Unions don't exist for the employees' benefit, they exist for the union's benefit. There's a big ol difference, and because of their protected status, unions get away with a lot of really horrifying behavior.

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.

Employees shouldn't join unions that don't exist for their benefit. And if a union doesn't benefit the workers, they should leave and start a new union.

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.

Union electrician here...I can annectdotally counter your "categorical" claim...have you ever worked in a skilled trade union?

> fair workplaces

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.

Yikes, I read my original post and I think yeah, you're right. I mean "more fair workplace". And fair being for both employee and employer. That's why I think competition would be important, as long as we can avoid a race to the bottom situation it might make unions more relevant.

I think what he/she was getting at is that "fair" isn't defined (by you).

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.

What really disappoints me is when unions make demands unrelated to pay or work conditions, but to restricting competition. See LA teachers union and their demands to cap charter schools. This is a direct demand to punish teachers who are not part of unions. This is a stark reminder that unions is a "fight coercion with more coercion" solution.

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.

> What really disappoints me is when unions make demands unrelated to pay or work conditions, but to restricting competition

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

I agree strongly. Unions don't have to undermine the productivity of a company (and really they shouldn't).

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.

> Push for equal pay among everyone.

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

EDIT: removed an ill-thought claim.

I work in an org with an IT union in a small area with little options.. its terrible. There is actual negative to doing work when you can hope some other sucker steps up to the plate, you can't get fired, you make the same cash. Oh the things I've learned.. don't even get me started on grievances etc

I honestly wonder (without knowing much of the history mind you) if the USA purposely made unions awful as to promote the mindset "I would rather not have a union" amongst the workers. For sure unions are terrible here, but it seems quite strange to have anti-competitive laws for unions when the USA is near-built on capitalism and the free market.

Having competing unions is an interesting concept. It may be a hard sell because technically the primary legal ability of a union is prevent competition among the workers. If you are a rock star you can't get hired at a greater wage. If you are a nepotism cling on you can't get fired or demoted.

You've hit the nail on the head. I've seen both sides of the union coin. Unions need competition just as much as business do to function properly.

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.

In Norway, each employee freely chooses their union. It is common in some industries that people belong to several different unions, and that some are not part of union. And usually they are based on particular profession, like engineering or economics. Unions then have more a passive role, offering services like free legal representation, better insurance deals, and training.

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.

Why does there have to be standard working terms? In the US professional baseball, hockey, and football have player unions and things like salary are negotiated per person.

They aren't standard working terms because of the unions. They are standard working terms because all teachers (who work in state schools at least) are employed by the local education authorities, who in turn set their working terms and salaries based on the government's department for education. So for teachers there is no individual salary negotiation, it's all decided centrally by the government and you either take it, or move to the private schools of which there are a lot less. (This is UK for me, but based on what op said, I think it's similar)

Yep very similar. There is built in some automatic compensation for years of service, and the payscale is inflation adjusted. For a given position, there is a small range of possible salaries. So it is in principle possible to have a bit of independently negotiated salary. In practice almost everyone falls very close to each-other.

This is not to say that individual teachers cannot earn more or less, just that the scale on which they are being paid has been decided in advance, right?

Percentage of revenue going to the players has already been negotiated.

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.

> It should be used to create fair workplaces.

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.

> You can't get good results through bad means.

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

There is a reasonable argument that competition for worker and increased wealth in the society also created these conditions.

Higher worker productivity achieved those things, not unions.

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.

Higher worker productivity naturally leads to shortened hours? No wonder we've all got 15 hour workweeks now.

Better be damn sure about that. If you want to live like a worker in the 1850's, you can work 1/5 what they worked.

No - higher productivity made it _possible_ but unionized workers fought and died to make it actually happen.

What unionless countries achieved these things? It seems to me that workers in countries with unions tend to have far better working conditions than those in countries without unions. The only alternative to unions to get these things is to get them directly enshrined in law, but in most countries that only happened after unions fought for it.

> What unionless countries achieved these things? It seems to me that workers in countries with unions tend to have far better working conditions than those in countries without union

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.

Exactly. Look at LA Teachers unions demanding cap on charter schools.

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.

That is largely revisionist history, most of those things where already happening naturally due to competition between employers. Unions may have accelerated it a few years but the idea that we as a society would have never gotten a 5 day work week or an 8 hour day with out the unions is just false

There is fierce competition for employees in tech, but the hours seem to be normalized at 50+...

Few jobs show so much flexibility as tech. People work as they please, including shortened hours.

Idk where you work, but 40hrs a week is the floor not the ceiling in my workplace.

You may find this link interesting: https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ford-factory-wor...

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....

This is a really good comment.

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.

Legislators delivered it. It's not clear unions were a required interim for that to happen.

Legislators cannot deliver what they do not provide.