I think it's important to note here that "bad for management" doesn't necessarily mean "good for employees". It is possible that unions are bad for both, by gumming up the negotiating process, and insulating low performing employees at the expense of high performing employees. It may or may not be the case that this is what happens, but it does not follow from the fact that management opposes it, therefore it is good for employees.

Also important to note there is a difference between "bad for employees" and "bad for employees because we're going to retaliate".

In high school teacher X was notorious for giving no work and no s*its. He missed lots of his classes so always subs. We thought it was cool (usually easy A). He was there years but my senior year he must have done something way over the line because he was fired midday. Amazingly the gossip never figured out what he did (despite kids w parents on school board)

Unions can go too far in supporting people who should not be protected,but a large part of the reason they do is that they came into existence at a time when employers literally were prepared to see workers die to protect their ability to mistreat people.

Unions tends to take softer stances e.g. in parts of Europe where their level of involvement in decision-making means the hard-line stances are no longer seen as necessary.

Things like UBI, higher minimum wage, reduce exempt classification loopholes etc all seem like ways that rules could change to benefit everyone.

I would LOVE to see the data that says a seniority based union system results in better retention of high performers and their continued push to perform well.

I was on a systems engineering team at this studio, and our union counter parts were nothing but incompetent pains in the ass.

Unions don’t have to be this way, and I think they serve an important roll, but people should really be careful what they are asking for as the results might not be what are expected.

https://www.google.com/search?q=do+unions+benefit+employees+...

First two links have loads of commentary with citations. There's plenty of books on the subject, as well, if you're interested. Amazon is a good place to look for them.

Eliminating any motivation to perform well is of course going to discourage people who try harder for rewards. That’s basic economics.

Claiming that the top performers will continue to innovate and lead when they are compensated the same as the bare minimum clock punchers is extraordinary and requires evidence.

About the only place where unions are better (at least the salary negotiating US style ones) are jobs where innovation and efficiency are irrelevant.

More generally, UBI cannot possibly solve for a scenario where people are being dramatically overpaid and there’s no way to correct it.

I don't disagree, but I don't know know if this is how the case needs to be made...

It's common knowledge in the software industry that the best way to advance is to hop jobs every two or so years. Do you think it's because of the non-existent unions, or because of corporations underpaying employees because they know they can get away with it?

Just one quick example for company we are talking about.

https://www.levels.fyi/salary/Google/

You go from level 3 at $150K to level 6 at $500K.

Bonuses for top performers where I am are very high (40% of salary) vs 5% of salary avg.

That works out when you start for startups, but if you want to make more than 250k, you're going to need to get promotions. The companies that pay more than that like google aren't going to hire someone into a L5 or above role that has jobbed hopped every two years without getting any promotions to an L5 or above level role at similar companies who also won't hire you at that level. There are routinely stories about people with 15+ years of experience getting hired as L4s because of this.

There are obviously exceptions especially if you write a really popular open source library but this generally holds.

First, this argument chain is about unions in general. Please read up on the full response chain to understand the context of my response, starting with stjohnswarts.

Second, this thread and story is not about Google. It's about Google's contractors. There's a very important distinction there, because contractors are often treated worse both by the companies they're working under as well as the contracted companies they're working with. Google might treat its own employees better (although the jury is still out on that with many stories alleging discrimination in terms of pay and what not) but this story is obstensibly about the anti-union behavior occurring at companies Google is partnered with.

There are contractors to google making a killing - seriously - if you own your own business or provide a service to google you can make bank.

One example -> some of the employee / teambuilding / staff appreciation stuff. If the google FTE's like doing your teambuilding program google is absolutely happy to pay for it.

I know some other direct contract work with google - generally don't fight on price but their focus was on quality.

I'd like to hear some firsthand experiences of direct contractors working for google (ie, google 1099's) getting badly treated because that wasn't what I saw.

>HCL employee and union organizer Ben Gwin says HCL workers make between $30,000-60,000 a year, and it varies widely. According to Glassdoor, a site that collected salary information from 73 people, Google software engineers in Pittsburgh earn on average $121,000 a year, ranging from $88,000-171,000 a year.

If you're going to make claims like that, please read the actual article we're discussing before jumping into the conversation. I've been a contractor before (albeit in different circumstances and not for google), I am very familiar with how the system can work and how contractors can be generally treated.

I'm not aware of almost anyone (network infra contractors / team build soft touch providers) who historically haven't been paid very reasonably for their work working for google.

And Google does business with contractors who have unionized employees. I'm not aware of them caring too much about that either.

Google does thousands of H1bs and has something like a 99% approval rate even under trump so they don't mind working with international folks.

For your second point: The intent of this article, which I hope you have read by now, specifically talks with people who say they are not being paid well working for Google as a contractor. They directly quote people who say they are not being paid reasonably for their work.

For your third point: Yes, I'm sure Google does business with unionized employees. This article is about a contractor, which is working for Google, using anti-union practices to prevent their workforce from unionizing because according to the workers they are underpaid.

And your final point has literally nothing to do with the article we're discussing or the entire argument chain we're in right now.

This constant insistence that google contractors are being paid $30K to do work that $171K engineers are doing in the same geo area is totally false. That does not happen. I am open to a specific example, but I'm not aware of one.

To be a google contractor you need a contract that has google's name on it (or Google LLC etc). That is the literal definition of being a google contractor. You get a 1099 from google. If this describes you - you are, on average, paid well.

Google flies on US airlines with highly paid and unionized pilots - I don't think they care.

Are you confusing google contractors with employees of a large non-google business?

Oh really. Because to me it sounds like a statement about human motivation patterns, and some huge assumptions about it that are, quite often, wrong. Just like cats, humans can be motivated by:

* food (or food-equivalents in the form of flipping some bits in a bank) * social interaction (60% of cats as long as not starved!)

...also, unlike cats (AFAIK), but very frequently (also AFAIK) humans can be motivated by:

* self-expression * perceived benefit to society.

If not for the need for self-expression, there would be barely anyone working in the games industry. And pretty much every company's internal relations spew more-or-less thinly veiled nonsense about how spying on customers is good - or at least acceptable - actually. That's because the last part is an _enormous_ part of motivation for many.

> Claiming that the top performers will continue to innovate and lead when they are compensated the same as the bare minimum clock punchers is extraordinary and requires evidence.

...except non-unionised companies often tolerate bare minimum clock punchers, and, conversely, unions often penalise those. Good relationship with management can easily allow slacking, and unions have more interest in company's survival than some nomadic C-level.

You're making things up and then demanding others to provide evidence. Some of us actually worked in an office for more than a day, you know.

Lol. I think you need to look up what the study of economics is.

"People on the upper end will not stop contributing or trying".

I was interested in the citation for this given the anecdotal info I had which involved high performing folks trying to find more rewarding work elsewhere.

Here's Nobel economist Milton Friedman discussing it in more detail. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xzYgiOC9cj4

It's become clear in the past few years that a lot of people care less about winning than they do about their "enemies" losing. To them, it doesn't matter if you hurt yourself, as long as you hurt the people who disagree with you as well.

Most of the people I know that voted for Trump don’t even like him. It was just more important to keep Clinton out of office. Most of the people I know that voted for Clinton didn’t even like her, but she wasn’t Trump so she got the vote.

What is “good for employees” or “bad for employees” may not be the same for all employees. A policy which favours the interests of one group of employees may disadvantage another. Which group of employees’ interests will a union prioritise?

For example, suppose management has budgeted enough for a 2% across the board pay rise. Management has two basic choices about how to distribute this:

Option 1) Everyone gets 2%

Option 2) Above-average performers get more than 2%, every one else gets 0%

If you are an above-average performer, Option 2 is best for you, whereas if you are not, then you will be better off with Option 1. Which of those two options will the union advocate for?

What if both could benefit? What could a modern union look like today?

We think in terms of unions = bad, but union is simply employees organizing and negotiating as a group.

