindicato en Amazon dentro de los EE UU? (BusinessWeek)

Unions

Amazon May Get Its First Labor Union in the U.S.

By Brad Stone                                                                                              December 17, 2013

 

 

Employees work on the inbound line at the Amazon fulfillment center in Phoenix on Dec. 2

 

Amazon.com’s (AMZN) labor problems have mostly been confined to the online retailer’s warehouses in countries such as Germany—until now. For the first time, employees in a U.S. Amazon facility have successfully petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to hold union elections.

 

On Dec. 6, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers (IAMAW), a trade union of the AFL-CIO, filed a union election petition with the National Labor Relations Board on behalf of 30 equipment maintenance and repair technicians working at the year-old Amazon fulfillment center in Middletown, Del. The fact that the petition was filed suggests, according to the union, that it has interest from at least a majority of those 30 workers, who are seeking to vote on whether to hold elections to establish a union.

 

According to John Carr, a spokesman for the IAMAW, Amazon and the union have now reached an agreement to go forward with this election. It will be held on Jan. 15 in a conference room at the Delaware facility; only members of the group of 30 technicians will be allowed to vote. The vast majority of workers at the year-old facility—more than 1,500 pickers and packers who move products from shelves into boxes and trucks—will not vote, nor will they be covered by the union if the technicians vote to form a collective bargaining group.

 

Video: Behind the Scenes of Cyber Monday at Amazon

 

Amazon has successfully fought such efforts in the U.S. for years. In 2000, workers at a customer service call center in Seattle lobbied to form a union and met with stiff resistance from the company. Amazon ultimately closed the facility during a broader retrenchment during the dot-com bust. In cases over the years where labor organizers passed out union literature outside Amazon facilities and tried to foment union activity, Amazon managers have reacted swiftly, meeting with workers and explaining the company’s strong opposition to organized labor.

 

“We respect the individual rights of our associates and have an open-door policy that allows and encourages associates to bring their comments, questions, and concerns directly to their management teams,” said Mary Osako, an Amazon spokesperson. “We firmly believe this direct connection is the most effective way to understand and respond to the needs of our workforce and do not believe there is a need for third-party representation. Amazon’s culture and business model are based on rapid innovation, flexibility, and open lines of direct communication between managers and associates.”

 

Amazon is facing a small but growing drumbeat of dissatisfaction in its sprawling network of 96 centers around the world. Workers in Germany have gone on strike several times this year, and this week organized demonstrations outside Amazon’s Seattle headquarters, though they have had more success garnering headlines than slowing down Amazon’s operations during the holiday season. Critical articles about the pace, pay, and quality of work in Amazon’s fulfillment centers have also appeared in outlets such as Mother Jones, the Guardian, and the BBC.

 

Video: Amazon's Robotic Workforce: No Coffee Breaks Needed

 

Over the next month, the battle in Middletown is likely to be hard-fought. Amazon has hired the services of law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius to aid it in the matter. Outside law firms typically help companies wage their election campaigns and make the case to employees why they are better off without union representation.

 

While the stakes appear small, the union says it’s a foot in the door at Amazon. “Can this turn into other locations, or more people in that location? That is certainly the interest for any labor organization,” Carr says. “I certainly imagine there’s an interest somewhere else in that particular facility, and if not, we hope to stimulate some.”

 

Story: The Secrets of Bezos: How Amazon Became the Everything Store

The bottom line: In a first, Amazon workers have successfully petitioned the National Labor Relations Board to hold a union election.

 Stone is a senior writer for Bloomberg Businessweek in San Francisco. He is the author of The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon (Little, Brown; October 2013). Follow him on Twitter @BradStone.

 

 

 

 

Economía Global: Quién es el Jefe en Nor-Korea? (BusinessWeek)

Global Economics
On Anniversary of Dad's Death, Kim Jong Un Shows Who's Boss

By Bruce Einhorn                                                                       December 17, 2013

 

Flowers piling up in Pyongyang beneath portraits of deceased North Korean leaders Kim Jong Il and Kim Il Sung

 

As North Koreans marked the second anniversary of Dear Leader Kim Jong Il’s departure today, one thing was certain: The tens of thousands of attendees at the memorial service made sure to applaud his son and successor, Kim Jong Un—and to applaud vigorously, with unmistakable enthusiasm.

