Would you please review the site guidelines [2]? They include this: "Please don't sneer, including at the rest of the community." One common kind of sneering is this sort of supercilious dismissal of everybody-else-in-the-community and their dumbass "hilarious" opinion—this is an internet genre we need to avoid in order to have real conversation. If you're posting here, you're as much the community as anyone else is.
I understand what it's like to feel surrounded by enemies/jerks/assholes when you constantly run into comments saying things you strongly disagree with. But it's important to understand that this effect is largely a consequence of the fact that everyone is crammed into one big room here—there's no self-selecting into silos the way other sites do it (follow lists, subscriptions, social graphs, and so on). If you don't understand that, this place will feel much more fractious than it actually is [3], and the consequences of that are pretty stark: one ends up feeling surrounded by demons [4], and tends to retreat to things like defensive sarcasm, putdowns of others, etc.
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23308098
[4] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
If we’ve reached the point where the strongest arguments for unionizing is that maybe this time it will somehow be different than other unions, that’s not encouraging.
One thing that every disliked union seems to have is the goal of permanence for the union itself. Maybe instead of having elected or long-term leaders in a permanent union, some should try a sortition process in a conference-like structure that reconvenes when enough employees vote to convene, then disbands until called upon again.
I think the strongest argument for unionizing is that we know that this time is different from other times - wealth inequality is staggeringly high.
Seems like a leopards ate my face moment.
Similarly in tech, unions can be a way of gaining greater profit sharing for the high-skilled workers necessary for the business to function. Where tech workers lie in income percentile is irrelevant and distracting to this question.
From a societal standpoint, it doesn't particularly aid widespread inequality if a small number of tech workers receive a bump in income; the union may cause the situation to worsen, as the union has an incentive to keep the supply of employees restricted in order to maximize their compensation. The unionized employees would be protected from public competition.
Having pro-sports players in a union hasn't exactly improved widespread inequality.
Moreover, much wealth (especially at the top) is held in equities, often that aren't sold before being passed on to inheritance. That means:
a. that this wealth isn't counted as income
b. that decreases in equity prices due to unionization (and corresponding decreased expected returns to owners/shareholders) will burden the non-working rich disproportionately.
Sure, it won't solve wealth inequality - but where there is a zero-sum tradeoff, that tradeoff will mostly be from rich tech owners + management to affluent tech workers, not from the rest of society to the tech workers.
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2019/02/06/people-l...
Zuckerberg making $80 billion instead of $1 billion has literally no impact on the homeless in the bay. He only buys one or two houses at most. If the Facebook employees made even more money, that would only exacerbate the housing crisis because they could bid prices much higher (thousands of Facebook employees vs 1 Zuck).
The thing about this is, when other organizations and industry are "disrupted", according to the usual west-coast definition of "disrupt" this typically means exploiting a market to the benefit of shareholders by eroding labor standards. What does one erode while disrupting a union, when those same standards are that org's goal?
The only thing I can think of that the modern form of "disruption" would do to unions is to allow them to "screw over" their members more efficiently.
- The market is labor
- The shareholders are the union members
- The labor standards are the current status quo, which made Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe owners and managers believe this (https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/37...) was acceptable until the government forced their hand on it. "Erosion," here, would be a disruption that makes the status quo worse for company owners... Makes that kind of one-sided back-room dealing no longer safe for the companies that engage in it, since they no longer fear merely government intervention, but their own employees banding together to say "Knock it off."
Did Google workers have other options here?
The advantage of affiliating with a larger organization is their weight becomes a part of your collective bargaining strength. That is, if Google does something the union doesn't like then the entire CWA might get mad at them. I don't know that there are any clear disadvantages from a union's perspective, which is why basically all organizing efforts do it.
From a bird's eye perspective, the disadvantage is that there's no meaningful competition or innovation, because all new unions see themselves as part of the traditional union movement where solidarity is prized. If someone else formed a competing union with a clever new idea for how to organize Google workers, the CWA-backed union would denounce it and demand that Google refuse to talk to the second union.
1) a substantial part of your dues are passed on to support the larger organization
2) some member services are delegated to the larger union, and some larger unions are better at member services than others
3) some larger unions spend a lot of money on political activism instead of member services
4) less independence of action, as larger unions might have different priorities than what ground level members want (e.g. wanting to get a contract settled instead of fighting for more; external organizing over internal organizing)
Can you give examples of such new types of unions that have been established the last 1-2 decades, and how they differ from the "legacy" versions?
This is a great article about them. Maybe paywalled, sorry!
https://www.ft.com/content/576c68ea-3784-11ea-a6d3-9a26f8c3c...
If you Google "IWGB deliveroo" or "UVW St. Marys" you will find interesting case studies where each have represented delivery riders and nurses and won concessions where a bigger union wouldn't have bothered cos of the risk involved. Echoing the comment a few levels up, this can definitely be seen as a "disruption" of what a union is or is expected to do.
I heard Hitler liked dogs, so if you like dogs you're obviously anti-Semitic.
EDIT: The point of this was to show how absurd adjunct comparisons like this are.
The funny thing about unions is that the HN community believes that every other organization and industry can be disrupted...EXCEPT unions.
It’s hilarious. The comments are usually all anecdotal with some story about an uncle or father who was “screwed over” by his union back in the 80s or 90s.
We are capable of creating a new type of union and making collective bargaining better than what previous generations had in this current era of the greatest wealth inequality since Rockefeller and Carnegie.
What do the tech elite and robber barons have in common?
- They are all anti-union and collective bargaining.