The rampant corruption in American unions contributed to this.

Here’s the most recent instance:

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/busi...

San Fra public employee payroll takes the cake.

Average compensations (total headcount)

Nurse $293,000 (1471) Firefighter $192,000 (902) Police officer 3 $216,500 (821) Sergeant 3 $265,188 (500) EMT/Paramedic $194,344 (419)

"A fire prevention lieutenant made $415,111 – more than double their $184,791 base salary with a whopping $230,320 in overtime"

I'm all for competitive pay, but this is clearly out of whack.

Recall the Spanish airtraffic controller strike of 2010. On average, they were making $400k/year with some double that, yet had the balls to go on strike. Federal gov't and military stepped in and took over, ending the gravy train.

I wonder when the tipping is point is going to come for the U.S.

With that said I'm always skeptical of these numbers - you don't exactly see SFPD officers vacationing in Marakesh and flying first class, but that's typical for stripe new grads.

Government needs to be paying market salaries to its employees, period. If gov't employees don't like it, they should quit and find another job like everyone else.

In NYC it has gotten to the point, thanks to unions and regulations, that digging new subway tunnels is too expensive to consider. There was an article here at HNews a few weeks ago about a study that pointed out people making $75/hr in the tunnels to do more or less nothing.

Why do we care about the well being of few thousand workers over millions of taxpayers, many of whom make less than the gov't / union employees? makes no sense.

The median union worker does not make $400,000 a year in any city in the US. Picking extremes and calling it the norm is just picking facts to promote an opinion.

Whether you support or dislike unions in general is no reason to argue without useful facts to allow for reasoned discussion. This isn't Reddit.

Even if they were, I grant companies far greater leeway to set the wages that make sense for them, with the only control being whether I'm willing to shop there and/or hold their shares. Government salaries should be subject to greater public scrutiny than corporate compensation, IMO.

For proof, check your local and state government pension plans reports. And note that those numbers are optimistic by at least 30% (compared to how the government forces private employers to value defined benefit pension liabilities).

Pay and treat public workers like shit, especially in high-demand high-skill professions, and good luck trying to recruit and retain anyone even semicompetent.

> Government needs to be paying market salaries to its employees, period.

Government usually pays well-below-market salaries, and still-below-market total comp, which is why it disproportionately attracts people who either prefer stability of the particular style of benefit structure it provides, who have a strong preference for a particular field of endeavor unique to the public sector, or who simply can't hack it in the private sector.

> In NYC it has gotten to the point, thanks to unions and regulations, that digging new subway tunnels is too expensive to consider.

Public sector unions have almost nothing to do with that, though, since the labor is almost entirely contracted-out (so, private sector unions, to the extent unionized), and anyway the main cost drivers aren't labor costs but MTAs horrible contracting process and NY State contracting rules.

> when one considers the enormous operating costs of the MTA (the other side of the same coin) that's all public unions driving costs up

Or it's the inefficiency that you get when you can't recruit and retrain the best workers, especially in management and knowledge-worker positions, because the best workers can make much more money in the private sector.

That may be true for base salaries, but if you take into account overtime and pension/health benefits that is not the case. If what you say is true, gov't emplpyees would quit en masse; however that's not happening. I know from personal experience people that get government jobs and act like they won the lottery.

> Public sector unions have almost nothing to do with that, though, since the labor is almost entirely contracted-out (so, private sector unions, to the extent unionized), and anyway the main cost drivers aren't labor costs but MTAs horrible contracting process and NY State contracting rules.

In NYC at least, public projects like subway construction use by law or by convention only union labor. That's a huge cost driver. You are right that that's private unions when it comes to construction, however when one considers the enormous operating costs of the MTA (the other side of the same coin) that's all public unions driving costs up and resisting any modernization that would make the system more efficient.

You are also right that contractor oversight sucks and that's also a cost driver; both are valid issues.

> That may be true for base salaries,

That's specifically what the phrase you quoted refers to.

> but if you take into account overtime and pension/health benefits that is not the case.

It's still below market, though not as much. As I said in the next phrase in the same sentence from the one you quoted.

> If what you say is true, gov't emplpyees would quit en masse

No, if what I said was true, government would (as I said, again, in the same sentence you pulled the quote from) disproportionately end up employing those with noncompensation reasons to choose the particular work, and those of below average competence. Which it does. Government employees would only quit en masse if the below-market pay was a sudden transition from at-market pay.

