I have pretty mixed feelings on unions. I spent most of my early career as a non-union blue collar worker embedded into mixed teams (union + non-union members). The general experience I walked away with was that unions seemed to attract the worst employees. I remember one individual in particular who, having worked with him for two years, never once actually did any work. He was actually one of my first mentors and I vividly recall riding in the truck with him as he explained "the game" to me about how to make good money while basically doing no work, and how it was "unfortunate" I couldn't play because I was "working for the man."
This might not seem so annoying, but in the Bay Area where I worked, the unions had lobbied to secure work that could _only_ be done by union members. For example, I was a controls technician, and I legally couldn't wire a 12v controller because it was considered protected work. Which means I had to try to convince the same people who were not incentivized to be productive to help me.
So yeah, after a few years of that, I left with a pretty sour taste in my mouth. That being said, philosophically I like the idea of unions. I've had my own share of experiences being abused by "the man." The retirement plans offered in particular were always alluring. But, despite being invited to join, I never felt compelled because I just couldn't find myself enjoying working with the people they attracted.
Similar life experiences. Like the idea of unions - especially how they are explained at a textbook level. I fully believe labor needs as much leverage against capital as possible for the scales to be balanced at all.
But US unions seem to exist nearly exclusively to protect people who don’t want to work.
Not my thing. At all. One should be able to be rewarded for hard work and productivity when you are expending more effort than the guy clocking in and doing everything possible to avoid it.
I’ve often thought you solve this via old fashioned guild based systems. The guild trains and provides labor while guaranteeing skills, quality, and honesty. They vet their members and cull the losers - a poor performing member should be seen as a liability for the rest of the pool of labor and very quickly corrected or removed from the guild.
That way employers know that even if they are paying more than they would like, at least the labor being supplied is going to be top tier and the job will done done to a high standard and on time.
Unions devolving to simply protect the lowest common denominator is a problem.
There are some trades unions in local chapter formats that work somewhat like this today. I’d just like to see more of it and more formalized with local competition between different union groups.
>But US unions seem to exist nearly exclusively to protect people who don’t want to work.
They don't exist for that reason, but their inevitable ground state is that.
The fundamental and intractable problem with any form of socialization is that it naturally attracts free riders. The idea doesn't have a balanced equilibrium, so it's either logistically/bureaucratically heavy or always being pulled towards collapse.
Everyone who starts these systems has pure intentions, and the initial members tend to be dedicated too. But over time it will either naturally decay, or turn into the thing it was trying to fight.
This doesn’t seem to be a universal rule at all, but smells more of a boogeyman promulgated within US society.
The nordics are anywhere from 50% - 90% of all labor unionized and they absolutely destroy the US on every standard of living metric.
It seems to me a case that echoes “better to let 99 guilty men go free than to execute an innocent man”. Of course, in this case, the ratios are actually reversed. Should we execute 99 innocent men to make sure that 1 guilty guy gets punished?
There will be some free riders, just like there will be some welfare queens, just like there will be some voter fraud.
That said, these cases represent a vanishingly small minority of the whole, and the cure is far worse than the disease.
>It seems to me a case that echoes “better to let 9 guilty men go free than to execute an innocent man”. Of course, in this case, the ratios are actually reversed. Should we execute 9 innocent men to make sure that 1 guilty guy gets punished?
We don't have to do an echo. We can just do it as it is.
9 men hunt and 1 man eats free, so the 9 men are carrying the weight of the 1.
This system is inherently unstable and unsustainable. Maybe you can mitigate it (nordic style) by keeping a small population and drilling into people's heads from birth that "you take turns being the 1, and the 1 needs to be eager to get back to the hunt or shame will be had", but even then that is a not an inherently stable system, but one propped up by trust.
> 9 men hunt and 1 man eats free, so the 9 men are carrying the weight of the 1.
Updated the quote to the historically accurate 99 vs 1.
> This system is inherently unstable and unsustainable.
The countries cited are extremely stable. Arguably far more stable than the US.
That said, we can bring in the rest of Western Europe if 5 countries aren't enough of an example. They have union participation rates between 10% and 50%, median around 20%. The thing is, they have much larger proportions of their workforces covered by collective bargaining agreements - France for example is at 10% union participation yet 98% of labor covered by bargaining agreements.
Western Europe and the Nordics combined = ~400 million people, bigger population than the US, and far more diverse, so the common refrain of "small homogenous population" doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Of course, all societies so far have eventually been unstable.
We can just choose whether our unstable society will be a vindictive one that prioritizes punishing wrongdoers over the wellbeing of the whole, or a pragmatic and (as a nice bonus) compassionate one which prioritizes the wellbeing of the whole over a puritanical urge to purge the unworthy.
A healthy organisation can reflect on this tendency and purge some free riders to preserve itself. The fact that it doesn't, to me personally, just means it's not under external pressure.
If there is one thing free riders are generally skilled at, it's hiding the fact they are free riding. There is then an internal decay where as others learn the tricks, they realize that they can start coasting too, and they should, because why would you do extra work if you don't have to.
To defeat this you need intense oversight, but then you yourself become the man with an iron fist.
This is a super common theme whenever you dig into anything socialized. It works great when everyone understands the system and is dedicated to the work, the mission. But as soon as a single atom of "I can get away with not doing my full part" seeps in, it's like a seed crystal that eventually collapses the whole system.
It's the prisoner's dilemma. I believe any self-preservation optimized intelligence is going to suffer from these problems until those behaviors are countered in interaction by design (e.g. process, societal/cultural pressures, etc.) or removed from the baseline (i.e. evolved out.)
Our desires make us our own worst enemies, and until we acknowledge and openly plan to counter these tendencies, any social structure at some scale is going to fail to them. Unfortunately, the problems we face as a species are increasingly at larger and larger scales.
I'm not sure if we can remain what we would recognize as "human," and solve for this without surrendering some level of executive function to an entity not afflicted by it. Government and regulation are already expressions of this, while retaining our intrinsic nature, but history has demonstrated this is inherently unstable.
What definition of organizational health demonstrates this? Certainly none of the long-lived and powerful US unions have this property. Observationally, it seems that the strongest US unions also exercise their power to protect all within their fold. The worst offenders fail to be protected by the union, but in general, they are not purged. And US unions are quite powerful. The leaders wear Rolexes.
This seems logical. A labor union carries power commensurate with the number of members in it. It is more important for members that they be protected than that they be held to a high standard. If the latter is done, it is in service to the former. That is entirely the purpose of the union after all. No one forms a union so that others can hold them to a high standard of performance.
Thanks for sharing. Very interesting to hear someone else with a similar experience.
> Unions devolving to simply protect the lowest common denominator is a problem.
I've always wondered if this is because the ones most incentivized to stay are the ones that eventually make it into upper leadership. It always seemed to me like the decisions being made at that level were intended to protect those same people. For example, rather than seeing poor-performing members as a risk to the union, the answer was to just lobby legally secured work so that companies had no choice but to hire its members. Which is quite the game, because I'm sure at face value it sounds great (companies can't ignore unions), but the hidden reality seemed to be that it just ensured these people always had a job.
Honest question -- what should happen to poor performing people? They should have less money, less food, be homeless or what? Should they be more stressed and as a result somehow perform better?
On one hand I don't like to deal with results of bad craftsmanship, on the other hand I don't desire of the suffering of others.
The thing is real, but so are the people.
Not a snark or a gotcha, I'm a union member and recognise this thing at work.
> Honest question -- what should happen to poor performing people?
The union should help them find roles they can be successful in. It should offer them more specialized training, mentorship programs, and other ways to help build up their skills. If they refuse to take any of these seriously, they should be fired. To me, that's the difference between poor performing and intentional laziness.
There should be disincentives for poor performance, options to improve performance (training, counseling, etc.) and incentives for good performance (better raises, perks, etc.) to incentivize good employees.
Unions are supposed to defend the value of labour. I think in a fair society where losing your blue collar job didn't mean dog food for dinner the balance of responsibility and squeamishness could shift away from employers and unions in terms of keeping food in people's bellies after they get fired. Then unions and businesses can actually have somewhat aligned goals, which is better for everyone, really.
In order to protect the long term value of a profession or some other labour corps, you can't skip efficiency and defend poor work ethic. I think to a degree the medical profession exemplifies this with professional bodies regulating conduct and standard of care/work. Part of this is the generally earnest approach to the scrutiny, but I believe part is the lack of immediate grave concern to anyone ‘on the stand,’ who can be presumed to earn comfortably, upon losing their job.
> I fully believe labor needs as much leverage against capital as possible for the scales to be balanced at all
Competition is required, rather than unionization. If an industry is dominated by monopolies, not only do customers suffer, workers do too. Unions don't really fix the problem - only make certain groups win over others.
The problem is that they tend to benefit their members in a zero sum way. For example the LIRR wants a double digit raise not in exchange for hitting targets on on-time arrivals or some other metric. They want it or they strike and hold the community hostage. It bothers me that there's no value exchange it's just take take take, and ultimately at my expense.
Worse, public sector unions are ultimately at my expense in a way that I can't even fix by not buying the product, since they're taking it from my taxes.
The experience which I had which sums up the negatives about unions was when I was working at the then 4th largest printer in the U.S., and the largest privately owned print shop, when I pulled up in my then several years old Chevy Cavalier and parked next to a one year newer one --- an erstwhile union rep then pulled up in a brand new Lincoln Town Car and got out and asked me if I was interested in unionizing the company --- I pointed to the car I was parked next to and stated, "That car belongs to the owner of the company, it's the first new car he ever purchased, previously having driven company vans which had such high mileage that the company auctioned them off. Why would I give money to someone who is driving an even nicer car?"
The flip side was when the company owner retired from active management to the board of directors, and a management consultant was brought in to make the company more profitable --- he opened the curtains of the boardroom where he was making his pitch, pointed out at the parking lot filled with nice cars and trucks in good repair and stated, "You're paying too many people too much money."
