I have this condition called a recurrent corneal abrasion. Basically, my eyelid occasionally adheres to the skin on my eyeball and rips it open when I open them too quickly after waking up. It is very painful. The only thing that helps is an ointment that I put in my eye before I go to sleep. It comes in a tiny little tube, costs $40, lasts about a month. The last few tubes, I've kept even though they were "empty"; thank the hoarder in me. This turned out to be a saving grace, as the ointment is often sold out at nearby pharmacies, and I can't afford a new tube a month, anyhow. There tends to be enough left in each, if I spend a while squeezing the shit out of it, to get a small drop (1/10th of the recommended dose) into each eye for a couple of weeks. That's a few more weeks of not waking up feeling like someone has taken a razor blade to my cornea. I'll take it.
Also something about Cuba. I think my point is that we're a bit too cavalier with used electronics these days. The embodied energy and materials are huge, and we just... throw them out, in many cases. I'd like us to get used to repurposing these resources before scarcity forces us to. Really squeezing every bit of use out of them that we can. Bonus: because it's not the Hot New Thing Someone Is Trying To Sell You, you'll likely be less subject to the Hot New Trend Of Actually Being The Product.
And, for what it's worth: an original Apple I just sold for almost $450k at auction. Someone wanted that.
That's not a huge range - a handful of missed answers - and, I believe, lower than it used to be. I distinctly remember being, at 1490, in the bottom quartile of "Harvard-bound scores". Without any proof, I imagine that Harvard et al. dropping standardized test scores from their admissions requirements has skewed who actually submits them. Legacies will only do so if it doesn't hurt their otherwise venerable pedigree; non-legacies will say, "Well, every bit helps."
You don't really need them. An "average top rate of $49/hr" is like saying that the average top salary for a SWE is $500,000/yr. Great number; now, who is actually making it, and how many of them are there? Because this number is supposed to be, somehow, a representation of the gains of a typical worker who is subject to the deal. If it is not representative of such a worker, it's a misrepresentation.
I follow the argument, but one can't even make that statement with those numbers about most places SWEs work.
So if we take a company like Google where we could plausibly say "the average top salary for a SWE is $500,000/yr," already it is possibly more remunerative than most places an SWE would work. We could assume it was stated in extremely bad faith, that only 0.5% of the SWEs there make that and everyone else makes $75k. Or we could assume there is a ladder, a progression, and a path to get there. I don't believe the extremely bad faith representation would work here because of likely PR blowback. QED there is likely a path for a delivery driver to earn six figures at UPS.
> a representation of the gains of a typical worker who is subject to the deal
This is covered elsewhere in TFA, and is dependent on the kind of employee.
Accepting this logic: a top-end figure tells you nothing about the nature of the progression to get there. In particular, it doesn't say anything about the relative conditions on each step of the progression, nor (again) about how many make it up each step. The extreme version of this is, of course, how many food service and retail companies have billionaire owners while their lowest level employees qualify for Section 8 and food stamps. Clearly, there is a better way to represent conditions in such a company, beyond simply stating the CEO's take-home. (QED /s)
> now, who is actually making it, and how many of them are there?
Somewhere around 100-125K delivery drivers; any of them with 4 years full time seniority by the end of the contract, since the 5-year contract includes year-by-year general wage increases. The exceptions are employees in progression (less than 4 years full time under any classification), article 40 employees (air drivers, not many), and some seasonal work, most of which is defined under regional supplements.
Pay rate is determined by the contracts and years of seniority, nothing more.
Overtime past 40 hours (8 in a day or 6th punch) is the case across the US, I think, typically at 1.5x rate. Exact overtime rules vary considerably by supplement beyond that, particularly for part time employees.
OK. Top rate means the base pay rate (non-overtime) after completing progression, it's not totally clear to me if the "average" is over time or by area.
Remember that you're getting the press releases from the union leadership which needs to justify calling off the strike, plus the pro-corporate news media.
The reason to call of a strike is actually to be able to pass a _bad_ deal. You see, the workers are not very likely to accept a bad deal if they've just come out on strike - even if their leadership has made excessive concessions in the negotiations and is putting it up to a vote. If, however, the leadership has "taken the wind out of the sails" of the struggle, the demobilized workers have the gotten the message that their struggle is over and there's nothing to be done, and are much more likely to accept it. This is usually accompanied by union leadership publishing glowing descriptions of all of the wonderful gains, usually in vague and confusing terms; never listing the set of original goals; and not mentioning what concessions were made.