There's no particular reason to assume out-of-hand without further information that the interests of employees and management are intertwined (basically my earlier point), nor that they're separate & opposed (basically your point). But management by opposing the union so strongly is implicitly asserting that at a minimum they believe it'll be bad for management. They can also be wrong vs. right in that prediction. They may also explicitly assert it'll be bad for workers, and be wrong or right in that. Seems like there's a lot of game theory happening here and I bet there's some concise notation for all this. (Not my strong suit.)

Sometimes I wonder where did I go wrong?

More hours are for show.

We aren't robots. Having a late night today effects my work tomorrow.

There's a reason that what we now call "mass shootings" used to be called "going postal."

Whilst a lot of employers will have you opt out of the working time directive as part of an employment contract, you can opt back in at any time, limiting your max hours to 48 a week on average:

https://www.gov.uk/maximum-weekly-working-hours/weekly-maxim...

There was an example from UK, now for Poland:

* 40 hour week (anything above is overtime paid +50% more for first 8 hours during week and day, in weekends or night it is +100%)

* 20 or 26 (depending how many years you have worked in your life, usually after 2 years you get 26) + 13 public holidays.

* women after birth get 52 weeks off (plus their usual vacation), dads get 2 weeks off to be used during 2 years (the 52 weeks can be split between parents, so a mom can go to work and dad can stay with child for 32 weeks)

* on top of that when you are sick and go to doctor he/she can prescribe you a time off (sick off?), which is additional to your normal vacation (this is not limited to any number of days, e.g. when you break your leg you can be a year sick/unable to work), but pays 80% your salary

>> Normal working conditions for an employee

Basically not anywhere except government-related positions.

And I'm thinking of leaving because as a new company in a larger group they still don't give us meal vouchers like the rest of the companies in the group.

LUL! Those are amateur numbers, buddy. I do 11-6 maybe, and work at a big 5 tech company making big 5 tech company salaries. And frankly, we aren't working a lot of the time during the day either.

And yes, we have the "unlimited" vacation, which usually results in people taking about 4 weeks a year, on average.

I think people underestimate how easy it is to work at some of the big tech companies.

Big 5 tech companies are pretty great.

Out of curiosity - any downsides to your working conditions? You seem pretty happy about everything.

How is it that everyone that I talk to, knows what I am talking about when I say those words, but apparently you don't?

So it would be Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon, Apple, and maybe Netflix depending on who you ask.

And yes, I know that is more than 5 companies. It is a shorthand for "those prestigious, large tech companies that new grads apply to, and hire lots of people, and have large market caps".

If I talk to any new grad who is applying to companies these day, they will know what I mean when I say "big 5 tech companies".

This is a very common term in the interview/tech market and discussions.

The fact that this is how people use these words, makes it the definition.

Lots of people in the real world know exactly what it means when people say "big 5 tech companies".

You'd have to be extremely obtuse to not know what people mean when they say those words.

* Admittedly would swap Netflix with Microsoft in the FAANG acronym.

After a couple of more years like that wouldn't you get used to not doing much and then get slaughtered when inevitable change came around?

My friend referred to this kind of situation as "being in an ass" ;) Yeah, from time to time there's a smell but it's always warm, comfy and soft ;P

Maybe without unpaid overtime and burnout, developers will finally have the chance to contribute to open source and side projects that recruiters are always looking for.

Burnout sucks and being exploited sucks. I'm all for unlimited sick days, being compensated for all the work and time you put in, getting the benefits that you're guaranteed by law etc. In exchange for that I sure would expect the employer to expect me performing well. Quid pro quo. The USPS example didn't imply that imho.

EDIT: Did I misunderstand a joke or something? Doesn't seem like I said anything particularly controversial.

I'm not for exploiting people if that's what you mean. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

Is it possible that someone behaving that way has legitimate reasons to do so? Sure. I mean I've been wrong before :P It's that I (personal experience, anecdata) didn't encounter many situations like that is all.

If some employer is taking advantage of you you should quit. I do understand that not everyone is in a position to say 'fuck you' to a person/entity that's taking advantage of him/her and that that's a situation a union can help in.

You pay me for 40 I'll give you 40 You want 80 then you pay me for 80

My wife was on an assignment in South Korea and she experienced the 16 hour work days there. No one even blinked when you tried calling your colleagues at 11:00pm.

However, what my wife noticed is that most of the people working those hours seemd drousy, unfocused and inattentive. It boggles my mind how either of the sides of that work contract can think that that kind of situation is beneficial for either of the sides in any imaginable way...

Even sled dogs owners give them plenty of rest or they stop doing a good job and you think it would hurt human performances?

how is that awesome? the productive output of the most productive time of their lives is 4 times less. It would be truly awesome of course if they productively worked only 25% of the time with your efficiency and spent the rest 75% on say education, new tech learning, skills improvement, side projects... Unfortunately, i suspect, their time is simply wasted 4 times less efficiently than yours - may be using less efficient tools, processes, nobody cares about anything in particular because there is no point in improvement, etc...

I myself work in a very similar environment, a non-FAANG BigCo, my effective productivity is order of magnitude less than it was at previous jobs in particular because we're moving with the speed of midday sleeping flies, and moving any faster would create huge impedance mismatch causing systemic structural stress painfully affecting everybody. Such slowdown isn't good even in the short term as it makes your mind into a mushy soup zen-like diffusing through your skull and merging with the swamp around.

The negotiation process is the workers trying to keep more of the wealth they themselves create. "Gumming up" is when the people parasitically appropriating surplus labor time from those workers demand more.

> insulating low performing employees at the expense of high performing employees

Who will insulate us from the heirs expropiating dividend profits from high (and low) performing employees? What hubris that the heirs who do not work want those of us who do work in some Hunger Games competition against one another.

Have you considered that maybe peoples’ reactions are based on bad experiences with unions? In particular, public sector unions. Even liberal areas are pretty anti-union, and with things like the DC and NYC Subways falling apart despite massive funding, who can blame them? With police unions protecting crooked cops and teachers unions protecting bad teachers, who can blame them?

(I think it’s also fair to say that the sheer rapaciousness of American public sector unions is the result of an anti-union war that has otherwise receded from the public consciousness. They fight everything tooth and nail, even reasonable reforms, because they’re the outnumbered survivors of anti-union movements.)

That's because union organizing campaigns are so rare. Usually, the organizers get fired. WalMart has closed entire stores that voted for a union.

Some anti-union resources for employers.[1][2][3] [3] advertises a "95% win rate".

[1] http://www.unionproof.com/ [2] https://lrionline.com/fighting-a-union-3/ [3] https://anh.com/

Also, I'm very confused about your "liberal areas" comment. My impression as a regular NYC subway rider is that the subway doesn't have massive funding, and what little funding it has is being spent poorly because of decisions by politicians, not because any union has asked for anything or is getting paid too much. I've heard a lot of anger at service cuts, at our governor, at the recent fare enforcement crackdown. I've heard zero anger about the salaries paid to unionized employees.

(I have, in fairness, heard the fairly inside-baseball complaint that the unions are pushing back against extending one-person operation to more train lines, for fears of more job cuts. I don't know anyone who thinks that's the biggest problem facing the subway, and I think the vast majority of the ridership, even the politically-active ridership with opinions about the merits of unions, has very little idea that this debate even exists.)

I do agree that people in liberal areas are unhappy about police unions. I think that's its own, special thing (among other things, in NYC the Second Amendment applies more to cops and retired cops than it does to civilians), and I don't get the sense that people are unhappy about teachers' unions in the same way.

I think American "left" and the Left everywhere else are entirely different things. As a leftie in the UK, I do not recognise the NYT as left at all.

Unions always enforce expensive, outdated work. The taxi cab unions fought Uber and Lyft, a vastly superior taxi system, all to prop up an existing outdated system.

Vastly superior for who?

Good things won't last forever. The taxi cab unions are already fighting these companies back in many cities.

They kind of remind me of the record industry and file sharing in the 90s: fighting technology, so they can keep their outdated and expensive system in place.

Most unions are like this. As another example, they will fight automation and force companies to hire multiple, overpaid workers, for a job that can be done by a single person. This only holds companies back and puts them at a disadvantage.