An uncle of mine in the coal region of the northwestern Virginia mountain once noted that a local union organizer was noted for having 3 things in his trunk:
- a mimeograph
- a fifth of whiskey
- a sawed-off shotgun
Any discussion of unions needs to include a history of the Pinkertons.
This is usually one of the arguments made against unions, and I find it an interesting phenomenon.
Philosophically unions benefit the majority and are probably a net good on a social construct level. But they are likely a net loss to the top percentage of workers who are extremely motivated to move up and probably hurt innovation overall.
Unions exist to benefit the median and bring up the floor, but it stifles competition among those who really do desire to be at the top. And in doing so while it brings up the floor, it also brings down the ceiling because people who would normally be motivated enough to move up would not have much incentive to do so anymore.
Additionally most companies arguments against unions make the assumption that EVERYONE wants to be part of that top percentage, that everyone is extremely motivated to move up the ladder, etc. Also they bank on convincing everyone they could be part of that top percentage that moves up.
But statistically only so many can, and there is no universe where everyone can be that top worker who is successful because only so many can move up anyways.
Edit: Adding that this is from my perspective on US views of unions. I don't know much about how it differs elsewhere since many point out it seems to be done differently here vs elsewhere.
A key problem in the US is that in a unionized job you are legally required to be represented by the union. Union membership is non-voluntary.
If you think you are part of that top percentage or even if you think that the union is not representing your interests, tough luck. It is illegal to quit or reorganize like-minded individuals to form your own that better represents you. To reform the union you need to get 50% of the members to vote for change instead of just forming a new, smaller organization that represents your interests.
This is in contrast to many European unions where you can choose to join because you think they provide worthwhile benefits. Or you can choose to not join because it does not. Unions need to compete on benefits to their members and are thus incentivized to provide better benefits.
Someone taller has a better chance at becoming a pro basketball player. Shorter people are not given more leeway. But both tall and short people have the chance to try out (at least on paper).
Because the equivalence between being signed for the NBA and having apples to eat is nonsensical. We accept some things being unfair, not everything being unfair.
Fixating on apples is key to the metaphor. The shorter person has other opportunities to collect food that they are better suited for, e.g. picking strawberries.
> We accept some things being unfair, not everything being unfair.
Life is fundamentally unfair. Anything that tips the balance in the other direction is due to specific, continuous human effort. It's a good thing when we can make things more fair, but the inherent unfairness of life is not a cosmic injustice.
> Unions exist to benefit the median and bring up the floor, but it stifles competition among those who really do desire to be at the top. And in doing so while it brings up the floor, it also brings down the ceiling because people who would normally be motivated enough to move up would not have much incentive to do so anymore.
I think people tend to fixate on the worker-to-worker differences inside of unions. Yes, that is the most visible part of a union when in place, and at least in the US has valid arguments about meritocracy.
What is missed when limiting the scope to just that is the population-level abuses of workers that no amount of meritocracy will fix. When corporations engage in collusion against workers (now common and nearly unpunished in the US) the top-level wages are suppressed industry wide.
The whole pay band alignment that comes out of that undermines the meritocracy argument, and doesn't even begin to address the wage-fixing that has gone almost unchecked in tech for decades[1,2]. As a merited employee, you might have more options to where you can go, but it won't protect you from predatory hiring/layoff cycles and it certainly won't guarantee that you'll receive a truly competitive wage.
On paper, meritocracy sounds great. I have worked many places in tech and never once observed it, personally. Best case, if you have warmed a seat for enough years, then you advance that way. Worst, your employer knows they can just take advantage of you because you're willing to work without a dangling carrot.
As before, either the government frees itself from corruption and enacts justice or unions will come back. That is point we are at.
I always viewed unions as a temporary solution to a long term problem. Fundamentally, its simply a unit or type of organization. But for some reason here in the west they have become this entrenched institution in of itself, presumably because it tasted a modicum of power, that power had real influence over people, and wherever there is an institution that exerts power over people, it becomes prime targets for demonic and corrupting influence.
You had guilds in the middle ages, and that worked well to serve the primarily agrarian feudal society. Unions worked well in a rapidly industrializing country with little to no enshrined worker protections or rights. We saw measured, direct, positive change. But the last 30 years or so, I can't really say the same has happened. In fact, some of the most unionized sectors have seen the most degradation. Blame who you will (I've heard it all in this point), but the main take away is its not working. Maybe its time for a new structure for this modern, post industrial society.
It’s about showing up ready to do an honest days work for an honest days pay. Not going above and beyond, but being reasonable about the fact that at the end of the day it’s work and things need to get done for everyone involved to put food on the table.
Instead it becomes a cat and mouse game of figuring out how to game the rules and scam as many hours as possible while doing either nothing, or as bad of a job as possible. The whole “not in my job description” thing makes a bit of sense when first implemented as a union rule, but devolves rapidly into nonsense like office workers being unable to plug in a monitor at their desk and sitting around idle for a few days until a union electrician can amble on around.
There is of course a balance here, and it seems the US is one extreme or the other outside of the trade specific unions. Other countries apparently have avoided much of this absurdity somehow.
The grocery store union I was forced to join as a teenager made sense on paper. Make sure employees were kept in safe working conditions, couldn’t be fired arbitrarily, had a reasonable pace of work anyone could keep up with. But it was more about protecting that group of guys who spent half their shift out back on smoke breaks, purposefully damaging cartons of goods while stocking since they didn’t like a particular manager, etc.
If the unions were more really trade guilds and policed themselves people would have much higher respect for them, I feel.
And some unions practically are this, where the union negotiates rates and benefits, but the "customer" still gets to decide which particular people he hires (and so the "bad apples" never get any reliable business) - which I've seen in AV production, etc.
I don't disagree and thats likely the opinion of the vast majority of people. Thats why i say that unions and collective bargaining are most likely to be a net benefit overall.
It just hurts competition among those who have an internal motivation to go above and beyond. They will feel they are being held back and either lose motivation or go somewhere where they feel a union isn't holding them back.
And the downside of that is companies losing their most hardworking/motivated people.
Edit: the above was written before the edit adding the cat and mouse game.
Added: I agree as well that when implemented wrong unions have pretty annoying affects on peoples motivation or work ethic. People who are qualified for things aren't allowed to do things outside of their explicit job description/contract. Etc. Some argue this is good, others argue it just wastes tons of time and hurts progress.
> The grocery store union I was forced to join as a teenager made sense on paper. Make sure employees were kept in safe working conditions, couldn’t be fired arbitrarily, had a reasonable pace of work anyone could keep up with. But it was more about protecting that group of guys who spent half their shift out back on smoke breaks, purposefully damaging cartons of goods while stocking since they didn’t like a particular manager, etc.
Why do we constantly denigrate these "free loaders" and exalt the capitalists who quite literally free load off of our labor extracting untold billions and trillions of dollars off the backs of average folks like you and me while we get relative pennies?
I worked in Big Tech for a while. For a normal person, I made good money. But the founders and top shareholders of these companies made literal billions off the labor of myself and my coworkers while contributing absolutely nothing on a day-to-day basis. I would have to work 100 lifetimes to earn what many of them take home in a year.
Frankly, if the system allows some normal folks to dick around and get paid the same as billionaires jetting off to spend time on their megayachts then more power to the folks taking a smoke break.
> Why do we constantly denigrate these "free loaders" and exalt the capitalists who quite literally free load off of our labor extracting untold billions and trillions of dollars off the backs of average folks like you and me while we get relative pennies?
We should do both, but when I agree to take a job at a given pay, I show up every single day capable, ready, and willing to work for the wage I agreed to. When other people don't pull their weight, it means I have to take on an unfair amount of work to make up the difference so that I can complete the things I've committed to in the workplace. The focus is on worker to worker relationships, because those are the most locally impactful relationships you have in the workplace. At the giant corporation I currently work for, I'm in the ladder fairly high up compared to most people as far as steps from the CEO, and yet I still only see the CEO on video calls with the whole company 4 times a year. The person in the office down the road from me that is blocking me from completely the thing I need to do to meet my own quarterly objective is far more tangible and legible to me than whether or not the CEO is a bum who spends all day golfing.
The fundamental difference is I take personal accountability for my own behavior and commitments, and that is one camp. The camp that doesn't see an issue with union free riders not pulling their weight are generally folks who only see accountability collectively, rather than personally, or maybe don't even take any accountability at all. Accountability is generally in short supply in our current society, so maybe its a novel thing, but I actually don't like doing a shitty job and if its due to somebody else screwing me over at work, I don't like that person a whole lot more than I don't like someone who I've hardly ever met and never talk to (CEO).
And I personally think that billionaires extracting untold wealth from those of us doing the actual work is a far greater societal problem than some normal folks who are lazy but are making 0.0001% of what the capitalist class is extracting from my efforts.
> The camp that doesn't see an issue with union free riders not pulling their weight are generally folks who only see accountability collectively, rather than personally, or maybe don't even take any accountability at all.
And while I don't like that the Union protects folks like this, I believe the work they do to protect hard working folks like me from being "managed-out" or even laid off so that the billionaires can make even more money next quarter is of great societal value. We as workers deserve to have security that as long as we are meeting reasonable productivity targets, we won't be kicked to the curb.
Having dealt with a manager deciding they didn't like me and doing everything in their power to manage me out (successfully), despite me meeting every goal given to me, management and the capitalists can take a long walk off a short pier for all I'm concerned.
The same behavior displayed by union workers occurs at a level where people can hide behind a title (Vice President, department head, whatever). Yet people rarely look as critically at senior management as they do at union workers.
I also find it that people who are critical of union workers never seem to be critical of police or fire fighters, both of whom are unionized.
My dad was a union worker for 19 years and I don't think ever displayed any of the negative characteristics assigned to unionized workers.
ACAB largely exists due to the police union, and I always hear people astutely bring this up. Firefighters unions I know less about, but I've also only ever heard about volunteer firefighters and scarcely enough about them either..
