Labor unions are the reason why we have paid time off and 40 hour work weeks in the US. Unions in the US have a lot more negative press compared to other unions in the developed world. Big business has spent decades convincing Americans that unions are bad because for large corporations, they can make more money by reducing benefits and pay for their workers.

I would say in general, unions in Europe are viewed in a much more positive light. Collective bargaining allows for workers from blue collar to white collar work receive their fair share from the company.

I would try reading more about the labor movement in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_St...

Please try and broaden your views. HN is an anti union echo chamber for the most part.

> I would say in general, unions in Europe are viewed in a much more positive light.

It depends on the country. When I lived in Poland my father complained a lot about his union (Solidarność, he worked as an industrial electrician), as the management was mostly old people who did as little as possible to not lose their position, and did nothing outside of being in the union (they were retired). You would have a hard time outvoting them because you'd need to get a certain number of votes from multiple plants, around a thousand of people in total - campaigning alone would take most of your time, on top of doing your work. I haven't heard many positive stories about unions to be honest, and I lived in upper Silesia, the most industrialized region - where there were lots of them.

I'm not sure why my question came off as anti-union.

To me, the benefits seem obvious but I couldn't think of downsides. So I was, in fact, trying to broaden my views, just in the other direction, I suppose.

I've never felt the need to join a union but, fundamentally, I see nothing wrong with someone controlling their own capital (time, labor, and skills) and freely associating others to pool those resources into something that's more than the sum of their parts.

I can see where it might be a problem if a group ended up with a monopoly on some skill, but that's a problem with any kind of pooling of resources and we have tools to deal with such a distortion should it arise.

It's mostly anectadata from where I live in the UE, but unions can facilitate/enable abuse: for example once you're an union rep, you can't get fired, so at my previous company, being a rep meant you'd get two years where they could do nothing and be protected by their status. In that company, no negotiations between the unions and the company never went anywhere, since the multiple unions could never agree on what would be acceptable or not, with some unions looking more interested in just membership numbers that anything else. Another I've heard was that unions would cover for employees that should get fired for gross misconduct.

It's cool to have the worker protections laws here, but sometime it feels like unions are just useless/wastefull relics.

Really depends on the union structure.

I can imagine plenty of good and bad, and experienced a lot of bad.

My experience with some negatives:

- Unions love to get more and more involved in things, on a granular level because let's face it unfair things happen at every level of a job. The problem is negotiating that all out results in ultra prescribed jobs, job functions, and etc are all defined. Over time flexibility decreases and decreases .. and so on.

- Many unions love seniority, because powerful union members are often more senior. Not all, but many. There's few things less demoralizing than sitting behind a bunch more senior folks (i'm over 40 so this isn't just some ageist thing) who only want to learn what they want to learn ... and the union backs them at every turn. Promotions, choice roles and hours, all become about seniority.

- Limited relationship with your boss is another issue. I LIKE working with my boss and have all my career, but in a union situation it was a very prescribed relationship. My boss no matter what he felt couldn't treat me differently based on merit or anything else, it was all about the union rules. I could be the best, or worst there, it changed nothing. It dramatically changes that relationship. And no matter what anyone says your boss can still be a jerk if they want to and unions are sometimes unable to help. Thus...

- Unions can be surprisingly poor at helping out with individual issues. A lot of situations between the union and employer are negotiated out in detail. That means provided the employer meets various easily measured things, they can (and will quickly learn) all the things not negotiated by the union and can do what they wish there, and unions are surprisingly hands off at that point.

The fact is Unions are another bureaucracy and despite the goals they may not align with what you want, and they're more than happy to limit your options as much as any nasty employer.

Depends on the nature of the work and variability of worker skills, along with the union structure. For work where the skills of the workers are mostly consistent, or where skills can be easily grouped into buckets based on training and seniority, unions work out really good for the employees.