If I remember correctly, NYC Subway budget is about 10bn.

London tube is about 2bn.

It's not a money problem.

2. My argument is not so much whether it has massive funding or not, my argument is that riders have the impression that it has insufficient funding - i.e., riders do not have the impression that the problem with the subway is union salaries and benefits. I'm (obviously) happy to get into transit geekery, but this discussion is about whether people have a positive or negative view of unions.

These costs also need to be normalized for ridership figures (NYC has higher ridership). And don't forget that most of the figures you're going to see for NYC are for the entire MTA, which runs a lot more than just the subway.

And it's important to distinguish the cost per ride vs the subsidy per ride. Fare revenue shouldn't count "against" a transit system.

For some figures, the total budget of the London Underground is £10.3B (inclusive of fares): http://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-budget-2019-20.pdf [pg 10]

The total budget of the MTA (inclusive of fares) is $16.3B: http://web.mta.info/news/pdf/MTA-2019-Prelim-Budget-July-Fin... [pg 14]

Normalize those figures to dollar amounts and account for ridership, and it appears that the MTA is cheaper per ride than TfL.

10.3bn number is for TFL combined, which includes buses, DLR, overground, tram and other.

There’s a serious problem with incentives in the taxpayer funded space due to every union member voting in political elections, whereas the non union public is not involved, resulting in the politicians and unions being able to strike deals and no one really representing taxpayers.

I’ll never get the support of Dues Crazy union leadership, those people who rip-off their membership with ridiculously high dues, medical and other expenses while being paid a fortune. But the members love Trump. They look at our record economy, tax & reg cuts, military etc. WIN!

7:32 AM - 29 Apr 2019

inb4 'Trump isn't a politician'.

I've always found this condemnation odd given how often it's actually true.

If you break down salaries by demographics, one of the biggest correlations with salary is age. Senior positions pay more than junior ones. It's an extremely common career path to start off in an entry level job and ultimately end up in management by the end of your career.

So the reason people think they'll be making more money in ten years is that most of them will be. You may not be Warren Buffet but you could easily be the manager of your branch office and making two or three times your current entry-level compensation.

One of them will be a team leader at some point. A second one might follow and become a team leader while the firth one goes higher.

Will they go up one more level ? let’s say yes. That makes e of them climbing the ladder.

Will there be a fourth ? probably not. That leaves 6 people not going up, and only earning marginally more. That’s less than half will see significant change in their 10 yers next.

Large organization graphs are shaped like pyramids, but the thing about a pyramid is that the combination of the top and the middle is as big as the bottom. The organizations large enough for unions to come into play have multiple layers of middle management.

But let's suppose the company is less than 50% managers. That still doesn't mean the typical person won't ever be a manager, it only means they're an employee for more time than they are a manager.

Also remember that small businesses employ the most people and don't have that sort of tree structure. In that case you typically have the owner and the apprentice who is expected to buy out the owner when they retire and ten person teams are not a thing. And you will often have some workers in larger organizations who don't move into management in the same company they started in but who do leave to strike out on their own, i.e. become a founder/manager of a new small business once they have sufficient industry experience.

Most people do not have a managerial position their entire lives - period.

There are indeed people who stay in dead end jobs indefinitely, but such people are not the majority of people.

https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/area_emp_chart/area_emp_char...

And those jobs often have less competition for those management positions because they're so often held by college students who go on to jobs in the industry they've studied rather than competing with other salespersons or fast food workers for the office manager position.

My political opponents are actual, non-embarrassed millionaires and billionaires from families of millionaires and billionaires.

My political allies are temporarily embarrassed millionaires, from the folks accepting below-market salaries to work at a potential unicorn to the folks buying literal lotto tickets at the corner store. A few of them are no longer temporarily embarrassed, having joined the right startup, which only goes to demonstrate that the worldview is correct. Things worked out for them without unionizing, clearly things will work out for me too one day.

If you were referring to only politicians, they're basically all millionaires.

(And I think you'll find that I disproportionately support the non-millionare politicians.)

You're counting your opponents as the second group and your allies as the first group. Someone on your opposing side could make the _exact_ argument by reversing the groups. It's telling that your statement does nothing to show what your actual politics are.

The people I support politically are generally wealthy. I am also fairly confident that the ones who aren't probably will be if they are in politics long enough and not necessarily through corrupt means. Anyone of that stature can, at the very least, sell quite a few books on their name alone for instance. It goes hand in hand that influential people can more easily amass wealth.

And I think my politics are more accurately represented by normal people vs. career politicians than by donkey mascot vs. elephant mascot. I vote Democrat as a matter of lesser-of-two-evils, but I yearn desperately for a world in which no one who's involved in any way with DCCC can have influence in politics ever again. If you find me someone who votes Republican who says the like AOC and hate Trump, I'd probably agree with them on a lot of things.

What you said paints your political allies as people you know personally who are essentially "down on their luck" people who are trying to make it while your political opponents are millionaires the likes of Mitch McConnell or a Lindsay Graham.

Someone with the opposite political leanings as you could say that their political allies are the steel workers in Pittsburgh and the auto workers in Detroit who's job were lost to globalization and free trade (and they vote Republican as a lesser of two evils) while their political opponents are millionaires like Nancy Pelosi and Diane Feinstein.

You're using two different categories of people as allies and opponents.

If you cast your argument using the same categories, it doesn't make sense. Your allies, Pelosi and Feinstein are just as wealthy as your opponents, McConnell and Graham. Or inversely, your allies, the folks buying lotto tickets accepting below market salaries who just haven't joined the right startup are just as poor as your opponents, the factory workers and coal miners who've lost their jobs to globalization and technology.

I think you're trying to say your allies are both groups from the second example and your opponents are both groups from the first example but that doesn't really work because you're actively supporting half of each and actively working against the other half. You've chosen a side that you believe will help both sides, even though they are your opponents but I don't think that's a unique position to your side.

becoming a millionaire is statistically highly unlikely, and why would such an unlikely event warrant anti-union sentiment?

Less unlikely than 3 decades ago, but the chance of a (lower) middle class person becoming a millionaire, and especially a liquid (non-retirement+primary home) millionaire, which is the kind of thing we think of when we say millionaire, is exceedingly low.

I know of nobody on the right that has voted with that mindset.

Of course, this "TEM" thing is partly a face-saving move for our white, right neighbors by progressives who don't want to point to the racism/classism and a willingness to accept Pyhric victories that really drives a lot of anti-union sentiment. Why, not wanting the "undeserving" to receive undo benefits is the crux of several arguments on this very page.

That said: how many posters here consider themselves just One Great Idea away from being the next Zuckerberg, and thus tend to view discussions on, I dunno, work/life balance or engineers' unions from an employer's perspective instead of their own? Seems like more than a few to me.

[1] OK, I checked wikipedia, turns out that the original phrase was "temporarily embarrassed capitalists", but this is the variant that stuck.

Viewing employment as a collaborative endeavor rather than a hostile negotiation goes a long ways towards improving both sides.

Finally, part of the issue is that basically none of the innovative companies in the US are union shops. Because of the ham-fisted salary control most US unions are known for, they are just seen as a way to get a company to pay more than the market price for a skill by forming a cartel.

Okay, everyone, think carefully about what the trite "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" quote implies. The underlying meaning is "These people are too ignorant/foolish/some other pejorative to recognize that they are not, in fact, 'temporarily embarrassed millionaires', LOL." It also has a implication of "I, however, do recognize this because I am wiser/smarter/etc. than them and I know what's good for them better than they do themselves."

If the people who repeat these kinds of things think that ordinary folk are not bright enough to pick up on these subtexts and resent the hell out of them for it, maybe they are not a tenth as smart as they think they are. Maybe it's time to stop parroting Wright's stupid quote and stop looking down on these people if you all actually want to, like, win elections or something.

Isn't mandatory membership a simple corollary of unionization efforts?

Why not? I can just demand that my contract looks the same as the unions, anything wrong with that?