I work at a company creating wealth, and heirs who own stock collect dividends from the company. What work did they do? You're talking about the guy sitting near you who you don't feel is working hard enough, and nothing of the parasitic heirs expropriating the product of unpaid surplus time of those working and creating wealth. Which unions are formed to rest control back from.
i like my union because they force the management to actually take care of our equipment. every non-union job i've had involves a lot of making fucked up shit kind of work. that's what i want from a union, tangible benefits to my working conditions. it's not a social club, and i'm not one to be worried about the caliber of people i associate with.
Similar mixed opinions. I think labor absolutely has an ability to make collective decisions but I also believe business should have the ability to fire at will and I am not convinced that unions should be protected from that.
I have only been exposed to unions like dock workers where who you know or the color of your skin matter more than your ability to execute on the job.
My first job out of college was a government union job (optional to join). I was pretty appalled by the behaviour I saw from older colleagues and the union reps. Government unions should be illegal in my opinion. Becoming the head of these unions is insane money, the union fees can run up to $50-$100 per month per member and if you look at the union salaries it mostly goes to the leadership sometimes earning $100-$200k or more on their part-time job on top of their actual job. Also the union organisers make pretty solid money setting it up. I think if you have more competition and more competing companies than wages stay competitive and employers have to be good to attract labor, it’s probably the best option. Humans are too dishonest to be trusted with such organisations. Invisible hand forces are harder to manipulate.
My wife is in a Union and she has been getting info that has nothing to do with her job. Some unions cross pollinate with whatever cause someone in the union is interested in. She wants a raise but can't because of collective bargaining, but the union isn't doing anything about that. However they are talking about other political issues. So her dues are not helping her but whatever political issue is being promoted.
It feels like a systems problem. It seems like the same theme that we see in for say, startup to corporate transformation. I think ultimately it comes down to size. They become too big and the power consumes. And they become what they once fought.
I had similar experiences as a former unionized worker. Unions definitely solve some problems, but they're not a panacea, and a lot of company BS just gets replaced by an equivalent amount of union BS. The most miserable people I've ever worked with were people at my former union with 10+ years on the job (I remember one lady was in the process of suing the company AND the union, lol); they couldn't leave without losing all their seniority and benefits, couldn't be fired, but still had a long way to go before retirement.
Very similar experiences here. My first job was in a union shop, but you could not be forced to join. Whether you joined or not, though, you had dues taken from your pay. I refused to join initially because I could choose to join at any moment, it wasn't a locked decision. I immediately had people trying to convince me to join, while within months of working there I realized how little pride or effort anyone took in their work. I worked at that company for three years and never joined the union, which apparently made the management think I wanted to be in management because they kept trying to promote me. I never wanted to be in management (then). I was easily 6x as productive as anyone else there, and I saw lots of really ridiculous petty corruption take place amongst the union members. Really soured me on unions, despite the general high level idea being something I agree with. I can't imagine ever joining a union.
Another issue with unions is that they should be symbiotic but often transition to parasitic. What I mean is there are times despite it being obvious the demands will drive companies into either re-org or bankruptcy proceedings they’ll go full steam. The demands also at time accelerate offshoring or sending some of the work over-seas. Obviously all these scenarios are detrimental to the future of the workforces they represent.
Typical HN war story about how one’s coworkers are incompetent or chronically lazy. I guess this is the HN version of hard-hatters being vehemently against immigrant labor.
Meanwhile the concern for being abused by people with actual power is just an emotionless throwaway scare quote. “The man”.
We certainly don't need private investment to develop an economy. I, for one, am tired of supporting lazy parasites whose only contribution is money, and who don't know how to invest it for the rest of us. It's a completely broken model.
If you have a machine that makes widgets, which requires people to operate, the machine (capital) without anyone operating it (labor) is worthless, but if you have people (labor) without any machine (capital), you won't have any widgets.
I feel like this is one of those situations where "the whole is larger than the sum of the parts" - combining the power of capital and labor, you get much more value than just capital or just labor.
Of course, this does NOT imply that "I provided the capital, it couldn't have happened without me, ergo I deserve all the rewards" is true, even if, if we look at the history and current state of the world, generally speaking it is more advantageous to provide capital than it is to provide labor.
Your probably a normal guy making a comment in good faith, but I can't help but think this is the exact sort of dark marketing that I would do if I was an anti union commenter/marketer. Attack the vague made up values of union members because you can't attack the fact that large companies have been anti-worker for awhile and most people believe that. I'll also add onto here that if this comment gets down voted into the dirt, I'm likely right. Also let me be clear, I'm not attacking your comment but what sort of comment would be most-likely amplified by anti-union forces.
The poor reputation of unions in the US is well-deserved. The unions are writing their own anti-union propaganda, you can't blame other people for noticing this. Your argument is essentially that we should pretend this obvious badness doesn't exist because it makes unions look bad.
It is weird how much discourse these days is about pretending something obviously true isn't actually happening. The first step of fixing a problem is being honest about its existence. The inability of some people to be honest about the existence of obvious things is why so many problems go unaddressed.
Well, I'm the sole provider in a single income family with several dependents. My assumption is that would make me the natural fit for a union given how much my employment means my family stays off the street. That's why I have mixed feelings. The idea of a union aligns with my living situation. The reality, however, always left a sour taste in my mouth.
Maybe, but I have heard the exact same experience from my Dad and others that have worked with unions. It unfortunately seems to attract people trying to take advantage of the system. Personally if I were offered similar jobs, one with a union, one without, I'd take the one without.
Rein in the worst excesses, and you won't have the general population spreading these stories as a response to their own experiences with unions. Living in NYC and observing union workers was enough to fully convince me that union regs weren't promoting efficiency in the workplace, no need for shady capitalists to try to convince me. And a lot of times, those people were working for public dollars, so it was hurting all of us.
I'm generally pro-union and certainly fair wage, but it's important to keep in mind that unions will grow into their own power centers and have leadership with its own internal goals which are not aligned with either their working members nor the employers.
but it's important to keep in mind that without unions the corporation will grow into their own power centers and have leadership with its own internal goals which are not aligned with either their working members nor the employers
A bunch of people form an organization so that they can work together to sell stuff.
When they're selling widgets, or other people's labor, we call those people "management" and we call their organization "business" and it's the standard way of doing things.
When they're selling their own labor, we call it a "union" and suddenly people have Opinions about whether they're really a good thing or not.
If Bob's Heavy Manufacturing Concern can collectively bargain with its customers when selling its Retro Encabulators, then Bob's employees should be able to collectively bargain with its customer i.e. Bob when selling their product i.e. their labor.
As i see it, Unions are groups of employees where they have agreed to cooperate to get a better group outcome than they might be able to negotiate individually. It often caps the outcomes for the very very best, and raises the outcomes for the very very bottom. But across a wide swath they are earning more, or treated better, than they would be had they tried to do it alone. TBD if the union fees negate more or less than this gain.
IMO Cooperatives are a better model, it combines cooperative behavior with the dual risk/profit model of entrepreneurship.
I don’t think it’s weird. Why should a union be a protected class that you cannot fire? If a company can find people to work cheaper than what the union offers why should they have to continue to employ union workers? Pros/Cons to everything. I generally sit into the stance that the free movement of labor is one of the things the US gets right.
Is that correct? I thought the NLRA was shaped in such a way that you cannot fire someone because they are in a union. You cannot refuse to hire known union supporters.
I liken to being similar to a protected class that you cannot discriminate against.
Edit: why would this get downvoted? If I am wrong about the NLRA I am happy to be corrected.
To be clear you can fire union members but not because they are in a union, support a union or organizing to be in a union. Very similar to a protected class.
I think where it breaks down though is if a company manages to monopolize the market we all recognize this is bad. If a union tries to monopolize the labor supply to a company, most pro-union opinions celebrate this and argue the company should have to negotiate with the union to find a rate rather than being able to just shit-can everyone in the union and move on to the next guy.
Union itself I'd agree could function as basically a corporation of workers. That's not on face a bad thing, but the devil is in the details of what kind of violence (via law or otherwise) is used to try and use that to form a monopoly. Of course the companies are no better in this regard, they use the violence of the state to monopolize markets as well.
Aren't exclusive contracts pretty common in business? There's a big difference between monopolizing the supply to a single customer, which happens all the time, and monopolizing an entire market.
Yes if it's just a voluntary contract I see nothing sinister. If some employees form a union that's not sinister. If the company signs a contract with them that's not sinister. But if some employees want a union and that automatically means they've forced the other employees to join rather than allowing the other employees to pick to work outside the union, or automatically means the company is involuntarily bound to contract, that would be a bit sinister.
Involuntarily binding the company to the contract would be bad, I agree.
But what's wrong with forcing the other employees to join to keep their jobs? That is fundamentally a requirement on the company, that they only hire people in the union. And that's no different from any other sort of exclusive contract. If a restaurant has an exclusive contract with Coke, is it sinister to say that Pepsi employees can't supply them, and they have to join Coke if they want to do that?
I'm saying suppose some employees decide to form a union. And the company doesn't consent to sign an exclusive contract. As I understand it there are unions advocating that workers that didn't agree to a union still have to be bound to it anyway.
It's my understanding in some states in the US it's possible a worker will be forced to join a union if a certain number of other workers want a union, even if neither the worker nor the company hiring them consent to it. In about half of states under "right to work" though they do give employees the option to not join the union if they don't want to.
This happened to me when I was working a ~minimum wage job at a grocery store. At the time it was not a right to work state, and I was forced to join the UFCW. The union I was forced to join then made me pay dues, pushing me below minimum wage.
How about forcing businesses to be owned by their employees [1]? Instead of taxing the owning class and being paid UBI peanuts, you become the owning class and reap the rewards directly.
Instead of repeating vapid arguments from the past 30 years designed to disincline people from joining unions, maybe you could look outside of your own borders and realize that it's not an inherent property of unions. Inherent to the US and your extremely unhealthy relationship with work, maybe.
It's not 30 years old though, the longshore union leader a few years ago literally went on live national TV with a fucking rolex and gold chain screaming how broke he was and that (in his own words) his message to America is "I will cripple you" if people trying to import things like medicines, foodstuffs, and everything else into American ports don't pay more union money to their monopolized union instead of investing in automation and modernizing our ports.