An uncorrupted union would never calls off a strike because of an employer proposition: If the proposition/proposed contract is offered enough time before the strike was decided, then it is brought up for discussion - with the negotiations team presenting both the benefits and the detriments: What they got and what they conceded; and the result of the discussion decides the fate of the planned strike. But when an offer is made just before a strike, naturally - the strike proceeds, and the offer is discussed in parallel with the strike. If the offer is accepted, the strike ends up being a short one; and if it is rejected - the struggle continues with the "wind in their sails".
> Wage increases for full-timers will keep UPS Teamsters the highest paid delivery drivers in the nation, improving their average top rate to $49 per hour.
Seems pretty good. I may take a break from tech and drive for a while.
4 years full time, to be specific, unless progression time is reduced. Off the street 22.4 hires from Covid times, who started at $20.50, will be converted to RPCD and making $45 within the next couple years.
I don't think so. The air conditioning bit was a big point*, and it doesn't look like they've moved at all since June. The deal says they'll put AC in vehicles purchased from 2024 forward, but no retrofits except for a "heat shield" for the cabin. Unless UPS plans to replace its fleet in 2024 (it does not), it will be years before the vast majority of drivers have AC. More are going to die.
*because multiple deliverymen have died of heat-related illness while on the job, and it's otherwise a major long-term health concern
> Unless UPS plans to replace its fleet in 2024 (it does not), it will be years before the vast majority of drivers have AC
This is what makes it a fair deal. Give and take. A maximalist position from labour would demand UPS churn or retrofit its entire fleet overnight. That's obviously not feasible, even if it makes for great PR.
> no retrofits except for a "heat shield" for the cabin
Maybe I'm reading "all cars get two fans and air induction vents in the cargo compartments" incorrectly?
I disagree. What would make it fair is that they put air conditioning in vehicles that service areas that have a high probability of being very hot during the summer. UPS should pay a price for neglecting the welfare of its workers for so many years and pay up to put air conditioning in its vehicles.
Give and take does not always mean a fair deal. Some negotiating positions are just plain wrong. If it is infeasible to retrofit vehicles then one has to accept that but this doesn't make it fair.
> What would make it fair is that they put air conditioning in vehicles that service areas that have a high probability of being very hot during the summer
Or pause delivery by ambient-temperature vehicles during the hottest parts of the day. There are a number of solutions which, while not suited to Twitter, can be worked out between adults not drawing red lines for the public's consumption.
Note that we don't have the NMA. We're going off highlights, one bullet point among which reads "safety and health protections, including..."
This entire thread is a brilliant illustration of why compromise cannot be made in public anymore.
I think you didn't read carefully what I wrote. I will state the last sentence again. If it is infeasible to add air conditioning then that is a reality but the compromise is not fair.
My overall point though was that the act of compromising does not make a deal fair. Some compromises are still unfair.
It is not fair in this day and age to require people to drive air conditionless vehicles in hot weather. There may be no other feasible alternative but let's not declare this part of the outcome fair.
> It is not fair in this day and age to require people to drive air conditionless vehicles in hot weather
Why? (Honestly.)
This reminds me of the windowless-apartment debate in New York. Community board members in rent-controlled units complain it's not fair for the poor to have no windows. As a result, the cheapest (legal) apartment was a bells-and-whistles deal. Meanwhile, I (illegally) subletted a windowless room in a full-floor loft for $900/month; even when (years later) I had a window, I put blackout curtains over it. The loft was a fair deal for me. Even if it offended another's sensibilities.
Give and take doesn't make a deal fair. But it indicates both sides have bargaining power. Given a trade-off between more hours, higher pay, a faster roll-out of electric vehicles, and/or more hires, on one hand, and A/C retrofitting, on the other hand, there are valid--even fair--tradeoffs the parties could have made that differ from yours or mine.
> It is not fair in this day and age to require people to drive air conditionless vehicles in hot weather
Why?
Because my sense of what was is fair tells me this is not fair. To you it is fair. So be it.
But it indicates both sides had bargaining power.
It does not indicate this. Consider an extreme example.
Labor: We need a $5 an hour raise.
Management: We will give you $0.01 raise.
Labor takes deal because they, in reality, had very little relative bargaining power. But a compromise was made! The act of compromising does not, in and of itself, indicate anything other than that a compromise was agreed upon. It does not indicate fairness, relative bargaining power, or anything else without further information.
My point was to object to original characterization of this being fair since it was a compromise.
I don't know what the tradeoffs were in the UPS bargaining. I do know that requiring someone to drive in an airconditionless vehicle in hot weather is not fair.
> Labor: We need a $5 an hour raise. Management: We will give you $0.01 raise.
