Most of the unions I've seen aren't voluntary. When I was in grad school, I was forced to pay dues into the union. I don't like that. I think there should be as many unions as employees like. I don't understand how the union can be understood to be negotiating on my behalf if I can't choose not to have them negotiate on my behalf.
Once the union has negotiated a budget for itself, it has an independent mandatee to sustain itself, which is sort of detached from any selective pressures. If I'm a bad employee, I get fired. If the company is bad, it goes bankrupt. If a union behaves badly, the consequences are indirect. A bad union only gets its comeuppance if the company goes under.
Because the selective pressure on it is indirect, evolution can't happen within regimes, it can only happen when union workers transfer (or don't) organizational knowledge into a new host company. Basically, like a virus. It's just weird to have an entity that doesn't face any consequences.
To the extent that employees have collective bargaining power, they can just use it. Get a group together, write a letter to Elon, and threaten to quit. See what he says. If you have any leverage, you can use it. If you don't have any leverage why would the union fare any better?
He'll identify the key players and throw them a bone and tell the rest to go ahead and quit, maybe even sue them as an example. The whole point of a union is that it can't be defeated by divide-and-conquer: it provides a reasonable counter-balance to the amount of power wielded by the employer. Instead of the threat of a few people quitting, their biggest leverage is "there'll be work stoppage"
Unions can get fired by their employees, in fact it's something that has happened. Their pressure is very direct, they have far more invested in the company working than management more often than not. If a CEO loses their company but has drawn a few mil from it in savings, they have a relatively easier path to rebuilding themselves than employees who have far less wealth.
>To the extent that employees have collective bargaining power, they can just use it. Get a group together, write a letter to Elon, and threaten to quit.
You've literally just described a union. The reason they're compulsory in union companies is they threaten ruining production if non-union members get used, as a way of giving themselves more bargaining power. The reason you're required to pay dues is the union is required BY LAW to pay for your legal defense and benefits whether you want to be a member or not, so it seems kind of mean to not pay for that.
I don't know enough to speak to the 'being forced to pay dues' point but having as many unions as employees want defeats the purpose of a union. You need everyone to come together as one to have any power. Have multiple unions and the company can play them off against eachother.
>> To the extent that employees have collective bargaining power, they can just use it. Get a group together, write a letter to Elon, and threaten to quit. See what he says. If you have any leverage, you can use it. If you don't have any leverage why would the union fare any better?
If people that work on the production line doing unskilled tasks got together and complained about safety and refused to work until it was fixed the company could easily fire them and hire another bunch of people tomorrow. If the union comes to the company with the issue on their behalf the company has to listen because the union members will include skilled workers too and they company can't afford to lose them.
- Factory layoffs HAD to be done by seniority rather than merit. We knowingly laid off top performers, just because they were newer to the company (due to union contract rules).
- Vendors at a tech conference got in trouble for moving their display tables a few feet because that was supposed to be done by union workers.
- Promotions and raises strongly tied to seniority, less flexibility.
IME seniority and political patronage is basically how a lot (if not most) companies promote too - under the guise of being purely concerned about objective performance of course.
For example, if you want layoffs performed by merit, you'd need a union board to verify those metrics and agree to them, with the addition of a bonus for those who performed well enough to stay or some stock in the company.
Vendors moving stuff is a bit harder because if they break some shit, the union will be forced to cover them by law despite the fact their people had nothing to do with it. They'd probably relax it if their company paid for insurance that covered anyone and everyone doing work on the premises.
Promotions and raises can again have more company input but the union would want more money for people who are promoted. They choose not to pay it and deal with the system as is.
Unions are one tiny attempt by the common-man to even that out a fraction, and is therefore evil by definition, because it goes against the above point.
Anyone against unions is either a) an obscenely rich owner who doesn't want to share, or b) has been tricked into thinking making rich people richer will help them in some extremely obscure way.
I'm broadly supportive of private sector unions, and I think it would be great if the relationship between unions and employers in the US would more closely match what I've observed in Europe and Japan. With that being said, I think it's perfectly reasonable to be supportive of unions in general, while being critical of certain aspects of them.