No, What I would like is that other people are free to collectively bargain on their own behalf, and their own behalf alone, and I am free to bargain individually for myself, without their "help" or obligations.

Although unions proximately came into existence for the purpose of taking collective action against oppressive employers, it's equally true, and at least as important, to understand that they came into existence in order to fill a regulatory vacuum in labor law.

This should prompt some important questions:

1. Should the job of protecting workers from employers properly belong to any entity other than the government?

2. Is filling the regulatory vacuum with regulation theoretically or empirically insufficient to protect workers?

3. Are unions the only means of collective action?

4. Are the functions that unions serve beyond coordinating collective action actually necessary in order to protect workers? Would they still be necessary even if labor law was sufficiently well regulated?

My position is this: We should dramatically expand and increase labor regulation and enforcement actions, and we should allow employees to take collective action. Then we should ask ourselves whether unions are still necessary.

Agree 100%.

Im the United States most local and state ballots have measures on them generated by petition drives. Get X number of registered voters to sign a petition and it is on the ballot.

I always signs these when the someone approaches me. I may not agree with the cause or be a proponent of the goal, but the group organizing should have the right to appear on the ballot and have citizens votes on it.

I don't think it's a fair comparison.

"One can be pro-organizing but not pro-union."

My understanding is the OP Was looking at it through the lens of a worker.

My comparison was meant to say I support someone's initiative to have something put up for a vote, but that doesn't mean I will vote for it. I could have been plainer in the explanation.

Phase transitions and bifurcations show up all the time in natural systems, from mathematics to cell division and population ecology; I don't know why people think social structures would be immune from this.

You're right but because it's no different from someone saying their specific solution is the only way. In reality, there are a multitude of different opinions and it seems likely to me that more than one would be effective.

> There's some times and things where one should expect a normal distribution, and other times and things where a binomial distribution shows up.

Sure things might tend to distribute into two major positions but that doesn't mean nobody holds a different opinion and it says absolutely nothing toward whether those two solutions are somehow the ideal solutions (or one of them, in the case of the OP).

Your statistical example actually takes things the wrong direction. The person you are responding to is positing a distribution with more than two modes, not fewer, and by suggesting there are two your example actually is closer to the “centrist” straw man.

The argument you are calling “centrist” is not claiming there is a “truth somewhere in the middle”. It’s claiming there are plausible positions (concentrations of probability in your metaphor) in more than just two locations.

I also considered adding that the assumption of a one-dimensional parameter space is also overly reductionist and not representative of the majority of positions people take when they feel like the mainstream choices are both wrong.

Then you responded with a completely different set of points attacking the parent poster on completely unrelated topics that you somehow equated to what the parent said.

If we want positive change in our world we need respectful and rational discourse. Posts likes yours actively tear down discourse and makes worse the very problems you mention.

You were quick to list the handful of dictators and “strongmen” you know off hand, but for every example you listed there is someone like Merkel, Obama, etc. on the other side.

It comes down to both our ideologies being wrong. No you can’t talk your way through everything and no you can’t fight your way through everything either. You have to wade through the muck in the middle, and because that muck isn’t sexy very few people are actually willing to do it.

You seem to be characterizing ideologies as fight everything out vs talk everything out, and then saying that centrism is the 'muck in the middle' where compromises are brokered. Why, then would you invalidate the whole concept of opposition and dismiss them as ignorant?

This is a very ahistorical take. Tone policing and "moderation in discourse" has a strong connection to the will to maintain status quo. Radical discourse, direct action and even an unpleasant tone have however a rich history of change, both positive and negative.

A. You can be moderate because you believe moderate actions will bring about radical change, or

B. You can be a moderate because you believe things are good to some degree as they are, and any actions should result in moderate changes.

I'm inclined to believe the calls to moderate discourse come from the latter group. "Rational discourse" stands in opposition to "irrational discourse", with implied irrational demands.

In other words, if you can't see why group X would want something, you won't see anything group X does to get that as rational.

Why should every position need teeth? Isn't it possible that we are largely doing things correctly enough, and we should focus on the exceptions to that?

> "...I just don't support ... my parents meeting my daughter and her black boyfriend" [your caricature of a moderate liberal]

What do you accomplish, if your parents really are so racist, by tactlessly exposing to something they will simply reject? You have better options, even if your goal is for them to change. What about his parents, are they good? Maybe if they knew your daughter's boyfriend's parents were responsible, the truth would be easier to accept. I don't get why empathy is no longer a common resource for solving problems in the left coast culture.

People who are wrong about something are still people, and you won't notice when you're wrong like them, so why can't you empathize sometimes?

This is hardly my experience with racists. It would be nice if it worked, but there's a huge gulf between "empathy" and "wishful thinking."

(And my experience with racists is informed by gulf coast culture, not left coast culture.)

If they're your own parents, you have a huge advantage in terms of common ground.

The Klansman, at least in the present day, knows that he's on the margins of society's beliefs. Like any other tiny political position, holding those beliefs is uncomfortable. Even among the second category of racists, the KKK is too far. The Klansman doesn't have friends. His subconscious has been hoping for a way to rationalize leaving; it's more than happy to listen to Daryl Davis. His conscious, of course, is embarrassed to have been wrong, but with time that will fade.

The second category of racists don't believe that they're racist. They believe (possibly correctly) that they're in the mainstream, that the label "racist" has been turned into a cudgel by a minority. If their own child is dating a black man, well, it's the child that's been brainwashed, the common ground is to convince their daughter to remember how the family works. (Why did no KKK member attempt to convince Daryl Davis to cease his crusade?) They're the ones who have friends and social groups who will support them. They're the ones who can easily find neighborhoods and churches and grocery stores free of black people - not that black people would be unwelcome, but clearly, it's unnatural for whites and blacks to interact. They have no subconscious desire to rationalize changing their minds; if anything, they have a subconscious desire to keep their feelings. (What will their friends say? What will their extend family say? What will their church say? Well, they won't say anything, but we all know what they'll think, right?)

The Klansman is a Klansman because his friends are Klansmen. If left to their own devices, they'll just get more used to living that way.

Daryl doesn't win because he's on a crusade, he wins because he's a good friend.

It's great when this happens, but it's also extremely labor-intensive and it requires the person who has been in the grip of a hateful ideology to be looking for a way out of it in the first place. If they're not, then things can go terribly wrong. Back in 2017, three bystanders tried to intercede with a guy who was screaming racial abuse at two women on public transport, and he stabbed all three intercessors, killing two of them.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Portland_train_attack

Unfortunately it is the job of those sympathetic to a cause to support it, whether they are victimized or not.

It's not "fair" or "right", it's just a reality that causes are advanced by those who care about them. Life is tragic that way.

> Back in 2017, three bystanders tried to intercede with a guy who was screaming racial abuse at two women on public transport, and he stabbed all three intercessors, killing two of them.

If he was ready to stab this woman, it is what it is. The lunatic who did the stabbing didn't get his way for free either. May they rest in peace.

Lunatics are brave and motivated, and heroes must be brave as well. It'd be nice if heroes could be effective and strong as well, but we don't get to choose when life calls upon us.

If that seminal Klansman were a lunatic, Daryl could have died that night. Daryl's a brave man, and that is unfortunately what is called for.

It's not fair or right either. Life is tragic that way. Sometimes your kids find no need to empathize with you.

My point (in the original context, but it still stands) was more that if you are serious about it being a good thing for your parents to be at peace with your daughter's race mixing, then you have to be serious about accomplishing that goal. The best way is probably not lashing out or lecturing the elderly about your perceived disappointment with them.

I suspect that people who do not consider their methods, are often not acting out of a sense of duty or charity, but instead engaging in an elaborate virtue signal, with the people they should care for standing as props.

In the case I mentioned the perpetrator was arrested by police, but you're waving aside the deaths as 'life is tragic, rest in peace.'