After all, one of the crimes committed by his purged uncle, Jang Song Thaek, before his execution last week was a supposed failure to clap appropriately when a party meeting gave bestowed a military title on his nephew. As the North Korean news agency reports, Jang “behaved so arrogantly and insolently as unwillingly standing up from his seat and half-heartedly clapping, touching off towering resentment of our service personnel and people.”

The regime is using the anniversary to hammer home to audiences domestic and foreign that the Kim dynasty is secure, notwithstanding the threat posed by Jang. After all, like his grandfather and father before him, Kim Jong Un has the army on his side, the Korean Central News Agency insisted in a report published yesterday. North Korea’s military “is the eternal army of Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il and Kim Jong Un and it will always remain the army of Kim Jong Un defending him unto death and upholding his leadership only.”

Video: Kim Jong Un’s Uncle Executed in North Korea Purge

 

It’s easy to mock the North Korean system and its ridiculous rhetoric, but the execution of Jang on the eve of the anniversary is a reminder how much the Family Kim continues to rely on terrifying its own people in order to survive. North Korean purges are as old as the regime itself, but the swift execution of Jang is a departure.

“What is new this time, though, is that Kim Jong Un executed his uncle-in-law in such a brutal way, which reveals a certain amount of hubris and the temperament of the young leader, different from that of a seasoned, aged leader,” writes Haksoon Paik, senior fellow and director of the Center for North Korean Studies at the Sejong Institute in South Korea. “It is clear by now that Kim Jong Un’s newly-established image appears to have struck fear deep in the minds of North Koreans, invoking ‘forced compliance’ of the people and power elite alike,” Paik wrote on the blog of 38 North, a program of the U.S.-Korea Institute at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies.

With trouble looming for the North Korean economy, Jang’s death is likely to silence anyone thinking about challenging Kim’s policies. Stephen Haggard, a North Korea expert at the University of California, San Diego looks at the indictment against Jang, which the regime has conveniently made public so all can see the crimes of the “Despicable Human Scum.” It turns out Jang, according to this narrative, was planning on becoming North Korea’s premier, fixing the country’s economic problems, and then taking advantage of his new prestige to boot his nephew. “As an exercise in scapegoating the charges are masterful propaganda,” writes Haggard. “Not only is the poor economic performance of the country the result of ‘traitors’ rather than the Kim Il Sung-Kim Jong Il-Kim Jong Un leadership. But complaining about the economy is now tantamount to being complicit in Jang’s ‘factionalism.’”

The outlook isn’t totally grim, according to Paik, who argues that Kim Jong Un might feel confident enough to become someone whom the Obama administration and others can deal with in addressing such issues as North Korea’s nuclear weapons: “What is not difficult to predict is that Kim Jong Un, now that he can stand on his own feet and desires to open his own ‘glorious’ era in the 21st century, will be more willing to cooperate with the United States, South Korea and international community for the resolution of key problems—economic, war and peace, and nuclear—that he has inherited from his predecessors.”

 

Einhorn is Asia regional editor in Bloomberg Businessweek’s Hong Kong bureau. Follow him on Twitter @BruceEinhorn.

La Economía Global: Está en retirada el Libre Comercio? (BusinessWeek)

Farewell to the Age of Free Trade
By Joshua Kurlantzick                                                                          December 12, 2013

Since the end of World War II and the birth of the modern global economy, business leaders have come to accept an iron law: International trade always expands faster than economic growth. Between the late 1940s and 2013, that assumption held true. Trade grew roughly twice as fast as the world economy annually, as fresh markets opened up, governments signed free-trade pacts, new industries and consumers emerged, and technological advances made international trade cheaper and faster.

 

Now this iron law may be crumbling. Over the past two years, international trade has grown so slowly that it has fallen behind the growth of the world economy, which itself is hardly humming. Major potential trade deals, such as the proposed Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership between Europe and North America, are at risk of falling through. At an early December meeting in Bali, representatives of the 159 members of the World Trade Organization agreed to move forward with basic trade facilitation measures but failed to reach any consensus on what should be on the table for the next WTO round, instead just deferring action on substantial items.

 

Despite such worrying trends, many economists and trade specialists seem unfazed. In its latest research report, HSBC (HSBC) predicted that global trade will continue expanding by about 8 percent annually for the next two decades, outstripping the world’s economic expansion.

