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A comment on Tech Start-Up Fires Engineers Amid Union Organizing Effort. Parent comment

Re:Tech Start-Up Fires Engineers Amid Union Organizing Effort by Barraketh on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @01:45AM (#16272020)
Actually I think that you're just looking at the situation from a different angle than many of us. The reason I have some distrust of unions is that they sometimes seem to promote inefficiency as a policy. The distribution of money problem is actually orthogonal to the problem of "how do you do task X most efficiently". If a machine can do the work of 10 men, then to have those 10 men doing the work of the machine is literally wasting their lives.

I wish that unions pursued more contracts of the form "we get X percent of revenue/profits" and then distributed those profits amongst their membership the way they saw fit. This way decreasing the amount of work per person does not decrease the amount of money per person and business and union interests are aligned. I'm sure there are practical reasons why that's difficult though.

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Re:Tech Start-Up Fires Engineers Amid Union Organizing Effort by guelo on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @02:29AM (#16272183)
I can think of a thousand examples of capitalists pursuing inefficiency as a policy. First thing that came to mind is when food companies change packaging to hide the fact that they reduced the amount being sold.
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Re:Tech Start-Up Fires Engineers Amid Union Organizing Effort by ubernostrum on Wednesday January 31, 2018 @02:04AM (#16272113)
No, I really think there is a double standard for corporations versus unions.

Witness the complaint about unions pushing back on automation -- yet how many companies and corporate cartels have attempted to quash, or even outlaw, new technology they saw as a threat to their revenue streams? Why do we not simply say that we live in a greed-driven system, and this is the consequence, and try to address the root of it? Instead we get endless "well unions do some bad things" comments, imposing a far higher standard of perfection than we'd ever apply to a corporation.

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