You're not pro-union if you still spout anti-union propaganda. You spent more words arguing against unions than you did for them. I'd say your first part of the sentence is probably more of a rhetorical trick than anything close to true
there’s also a dam breaking effect. if unionization starts kicking off again, that can be contagious. so companies are incentivized to “nip it in the bud”
Recently the LIRR (Long Island Rail Road workers) went on strike. The NYT has covered it, including this interesting fact:
> For instance, if an engineer drives a diesel train at the start of a shift but is asked to switch to an electric train in the same day, the M.T.A. must compensate that worker with two days’ pay. If, on the same day, the engineer is also asked to switch from driving passengers to driving a train back to a yard for maintenance or storage, that worker is entitled to a third day’s pay.
Take from that what you will.
My view is that -- with some exceptions -- unions today are mostly bad, and worth fighting.
The reason for this rule is that it forces management to schedule workers more predictably and compensates workers who invest in obtaining broader qualifications.
> My view is that -- with some exceptions -- unions today are mostly bad, and worth fighting.
There are literally thousands of unions just in the US. I agree that some are dysfunctional, but making a claim like "with some exceptions -- unions today are mostly bad" needs a lot more evidence. My counter-evidence is simple: historically, there's a direct correlation with the strength of unions and the existence of a strong middle class.
> The reason for this rule is that it forces management to schedule workers more predictably and compensates workers who invest in obtaining broader qualifications.
No, it's just a scam, and anyone should be able to see that. It's like saying I get 2 days pay if I have to write go in addition to typescript. And 3 days pay if I have to write java.
> There are literally thousands of unions just in the US. I agree that some are dysfunctional, but making a claim like "with some exceptions -- unions today are mostly bad" needs a lot more evidence. My counter-evidence is simple: historically, there's a direct correlation with the strength of unions and the existence of a strong middle class.
Unions had a good reason to exist post industrialization when many people worked in factories under terrible conditions. But today, in the West, that's no longer the case. Today, unions are mostly bad.
This is an adversarial process. Unions exist to fight employers. Unions spend about 23 billion a year in total. Only spending 1.5B to defend against 23B looks like a bargain.
AFAIK The USA is one of the most anti-union non-authoritarian countries for a very long time. In other countries people receive a lot more support and protections for the right to organize
It that’s true, why is union membership declining? why did Trump et al gut the NLRB? why do starbucks unionized employees STILL not have a contract years after forming a union?
Yeah, total us payroll is around 15T. They are basically spending $10 per employee per year. Or 1/10000 of the total spending on wages.
This is actually small in terms of political spending. There are random scam ballot measures in CA that get more spending per voter than this.
*edit: the actual report details this is just for services related to efforts targeting their own work force via lawyers and consultants. The total spending on the issue is likely much higher:
https://www.epi.org/publication/u-s-employers-spend-more-tha...
Stuff like this and also lobbying have an incredibly high ROI. Once a company has reached a certain size investing in changing rules to their favor is the best investment they can make.
this really depends on the industry and union. In some sectors they hold zero power (software development) and in other they have it locked up (auto manufacturing)
The word "fight" is doing way too much work in this Guardian headline, because that money includes labor relations work employers do to try to stave off the incentives to start unions. You can feel any way you like about it, but logically if you're going to argue that you have to argue that every dollar above median a non-unionized shop pays is also an effort to fight unions.
This will not work until unions deal with the reality of globalization, and push to form a worldwide union, which ensures compensation has no more than 2x difference based on one's country. This is the multiplier where people will not want to transfer work for cost vs skill level.
This is unpalatable to HCOL engineers, because their pay will significantly compress in this union to support the growth of compensation of similarly skilled LCOL regions/countries.
Think about the recent tech layoffs - we spend a lot of time comparing one set of severance concessions to another. Wouldn't it be better if this were a matter of contract instead of your great corporate overlords deciding how much they deign to give you as they take away your job?
I feel like the general consensus on most of the recent layoffs were that they severance was pretty generous. If it seems to be working okay, why do we need to introduce additional inefficiencies to get something we already have?
The issue is the 'most' - and the severance packages can be changed tomorrow unilaterally.
And maybe it would be better not to have the layoffs in the first place? The profits of the hyperscalers are growing steadily even as they fire more workers.
I think this may be one of the last moments when programmers have enough power to dictate these things, should LLMs become as powerful as some suggest.
Unions only exist because there is a huge power imbalance between employer and employee. They attempt to balance the field.
In doing so, companies may lose their leverage and are forced to actually negotiate. This is often painted as blackmailing, but it's the same thing they do to employees. Bosses often go with "we're doing you a favor. If you don't want this job, I have a replacement for you".
When their power and leverage vanishes, they see it as being blackmailed, when in reality they are just being forced to play a fair game.
This thread has several stories of unions "keeping lazy workers", etc. I can't deny your experiences. But what about the thousands of companies that violate Labor Laws? Why are we not talking about these stories? e.g. https://www.epi.org/publication/unlawful-employer-opposition...
When you push people hard enough, they will fight back. In fighting back, the corporations that had the leverage will feel attacked by losing their power.
While 68% of workers approve unions (https://news.gallup.com/poll/694472/labor-union-approval-rel...) there are only 9% of them that actually belong to a union. That's a huge discrepancy. It can be explained by the immense difficulty in forming one due to illegal corporation practices and laws that make it difficult.
Loosely that just means that if you work somewhere with a lot of employees, you'll hear that the same job in a neighboring state pays 1.5-2 times as much. And that they have a harder time firing you. And that you'll be more likely to get compensated if you get hurt or whatever. Etc etc etc because unions.
It was pitched as a way to avoid paying union dues and possibly make it easier to move around the job market. And especially avoid working with "those" people.
If you sensed the ick factor there, that's why I think it's hard to have a rational debate around unions. It's become a divisive word like liberal due to deep-rooted disagreements going back to the founding of the (cough) union.
I prefer to use a term like representation. Do we want an advocate between us and the bosses when the next round of layoffs comes? Of course. Do we want our own form of human resources (HR) that has real teeth when something violent or inappropriate happens to a coworker? Of course. Do we want to have our voices heard when it comes to the quality of our work environment? Of course.
When people agree on principles but not on the umbrella term that covers them, it makes them vulnerable to political manipulation so that they can be divided and convinced to vote against their own interests.
I understand that a free market where people can switch jobs easily might be seen as more ideal than unions. But do we live in that market really? How many cities in America have a handful of large companies propping up the local economy? How many of those companies would take us in if we got fired from the other companies? How often do we hear about people moving to another city because they can't find a job?
There seems to be quite a discrepancy between the ideal and the actual. Another way to make people vulnerable to political manipulation.
I think maybe it comes down to how we see ourselves as blue collar or white collar. I understand how unions might be against the interests of white collar workers who tell blue collar workers what to do. What I can't understand is why blue collar workers would be against unions. What is the rationale there, really?
Without logic, we're left with bad faith arguments. Unions don't exist much these days for the same reasons that people on food stamps vote for billionaires. There's an irony there that their hope for opportunity gets used against them in a negative reinforcement loop. It's plain to see, and yet no help is coming.
If companies decide who gets hired instead of the people doing the work, that would seem to open the door to corruption and prejudice. So it's interesting that we might associate unions with mob activity, but not the existing corporate status quo. Why is that?
$1.5B is roughly the wage theft recovered between 2021-2023. It's estimated that more than $15B in wage theft occurs annually just from minimum wage shortfalls.
Keep in mind that wage theft is narrowly defined to include only blatantly illegal actions such as underpaying minimum wage, failing to pay overtime, requiring off-the-clock work, denying meal breaks, etc. It that doesn't even get into more general wage suppression via abusing visas, anti-poaching collusion with competitors (a favorite pastime of FANNG), and at-or-below inflation raise policies, among other things, which have caused wages to diverge from productivity over the last half century.
I have pretty mixed feelings on unions. I spent most of my early career as a non-union blue collar worker embedded into mixed teams (union + non-union members). The general experience I walked away with was that unions seemed to attract the worst employees. I remember one individual in particular who, having worked with him for two years, never once actually did any work. He was actually one of my first mentors and I vividly recall riding in the truck with him as he explained "the game" to me about how to make good money while basically doing no work, and how it was "unfortunate" I couldn't play because I was "working for the man."
This might not seem so annoying, but in the Bay Area where I worked, the unions had lobbied to secure work that could _only_ be done by union members. For example, I was a controls technician, and I legally couldn't wire a 12v controller because it was considered protected work. Which means I had to try to convince the same people who were not incentivized to be productive to help me.
So yeah, after a few years of that, I left with a pretty sour taste in my mouth. That being said, philosophically I like the idea of unions. I've had my own share of experiences being abused by "the man." The retirement plans offered in particular were always alluring. But, despite being invited to join, I never felt compelled because I just couldn't find myself enjoying working with the people they attracted.
Similar life experiences. Like the idea of unions - especially how they are explained at a textbook level. I fully believe labor needs as much leverage against capital as possible for the scales to be balanced at all.
But US unions seem to exist nearly exclusively to protect people who don’t want to work.
Not my thing. At all. One should be able to be rewarded for hard work and productivity when you are expending more effort than the guy clocking in and doing everything possible to avoid it.
I’ve often thought you solve this via old fashioned guild based systems. The guild trains and provides labor while guaranteeing skills, quality, and honesty. They vet their members and cull the losers - a poor performing member should be seen as a liability for the rest of the pool of labor and very quickly corrected or removed from the guild.
That way employers know that even if they are paying more than they would like, at least the labor being supplied is going to be top tier and the job will done done to a high standard and on time.
Unions devolving to simply protect the lowest common denominator is a problem.
There are some trades unions in local chapter formats that work somewhat like this today. I’d just like to see more of it and more formalized with local competition between different union groups.
>But US unions seem to exist nearly exclusively to protect people who don’t want to work.
They don't exist for that reason, but their inevitable ground state is that.
The fundamental and intractable problem with any form of socialization is that it naturally attracts free riders. The idea doesn't have a balanced equilibrium, so it's either logistically/bureaucratically heavy or always being pulled towards collapse.