Police were called out the evening previous to the attack when the same guy was verbally abusing a black woman, Demetria Hester, on the same transit line, but they didn't arrest him and seemed to suggest to the woman that she had brought it on herself because she had fought back against his aggression and kicked him in the balls. It's subsequently emerged that Christian had threatened police, and despite all this they didn't do anything until after he had killed (reasonably comprehensive details below).

https://www.wweek.com/news/courts/2019/09/13/alleged-max-kil...

Your whole position seems to be predicated on a kind of passive resistance, and if that gets people killed well that's just too bad. It seems like you're saying that anyone who actively resists or retaliates against aggression thereby loses all moral standing. That seems like a pro=aggressor position to me, since aggressors don't really care what other people think.

The points you're arguing against are ones I never made, so I will not go to any effort to defend or disavow them. I get the impression you're making no effort to find sense in what I'm saying, and looking for an excuse to call it "nonsense". I don't appreciate that and I won't keep it going.

It's not "fair" or "right", it's just a reality that causes are advanced by those who care about them. Life is tragic that way. [..] If he was ready to stab this woman, it is what it is. The lunatic who did the stabbing didn't get his way for free either. May they rest in peace.

All I did was summarize your comments above for the sake of brevity. I do think it's nonsense, and callous nonsense at that. What sort of sense am I supposed to have found that I missed?

People who are wrong about something are still people, and you won't notice when you're wrong like them, so why can't you empathize sometimes?

Oh dear no. Sure, they're still people, but if they've chosen to be mean about their views eventually they're going to be treated with reciprocity. It is not valid to say that 'you won't notice when you're wrong' as many people actively engage in self-reflection and other approaches so as to improve their decision-making.

When those asking for empathy habitually deny it to others, it's reasonable to question whether their request is made in good faith or is a mere gambit. The more a person's behavior resembles the latter, the more reasonable it is to cut them off.

Unions are just corporations for labor sales. If you don’t like your management, replace them with your vote.

Not necessarily, some are democratic, like some in Sweden. The IWW is an example of an alternative to the centralized unions [1].

1. https://www.iww.org/about/official/OBU

But that's the problem. The employee faces the same asymmetry when dealing with the union as dealing with the employer -- a single individual has difficulty driving a change in organizational behavior.

It's harder for an individual to fix a bad union than to leave the company for one without that union, so that's what many people will do. Which makes it even harder for anyone to do it your way, because many of the people who agree that there is a problem will have left.

Is that accurate?

That's especially true when there are other jobs in the same industry and the same city but at a different company.

Emoloyees aren't part of the corporation any more than the widgets they make are.

Which is why they're not democratic, opposed to say cooperatives.

Not necessarily, some are quite centralized. For example, LO in Sweden. The US has plenty of examples. Look at Harlan County for an extreme example.

Do you understand now why decentralization of power can have its uses?

Worked at a factory many years ago (early 90s) where we supplied a union shop with parts. UAW was trying to unionize our plant, and management flipped its shit and went on the warpath. Prior to that I was really not pro-union, despite my father having been a UAW member and drilling into my head the times when the union kept the company from dicking people around.

They showed their true colors loud and clear, but people still voted against the union. Despite all evidence to the contrary, they had people convinced that they were each and every one high performing employees who'd be held back by things like standard pay scales and agreements on overtime, etc.

Sadly by that time I wasn't at the shop to vote anymore, because I was fired for speaking up against random drug testing. (Technically, I was fired for a "willful work stoppage" after coming back from lunch fifteen minutes late despite company policy saying you had 3 strikes in, IIRC, 90 days for being late to or back to work. It just happened to coincide with making noise about the brand new random drug policy introduced right around the time the UAW started trying to organize the shop.)

I get that the UAW and other unions have their problems, but I wish people would work more on fixing those problems than giving up on the idea of unions. The older I get, and the more corporate bullshit I see, the more I believe we need more organized labor and not less.

It parallels the view of government I grew up with.

Never really questioned where this view came from though, but my guess would be persistent long term marketing by interested parties. "Nudging" if you will.

That's what socialism, union's, and co-ops are up against. A sentiment that's been groomed over a long time, that makes you feel like a Commie or a conspirator if you question it.

It's lead me to think that capitalism has become a religion. If you question it you get labeled subconsciously by otherwise reasonable peers.

Strikes and disruption with unions using the tactics of previous decades - when they had fought for and won sorely needed rights, was no longer fit for purpose. They'd achieved the hard part now were fighting battles fewer and fewer outside the union cared for. When your refuse, electricity, heat or bank is disrupted for a lengthy period, while everyone is struggling, sympathy dwindles quickly. Resentment sets in, even for a fair and deserved pay rise, if it triggers yet another strike.

What does surprise me somewhat, is the complete lack of resurgence, or even much recovery, in US and UK after being effectively neutered during the Reagan/Thatcher years. Europe seemed to fair better, so they have kept more union presence than the Anglosphere. Yet it's pretty clear we need something sticking up for worker rights once again.

Coops are a completely different animal, and I've never encountered or heard of objection or resentment to those across my life. Capitalism, and most especially the modern neoliberal variant are indeed religions, with just as much dogma.

There is something categorically different and I'm not sure how that came to be.

Edit: I'm rate limited for comments. Thank you, my dude, for the recommendation.

Adversarial Legalism by Robert Kagan. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674012417

Now, do the benefits to the workers in a dirty union outweigh the benefits to working for an abusive corporation? I have no idea.

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/04/art2full.pdf

If there are two corrupt things, why add a third one to increase the misery?

Instead of the corrupt company doing everything it can to exploit employee labor, it has to fight the corrupt union doing everything it can to exploit the corporation. Otherwise if you want to argue that we should remove all corporations like we do unions because of their corruption, then I'd be all for that.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence

If you're in California right now and watch enough TV to see anti-vaping commercials, you'll relate to the idea that hammering a message into a viewer's head as if with an adze is seen as a useful strategy, regardless (or maybe because) of the quality and integrity of the message itself.

This is also of a piece with the generally constant push for employees to identify with the company's interests over their (and their colleagues') own. I think that finding Google's moves here as ridiculous is not something that can be counted on to be common sense. It sure feels like a material if-this-then-that relationship, but a lot of times people (you know...them ;) will only remember the last and/or loudest message they heard about something.

I live in SC and the volume of pro union propaganda that gets put out every time there’s an upcoming vote for Boeing is mind blowing. It’s not something you see often around here so when it suddenly appears it’s very out of place and noticeable.

It’s a vote. People are going to campaign for their interests.

lol this is precious

Snickering at me while being unaware of such a basic fact is deplorable.

If you aren't far libertarian, the government exists specifically to limit what people can contract to do. Unless you consider a government to be nothing more than a contract-enforcement entity (and even then, it is in some sense implied by there being contracts that the government would refuse to enforce).

Further, describing a constitutional law as a violation of rights is in a sense a reverse tautology. It is by definition not a violation of anyone's rights, unless you believe that the US legal system is in some sense unjust, in which case I'm very, very curious to know in what way US law is unfair to employers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_contract

Freedom of contract is a basic prequisite of a free society. It's a subset of free association.

>Unless you consider a government to be nothing more than a contract-enforcement entity

In a free society the government exists only to restrict action in order to protect rights, which extends to the rights one gains through contracts, and to administer public goods for the public benefit.

In a free society the government does not restrict the right of two consenting adults to engage in a mutually voluntary interaction.

There's absolutely no excuse for laws that restrict the right of someone to offer employment terms that reserve the right to fire someone for unionizing or going on a strike.

>Further, describing a constitutional law as a violation of rights is in a sense a reverse tautology.

That's a disingenuous appeal to legality. Law does not confer moral legitimacy.

Freedom to contract that you describe is not commonly considered ethical. While you're correct that law does not on its own confer moral legitimacy, you can usually find some jurisdiction that does something. There aren't any that provide complete freedom to contract. It's a highly fringe anarcho-liberetarian position vthat leads to exploration.

Powerful employers therefore neutralize each other's power because they are competing for the same pool of workers.

A powerful corporation has no power to compel someone to agree to an employment contract that is not the best one on the market just as a powerful corporation has no power to compel someone to buy a product that is not the best one on the market.