 

Story: Free Trade and Secrecy Don't Mix

 

Such optimism is misplaced. Expectations that emerging markets could boom for decades haven’t come true. Advances in technology over the past five years have facilitated the rise of state capitalism and made it easier for companies to stay in their borders. And unlike at just about any time in the past six decades, the political leadership of almost every major economy is weak, making it easier for protectionism to flourish. The era of free trade as the world has known it is dangerously close to coming to an end.

 

The belief that trade flows would inevitably increase was based on two assumptions: Emerging markets still had huge space to expand, and new technologies would make businesses more interconnected. These ideas still power reports such as HSBC’s forecast. But they appear to be wrong. Today’s technological advances don’t necessarily lead to economic integration. The latest breakthrough in manufacturing, 3D printing, makes it easier for companies to keep their design and initial production work in-house and cut out suppliers—which reduces trade, because it removes incentives to outsource later rounds of manufacturing overseas. The coming breakthrough in many science-based industries—such as synthetic biology, in which living forms are created from strands of DNA—will similarly create pressure for companies to keep operations in-house. Already, many corporations are coming home: Cross-border investment inflows fell by 18 percent in 2012 and probably will drop again in 2013.

 

Far from creating a long tail, globalization and the Internet have instead made economies of scale more important to companies’ survival. That has prompted consolidation in industries from telecommunications to oil to mining, allowing many of these industries to become dominated by giant state-owned companies from countries such as China, Russia, and Brazil. These state-owned enterprises are hardly forces for free trade: They often crush entrepreneurs in their own societies, and they often push for protectionist barriers, not against them.

 

STORY: What's Roiling the Waters of Global Trade

 

As for the big emerging markets, they aren’t proving as resilient as expected, despite their huge consumer classes. China’s economy has slowed only marginally, but every other major emerging economy, from India to Brazil, has seen its growth drop precipitously the past two years. (When all the figures were finally in and calculated this summer, it turned out that Brazil’s economy grew by only 0.9 percent in 2012, far less than Brazilian leaders and economists had forecast.)

 

Many of these, such as India, have based their hopes for growth on services, not the export-oriented manufacturing that enriched Japan and the Asian tiger economies—and before them Britain, the U.S., and other countries. As economists Amartya Sen and Jean Drèze note, services not only employ fewer people than manufacturing, but they also face far more trade barriers by developed nations than manufactured exports.

 

These challenges might be surmountable if a stronger international consensus in favor of free trade existed. Over the past 60 years, at least one major economy was able to take the lead in advancing the global trade agenda. Today, however, every prominent trading economy is too consumed by problems at home. Weakened by the shaky rollout of health-care reform, President Obama faces a hostile Congress that has little inclination to support either the administration’s proposed free-trade agreement with Asia, called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), or a U.S.-European trade pact. China’s top leaders are still trying to consolidate power and address domestic challenges such as land reform.

 

Britain is consumed with austerity, Japan is embarking on contentious economic reforms, and Germany is constrained by its history and Berlin’s consensual politics. Reports of U.S. spying on top European leaders have caused politicians across the European Union—already skeptical of a trans-Atlantic trade zone because of concerns that many European industries would be swamped—to call for trade negotiations with the U.S. to be cut off. As of early December, negotiations have resumed, but the prospects for a deal remain highly uncertain.

 

STORY: A Shrinking U.S. Trade Deficit—Brought to You by Fracking

 

The absence of political leadership has benefited populist forces and companies willing to flout trade rules. The Center for Economic Policy Research, a U.K.-based economic think tank, recently published a comprehensive analysis of trade-related legislation and other measures implemented by the Group of 20 countries over the past five years. Last year, G-20 countries passed 23 percent more protectionist measures than they had in 2009, while midsize trading nations—those slightly smaller than the G-20 economies—also have seen increases in protectionist measures. Major trading economies have turned to regional trade agreements, particularly in Asia, yet it remains unclear whether these deals foster global trade or simply discriminate against countries that are not signatories.

 

Getting the global trade agenda back on track won’t be easy. Although it’s debatable whether regional agreements promote multilateral trade, the White House needs to get the TPP finalized by the time the president heads to Asia next spring, so he can show America’s partners that the U.S. still has some credibility on trade. In addition, the U.S. should offer European allies concessions on surveillance issues, if that’s what it takes to get the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership off life support. And leaders of the major economies should make clear that Roberto Azevêdo, the director-general of the WTO, has their backing in pushing to restart talks on a new global trade round, even after the failed negotiations on the round in 2009 and 2011.