Labor takes deal because they, in reality, had very little relative bargaining power. But a compromise was made!
Except this doesn't reflect the reality of the deal. Real pay bumps, hiring commitments, a new paid holiday--these aren't minor concessions. There was palpable uncertainty around whether there would be a strike. Teamsters estimates the value of concessions around $30bn; that's 20% of UPS's market cap, delivered to drivers over five years.
Clearly you are not reading what is being written. As stated several times. My objection is your original characterization that the issue of air conditioning was fair because it was a compromise.
Not all compromises are fair. Not all compromises indicate relatively equal bargaining power. Not all compromises....
The point is, you don't know whether it was fair either and you have no idea about the relative negotiating powers of the parties.
Maybe the AC portion of the deal translated directly into wage dollars on the negotiating table. Maybe it was a "pick 3 out of 4 deal".
Your posts are just pointless pedantry about an article where we (as the public) have very incomplete information about the preferences and the negotiating powers of the involved parties.
My complaint is that people often times think something is fair because both sides compromised. That thinking is sloppy and incorrect. A deal isn’t fair because it involved compromise. It’s like when people say, “both sides are unhappy with the deal so it means it’s a fair one”. That’s dumb thinking and inaccurate. It might be correct most of the time but not all of the time.
That a compromise was made does not make it fair. The act of compromising in and of itself does not necessarily imply fairness.
I’m not being a pedant. I’m claiming the original reasoning for believing this part of the deal is fair because it involved compromises. I also claim that requiring people to drive all day in hot weather in an air conditionless vehicle is inherently unfair.
>But it indicates both sides had bargaining power.
>It does not indicate this. Consider an extreme example.
>Labor: We need a $5 an hour raise. Management: We will give you $0.01 raise.
Well, no because if they had no bargaining power management could have told them to fuck off, or pay them even less. "Had bargaining power" =/= "had the upper hand"
Pick a dollar amount greater than $0.01 then in my example. Pick the smallest value such that you believe it provides an example of where a compromise is reached but the compromise does not indicate relatively equal bargaining power.
In the original example I gave a compromise was made. Namely the $0.01 increase in pay. I claim one side didn’t really have bargaining power. Do you believe all instances of compromise indicate bargaining power on both sides? I don’t. Sometimes one side budges very little and has way more power than the other. So much so that it’s not accurate to say both sides had bargaining power.
Sometimes labor has very little pricing power for their labor. There are many instances of this being true. If you don’t agree with this then please read up on labor history.
Then what was the point of the comment you originally made that I responded to? It appeared to be sarcasm and saying that if management only offer $0.01 raise then get a job elsewhere. That sort of simplistic reasoning doesn’t work in all situations. Namely it doesn’t work if labor overall has very little pricing power for the cost of their services.
The sky isn’t always blue. Which is ironic given your response.
> "We’ve hit every goal that UPS Teamster members wanted and asked for with this agreement. It’s a ‘yes’ vote for the most historic contract we’ve ever had.”
While the issue of fairness is subjective, it seems objectively good that the union was able to get what they wanted and asked for. Seems fair to me.
Given that quote, it does indeed seem like a fair deal overall. I was objecting to the characterization that the part of air conditioning had to be fair because there was an agreed upon compromise.
Also, I think its unfair to require people to drive air conditionless vehicles in hot weather.
Fans are not equivalent of air conditioning, particularly on hot and humid climates where the ability for the human body to conduct evaporative cooling significantly decreases with increasing humidity.
They aren’t. But forced convection still significantly lowers temperatures in metal and glass vehicles and this is enough to make a big difference in risk.
"Fair" does not mean "central, between horrible and tolerable".
>That's obviously not feasible
Your curt dismissal belies that it's actually not just feasible, but a necessity. I would like to see UPS spend the money to replace/retrofit, rather than fighting lawsuits from the relatives of dead or disabled workers, only to have to replace/retrofit anyway.
The logic reminds me of finding the truth somewhere between the extremes of "the Earth is flat" and "the Earth is an oblate spheroid." We'll just say the Earth is a cube and if both sides are unhappy, we know it's a job well done.
I dont know why you're so heavily downvoted. The second point is entirely correct and your first other than claiming something is not feasible without data to back it up (although i admit it probably isnt feasible), it seems very true and fair.
A fair deal doesn't externalize costs to risking peoples' lives, that's probably where the negativity is coming from.
Compromise in middle grounds assume the two sides have reasonable baselines. Disregard for human life isn't a reasonable baseline. I don't know all the details but I'd argue for some options to allow flex time in driver schedules with non-retrofitted vehicles to stop by somewhere, take a short snack break and cool down, not be so pressured they have no option but to stay in the heat or be fired. That seems like a reasonable middle ground, to me.