>>There aren't any that provide complete freedom to contract.

That's an appeal to popularism. 300 years ago a slavery supporter could say the same about slavery.

>>It's a highly fringe anarcho-liberetarian position vthat leads to exploration.

There is no evidence at all that it leads to exploitation and name-calling basic principles of justice doesn't make them go away. Two consenting adults have every right in the world to enter into any agreement they want as long as it is mutually voluntary as judged by a competent court. Cookie cutter rules that generalize entire classes of interaction as non-consensual don't cut it. They are crude interventions that are based on popular misconceptions.

Sure, and minimum wage and fair housing laws are simply legal shortcuts to abbreviate arguments about non-genuinely-consentual contracts.

> Second, balance of power is irrelevant for a mutually agreed contract. Powerful companies compete with each just as much as they compete with workers.

This is naive. Certainly in markets where demand outstrips supply this is true, but for markets where supply is smaller than the demand (housing, jobs, healthcare, you see a pattern?) there's little need for suppliers to compete with each other, except at the very top of the market.

Put it simply, if I can pay you $3.00 or $15.00, and make a profit either way, I'll choose to pay you $3.00, and there are markets where that is absolutely possible.

> That's an appeal to popularism. 300 years ago a slavery supporter could say the same about slavery.

No, there have always been some jurisdictions where slavery was outlawed. I'm saying that there are zero jurisdictions with an unrestricted "freedom of contract". In other words, literally no governing body recognizes such a freedom, anywhere in the world.

> There is no evidence at all that it leads to exploitation and name-calling basic principles of justice

Calling a position fringe has exactly as much merit (actually more, since its based on evidence that no one recognizes it) than calling it a "basic principle of justice". You're essentially claiming that there are no just governments anywhere, which is indeed your prerogative (and I might be inclined to agree although for vastly different reasons), but you have yet to justify why your world is more just. Below I outline why why I believe your world would increase homelessness and exploitation of lower class working people at the hands of employers and landlords, as one example. I claim that is less just than the world we currently inhabit. The onus is now on you to either explain why more exploitation is more just, or why it won't occur.

> Two consenting adults have every right in the world to enter into any agreement they want as long as it is mutually voluntary as judged by a competent court.

The assumption here is that the person with the lesser power will be able to successfully win in court quickly and cheaply enough to make a court case worth it. That's an assumption that doesn't hold out in practice and makes these legal shortcuts necessary to prevent. It relies on a basic level of safety: an income to sustain yourself, a place to live, at a minimum. When adjudicating a contract with the provider of your income or your home, you risk abuse at the hand of them. You also need to know your rights and responsibilities, and have some way of ensuring your continued safety in the meantime. That's not possible when you're taking an adversarial relationship with someone who could make you homeless. Even if (and that's an if) a court eventually finds them to have acted in bad faith, you're still homeless. You lose relatively more.

They're over-generalizations. There is no way all work arrangements that pay below the mandated minimum would be thrown out by a court as non-consensual for example. Same with tenancy agreements that don't meet so-called fair standards.

>>Certainly in markets where demand outstrips supply this is true, but for markets where supply is smaller than the demand (housing, jobs, healthcare, you see a pattern?) there's little need for suppliers to compete with each other, except at the very top of the market.

That's not how supply and demand works. There is always demand for labor at a low enough price point. That's why minimum wage increases unemployment and reduces employment growth when it rises above market wages. It makes it illegal to satisfy demand that what otherwise exist at certain price points.

No economist worth their salt would claim that at certain supply demand ratios, competition doesn't exist.

>>Put it simply, if I can pay you $3.00 or $15.00, and make a profit either way, I'll choose to pay you $3.00, and there are markets where that is absolutely possible.

Of course.. But that in no way implies employers aren't in competition with each other. You're just naively assuming that low wages is an indication of employers having no competition, when in reality means the level of capital is low.

If in your scenario, I can pay you $3, it's in society's interest I do that and reinvest the rest to increase capital concentrations that are the source of all wage growth, or to hire 5 workers instead of one.

And this isn't merely theoretical. If in Bangladesh, a minimum wage of $15/hour were instituted, it would outlaw huge swathes of voluntary employment contracts, and would devastate people's economic lives.

Again, basic economics.

>>No, there have always been some jurisdictions where slavery was outlawed.

No there hasn't. Slavery was a universal institution for much of human history.

>>Below I outline why why I believe your world would increase homelessness and exploitation of lower class working people at the hands of employers and landlords, as one example.

Your exploitation arguments are basic on common fallacies held by those without an understanding of economics.

>>Calling a position fringe has exactly as much merit (actually more, since its based on evidence that no one recognizes it) than calling it a "basic principle of justice".

It's a basic principle of justice because once you strip away ideological rationalizations and appeals to legal conventions, almost anyone would acknowledge that forbidding two adults from partaking in an interaction they both genuinely consent to a totalitarian infringement of their rights.

>>The assumption here is that the person with the lesser power will be able to successfully win in court quickly and cheaply enough to make a court case worth it.

First of all, that's something the government can directly address, rather than social activists using it as an excuse to institute cookie cutter rules, and second litigation naturally balance is this because the more powerful party has more assets that can be confiscated by courts. Lawyers will represent under resourced parties for free because they can earn a commission on whatever the suit wins.

You're assumption is that I'll reinvest the rest into the company, instead of just pocketing the difference myself. If I can sustain myself comfortably pocketing the difference, why re-invest the rest. You're assuming certain incentive structures that don't always exist in the real world.

> No there hasn't. Slavery was a universal institution for much of human history.

Near universal, not universal.

> And this isn't merely theoretical. If in Bangladesh, a minimum wage of $15/hour were instituted, it would outlaw huge swathes of voluntary employment contracts, and would devastate people's economic lives.

Yes and? That isn't relevant to any argument I'm making. I agree that the specific regulations of what contracts can/cannot permit may not all be universal. That doesn't mean that some provisions cannot be universal. As a simple example, a contract between two consenting parties that contracts one to commit a crime on behalf of the other in return for some payment should be universally void, despite both parties consenting. That doesn't require that the list of crimes be universal across jurisdictions. Only that the principle: "A contract between two consenting groups that requires one to act criminally is invalid."

> almost anyone would acknowledge that forbidding two adults from partaking in an interaction they both genuinely consent to a totalitarian infringement of their rights.

Leaving aside my personal opinions on any of these issues, I disagree that this opinion is anywhere near common. There are acts that society considers it okay (and perhaps ethical) to prevent a single person from doing (suicide), and where it is often criminal to help someone (physician-assisted suicide). There are all sorts of acts that all kinds of people want to have the government prevent two consenting people from partaking in (marriage if you're not straight, all kinds of kinks). Currently, some of these things are legal and some are not. "Once you strip away ideological rationalizations" is doing a lot of work for you there. What you're claiming is that "once you strip away <ideological systems with which I disagree> almost anyone would acknowledge <the validity of my preferred ideological system>." Which is vacuous. You have to justify why your system is superior to the others, you can't do that by ignoring them. What makes the world better if we replace a "totalitarian" government, over which I maintain the ability to influence, with a totalitarian corporation whom I can exert no control over? Either explain why that is more just, or why it won't happen.

> Your exploitation arguments are basic on common fallacies held by those without an understanding of economics.

Yet you've not actually addressed them. If you understanding of economics is superior, it should be straightforward to correct me.

> First of all, that's something the government can directly address

They do, by streamlining certain court cases and making particular contract provisions explicitly illegal. You just dislike their solution.

> Lawyers will represent under resourced parties for free because they can earn a commission on whatever the suit wins.

Sometimes, the law isn't perfect. This is especially true if you allow the empowered group to write contracts which include stipulations to, for example, cap their own liability, or require arbitration outside of the court. Things that the empowered group is more free to do under your proposal.

To circle back to the beginning of this conversation, in the US, the freedom of contract you describe is not recognized. So your original claim, that "unions got laws passed that violate the rights of employers" is untrue: the right is not and has not ever been recognized. It is not enshrined anywhere, it cannot be violated because it does not, within our jurisdiction, exist. You can argue that it perhaps should be a right, but it is not widely recognized as one.