Everyone who starts these systems has pure intentions, and the initial members tend to be dedicated too. But over time it will either naturally decay, or turn into the thing it was trying to fight.
This doesn’t seem to be a universal rule at all, but smells more of a boogeyman promulgated within US society.
The nordics are anywhere from 50% - 90% of all labor unionized and they absolutely destroy the US on every standard of living metric.
It seems to me a case that echoes “better to let 99 guilty men go free than to execute an innocent man”. Of course, in this case, the ratios are actually reversed. Should we execute 99 innocent men to make sure that 1 guilty guy gets punished?
There will be some free riders, just like there will be some welfare queens, just like there will be some voter fraud.
That said, these cases represent a vanishingly small minority of the whole, and the cure is far worse than the disease.
>It seems to me a case that echoes “better to let 9 guilty men go free than to execute an innocent man”. Of course, in this case, the ratios are actually reversed. Should we execute 9 innocent men to make sure that 1 guilty guy gets punished?
We don't have to do an echo. We can just do it as it is.
9 men hunt and 1 man eats free, so the 9 men are carrying the weight of the 1.
This system is inherently unstable and unsustainable. Maybe you can mitigate it (nordic style) by keeping a small population and drilling into people's heads from birth that "you take turns being the 1, and the 1 needs to be eager to get back to the hunt or shame will be had", but even then that is a not an inherently stable system, but one propped up by trust.
> 9 men hunt and 1 man eats free, so the 9 men are carrying the weight of the 1.
Updated the quote to the historically accurate 99 vs 1.
> This system is inherently unstable and unsustainable.
The countries cited are extremely stable. Arguably far more stable than the US.
That said, we can bring in the rest of Western Europe if 5 countries aren't enough of an example. They have union participation rates between 10% and 50%, median around 20%. The thing is, they have much larger proportions of their workforces covered by collective bargaining agreements - France for example is at 10% union participation yet 98% of labor covered by bargaining agreements.
Western Europe and the Nordics combined = ~400 million people, bigger population than the US, and far more diverse, so the common refrain of "small homogenous population" doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Of course, all societies so far have eventually been unstable.
We can just choose whether our unstable society will be a vindictive one that prioritizes punishing wrongdoers over the wellbeing of the whole, or a pragmatic and (as a nice bonus) compassionate one which prioritizes the wellbeing of the whole over a puritanical urge to purge the unworthy.
A healthy organisation can reflect on this tendency and purge some free riders to preserve itself. The fact that it doesn't, to me personally, just means it's not under external pressure.
If there is one thing free riders are generally skilled at, it's hiding the fact they are free riding. There is then an internal decay where as others learn the tricks, they realize that they can start coasting too, and they should, because why would you do extra work if you don't have to.
To defeat this you need intense oversight, but then you yourself become the man with an iron fist.
This is a super common theme whenever you dig into anything socialized. It works great when everyone understands the system and is dedicated to the work, the mission. But as soon as a single atom of "I can get away with not doing my full part" seeps in, it's like a seed crystal that eventually collapses the whole system.
It's the prisoner's dilemma. I believe any self-preservation optimized intelligence is going to suffer from these problems until those behaviors are countered in interaction by design (e.g. process, societal/cultural pressures, etc.) or removed from the baseline (i.e. evolved out.)
Our desires make us our own worst enemies, and until we acknowledge and openly plan to counter these tendencies, any social structure at some scale is going to fail to them. Unfortunately, the problems we face as a species are increasingly at larger and larger scales.
I'm not sure if we can remain what we would recognize as "human," and solve for this without surrendering some level of executive function to an entity not afflicted by it. Government and regulation are already expressions of this, while retaining our intrinsic nature, but history has demonstrated this is inherently unstable.
What definition of organizational health demonstrates this? Certainly none of the long-lived and powerful US unions have this property. Observationally, it seems that the strongest US unions also exercise their power to protect all within their fold. The worst offenders fail to be protected by the union, but in general, they are not purged. And US unions are quite powerful. The leaders wear Rolexes.
This seems logical. A labor union carries power commensurate with the number of members in it. It is more important for members that they be protected than that they be held to a high standard. If the latter is done, it is in service to the former. That is entirely the purpose of the union after all. No one forms a union so that others can hold them to a high standard of performance.
Thanks for sharing. Very interesting to hear someone else with a similar experience.
> Unions devolving to simply protect the lowest common denominator is a problem.
I've always wondered if this is because the ones most incentivized to stay are the ones that eventually make it into upper leadership. It always seemed to me like the decisions being made at that level were intended to protect those same people. For example, rather than seeing poor-performing members as a risk to the union, the answer was to just lobby legally secured work so that companies had no choice but to hire its members. Which is quite the game, because I'm sure at face value it sounds great (companies can't ignore unions), but the hidden reality seemed to be that it just ensured these people always had a job.
Honest question -- what should happen to poor performing people? They should have less money, less food, be homeless or what? Should they be more stressed and as a result somehow perform better?
On one hand I don't like to deal with results of bad craftsmanship, on the other hand I don't desire of the suffering of others.
The thing is real, but so are the people.
Not a snark or a gotcha, I'm a union member and recognise this thing at work.
> Honest question -- what should happen to poor performing people?
The union should help them find roles they can be successful in. It should offer them more specialized training, mentorship programs, and other ways to help build up their skills. If they refuse to take any of these seriously, they should be fired. To me, that's the difference between poor performing and intentional laziness.
There should be disincentives for poor performance, options to improve performance (training, counseling, etc.) and incentives for good performance (better raises, perks, etc.) to incentivize good employees.
Unions are supposed to defend the value of labour. I think in a fair society where losing your blue collar job didn't mean dog food for dinner the balance of responsibility and squeamishness could shift away from employers and unions in terms of keeping food in people's bellies after they get fired. Then unions and businesses can actually have somewhat aligned goals, which is better for everyone, really.
In order to protect the long term value of a profession or some other labour corps, you can't skip efficiency and defend poor work ethic. I think to a degree the medical profession exemplifies this with professional bodies regulating conduct and standard of care/work. Part of this is the generally earnest approach to the scrutiny, but I believe part is the lack of immediate grave concern to anyone ‘on the stand,’ who can be presumed to earn comfortably, upon losing their job.
> I fully believe labor needs as much leverage against capital as possible for the scales to be balanced at all
Competition is required, rather than unionization. If an industry is dominated by monopolies, not only do customers suffer, workers do too. Unions don't really fix the problem - only make certain groups win over others.
For once, the union is one of the rare in-groups that are very easy to join and actually benefit their members
The problem is that they tend to benefit their members in a zero sum way. For example the LIRR wants a double digit raise not in exchange for hitting targets on on-time arrivals or some other metric. They want it or they strike and hold the community hostage. It bothers me that there's no value exchange it's just take take take, and ultimately at my expense.
Worse, public sector unions are ultimately at my expense in a way that I can't even fix by not buying the product, since they're taking it from my taxes.
The experience which I had which sums up the negatives about unions was when I was working at the then 4th largest printer in the U.S., and the largest privately owned print shop, when I pulled up in my then several years old Chevy Cavalier and parked next to a one year newer one --- an erstwhile union rep then pulled up in a brand new Lincoln Town Car and got out and asked me if I was interested in unionizing the company --- I pointed to the car I was parked next to and stated, "That car belongs to the owner of the company, it's the first new car he ever purchased, previously having driven company vans which had such high mileage that the company auctioned them off. Why would I give money to someone who is driving an even nicer car?"
The flip side was when the company owner retired from active management to the board of directors, and a management consultant was brought in to make the company more profitable --- he opened the curtains of the boardroom where he was making his pitch, pointed out at the parking lot filled with nice cars and trucks in good repair and stated, "You're paying too many people too much money."
An uncle of mine in the coal region of the northwestern Virginia mountain once noted that a local union organizer was noted for having 3 things in his trunk:
- a mimeograph
- a fifth of whiskey
- a sawed-off shotgun
Any discussion of unions needs to include a history of the Pinkertons.
My name is Jesse James and I would like to know more about the history of the Pinkertons 8I
This is usually one of the arguments made against unions, and I find it an interesting phenomenon.
Philosophically unions benefit the majority and are probably a net good on a social construct level. But they are likely a net loss to the top percentage of workers who are extremely motivated to move up and probably hurt innovation overall.
Unions exist to benefit the median and bring up the floor, but it stifles competition among those who really do desire to be at the top. And in doing so while it brings up the floor, it also brings down the ceiling because people who would normally be motivated enough to move up would not have much incentive to do so anymore.
Additionally most companies arguments against unions make the assumption that EVERYONE wants to be part of that top percentage, that everyone is extremely motivated to move up the ladder, etc. Also they bank on convincing everyone they could be part of that top percentage that moves up.
But statistically only so many can, and there is no universe where everyone can be that top worker who is successful because only so many can move up anyways.
Edit: Adding that this is from my perspective on US views of unions. I don't know much about how it differs elsewhere since many point out it seems to be done differently here vs elsewhere.
A key problem in the US is that in a unionized job you are legally required to be represented by the union. Union membership is non-voluntary.
If you think you are part of that top percentage or even if you think that the union is not representing your interests, tough luck. It is illegal to quit or reorganize like-minded individuals to form your own that better represents you. To reform the union you need to get 50% of the members to vote for change instead of just forming a new, smaller organization that represents your interests.
This is in contrast to many European unions where you can choose to join because you think they provide worthwhile benefits. Or you can choose to not join because it does not. Unions need to compete on benefits to their members and are thus incentivized to provide better benefits.
equality of outcome is unnecessary, only equality of opportunity is required.
So if the apples are in a 3.5m high tree and you're 2m tall and I'm 1.5m tall, it's fair if we both get 1m ladders?
why isnt it fair?
Someone taller has a better chance at becoming a pro basketball player. Shorter people are not given more leeway. But both tall and short people have the chance to try out (at least on paper).
Because the equivalence between being signed for the NBA and having apples to eat is nonsensical. We accept some things being unfair, not everything being unfair.