> other than claiming something is not feasible without data to back it up
Fair enough. UPS operates 125,000 trucks in America [1] with a useful life of 5 to 15 years [2].
So the question is, do you spend hundreds of millions of dollars retrofitting the current fleet, or, spend that money accelerating the purchase of new vehicles, which presumably come with additional perks beyond just air conditioning?
Air conditioning was fairly easy for both parties to agree on, due to a very successful PR campaign that the company wants to bury. Something like an accelerated schedule to retrofit current vehicles would be expensive to negotiate and result in sacrifices elsewhere.
Cabin AC won't fix cargo areas hitting 140s, and most drivers wouldn't agree to lose $5/hr for AC today or something like that. The heat shield is for the cargo compartment, along with improved air intakes / ventilation and possibly other mitigations - they get absurdly hot and have minimal airflow.
>I could understand this if it was acquired and then heavily censored
This has happened. Impression count has been decimated for anyone without a check. Bonus points if you've ever blocked Elon or posted with a sentiment he disagrees with.
Wait the suggestion is that billionaires/powerful people bought Twitter for nefarious purposes. Is it not worth more intact but surveilled and censored than utterly sabotaged with Elon graciously taking one for the team?
I’m not convinced, this is a bit complex, conspiratorial and nonsensical for me. When the simpler explanation is that Elon has just mismanaged the company.
So they were so harmed by the newly censored and under-friendly-control-for-$44b Twitter that they decided to spike it altogether and presume no similar social network would ever pop up again?
It really isn't. State - really, conservative party - antipathy to Twitter is well-known. This antipathy was instigated by Twitter's role in incubating several large, progressive movements over the past decade: the Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, the anti-TPP and anti-SOPA protests, the Umbrella Movement and its descendants, etc. We know this antipathy exists because many of the states vulnerable to similar movements and that have the power to ban Twitter have done so.
Twitter also allows for the real-time dissemination of information unfavorable to corporations, like during outages and accidents, and the widespread dissemination of less time-sensitive information by journalists who aren't beholden to corporate media gatekeepers.
Elon Musk's various ventures rely heavily on buy-in from the government - SpaceX relies on NASA's resources, Tesla has only been profitable because of generous renewable energy grants, and even Paypal benefited from lax oversight from financial regulators. That there is likely a relationship is less "Pizzagate" and more "Trump and Russian interference." And if you're going to pretend that that's not a damning analogy, all that does is expose how unserious you are about the matter.
All of that aside, there is also the matter of Musk 1) having had a checkered history with Twitter as it was, including its users, and 2) not having actually wanted to buy Twitter after his initial due diligence. Considering that his actions after completing the deal included firing most of the workforce, stripping users of multiple privileges, and stripping the company itself of its branding, it's not at all farfetched to conclude that he has no intention of simply renovating Twitter, but instead means to strip it down to studs or foundation and build a gaudy temple to his own warped sense of entrepreneurship. This is, after all, the man who insisted that the model names of his cars spell out "S3XY".
The Microsoft decision was based on dominance of a particular portion of the computing industry, x86 CPU-based PCs, not "computers, mobile devices, or VR". The equivalent here is passthrough-capable spatial computing devices running on ARM chips. That's a market that's in its infancy. It's hard to say what it looks like in 5-10 years. Because the AVP is currently singular in its capabilities (and priced as such), it can be argued that it's the only product available in the space it occupies. If they Sherlock any of the applying apps or platforms in that environment, it would seem to be an antitrust violation, as they'd be the only game in town for substantially similar hardware platforms.
My high school language was Japanese. Attempting European languages in adulthood, I'm always thrown off by the object-verb order. My brain subconsciously skips over the action, hears the object and then is left waiting to hear what we're supposed to do with it.
AFAIK Japan is a high-trust, high-context society. It is difficult to break into social groups or make new acquaintances, while the infrastructure necessary for living a "solitary" existence (supported by service-providing strangers) is extant and quite sophisticated.
Also something about Cuba. I think my point is that we're a bit too cavalier with used electronics these days. The embodied energy and materials are huge, and we just... throw them out, in many cases. I'd like us to get used to repurposing these resources before scarcity forces us to. Really squeezing every bit of use out of them that we can. Bonus: because it's not the Hot New Thing Someone Is Trying To Sell You, you'll likely be less subject to the Hot New Trend Of Actually Being The Product.
And, for what it's worth: an original Apple I just sold for almost $450k at auction. Someone wanted that.