And that's fine too. The $12 profit is appropriate compensation for the person investing their capital into a capital starved sector of the economy. That compensation is incentive for others to invest in that sector.

Self-interest will drive many to reinvest that profit, because profit margins that good are hard to pass up, and don't last forever.

>>Near universal, not universal.

You are idealizing the past. Slavery was totally and utterly commonplace before the emergence of humanistic theological traditions.

>>That doesn't mean that some provisions cannot be universal. As a simple example, a contract between two consenting parties that contracts one to commit a crime on behalf of the other in return for some payment should be universally void, despite both parties consenting.

That is not consensual. Just as you cannot personally violate someone else's rights by depriving them of their property or damaging their person without their consent, you cannot collaborate with someone else to do so. Any contract formed toward that end is an act toward a commission of a violation of someone's rights, and thus appropriately prohibited.

No mutually voluntary contract falls in this category, and thus your example is inapplicable.

>>Leaving aside my personal opinions on any of these issues, I disagree that this opinion is anywhere near common.

I think anyone who's grown up with Western ideals would consider a third party interfering with a consensual interaction between two adults to infantilize and patronize one or both counter-parties and to be a totalitarian imposition.

That's why courts would rule all such contracts valid in the absence of legislative limitations on the freedom of contract. Courts with juries of one's peers which get an opportunity to deliberate on issues are the best arbitrator of justice and most accurate reflection of people's genuine beliefs on the issues.

>>Yet you've not actually addressed them

I have, a number of times. See my point about the 'fair' wage level and the existence of competition at any capital to labor ratio.

The fact that you're making these assertions at all, when they are so unscientific, is irresponsible.

>>They do, by streamlining certain court cases and making particular contract provisions explicitly illegal.

Blanket judgements based on crude generalization are not directly addressing the issue of less resourced parties being at a disadvantage in legal battles.

The issue is the legal disadvantage that less resourced parties face, which has to be addressed by more resources going towards legal counselling and representation for less resourced parties.

>>This is especially true if you allow the empowered group to write contracts which include stipulations to, for example, cap their own liability, or require arbitration outside of the court. Things that the empowered group is more free to do under your proposal.

If the less powerful party provides genuine consent to such a provision, then it's no one else's business. They agreed to those circumstances.

>To circle back to the beginning of this conversation, in the US, the freedom of contract you describe is not recognized

And to circle back to my first point, anti-free-market pro-union ideology is pervasive in the US.

Arguing with libertarians and showing how naive and simplistic their assumptions are is sport for intellectual types in the US.

>>So your original claim, that "unions got laws passed that violate the rights of employers" is untrue: the right is not and has not ever been recognized.

Just like slavery didn't violate anyone's rights 300 years? Just because something isn't recognized by the law doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

This doesn't address the imbalance of power between the job seeker and the job provider. The job seeker is still at a disadvantage in the relationship. We're talking externalities, not the efficiency of supply and demand in a perfectly efficient market. I reject the notion that such a market exists.

> Any contract formed toward that end is an act toward a commission of a violation of someone's rights, and thus appropriately prohibited.

There are crimes that don't involve the violation of anyone's rights. Such contracts should still be invalid.

> If the less powerful party provides genuine consent to such a provision, then it's no one else's business. They agreed to those circumstances.

And are now unable to seek retribution for additional damages. You're arguing for the ability to sign legal protections away.

> Blanket judgements based on crude generalization are not directly addressing the issue of less resourced parties being at a disadvantage in legal battles.

Then provide a more direct solution.

> The issue is the legal disadvantage that less resourced parties face, which has to be addressed by more resources going towards legal representation for less resourced parties.

This is a start, but doesn't address the potential loss of livelyhood. It also doesn't address the potential for abuse at the contract negotiation process. If you're going to propose something like everyone getting free, government provided legal aid and some form of basic income, sure that might address all of my issues, but I have a feeling you wouldn't appreciate the taxes required to maintain such a system.

> I think anyone who's grown up with Western ideals would consider a third party interfering with a consensual interaction between two adults to be a totalitarian imposition that infantilizes and patronizes one or both counter-parties.

And yet I just gave a laundry list of counterexamples. Repeating utterly untrue statements doesn't lend them more legitimacy, it just makes you look out of touch. Which, to be clear, you are.

The US is, compared to most of the western world, far more anti-union, and anti-union ideology is more pervasive here than in most western nations. The right to act without government intervention to the extent you hold it is a fringe view, and is not something that most people support. And there's good reason for that:

> Just like slavery didn't violate anyone's rights 300 years?

> If the less powerful party provides genuine consent to such a provision, then it's no one else's business. They agreed to those circumstances.

Your proposed system would allow people to sign themselves into slavery. Stop trying to argue that slavery was some unjust evil, when you're simultaneously arguing for a system that would allow slavery. You can't have it both ways. Either slavery (or perhaps indentured servitude, since that was often consensual) didn't violate people's rights back in the day, or your proposed legal framework, which would allow people to sign themselves over as slaves, would! Which is it?

They are not at a disadvantage. Whether the job seeker is dealing with a small business looking to hire someone, or a large corporation looking to hire someone, they have the same power to walk away if the job offerer doesn't offer the best terms on the market.

It's as simple as that. You're getting stuck on some trope about "imbalance of power" and are not dealing with the simple reality that in a free market, the only power someone has over another is to offer them a better deal than the next best offer on the market.

That is not exploitation, or abuse or anything else that we need to violate the freedom of contract for.

>>There are crimes that don't involve the violation of anyone's rights.

Nothing that doesn't involve the violation of anyone's rights should be a crime.

>>You're arguing for the ability to sign legal protections away.

Yes I'm arguing that people should be free to make their judgments on what offer to accept. We don't need to deny people the right to offer terms because we assume that others lack the judgment to decide for themselves whether those terms are in their interest.

>>Then provide a more direct solution.

I did: provide more resources for legal representation for less-resourced parties.

>>This is a start, but doesn't address the potential loss of livelyhood.

It does, because a strong enough case of contract violation will allow legal firms to pay the wronged party living costs on the expectation that the defendant will need to cover those costs at a later date.

>>It also doesn't address the potential for abuse at the contract negotiation process.

And your solution doesn't address the vast swathes of mutually beneficial contracts that are prohibited by your cookie-cutter restrictions.

Problems should be addressed on a case-by-case basis, through court proceedings that weigh the facts of each case. Cookie cutter rules that generalize entire classes of ostensibly mutually voluntary interactions as "involuntary", based on ridiculuos equations like "unequal power leads to unfair contracts" are not justice. They are not good government. They are not reasonable laws.

>> some form of basic income

No thank you. No universal welfare extracted through pain of imprisonment from those producing value.

>>And yet I just gave a laundry list of counterexamples.

I refuted every one of your examples.

>>Repeating utterly untrue statements doesn't lend them more legitimacy, it just makes you look out of touch. Which, to be clear, you are.

Any reasonable person would view a third party forcibly interfering and preventing a mutually voluntary interaction between two consenting adults as patronizing, and totalitarian. That's a fact that's clear once you strip away political partisanship, appeals to legality and ideological rationalizations.

You're just in denial that the ideology you bet the farm on is, like all ideologies, wrong.

>>Your proposed system would allow people to sign themselves into slavery.

No. No court would allow that under common law. A court would find an argument that what a person agreed to a decade earlier cannot bind the person they are in the present, because the two people are not in effect the same person, as reasonable.

Like I said: arguing with libertarians and showing how naive and simplistic their assumptions are is sport for intellectual types in the US. You're a typical example of that.

So you're saying that a blanket rule to make contracts that involve selling ones-self into slavery makes sense? Or that there are certain circumstances in which selling oneself into slavery is alright, and so it should be adjudicated by the court on a case by case basis?

How even could someone who is a slave (and therefore likely limited in their movements) petition a court?

> A court would find an argument that what a person agreed to a decade earlier cannot bind the person they are in the present

People sign contracts for more than 10 years all the time (mortgages, as an example). You saying we can just back out of those?