Fixating on apples is key to the metaphor. The shorter person has other opportunities to collect food that they are better suited for, e.g. picking strawberries.
> We accept some things being unfair, not everything being unfair.
Life is fundamentally unfair. Anything that tips the balance in the other direction is due to specific, continuous human effort. It's a good thing when we can make things more fair, but the inherent unfairness of life is not a cosmic injustice.
> Unions exist to benefit the median and bring up the floor, but it stifles competition among those who really do desire to be at the top. And in doing so while it brings up the floor, it also brings down the ceiling because people who would normally be motivated enough to move up would not have much incentive to do so anymore.
I think people tend to fixate on the worker-to-worker differences inside of unions. Yes, that is the most visible part of a union when in place, and at least in the US has valid arguments about meritocracy.
What is missed when limiting the scope to just that is the population-level abuses of workers that no amount of meritocracy will fix. When corporations engage in collusion against workers (now common and nearly unpunished in the US) the top-level wages are suppressed industry wide.
The whole pay band alignment that comes out of that undermines the meritocracy argument, and doesn't even begin to address the wage-fixing that has gone almost unchecked in tech for decades[1,2]. As a merited employee, you might have more options to where you can go, but it won't protect you from predatory hiring/layoff cycles and it certainly won't guarantee that you'll receive a truly competitive wage.
On paper, meritocracy sounds great. I have worked many places in tech and never once observed it, personally. Best case, if you have warmed a seat for enough years, then you advance that way. Worst, your employer knows they can just take advantage of you because you're willing to work without a dangling carrot.
As before, either the government frees itself from corruption and enacts justice or unions will come back. That is point we are at.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/37...
[2] https://conversableeconomist.com/2025/10/31/the-silicon-vall...
> On paper, meritocracy sounds great.
In reality, meritocracy was a slur word. It was coined in 1956 to describe a farcically unequal state that no one in their right mind would want to live in: https://archive.discoversociety.org/2018/10/02/meritocracy-a...
I always viewed unions as a temporary solution to a long term problem. Fundamentally, its simply a unit or type of organization. But for some reason here in the west they have become this entrenched institution in of itself, presumably because it tasted a modicum of power, that power had real influence over people, and wherever there is an institution that exerts power over people, it becomes prime targets for demonic and corrupting influence.
You had guilds in the middle ages, and that worked well to serve the primarily agrarian feudal society. Unions worked well in a rapidly industrializing country with little to no enshrined worker protections or rights. We saw measured, direct, positive change. But the last 30 years or so, I can't really say the same has happened. In fact, some of the most unionized sectors have seen the most degradation. Blame who you will (I've heard it all in this point), but the main take away is its not working. Maybe its time for a new structure for this modern, post industrial society.
Squid Game
It’s not about just being a top worker though.
It’s about showing up ready to do an honest days work for an honest days pay. Not going above and beyond, but being reasonable about the fact that at the end of the day it’s work and things need to get done for everyone involved to put food on the table.
Instead it becomes a cat and mouse game of figuring out how to game the rules and scam as many hours as possible while doing either nothing, or as bad of a job as possible. The whole “not in my job description” thing makes a bit of sense when first implemented as a union rule, but devolves rapidly into nonsense like office workers being unable to plug in a monitor at their desk and sitting around idle for a few days until a union electrician can amble on around.
There is of course a balance here, and it seems the US is one extreme or the other outside of the trade specific unions. Other countries apparently have avoided much of this absurdity somehow.
The grocery store union I was forced to join as a teenager made sense on paper. Make sure employees were kept in safe working conditions, couldn’t be fired arbitrarily, had a reasonable pace of work anyone could keep up with. But it was more about protecting that group of guys who spent half their shift out back on smoke breaks, purposefully damaging cartons of goods while stocking since they didn’t like a particular manager, etc.
If the unions were more really trade guilds and policed themselves people would have much higher respect for them, I feel.
And some unions practically are this, where the union negotiates rates and benefits, but the "customer" still gets to decide which particular people he hires (and so the "bad apples" never get any reliable business) - which I've seen in AV production, etc.
I don't disagree and thats likely the opinion of the vast majority of people. Thats why i say that unions and collective bargaining are most likely to be a net benefit overall.
It just hurts competition among those who have an internal motivation to go above and beyond. They will feel they are being held back and either lose motivation or go somewhere where they feel a union isn't holding them back.
And the downside of that is companies losing their most hardworking/motivated people.
Edit: the above was written before the edit adding the cat and mouse game.
Added: I agree as well that when implemented wrong unions have pretty annoying affects on peoples motivation or work ethic. People who are qualified for things aren't allowed to do things outside of their explicit job description/contract. Etc. Some argue this is good, others argue it just wastes tons of time and hurts progress.
> The grocery store union I was forced to join as a teenager made sense on paper. Make sure employees were kept in safe working conditions, couldn’t be fired arbitrarily, had a reasonable pace of work anyone could keep up with. But it was more about protecting that group of guys who spent half their shift out back on smoke breaks, purposefully damaging cartons of goods while stocking since they didn’t like a particular manager, etc.
Why do we constantly denigrate these "free loaders" and exalt the capitalists who quite literally free load off of our labor extracting untold billions and trillions of dollars off the backs of average folks like you and me while we get relative pennies?
I worked in Big Tech for a while. For a normal person, I made good money. But the founders and top shareholders of these companies made literal billions off the labor of myself and my coworkers while contributing absolutely nothing on a day-to-day basis. I would have to work 100 lifetimes to earn what many of them take home in a year.
Frankly, if the system allows some normal folks to dick around and get paid the same as billionaires jetting off to spend time on their megayachts then more power to the folks taking a smoke break.
> Why do we constantly denigrate these "free loaders" and exalt the capitalists who quite literally free load off of our labor extracting untold billions and trillions of dollars off the backs of average folks like you and me while we get relative pennies?
We should do both, but when I agree to take a job at a given pay, I show up every single day capable, ready, and willing to work for the wage I agreed to. When other people don't pull their weight, it means I have to take on an unfair amount of work to make up the difference so that I can complete the things I've committed to in the workplace. The focus is on worker to worker relationships, because those are the most locally impactful relationships you have in the workplace. At the giant corporation I currently work for, I'm in the ladder fairly high up compared to most people as far as steps from the CEO, and yet I still only see the CEO on video calls with the whole company 4 times a year. The person in the office down the road from me that is blocking me from completely the thing I need to do to meet my own quarterly objective is far more tangible and legible to me than whether or not the CEO is a bum who spends all day golfing.
The fundamental difference is I take personal accountability for my own behavior and commitments, and that is one camp. The camp that doesn't see an issue with union free riders not pulling their weight are generally folks who only see accountability collectively, rather than personally, or maybe don't even take any accountability at all. Accountability is generally in short supply in our current society, so maybe its a novel thing, but I actually don't like doing a shitty job and if its due to somebody else screwing me over at work, I don't like that person a whole lot more than I don't like someone who I've hardly ever met and never talk to (CEO).
And I personally think that billionaires extracting untold wealth from those of us doing the actual work is a far greater societal problem than some normal folks who are lazy but are making 0.0001% of what the capitalist class is extracting from my efforts.
> The camp that doesn't see an issue with union free riders not pulling their weight are generally folks who only see accountability collectively, rather than personally, or maybe don't even take any accountability at all.
And while I don't like that the Union protects folks like this, I believe the work they do to protect hard working folks like me from being "managed-out" or even laid off so that the billionaires can make even more money next quarter is of great societal value. We as workers deserve to have security that as long as we are meeting reasonable productivity targets, we won't be kicked to the curb.
Having dealt with a manager deciding they didn't like me and doing everything in their power to manage me out (successfully), despite me meeting every goal given to me, management and the capitalists can take a long walk off a short pier for all I'm concerned.
The same behavior displayed by union workers occurs at a level where people can hide behind a title (Vice President, department head, whatever). Yet people rarely look as critically at senior management as they do at union workers.
I also find it that people who are critical of union workers never seem to be critical of police or fire fighters, both of whom are unionized.
My dad was a union worker for 19 years and I don't think ever displayed any of the negative characteristics assigned to unionized workers.
ACAB largely exists due to the police union, and I always hear people astutely bring this up. Firefighters unions I know less about, but I've also only ever heard about volunteer firefighters and scarcely enough about them either..
There are a lot of people who are not in unions who do no work.
It is a plague in the programming field.
Not having unions is not a silver bullet for that problem. So maybe it is a false attribution/bias on your part
> never once actually did any work
I work at a company creating wealth, and heirs who own stock collect dividends from the company. What work did they do? You're talking about the guy sitting near you who you don't feel is working hard enough, and nothing of the parasitic heirs expropriating the product of unpaid surplus time of those working and creating wealth. Which unions are formed to rest control back from.
i like my union because they force the management to actually take care of our equipment. every non-union job i've had involves a lot of making fucked up shit kind of work. that's what i want from a union, tangible benefits to my working conditions. it's not a social club, and i'm not one to be worried about the caliber of people i associate with.
Similar mixed opinions. I think labor absolutely has an ability to make collective decisions but I also believe business should have the ability to fire at will and I am not convinced that unions should be protected from that.
I have only been exposed to unions like dock workers where who you know or the color of your skin matter more than your ability to execute on the job.
My first job out of college was a government union job (optional to join). I was pretty appalled by the behaviour I saw from older colleagues and the union reps. Government unions should be illegal in my opinion. Becoming the head of these unions is insane money, the union fees can run up to $50-$100 per month per member and if you look at the union salaries it mostly goes to the leadership sometimes earning $100-$200k or more on their part-time job on top of their actual job. Also the union organisers make pretty solid money setting it up. I think if you have more competition and more competing companies than wages stay competitive and employers have to be good to attract labor, it’s probably the best option. Humans are too dishonest to be trusted with such organisations. Invisible hand forces are harder to manipulate.
My wife is in a Union and she has been getting info that has nothing to do with her job. Some unions cross pollinate with whatever cause someone in the union is interested in. She wants a raise but can't because of collective bargaining, but the union isn't doing anything about that. However they are talking about other political issues. So her dues are not helping her but whatever political issue is being promoted.
