My concern with the anti-union rhetoric in the USA is that we then turn to the government to protect workers. I think it's a lot better to have a union vs government as long as that union isn't protected from competition like they are today.

If we can introduce competition into unions then they might better serve the workers and the company.

I've worked with several unions in different industries, and I can say pretty categorically that unions are brazenly unethical.

Unions may sometimes improve working conditions and pay, but only in the sense that the mafia reduces crime. You have to start out from a truly horrifying place for their bargain to be any better, and in taking that deal you're giving up on ever having a healthy environment.

This happened years ago in Netherland: many railway employees weren't happy with something their union (part of the largest union federation) negotiated for them, so they left and started a competing union to negotiate for them instead. Messy, embarrassing for the big union, but it solved the problem.

Not sure if the alternative union still exists or if it merged back into the large union again.

What is this?

EDIT: I don't mean to snark, it just seems like an inherently utopian ideal. Material concerns should dictate workspace conflict resolution. I certainly agree with your overall statement.

My notion of a fair workplace is one where people's pay and rewards are entirely determined by their skill and merit, as judged by the management.

But lots of other people and especially unions define it totally differently: one where people's pay is determined by tenure, their union contract or their gender/race. That seems to be what these Kickstarter employees want.

Without a clear definition the word 'fair' can be interpreted as having polar opposite meanings.

It is important to remember that economic coerciveness is a result of overwhelming scale and bargaining power of one party over another. Kickstarter is a 100-ish headcount company located in Brooklyn, NY. This is hardly a captive employee pool compared to say, factory workers in a small town whose entire economy is centered around that one factory.

If Kickstarter workers unionize, I don't not believe it will results in two sides with equal bargaining power, Kickstarter will be in a substantially weaker position. If Kickstarter refuses the offer, all function ceases. If the workers refuses the offer, they have the robust job market of Brooklyn NY to fall back on.

That's not competition, that's just giving away public money.

A few things that a modern union could do:

1. Place limits on expected working hours. Let the management know that working above 40 hours a week, or needing to be on-call 24/7 should not be the norm. Let management know that using all your vacation time should be the norm. Set minimum amounts of vacation time for people to take, when a company advertises "Unlimited PTO". 2. Fight for minimum cost-of-living increases, presumably tied to a fair metric such as the CPI in an area. Every company that I have worked for has had a hard limit on the raises that you can earn each year--usually around 3%. This is typically close to or just above inflation. 3. Collectively hold the company leadership accountable for their actions. When management doesn't act in a professional way, they should be held accountable in the same way that someone lower on the corporate ladder would be. 'Unprofessional' behavior could be anything like sexual harassment, being physically aggressive, etc. We've all seen this first-hand or heard about it; typically HR won't get involved because it's easier to make the rank-and-file worker change divisions or leave, than to have the upper management change. 4. Place limits on executive pay relative to worker pay. Today a CEO makes hundreds of times more than your average rank-and-file worker. This multiple is only increasing. A union could fight executive pay increases without commensurate increases to worker pay.

A few things that modern unions don't have to do:

1. Push for equal pay among everyone. I think we can all acknowledge that knowledge-workers don't all contribute to projects with the same level of effectiveness. I know some of my coworkers are better at their jobs than I am--and I'm okay with them getting paid more than me. Because we aren't just a cog in a machine, it doesn't make sense to treat each other as directly replaceable parts. 2. Encourage workers to limit their productivity, for fear of eliminating jobs. The union should win when the company wins. The union should do its part to help the company create more value for the world, and make sure that the employees get a fair share of that value.

I think it comes down to being fair versus being equal. Workers used to be equal labor substitutes, so the unions treated everyone as equal. Workers are no longer equal, but unions haven't evolved to the new business realities.

For what it's worth, I'm not a software engineer and I don't work in the Bay area. My city doesn't have many job opportunities, so I don't have the luxury of just leaving a company without also packing up and moving to a new area. For my coworkers who own houses or have a family, this is particularly hard. A union could help us create a better working environment, but many people have this idea of what a unions are based on a system of unions that was based in 19th and 20th century manufacturing.