This type of behaviour is massively wasteful and a drain on the wealth of a country. It's wise to avoid it.

Corruption in union leadership is defined as cooperating with management instead of cooperating with workers, i.e. the union. That’s literally the problem. And there’s an objective history of why it happens in the US. See: AFL-CIO pact, Taft-Hartley Act, Cold War, McCarthyism, etc.

French workers weren’t necessarily upset with the Soviets after the war. ;)

We tend to hold Union officials to standards of conduct more similar to public employees and elected officials, rather than their private sector counterparts. I’m not sure that makes much sense.

Union leaders talk about fighting for workers. Pay your dues, they go to fighting for worker rights. We’re here to look out for you.

When the people representing you start stealing your money it makes you wonder how much they are looking out for you.

One of my first jobs was working part-time in a grocery store: collecting shopping carts, "clean up in aisle 7", stocking shelves, etc. I was 16 and forced to pay dues to a union. The dues were deducted from my minimum-wage paycheck. I had NO opt-out option. I worked maybe 10 hours per week? I was a high school student. I got ZERO benefit by paying union dues. This extortion was corruption in itself, nevermind the executive-level corruption that makes headlines every few years.

The most famous example is Jimmy Hoffa, whose story has been made into films... including one in 1992 with Jack Nicholson.

“ Hoffa became involved with organized crime from the early years of his Teamsters work, a connection that continued until his disappearance in 1975. He was convicted of jury tampering, attempted bribery, conspiracy, and mail and wire fraud in 1964 in two separate trials.”

One example of many.

> This sort of thing happens in private corporations

Private corporations have a mission to make money. Unions have a completely different mission.

Private corporations also have a pretty consistent thread of corruption, a similar example to the one you gave being HSBC laundering money for drug cartels. Again, pretty comparable.

This isn't to say corruption in unions hasn't been part of why they've declined, its almost definitely part of it. While a corrupt corporate leader generally creates more money for its stockholders a corrupt union rep often costs the rank-and-file members which can greatly sour their opinions of unions as a whole. But there's nothing inherent to unions with regard to corruption, people in power often take advantage of their position no matter what type of structure they have that power in, and the point that it appears, at least to some people, that unions are held to a different standard than other types of organizations is worthy of being discussed.

However, after that corruption was cleared up and the pensions moved to Goldman and Northern Trust, the funds were destroyed and benefits to retireeswere deeply cut.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/how-the-teamsters-pension-...

I had to keep pausing and checking if something was real as I couldn't believe how bad things got

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/27/business/uaw-dennis-willi...

This is one of the reasons I feel the pendulum has maxed. That said, this takes us straight to the familiar for/against discussion, just with a sharper edge. The union busting debate needs to be had too, but it doesn't tell us much about the type of union they want to build and what that means.

The linked article (thanks) is another case in point, I think. It talks about union busting. Ways in which (like your quote) working conditions aren't good. ... OK.

I don't mean to disparage... IMO, the elephant in the room isn't being addressed. What would a "union win" in amazon (or other young megacorp) mean? More pay, how much more, how would that work?

Let's compare to another field: sports. The UFC is currently experiencing player union agitations. What a "union win" looks like is fairly defined. Other sports leagues are unionized. The realistic range of outcomes is understood.

Forget the conflict side for a moment, what's the goal?

If you are unhappy with a contract, don't sign it.

Normally, you negotiate your contract because your company wants you, and finding someone else that would agree to the contract is a non-trivial amount of effort, so they'll hear you out. In these people's cases, all they'd hear is "lol, no" if they tried to negotiate individually, because they'd have virtually no power. As a result they're trying to find leverage in numbers: We want the freedom to negotiate all our contracts to our advantage, otherwise we're striking.

Allow me to put things differently: There is no law that says that Amazon must accept whatever terms are put forth by these unions. Amazon can, if they wish, outright refuse their terms and tell them that the contract is as-is and will not be altered.

While I'm not saying this is your case, I am puzzled at people who argue against unions with your last line, because it really does cut both ways. "If you are unhappy with a contract, don't sign it". Well, a union is a form of negotiating said contract, and to the companies being proposed those terms: "If you are unhappy with the terms, don't sign it". Makes sense, right?