Negotiating working conditions with a union-enforced contract gets rid of mickey mouse management, and establishes a process for workers to review working condition changes. I honestly believe that's the best feature of unions.
(The worst feature of unions is their tendency to protect the worst employees -- the "interently lazy" types. As long as "protecting the worst employees" is a key concept, unions won't make it back.)
What's needed is a situation more akin to what hollywood has. A union sets the floor on treatment and wages and individual agents advocate for their clients. Also, I think the situation with large German corporations is better too, since it gives the union a literal seat at the board which puts the people running the corporation onto the same team as the people running the union.
0. Yes I know there are the odd exceptions, but these are so rare they almost prove the point.
There are a lot of confounding factors in why different types of companies are founded. Saying that less employee owned companies are started is evidence of failure is at best a very shaky understanding of how to look at the business landscape.
Meanwhile, in some European countries (maybe Germany?) the unions were responding to the recession by cutting back on hours for everybody, to maintain broader employment. I remember thinking about 4 day work weeks.
The impression I formed was that the American unions were serving their narrow purpose of protecting members, especially senior members, but failing to serve as a "labor movement" with broader social goals, while taking credit for social gains of the past. It created a situation where many members of the working class believed that they were competing with the unions.
"Tendency to protect the worst employees" as opposed to a tendency to protect the best, or as a logical consequence of protecting the set of all current employees?
I've been a dev for 20 years now, and I've definitely had coworkers that fall into both those categories you mention.
I'm new-ish to management now, but I'm working under the (hopeful/optimistic) assumption that most people fall in the latter category. But I need to find a style that can handle both types of employees.
Some people are self-motivated when crunching numbers on spreadsheets because they find it satisfying but would need to be dragged kicking and screaming to provide phone support -- and vice-versa.
And there are probably some jobs that it's more common to be self-motivated for than others. Garbage collection? Data entry?
And that 2) is the view that arises when that cultural pressure is mitigated
It’s follow daddy’s orders/daddy knows best wrapped in economics and math and history that tries to say see look all this work by humans in a closed room proves this is how an economy should work
It’s religious in that no one knows how it works but we’re convinced it’s right
Having not been raised in a church and growing up in a remote place studying physics and electronics since I was 8 with my grandpa who grew up similarly in the 30s... the blind allegiance to such nonsense has struck me as utterly bizarre
“I’ve never looked. I just keep believing what they say.”
Nocebo effect in action
Google Varoufakis’s talk about the meetings during Greeks debt crisis. They had no theory or clue; they just wrote math that worked for the context in question— “Greek must lose and investors must win.”
Don’t get me wrong; I’m not talking about basic human needs being met. I’m talking about caring about Steve Jobs as if he’s was a child and enabling his childlike tantrums to hold so much sway over our reality.
It would be a better use of my time to find a 1.5 place and make it into a strong 2. Or a place that's already a 2 and make it even better. Let the market sort out the rest.
If you can get them to care about you or the thing you are trying to do, the worker bees will have to be stopped from burning out and the lazy guys will find ways to get the job done without spending too much effort.
How to so that is difficultut, but there's one thing that doesn't work: putting the screws
"Than he is" is unnecessary: He may think himself lazy, even to a point of pride when he thinks of the clever stuff he gets away with.
There are fundamentally two schools of thought when it comes to management:
1. People are inherently lazy, and work only to satisfy their needs - enjoying their job is at best a distant second priority. The best way to get things done is to drive them harder with closer monitoring, punishment for failures, and threats to their ability to satisfy their basic needs.
2. People are inherently creative, and work to satisfy their desire to create - your job as an employer/manager is to help them not have to worry about lower needs on Maslow's pyramid. The best way to get things done is to give them them a vision, opportinities, targets, and tools to be productive.
Just quit a job after 5 years slaving under the former type of manager, and my life has never been better since I began working under the second.