To be very clear, this is not a goal commonly associated with unions, to my knowledge.

EDIT: removed an ill-thought claim.

My father is a trades person and when one union treated him badly he left for another one cause he had options. His union has also saved him from a lot of BS that companies he's worked for have tried to pull.

Alternatively when I was a student I worked a part time job where I was forced to be a part of a union with no options. Ever week they took money from my paycheck and the one time I had a grievance they pretty much ignored me. Making sure the girl that showed up hung over and vomiting every 2nd shift was not fired was more important because seniority.

Only some areas like teachers seem to have near-homogeneous membership and unions taking an active role. And this seems mostly to be because 90% have the same employeer - the state (public education). Because of standardized working terms (incl salary), they have to be negotiated centrally.

It should also be noted that the players union represents a tiny portion of the actual employees involved and they actively negotiate money away from other employees.

You can't get good results through bad means. Unions are fundamentally a destructive endeavor. Their use is practical but limited: the best thing unions ever fought was the state, not employers.

Like a 5 day work week from 6 days? Like 8 hour work days? Like safe conditions for workers. All things unions helped deliver.

Those gains so-called 'worker rights' were achieved in countries without unions as well. It's also unmentioned how much unemployment and misery unions also caused in this narrative.

Beware of correlation/causation. Unions that represent the highest earning workers are the strongest, because the strongest workers already have the highest bargaining power and the highest salaries.

A modern example of what productivity does to working conditions is in SV, where the unionized workers have less perks than the un-unionized ones.

Historically unions are always tied with: import restrictions, protection from competition, minimum wage laws (that dont apply to themselves), unemployment (the best way to increase wages for a union is to cut supply short).

As a nice example, Argentina has unions with constitutional level protections since the 50's, and unemployment is up, working conditions are down, poverty is up, import restrictions are up and minimum wage laws are up: result, 40% of the population works under the table, and union workers have some of the highest wages in the country.

You will seldom find improving working conditions without notable increase in GDP per capita.

Charter school teachers are non-unionized, so this demand harms the pay of non-unionized "outsiders". If they succeed, they can parade the statistic that "Unionized teachers have gained income over non-unionized teachers thanks to the wonderful work of unions", when in fact what they have really done is transfer wealth from outsiders to insiders.

Here's another link that I think has balanced coverage: https://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2015/sep...

Ford even wrote an article on the subject (which I can't seem to find at the moment). In it he discusses hiring private detectives to follow his workers to ensure that they spent the extra money he was paying him. He was worried that by paying his workers too much and giving them too much time off, he'd create another class of wealthy people. Instead his great experiment was to get them to spend their money, drive the economy and create a market for his cars.

So while I don't consider Ford to be a philanthropist for his moves, and while I recognise the achievements of unions in this area, it would be foolish to ignore the fact that 40 hour work weeks, minimum wage and safe working conditions have always been a win-win situation for industry. There have been companies who realised this win-win much earlier than they were forced to. I think one might even be able to argue effectively that these moves may have occurred even without the participation of the unions. Indeed, it is possible that despite all the good work from the unions, that laws of this nature were only passed because this was rapidly becoming the concensus opinion in industry anyway.

Just an aside while I'm here... I once was asked to sign a new contract with my employer with really draconian terms. I was already under contract and none of the termination clauses had come into effect, so I politely declined. They threatened to fire me at which point I asked them if understood the legal consequences of getting people to sign contracts under duress. Their lawyer, who was present, promptly apologised and wrapped things up.

As I was leaving, I mentioned that it would be a good idea to have an ombudsman to review these kinds of contract changes. I was now going to go talk with the rest of my colleagues and there was no way that anyone would sign the new contract from that point on. However, if they had an intermediary, there was a good chance that whatever problem they were having with the old contract could be solved. The HR person replied, "We'll never allow a union here and don't even think about threatening it". The lawyer laughed nervously (I really didn't envy him that day).