 

An era of shrinking trade would be disastrous. The past 200 years show that trade makes the world economy more dynamic. It brings people from different countries together and links economies to each other, fostering interdependence. Leaps in scientific progress usually occur during times of growing trade and migration, because these types of exchanges create intellectual ferment. And although conflict between states can still occur, enmeshing nations in webs of trade does create incentives for countries not to fight wars against their trading partners. Restoring faith in free trade isn’t just an act of economic self-interest. It’s essential to building a more prosperous and peaceful world.

 Kurlantzick is Fellow for Southeast Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations and author of the new book, Democracy in Retreat: The Revolt of the Middle Class and the Worldwide Decline of Representative Government.

Los Horribles Números detrás de la TV por Cable (BusinessWeek)

If you’re a cable TV subscriber who grumbles about paying for dozens of channels your family never watches, a media analyst has a message: That cable bundle carries all sorts of unseen benefits.
In a report that attempts to quantify the costs of an à la carte pricing for cable television, Needham & Co.’s Laura Martin estimates that $45 billion of TV advertising would be at risk under such a change, along with 1.4 million jobs, $20 billion in taxes paid by such cable operators as Comcast (CMCSA) and Time Warner Cable (TWC), and $117 billion in market capitalization. And maybe you wouldn’t miss the Christian-themed Smile of a Child channel or Jewelry Television, but if you love any of those niche networks you could almost certainly kiss them goodbye for lack of financial support.

The notion of “unbundling” cable television packages and allowing consumers to choose only those channels they want has long tantalized frustrated subscribers, who pay about $720 per year in the U.S. for an average of 180 channels. The average viewer watches somewhere from 16 to 20 of those, according to Needham, and the gap infuriates millions as they write monthly checks to cable companies.

Story: Bundled Cable TV Withstands Consumer Opposition

 

Martin argues in her report this week that à la carte pricing would lead to higher TV bills: “The notion of creating value through unbundling may be a laudable goal from a public policy point of view, but the world this premise describes can never exist.” That’s mainly because for every $1 of subscriber revenue, advertisers pay $1.24. Those payments totaled $101 billion last year, and $56 billion came from advertisers.

To keep the average cable roster of 180 channels, U.S. households would need to pay $1,260 yearly—or 75 percent more than they do now. But, wait, you say, the entire goal would be to pare that 180 drastically, down to the 15 or 20 I care to watch. Unfortunately, this is where the economics of the industry wallop an unbundler’s best-laid plans: The average annual cost to program a cable channel is $280 million, according to Needham’s math, and it’s way more for those that carry sports. Consumers tend to name an ideal price of $30 per month for just those few channels they want, according to Needham’s surveys. Across the 104 million U.S. homes with cable, that amounts to $37 billion per year.

Only 28 percent of current channels would survive in such a world—or about 50 channels in total. “Worst case,” Martin writes, “if distributors (who collect all the money) kept the first $30 billion (as they did in 2012), that would leave only $7 billion for content, implying only 7 percent of channels would survive and 173 channels would disappear.”

Story: Will Hulu Join Netflix in Rush for Cable-TV Partners?

 

What about advertising? That revenue would still exist but only for the most-watched channels, such as Fox News (FOXA), AMC (AMCX) and A&E, where Duck Dynasty has ruled cable-TV ratings. What Martin calls “passion channels” like Discovery’s (DISCA)Military Channel would, in all likelihood, not have meaningful advertising funds and would disappear, taking the massive bundle paradigm with them.

This math exercise doesn’t translate to any kind of real-world channel bundles a cable TV company would ever try to sell, given their enormous cost structures and the fact that ESPN (DIS) alone has some nine permutations. (So far.) Yet the overall “ecosystem” of Big Cable remains a lucrative market for both content creators and distributors, their periodic fighting over money notwithstanding.
While unbundling cable may not work economically, the Needham report does suggest one solution for people disenchanted over paying for all those unwatched channels: Cut the cord, keep your modem, and stream the shows you like from Hulu, Amazon (AMZN), or Netflix (NFLX). Says Martin: “That’s how capitalism works.”

Bachman is an associate editor for Businessweek.com.