For highly variable skill work, and where skill levels are difficult to track (at least in a non-gameable way), you can have lower skilled (or lower performing) employees that drag down higher performers, due to union rules requiring things like seniority-based pay brackets. So people that are really good at convincing their management that they are really good, and work in industries where there is high competition for their specialty, those are the ones that tend to be more anti-union for their line of work.

Athletes and actors are unionized.

This is misinformation. Unions are democratically led. They can have whatever rules they want regarding skill and pay. The point is that they reach a consensus and then negotiate as a single unit against their employer.

The commenter was describing what actually happens in unions. It’s technically correct to say unions are democratically led thus possible to change for the better, but it is incorrect to imply they are democratic so are likely to change. And so to point to union voting rules as a way to assuage concerns about common union practices is misleading.

Unions are democratically run by the workers for their own benefit. They should be mostly upside, or tradeoffs in your favor, since they're doing stuff that you voted for on your behalf.

People make a lot of noise about union dues, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to the higher wages the union will negotiate for. The most onerous requirement is being prepared to strike (and a lot of union dues are to set aside emergency funds for people during a strike).

That said, not all unions are equal. And like any small democratic institution, they're going to preferentially represent the people who get involved.

> People make a lot of noise about union dues, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to the higher wages the union will negotiate for.

My last job had a union and I was being paid 10¢ more per hour than minimum wage. Not exactly a “higher wage”

https://pedestrianobservations.com/2016/07/16/public-transit... gives a good overview - though in a very different context. Note that of the 3 criteria for joining a union 1 and 2 do not apply to programmers and 3 is questionably.

Edit, the article doesn't say this, but others have suggested the people joining the union may not be programmers...

If you don't necessarily agree with a specific decision the union is taking, you're dragged into it. But that's just part of collectivism and it's not necessarily a bad thing.

Some unions requires all employees to become members and charge a fee.

Some unions abuse their power to negotiate with the employer to make union leaders wealthy instead of granting benefits to the employees.

Some unions work alongside gangs to rake in illegal profit.

Some unions force all employees to take the same position of the union on certain issues meaning that people who oppose the measure may be blacklisted and pretty much terminated if the union uses its muscle.

Again these are just some unions and YMMV, the history of unions has many pros and cons with some being notorious and others being very much necessary in this day and age.

I'll give you an example. I have several family members and friends who have been in unions or who are in them.

A friend went to work at a company a few years ago. The copier was broke. They had to get a union guy out to verify that before they could get a new one. They then ordered a new copier. It arrived, but they had to arrange for union people to get it moved to their office. When the union movers saw that the dead copier was plugged in, they stopped what they were doing and left. It turns out they needed a union electrician to come out and unplug the printer. The office manager made sure that everyone in the office would keep their hands off the copier and not unplug it because they would likely be fired unless a union electrician did it. The union electrician showed up a week or so later and unplugged the copier. They then had to get the union movers back out to put the new copier in place and remove the old one. Then, they had to get the union electrician out to plug the new one in. This whole thing took several weeks.

My friend left the company and that company is now out of business, one reason being that they could not compete.

Unions go to extremes to protect jobs and find ways to unionize shops through intimidation. They prefer "card check" voting instead of secret ballots, because they can tell who voted which way. In Illinois, they even forcibly unionized people taking care of family members in their own homes.

https://www.illinoispolicy.org/news/seiu-fights-to-force-hom...

Your link (to an obviously-anti-union think-tank) describes government overreach much more than it describes typical activity.

Without knowing more details of the situation, the most glaring problem here is that the State of Illinois asserted that recipients of Medicaid stipends are "state employees". It's wrong to use this situation to ascribe dirty dealing to unions generally.

The state did, but who elected the people making the decisions? Whose candidates were they? It's obvious from the facts that the officials were acting in the interests of the unions here. What interest does a mother have to pay union dues so she can take care of a family member? What state interest is served?

You mean besides the dues?

Yeah. I'd expect to pay some sort of cost.