And this is the thing that drives me crazy about both sides of the equation. It really is a win-win situation. There is no need to have a "both sides". The company wants a good contract that protects them from crappy stuff. The employee wants a good contract that protects them from crappy stuff. But as soon as one side or the other gets the upper hand, they just try to crush the other side. It's really frustrating. Even the mentioning the idea of working together seems to be crazy talk. While I only mention this anecdote, I am one of the few people who have worked in a union shop as a programmer before. Exactly same thing, other way around. The union would happily drive the company into the ground if it meant getting some pointless concession for its members....

One thing your comment made me think about was a story I heard about a company who had a fairly draconian contract. One of the employees brought this up with the CEO and the CEO said it was what their lawyer suggested and so they did it.

Lawyers are there to protect the company. Sometimes they make recommendations that will help with the law but not necessarily with company culture and hiring people.

Kudos for knowing enough not to get suckered into a contract that wasn't good for you.

I've worked at plenty of companies which had huge inefficiencies (meetings 6hrs a day, forty approvals to get anything done etc etc), which held back individual success and were generally not meritocracies.

I think you find that all organisations with many humans involved all have inefficiencies but the media seems to love painting unions as the inefficient ones.

I'm a member of union (Australia) as a web developer, it doesn't interfere with my day to day working, negotiations or my work ethic but it's like having a backup lawyer in case there are problems with the workplace and I need some advice.

Work less? Or work 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week? There are plenty of examples out there of people who think that is the bare minimum.

> They directed the members to engage in behavior that was best for the union while bad for the workers and the company.

Of course, that is what a strike is, but a necessary evil.

Work less. There is no point in trying to put out anymore output than the bare minimum required if that's both the agreement between the union and the employee (promotions based on tenure) and between the union and the company (agreements on what minimum deliverables employees will deliver).

>Of course, that is what a strike is, but a necessary evil.

It's more than a strike. Continuing what I wrote above, unions will introduce obvious inefficiencies in order to support red tape processes rather than focusing on what the company is trying to accomplish. (e.g. no code can be committed without a review by two other clocked in union members while being backed by a ticket groomed by a clocked in agilist and released by two clocked-in SRE folks).

Seems fair to do the opposite.

That's obviously bad for employers, but it's also bad for other employees who aren't in the union, and for anyone who wants success to be based on talent and hard work instead of politics.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/are-unions-exploiting-their-emp...

I've worked for several unions and, at least in my experience, most union staff actually are unionized.

Of course, like any kind of organisation, whether it's a company, a business, a charity, a religion, or a political party, people will attempt to score themselves the best position and also improve the position of the organisation. This isn't a unique problem with unions, but with any kind of organisation, it's all money and power at the end of the day.

Unions in the US are democratic institutions, so if there is a problem with your union you can change things.

However, because the private firm is not legally, or practically democratic at all, it makes sense for those who love democracy (and themselves) to unionize, yes.

Democracy is great, don't get me wrong. But it doesn't magically mean that representation for your specific subgroup will exist. If you're part of a demographic with 10-15% representation in your union, is it really a crazy idea that your demographic might want to pool its votes together to ensure that you have more collective influence in a process that might otherwise ignore you?

Collective, coordinated negotiation being more effective than individual negotiation is the entire point of unions. It's just not clear to me why those principles would stop applying within a union itself.

Companies are extremely motivated to undermine unions. Unions tend to get stale as they age and lose their militancy. That's why wildcat action is so common. It sucks but even a workplace with a stale union is better off than one without collective bargaining.

The hardest part of organizing, like so many things, is going from 0 to 1. Once you've got a union you have a lot more power. Thinking you don't is what the company wants you to think.

The US has such a workaholic culture, with lack of sleep and lack of life outside of work being endemic. Less work is a good thing!