It feels like a systems problem. It seems like the same theme that we see in for say, startup to corporate transformation. I think ultimately it comes down to size. They become too big and the power consumes. And they become what they once fought.
I had similar experiences as a former unionized worker. Unions definitely solve some problems, but they're not a panacea, and a lot of company BS just gets replaced by an equivalent amount of union BS. The most miserable people I've ever worked with were people at my former union with 10+ years on the job (I remember one lady was in the process of suing the company AND the union, lol); they couldn't leave without losing all their seniority and benefits, couldn't be fired, but still had a long way to go before retirement.
It's rather arbitrary to monolithlize "union members" based on this limited experience.
Very similar experiences here. My first job was in a union shop, but you could not be forced to join. Whether you joined or not, though, you had dues taken from your pay. I refused to join initially because I could choose to join at any moment, it wasn't a locked decision. I immediately had people trying to convince me to join, while within months of working there I realized how little pride or effort anyone took in their work. I worked at that company for three years and never joined the union, which apparently made the management think I wanted to be in management because they kept trying to promote me. I never wanted to be in management (then). I was easily 6x as productive as anyone else there, and I saw lots of really ridiculous petty corruption take place amongst the union members. Really soured me on unions, despite the general high level idea being something I agree with. I can't imagine ever joining a union.
Another issue with unions is that they should be symbiotic but often transition to parasitic. What I mean is there are times despite it being obvious the demands will drive companies into either re-org or bankruptcy proceedings they’ll go full steam. The demands also at time accelerate offshoring or sending some of the work over-seas. Obviously all these scenarios are detrimental to the future of the workforces they represent.
Your anecdote is useful and will be upvoted
Typical HN war story about how one’s coworkers are incompetent or chronically lazy. I guess this is the HN version of hard-hatters being vehemently against immigrant labor.
Meanwhile the concern for being abused by people with actual power is just an emotionless throwaway scare quote. “The man”.
It'a worth noting shareholders also provide no value. We need to fix both ends of the equation to move forward as a society.
they literally provide value
Shareholders are investors who give valuable resources to business
We certainly don't need private investment to develop an economy. I, for one, am tired of supporting lazy parasites whose only contribution is money, and who don't know how to invest it for the rest of us. It's a completely broken model.
No, they provide capital. It's the workers who provide value to the company.
It's hard to explain why entrepreneurs want capital so much if it provides zero value. They're all stupid and doing something they ought not to?
arguably, capital is also value.
If you have a machine that makes widgets, which requires people to operate, the machine (capital) without anyone operating it (labor) is worthless, but if you have people (labor) without any machine (capital), you won't have any widgets.
I feel like this is one of those situations where "the whole is larger than the sum of the parts" - combining the power of capital and labor, you get much more value than just capital or just labor.
Of course, this does NOT imply that "I provided the capital, it couldn't have happened without me, ergo I deserve all the rewards" is true, even if, if we look at the history and current state of the world, generally speaking it is more advantageous to provide capital than it is to provide labor.
Your probably a normal guy making a comment in good faith, but I can't help but think this is the exact sort of dark marketing that I would do if I was an anti union commenter/marketer. Attack the vague made up values of union members because you can't attack the fact that large companies have been anti-worker for awhile and most people believe that. I'll also add onto here that if this comment gets down voted into the dirt, I'm likely right. Also let me be clear, I'm not attacking your comment but what sort of comment would be most-likely amplified by anti-union forces.
The poor reputation of unions in the US is well-deserved. The unions are writing their own anti-union propaganda, you can't blame other people for noticing this. Your argument is essentially that we should pretend this obvious badness doesn't exist because it makes unions look bad.
It is weird how much discourse these days is about pretending something obviously true isn't actually happening. The first step of fixing a problem is being honest about its existence. The inability of some people to be honest about the existence of obvious things is why so many problems go unaddressed.
A worldview where you see manipulation in everything seems sad.
Also perhaps review guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Well, I'm the sole provider in a single income family with several dependents. My assumption is that would make me the natural fit for a union given how much my employment means my family stays off the street. That's why I have mixed feelings. The idea of a union aligns with my living situation. The reality, however, always left a sour taste in my mouth.
Maybe, but I have heard the exact same experience from my Dad and others that have worked with unions. It unfortunately seems to attract people trying to take advantage of the system. Personally if I were offered similar jobs, one with a union, one without, I'd take the one without.
Yep, this is textbook unionbusting propaganda.
Rein in the worst excesses, and you won't have the general population spreading these stories as a response to their own experiences with unions. Living in NYC and observing union workers was enough to fully convince me that union regs weren't promoting efficiency in the workplace, no need for shady capitalists to try to convince me. And a lot of times, those people were working for public dollars, so it was hurting all of us.
Because its ultimately cheaper to suppress unions than it is to pay the workers the fair salary.
I'm generally pro-union and certainly fair wage, but it's important to keep in mind that unions will grow into their own power centers and have leadership with its own internal goals which are not aligned with either their working members nor the employers.
but it's important to keep in mind that without unions the corporation will grow into their own power centers and have leadership with its own internal goals which are not aligned with either their working members nor the employers
They are democratically run. This is a problem workers can solve.
Corporations are democratically run?
no. The unions are. Workers pick their union leadership
The discourse around unions is so weird.
A bunch of people form an organization so that they can work together to sell stuff.
When they're selling widgets, or other people's labor, we call those people "management" and we call their organization "business" and it's the standard way of doing things.
When they're selling their own labor, we call it a "union" and suddenly people have Opinions about whether they're really a good thing or not.
If Bob's Heavy Manufacturing Concern can collectively bargain with its customers when selling its Retro Encabulators, then Bob's employees should be able to collectively bargain with its customer i.e. Bob when selling their product i.e. their labor.
As i see it, Unions are groups of employees where they have agreed to cooperate to get a better group outcome than they might be able to negotiate individually. It often caps the outcomes for the very very best, and raises the outcomes for the very very bottom. But across a wide swath they are earning more, or treated better, than they would be had they tried to do it alone. TBD if the union fees negate more or less than this gain.
IMO Cooperatives are a better model, it combines cooperative behavior with the dual risk/profit model of entrepreneurship.
I don’t think it’s weird. Why should a union be a protected class that you cannot fire? If a company can find people to work cheaper than what the union offers why should they have to continue to employ union workers? Pros/Cons to everything. I generally sit into the stance that the free movement of labor is one of the things the US gets right.
They’re not a protected class that you can’t fire, unless the company signs a contract to that effect with the vendor selling them labor (the union)
Is that correct? I thought the NLRA was shaped in such a way that you cannot fire someone because they are in a union. You cannot refuse to hire known union supporters.
I liken to being similar to a protected class that you cannot discriminate against.
Edit: why would this get downvoted? If I am wrong about the NLRA I am happy to be corrected.
you can fire union members you can’t fire people for organizing.
To be clear you can fire union members but not because they are in a union, support a union or organizing to be in a union. Very similar to a protected class.
I think where it breaks down though is if a company manages to monopolize the market we all recognize this is bad. If a union tries to monopolize the labor supply to a company, most pro-union opinions celebrate this and argue the company should have to negotiate with the union to find a rate rather than being able to just shit-can everyone in the union and move on to the next guy.
Union itself I'd agree could function as basically a corporation of workers. That's not on face a bad thing, but the devil is in the details of what kind of violence (via law or otherwise) is used to try and use that to form a monopoly. Of course the companies are no better in this regard, they use the violence of the state to monopolize markets as well.
Aren't exclusive contracts pretty common in business? There's a big difference between monopolizing the supply to a single customer, which happens all the time, and monopolizing an entire market.
Yes, but they expire in ways that unions don’t
Does anything prevent a company from negotiating a time-limited contract with a union, other than the company's ability to negotiate?
Yes if it's just a voluntary contract I see nothing sinister. If some employees form a union that's not sinister. If the company signs a contract with them that's not sinister. But if some employees want a union and that automatically means they've forced the other employees to join rather than allowing the other employees to pick to work outside the union, or automatically means the company is involuntarily bound to contract, that would be a bit sinister.
unions don’t work unless everyone’s in them.
it’s a free country—individuals have freedom to just work at a non union shop.
Involuntarily binding the company to the contract would be bad, I agree.
But what's wrong with forcing the other employees to join to keep their jobs? That is fundamentally a requirement on the company, that they only hire people in the union. And that's no different from any other sort of exclusive contract. If a restaurant has an exclusive contract with Coke, is it sinister to say that Pepsi employees can't supply them, and they have to join Coke if they want to do that?
I'm saying suppose some employees decide to form a union. And the company doesn't consent to sign an exclusive contract. As I understand it there are unions advocating that workers that didn't agree to a union still have to be bound to it anyway.
It's my understanding in some states in the US it's possible a worker will be forced to join a union if a certain number of other workers want a union, even if neither the worker nor the company hiring them consent to it. In about half of states under "right to work" though they do give employees the option to not join the union if they don't want to.
This happened to me when I was working a ~minimum wage job at a grocery store. At the time it was not a right to work state, and I was forced to join the UFCW. The union I was forced to join then made me pay dues, pushing me below minimum wage.
how much were your dues? and you were getting $7.25/hr?
What's the alternative (no unions) like?
Probably a UBI-like approach? At least insofar as it changes the power dynamic in the employer/employee relationship.
How about forcing businesses to be owned by their employees [1]? Instead of taxing the owning class and being paid UBI peanuts, you become the owning class and reap the rewards directly.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative
Instead of repeating vapid arguments from the past 30 years designed to disincline people from joining unions, maybe you could look outside of your own borders and realize that it's not an inherent property of unions. Inherent to the US and your extremely unhealthy relationship with work, maybe.
It's not 30 years old though, the longshore union leader a few years ago literally went on live national TV with a fucking rolex and gold chain screaming how broke he was and that (in his own words) his message to America is "I will cripple you" if people trying to import things like medicines, foodstuffs, and everything else into American ports don't pay more union money to their monopolized union instead of investing in automation and modernizing our ports.