My own criticism of unions comes both from my personal experience working in a union shop, as well as second hand info I get from several close friends currently working in union shops at the Port of LA/LB and various municipal and private employers in the LA/OC area. My personal criticisms stem from what I viewed as an almost total inability to hold more senior employees accountable for performance, an extremely rigid organizational structure that made it very difficult/impossible for a low level employee like myself to try and get into new positions based on work and effort rather than strict seniority, and a very lax attitude towards harassment and discrimination towards those who were not white or Hispanic, and especially towards those who weren't heterosexual. Sprinkle in a heavy dose of nepotism at the top and things got bad enough that I actually quit and went back to working a crappy retail job.
Now I realize that these things could just as well, and in fact do, occur in non-union shops, which is why I still support unions in general, but again, I don't think they are above critique.
My view of public employee unions, particularly for public safety employees like police and fire, is more philosophically opposed.
Edited for punctuation.
I am in total agreement with you - Unions are good, but nothing is above constructive criticism.
After all, the goal is constant improvement.
I would also caution against assuming that because unions, and their members, might share similar views with traditionally left wing political parties in regards to employment policies, that these views extend to being left wing or "progressive" on non-work related issues. I would probably describe myself as being well to the left of mainstream US politics when it comes to most social issues, and probably fairly to the left on economic issues, and I did not get the sense that most union coworkers shared these sentiments in the least.
2) Next time you're in New Orleans read the passenger "rights" placard in a taxi. It's absurd and laughable. Protectionist rules there protect drivers behaving badly. You will be scammed every time you go there, if they don't try to get you on the way in they'll try on the way out. You get bonus points if they try both times. People who might oppose unions? People who've been burned by unions protecting bad behavior.
3) Police unions protect Police officers behaving badly. This prevents conversations about proper and improper behavior, which fosters bad behavior, which damages public trust and safety. Who supports public safety and trustworthy armed public servants? Hopefully everyone.
I'm all for workers rights but sometimes worker protections protect bad behavior which can lead to negative emotions about the process.
I agree, that's why I asked for other people's augments against them.
And of course you are correct, unions are not perfect and sometimes are downright stupid (your two examples). Just because something is not perfect is not a reason to not have it.
It's just a good reason to improve it.
On the whole, unions (including their sometimes stupid rules) are better that not unions, and I have never seen a compelling argument otherwise (other than the two reasons I mentioned in my original post, which are not valid)
I think unions are positive or negative on a case-by-case basis. Given the value of human life, safety-critical industries almost always benefit from union presence but Hollywood for example seems to take on unions as a burgeoning cost of doing business without them providing much in the way of real value. I don't think they're universally good or bad.
Public unions (police, fire, gov't workers, some teaching unions) are usually not politicized this way.
The HN crowd probably thinks the current meritocracy is good enough, so unions seem like an unneeded expense.
You tend to appreciate it more if it might have direct benefits to you.
I suspect if you asked people who were laid off, or older developers experiencing age discrimination, you would see a different distribution of opinions.
There's also some history in the US of unions lining their own pockets, shady deals, coercing membership, organized crime connections, etc. None of it very recent though.
Second hand things I've heard: (I know the people who saw these firsthand)
1) Detroit had rooms were extra workers would just watch TV all day. It they didn't show they could be fired but as long as they did they were kept on the books. The jobs were in the contract and the union wouldn't let them go away.
2) The lines had been designed to be run by 4 people each but they kept 5 for years just keep the union happy. A good company would buy these workers out or just let attrition take its course but they had to restaff at this level for years. This was finally solved by a strike where the replacement non-union, lightly trained office workers set 6 straight shifts of new plant output records.
3) A general sand bagging to keep worker count up. i.e. if you get done early, sleep/hide in your work truck, but you can only park it at these type of locations so it looks ok. Your scheduled route WILL take 8 hours, even if it only takes 5 after your first month. This is very common, even more so in cost plus government contracts where even the company likes it. Every extra $ is that much more profit.
I wish unions had better reputation but at least in the US it one of (mostly) lazy workers making sure they get their cut while doing as little as possible. I know this isn't 100% true but there is a kernel of truth.