If courts rule that selling oneself into slavery is in all circumstances non-consensual, then there's no problem at all with codifying that with a statute. This would never be the case with minimum wage or 'fair' housing laws.

Courts would absolutely find numerous if not almost all instances of such interactions as consensual.

>>How even could someone who is a slave (and therefore likely limited in their movements) petition a court?

The slavery is a private relationship, not one that is relevant to the court. The government doesn't deperson someone just because they enter into a slavery agreement with another party. The court would accept petitions from all legal persons.

>>People sign contracts for more than 10 years all the time (mortgages, as an example). You saying we can just back out of those?

Mortgage contracts govern property, not people. One has a right to give property away. One doesn't have a right to give their future self away.

This contradicts what you said earlier, which is that you should be able to sign away legal protections in a contact.

It seems we agree on one point: there are some rights you cannot sign away, and it is the government's responsibility to intervene in such a situation. You draw that line at somewhere around slavery. I simply draw the line elsewhere.

We're both willing to violate your previously involiable right to contract. If you truly believed it were involiable, you would respect a person's right to sign themselves into slavery or indentured servitude. There are situations where one might be willing to make such a decision: to save a loved one, perhaps.

But you've said that such a contract could be voided, even if at the time of signing the parties consented.

We both agree that there should be limits on the right to contract, much as there are limits on most other rights. I simply claim that the line should be drawn differently than where you believe it should be.

I'm not saying you shouldn't be able to sign away "legal protections", which is a vague term that has a very subjective meaning based on one's perspective on a particular contract.

I said that one shouldn't be able to sign away someone else's rights. I think a court would find that selling one's future self into slavery falls into this category.

You can't just blur the distinction between these two very different things and claim that I'm indirectly supporting one by supporting the other.

>>We're both willing to violate your previously involiable right to contract.

The right to contract doesn't need to be violated to end selling one's self into slavery. All that needs to happen is that a court find that in the future self is not the same person as the present self.

Unlike you I want these determinations to be made by courts of law not by very ill-informed and ideologically motivated social activists who are not carefully weighing the evidence of each case.

Claiming that selling ones self into slavery and accepting a lease agreement that says the property owner is not obligated to keep renting to you at the same price after 1 year are equally easy to make a blanket judgment about not being consensual, is disingenous.

And with regard to the very extreme scenario of the former; I'm not even saying we should make a blanket judgment about that at the legislative level. I'm saying that the courts should judge that and only if they determine that all cases of this situation are non-consensual, should a law be made to ban it.

So we have very differing views on this, despite the superficial similarities you pointed out, and which are only similarities when viewed out of context.

>>We both agree that there should be limits on the right to contract

Wrong, the right to contract does not allow violating other people's rights. Violating someone else's rights is non-contractual. I oppose an agreement to sell oneself into slavery only insofar as a court after careful and considered deliberations has determined that it is a violation of a party's rights, and thus not a fully consensual/contractual interaction.

You are not willing to make that leap and say that only courts should be making these determinations because only courts do the deliberation needed to competently judge these very complex matters. Because if you did make that leap then you would have to admit that you're a Libertarian and that left-wing ideology does not work. And you are not willing to do that.

In other words, your proposed legal system would prevent someone from signing over some rights to their future self. Your ethical reasoning behind this choice is irrelevant. The mechanics of your proposed laws would make certain contracts void.

As I've said before, courts cannot make decisions in a vacuum. They need laws to rule based on. The laws that would need to exist to enable the system you want in practice restrict the freedom to contract that you claim to leave unrestricted.

You try to avoid this contradiction by wrapping it up in the idea that you can be a different person in ten years, but current laws don't recognize that, and the only reason you'd need such a law is to resolve this contradiction without explicitly limiting the contract. It's transparent. I expect I could find more contradictions, but you'd similarly attempt special pleading for those cases.

No, that is not how common law works. Common law holds consent as a core principle of contract law. Courts take all manner of factors into consideration in determining whether parties gave consent.

Courts will most certainly consider the genuity of the consent a person gave 10 years prior to being foribly confined and made to labor for another.

You're using ideologically extremism and bigotry with your "free man of the land" nonsense accusation, which is intended to belittle and delegitimize me, and avoid contending with my point on its own merits.

>>They need laws to rule based on.

That is not how commom law works. Commom law is based on existing statutes and legal precedent. In the absence of the former, the latter suffices. Contract law in particular is based almost exclusively on common law.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precedent

>>You try to avoid this contradiction by wrapping it up in the idea that you can be a different person in ten years, but current laws don't recognize that

The argument has never been tested in court. I'm suggesting the argument would be accepted by a court, and you've provided no reason to believe it wouldn't.

> Courts will most certainly consider the genuity of the consent a person gave 10 years prior to being foribly confined and made to labor for another.

In the hypothetical, we've already agreed that the consent given was genuine. The question isn't whether or not the consent was genuine, the answer to that is a resounding "yes". The question is "is the person now, 10 years later, a different person such that their prior genuine consent no longer applies"? This question can be rephrased as "Is there a way to re-invent myself as a new legal being and avoid prior obligations and agreements at no consequence to myself?" They are in fact the same question. And courts time and time again have resoundingly answered that question with a no. A group that consistently tries to argue otherwise is freemen of the land. Hence me throwing you in with them, because you're using their (nonsense) arguments. Thankfully we've seen them try those arguments in court before, and they never win.

> I'm suggesting the argument would be accepted by a court, and you've provided no reason to believe it wouldn't.

Let me just repeat that last bit: these arguments have been tried, by the freemen of the land whose comparison you so resent. They never win. Courts have tested and failed these arguments because they are bad arguments.

>>The question isn't whether or not the consent was genuine, the answer to that is a resounding "yes". The question is "is the person now, 10 years later, a different person such that their prior genuine consent no longer applies"

That goes to the question of whethee the consent was genuine. Consent is not genuine when it is provided on behalf of another party.

>>This question can be rephrased as "Is there a way to re-invent myself as a new legal being and avoid prior obligations and agreements at no consequence to myself?"

A disingenuous leading construction of the question..

And being considered a different person does not allow one to avoid all obligations and agreements that their pass self entered into. All property bounded by past agreements would still be bound, and the vast majority of agreements use property as collateral to compel compliance.

Only self-imposed slavery would be nullified by such an affirmative response to the question.

This has nothing to do with your "freemen-of-the-land" nonsense accusation.

I'd be open to seeing a single court case where someone used the "they are not their past self" argument to get out of their legal obligations.

I wouldn't be so sure. Unionization is usually rare in the US, and combatting it therefore won't have much evidence to go on. So you end up with crazy people making shit up and seeing what sticks. Like the guy working for Oregon's negotiation team who created fake aliases 'Aanus McFadden' and 'Roy Vragina' to post anti-union messages on social media: https://www.wweek.com/news/2019/08/06/oregon-health-and-scie...

Cases like this are just sickening: https://www.illinoispolicy.org/news/seiu-fights-to-force-hom...

Several of my family members have been in unions, and all I can say is no thanks. I cannot imagine working in such an adversarial us vs them environment, where its all about assigning blame and working to rule. I cannot imagine being told I'm not allowed to work when I want to, just because the union boss wants to make a point.

The people doing it must believe it works. That's not the same as it actually working. People do things that don't work believing that they do all the time.

Nothing like those union leaders making $300k per year!

We just have such low awareness in the US about what unions are and how they work that we take self-serving, collaborationist, timid union leadership as a fact instead of something we can and should urgently struggle to change.

/s

Good afternoon. I want to thank you so much for coming. I know you didn't have a choice. The union will go out of their way to try to convince you that it's a good thing for you and that it is in your best interest. The contract that you get, if you get one, might include better wages and benefits. That contract might include the same wages and benefits you have today. And that contract finally might include less wages and less benefits. And the threat of a strike is no longer scary to employers, because today if you go on strike, while you can't get fired, the employer has the right to permanently replace you. I'll let that sink in.