Always?
Always. Power begets power. Everything needs to be kept in check.
The only question is where the line is.
You're not pro-union if you still spout anti-union propaganda. You spent more words arguing against unions than you did for them. I'd say your first part of the sentence is probably more of a rhetorical trick than anything close to true
I wonder if that's actually true - unionbusting is mostly an emotional issue for leaders and owners so I wonder if there's any calculation involved.
I've seen corporate HR got to insane (illegal) lengths to "stick it" to people trying to unionize - to the point of being severely fined.
So I wonder if anyone actually calculated financials here.
there’s also a dam breaking effect. if unionization starts kicking off again, that can be contagious. so companies are incentivized to “nip it in the bud”
1.5bn is a drop in the bucket.
It's cheaper to try and block other workers from getting a union card in your union to limit supply than trying to up your skills, as well.
Recently the LIRR (Long Island Rail Road workers) went on strike. The NYT has covered it, including this interesting fact:
> For instance, if an engineer drives a diesel train at the start of a shift but is asked to switch to an electric train in the same day, the M.T.A. must compensate that worker with two days’ pay. If, on the same day, the engineer is also asked to switch from driving passengers to driving a train back to a yard for maintenance or storage, that worker is entitled to a third day’s pay.
Take from that what you will.
My view is that -- with some exceptions -- unions today are mostly bad, and worth fighting.
> must compensate that worker with two days’ pay
The reason for this rule is that it forces management to schedule workers more predictably and compensates workers who invest in obtaining broader qualifications.
> My view is that -- with some exceptions -- unions today are mostly bad, and worth fighting.
There are literally thousands of unions just in the US. I agree that some are dysfunctional, but making a claim like "with some exceptions -- unions today are mostly bad" needs a lot more evidence. My counter-evidence is simple: historically, there's a direct correlation with the strength of unions and the existence of a strong middle class.
> The reason for this rule is that it forces management to schedule workers more predictably and compensates workers who invest in obtaining broader qualifications.
No, it's just a scam, and anyone should be able to see that. It's like saying I get 2 days pay if I have to write go in addition to typescript. And 3 days pay if I have to write java.
> There are literally thousands of unions just in the US. I agree that some are dysfunctional, but making a claim like "with some exceptions -- unions today are mostly bad" needs a lot more evidence. My counter-evidence is simple: historically, there's a direct correlation with the strength of unions and the existence of a strong middle class.
Unions had a good reason to exist post industrialization when many people worked in factories under terrible conditions. But today, in the West, that's no longer the case. Today, unions are mostly bad.
This is an adversarial process. Unions exist to fight employers. Unions spend about 23 billion a year in total. Only spending 1.5B to defend against 23B looks like a bargain.
yeah but how much are employers spending to lobby, etc, and is that not a significant force-multiplier on their 1.5B direct spend against unions?
They have the lawmakers on their side.
Who does? The unions definitely have lawmakers on their side.
AFAIK The USA is one of the most anti-union non-authoritarian countries for a very long time. In other countries people receive a lot more support and protections for the right to organize
what’s your evidence for that?
It that’s true, why is union membership declining? why did Trump et al gut the NLRB? why do starbucks unionized employees STILL not have a contract years after forming a union?
Unions are good and we need more of them.
Considering the annual revenue of Fortune 500 companies is near 20 Trillion, that is a much smaller amount than expected.
Yeah, total us payroll is around 15T. They are basically spending $10 per employee per year. Or 1/10000 of the total spending on wages. This is actually small in terms of political spending. There are random scam ballot measures in CA that get more spending per voter than this. *edit: the actual report details this is just for services related to efforts targeting their own work force via lawyers and consultants. The total spending on the issue is likely much higher: https://www.epi.org/publication/u-s-employers-spend-more-tha...
Stuff like this and also lobbying have an incredibly high ROI. Once a company has reached a certain size investing in changing rules to their favor is the best investment they can make.
They don't need to spend that much to convince people, Americans are already predisposed to hate unions (see the comments in this thread).
Not sure if that is a bad thing - labor unions can have too much power. Its not as if the employers agree to everything that they will go away.
we’re nowhere near that problem today. don’t worry.
Oh no, the unions are going to demand fair pay and good working conditions :(
Even unions like SAG-AFTRA, which is one of the most extreme ones I can consider barely reach 1% of the harm employers cause.
Any amount of power a labor union could have pales in comparison to what employers have over you as an individual.
this really depends on the industry and union. In some sectors they hold zero power (software development) and in other they have it locked up (auto manufacturing)
you’re saying corporation have zero coercive power against software engineers?
tell that to all the Meta coders being let go today.
The word "fight" is doing way too much work in this Guardian headline, because that money includes labor relations work employers do to try to stave off the incentives to start unions. You can feel any way you like about it, but logically if you're going to argue that you have to argue that every dollar above median a non-unionized shop pays is also an effort to fight unions.
Wow, what are they so afraid of? Treating people with dignity?
democracy in the workplace
1.5B seems kinda low, no?
that was my first thought too
This will not work until unions deal with the reality of globalization, and push to form a worldwide union, which ensures compensation has no more than 2x difference based on one's country. This is the multiplier where people will not want to transfer work for cost vs skill level.
This is unpalatable to HCOL engineers, because their pay will significantly compress in this union to support the growth of compensation of similarly skilled LCOL regions/countries.
QED: Unions will not happen.
Think about the recent tech layoffs - we spend a lot of time comparing one set of severance concessions to another. Wouldn't it be better if this were a matter of contract instead of your great corporate overlords deciding how much they deign to give you as they take away your job?
This may be the moment to start thinking about unions seriously in tech. The large employers have, themselves, acted to suppress worker power in the past: https://journals.law.unc.edu/ncjolt/blogs/wage-fixing-scheme...
I feel like the general consensus on most of the recent layoffs were that they severance was pretty generous. If it seems to be working okay, why do we need to introduce additional inefficiencies to get something we already have?
The issue is the 'most' - and the severance packages can be changed tomorrow unilaterally.
And maybe it would be better not to have the layoffs in the first place? The profits of the hyperscalers are growing steadily even as they fire more workers.
I think this may be one of the last moments when programmers have enough power to dictate these things, should LLMs become as powerful as some suggest.
Unions only exist because there is a huge power imbalance between employer and employee. They attempt to balance the field.
In doing so, companies may lose their leverage and are forced to actually negotiate. This is often painted as blackmailing, but it's the same thing they do to employees. Bosses often go with "we're doing you a favor. If you don't want this job, I have a replacement for you".
When their power and leverage vanishes, they see it as being blackmailed, when in reality they are just being forced to play a fair game.
This thread has several stories of unions "keeping lazy workers", etc. I can't deny your experiences. But what about the thousands of companies that violate Labor Laws? Why are we not talking about these stories? e.g. https://www.epi.org/publication/unlawful-employer-opposition...
When you push people hard enough, they will fight back. In fighting back, the corporations that had the leverage will feel attacked by losing their power.
While 68% of workers approve unions (https://news.gallup.com/poll/694472/labor-union-approval-rel...) there are only 9% of them that actually belong to a union. That's a huge discrepancy. It can be explained by the immense difficulty in forming one due to illegal corporation practices and laws that make it difficult.
I live in a Right-to-Work (for less) state:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law
Loosely that just means that if you work somewhere with a lot of employees, you'll hear that the same job in a neighboring state pays 1.5-2 times as much. And that they have a harder time firing you. And that you'll be more likely to get compensated if you get hurt or whatever. Etc etc etc because unions.
It was pitched as a way to avoid paying union dues and possibly make it easier to move around the job market. And especially avoid working with "those" people.
If you sensed the ick factor there, that's why I think it's hard to have a rational debate around unions. It's become a divisive word like liberal due to deep-rooted disagreements going back to the founding of the (cough) union.
I prefer to use a term like representation. Do we want an advocate between us and the bosses when the next round of layoffs comes? Of course. Do we want our own form of human resources (HR) that has real teeth when something violent or inappropriate happens to a coworker? Of course. Do we want to have our voices heard when it comes to the quality of our work environment? Of course.
When people agree on principles but not on the umbrella term that covers them, it makes them vulnerable to political manipulation so that they can be divided and convinced to vote against their own interests.
I understand that a free market where people can switch jobs easily might be seen as more ideal than unions. But do we live in that market really? How many cities in America have a handful of large companies propping up the local economy? How many of those companies would take us in if we got fired from the other companies? How often do we hear about people moving to another city because they can't find a job?
There seems to be quite a discrepancy between the ideal and the actual. Another way to make people vulnerable to political manipulation.
I think maybe it comes down to how we see ourselves as blue collar or white collar. I understand how unions might be against the interests of white collar workers who tell blue collar workers what to do. What I can't understand is why blue collar workers would be against unions. What is the rationale there, really?
Without logic, we're left with bad faith arguments. Unions don't exist much these days for the same reasons that people on food stamps vote for billionaires. There's an irony there that their hope for opportunity gets used against them in a negative reinforcement loop. It's plain to see, and yet no help is coming.
If companies decide who gets hired instead of the people doing the work, that would seem to open the door to corruption and prejudice. So it's interesting that we might associate unions with mob activity, but not the existing corporate status quo. Why is that?
They're just spending all they money they saved from the wage theft.
Wage theft is saving them tens of billions in the US every year. So they are hardly spending all of that for this!
I doubt it's close to everything they saved.
$1.5B is roughly the wage theft recovered between 2021-2023. It's estimated that more than $15B in wage theft occurs annually just from minimum wage shortfalls.
See: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021-23/
Keep in mind that wage theft is narrowly defined to include only blatantly illegal actions such as underpaying minimum wage, failing to pay overtime, requiring off-the-clock work, denying meal breaks, etc. It that doesn't even get into more general wage suppression via abusing visas, anti-poaching collusion with competitors (a favorite pastime of FANNG), and at-or-below inflation raise policies, among other things, which have caused wages to diverge from productivity over the last half century.