Unions can be useful for industry specific protections or benefits. This would provide different protections specific to a type of work.

I think arbitration protections and restrictions on employment contracts to preserve employee rights should be handled through legislation since it should be universally applicable to all workers. This would remove the variance in protections from one union to another.

Legislation would be ideal, but in the absence of such legislation (such as the bill mentioned in the article to limit mandatory arbitration that was attempted in 2019 and passed the House but was never voted on in the Senate) unions still might be the best option in the short term.

Maybe. Unions can become corrupt or politically influenced too. In fact, organized labor is one of the main money makers for organized crime. I'm not saying all unions are bad, just that some can be. Just as any power structure like governments or company management can be too.

I wonder if the major unions have banned together to get that bill introduced and voted on? It could be possible that they wouldn't support legislation like that because more legislative protections can make the union seem less useful.

If the unions don't have incentive to push the bill and more workers are covered by unions and don't see the benefit of the bill because they are already protected, then could that delay or even prevent the passage of those protections? It may end up as a long term fix that leaves non-uninonized groups and groups that seem unlikely to organize, like IT. Of course with widespread existing adoption, a counter point could be less opposition to it.

I suspect the reason it didn't pass the Senate is that Republicans are in the majority there, and I can't imagine any union having much influence or leverage with Mitch McConnell to even convince him to hold a vote.

Good luck getting suitable legislation through parliament without power. Power listens only to power.

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

The GP comment stepped a foot over that line but this is crashing right through it. Please don't. We're trying for curious conversation here, not repetitive bashing.

I’ll attempt to “not flamewar” but you are being rather sensitive about this. A decent moderation is necessary but i fail to see any reason for the watchdogs to hate on my post.

Fact is Chicago is very much underwater because unions have gripped the city’s pension to the point that they cannot pass meaningful budget resolutions.

Unions had a place at the beginning of the industrial age for worker safety and reasonable wages. With OSHA and a long list of other laws, unions are largely outdated.

Please contribute something useful and not rules that are hardly being bent otherwise you are cluttering “curious conversations.”

It was a cliché one-liner on a divisive theme that was far off topic. That certainly counts as flamebait. This is not a borderline call!

Sometimes people make a more substantive comment in response to a moderation scolding—sort of explaining the background that was in their mind but which they didn't say earlier. I'd say your second and third paragraphs here count as that. If you had included that in your original post, it would at least have been not a one-liner and less of a cliché, and I probably wouldn't have replied.

Only the biggest, nastiest unions were able to survive the purge.

The claim that unions are horrible may be true for some large, high profile unions, but what everyone seems to ignore are all the small, totally unknown unions that get shit done.

A good rule of thumb: if the union is so large that it has enough bureaucrats that they have their own Union, then it's likely most of your dues are spent on propagating the Union bureaucracy and not necessarily on aiding the employees the Union represents.

> Chicago is a great example of labor unions and how well they work out.

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

Chicago ain't the world! Here, in Germany, labor unions are not perfect either, but pretty effective. It's a question of culture: if something never can grow up, into a solid state, it will cease to succeed. In the US unions get constantly hated and attacked. It's difficult to develop a healthy personality under such circumstances.

I loooove me some fallacies and biases. I work diligently everyday at work to avoid them.

However; I think this is misplaced as a quick search of Chicago news will inform the reader that Ms. Lightfoot has her hands full trying to balance a budget while not crippling the city because of unions. There is no fallacy here, only truth that is uncomfortable to some.

> There is no fallacy here, only truth that is uncomfortable to some.

There is, though. And it is an association fallacy.

You wrote:

> Chicago is a great example of labor unions and how well they work out.

The error in your logic:

Premise: Chicago's labor unions are labor unions.

Premise: Chicago's labor unions are bad.

Your conclusion: Therefore, all labor unions are bad.

What the hell do you people think Chicago is? It's not 1929 anymore.

4 of the last 10 Governors of Illinois have gone to prison.

That's funny, because your chosen statistic requires you to go back to 1961.

Illinois had a governor arrested while in Office just 12 years ago for corruption. They've had it repeatedly over the last 60 years. Seems like a trend, and not just limited to 1929.

The governor of Missouri was indicted in that same time frame, and the governor of Alabama convicted.

And?

You're right I mean the teamsters union is such an upstanding example of the positive effects of unions.

What are some other examples of how well they work out? Paid holiday? Days off? Working environments that weren't deathtraps? Sounds pretty good to me.

You don’t have those in your non-union job? Everyone I know in tech already gets paid time off, and safe work environments.

Of course I do. Don't be a childish, passive-aggressive dickhead [0]. You know as well as everyone else here that these were fought for and won by unions.

[0] I make no apology. I really don't like that kind of phony bullshit pretend question. Its dishonesty is corrosive to discourse.

That seems like an inappropriate overreaction. Also, no, they were not. Companies who have never had unions offer these things, because we would not work there if they didn’t.

Even if they were, the fact that they are ubiquitous today without unions would mean that this is historical trivia, and not an argument that supports having a union today.