> Unions depress wages for top performers, and protect incompetent staff.

Entertainers and sports professionals have unions which do not seem have this problem.

Unions can only raise wages by constricting the supply of labor. SAG does this by forcing productions to hire a certain percentage of SAG members. This works out fine because are essentially a infinite number of potential actors, so the market wage of an actor in a competitive market is close to $0. In all other industries, unions incentivize stagnation.

That might be true sometimes, but it isn't the general rule. SAG is more akin to the way medical and legal organizations constrict supply. But most unions instead fix a structural problem.

One of the fundamental asymmetries of our corporate age is that employees have ~1 company, but companies have many employees. That gives a company enormous negotiating power: it's easier for them to find another employee than for you to find another job.

Unions act to restore balance so that companies and workers have more equal negotiating power. That doesn't come through supply restriction. E.g., in high school I worked for a grocery store and we were unionized. They could have fired all the stockers at once if they wanted, as it was not particularly hard to learn the job. But what they couldn't do was pressure me into taking less money by threatening to fire me.

The supply of physicians is primarily restricted by limits on federal government funding for residency slots in teaching hospitals. Every year there are students who graduate from medical school but are unable to practice medicine because they can't get matched to a residency program.

The supply of lawyers isn't restricted at all, as shown by stagnant or falling median wages. Almost anyone who wants to become a lawyer can enroll in one of the "third tier toilet" private law schools, and states don't impose any limits on the number of law school graduates allowed to take the Bar exam.

I'm surprised to hear the AMA has no influence over the size of residency funding, but if that's what you're saying, I'll take your word for it.

The supply of lawyers is restricted through onerous education and licensing requirements. You could argue that the fall in wages means they are no longer as effective in controlling supply. But if you think the supply "isn't restricted at all" I encourage you to start offering legal advice for money and let me know how that goes for you.

The AMA has been advocating for increased graduate medical education funding. I suppose they have some influence, but apparently not enough to convince Congress to boost funding enough to meet the demand.

I don't see anything particularly onerous about education and licensing requirements for lawyers. A sufficiently motivated student can complete law school and pass the Bar exam in a few years. So in practice there's no significant restriction on supply.

https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-con...

You really don't understand how multiple years of education plus a notoriously difficult exam count as a restriction on supply?

Again, if you think there are no restrictions, hang out your shingle and start giving legal advice. If you're right, you should be fine.

Things aren't as black and white. Unions, like every other manmade institution, seems to be rot when its getting big, old and fat.

German labour is heavily unionized, a lot of the workers are lazy and incompetent. A lot of the union leadership is well paid and almost never works. It heavily opposes remote work(for good reason, but with a slightly wrong conclusion).

Their salary negotiations have been a clusterf* in recent years. And in fact I tried them, and contributed. But attempts at protecting employee rights were not only shut down by leadership but also fellow union leadership. They were too busy cozying up to leadership instead of protecting and informing other employees of employee rights. When it comes to employer abuse they will be too "busy" to help you, so realistically you will still need your own private law insurance.

I'm not opposed to unions and I do agree that workers need better protection especially in the US. But we also ought to be able to talk about how these big institutions may no longer protect the interest of those people and at some point exist to feed their own mouths more than the workers they were intended to protect.

Is it better than nothing? Yes, absolutely. But why do man-made structure always end up like that?

I don't think I said things were black and white. I definitely agree that unions aren't perfect. But a lot of workers are lazy and incompetent regardless. People with power are problematic everywhere, too. I guess this is what we get when we try to run a planet and our main ingredient is half-evolved primates with a long history of trauma. At best, it's going to take us a long time to get things sorted out.

"Unions can only raise wages by constricting the supply of labor."

SAG doesn't make it's 'wage' because production companies are forced to hire from a smaller pool of SAG workers.

SAG sets prices.

There are actually an 'unlimited number' of SAG workers who would, if it were note for those numbers, also work for $0.

Also - unions don't set their wages by 'restricting labour' - they negotiate directly using the power of being able to shut down production. (Ok, arguably this is 'restricting the labour pool to current workers' but that would mean something different).

For Doctor and Nurses - you could argue that those guilds do actually restrict the number of workers in the field to keep prices up by supply & demand, but that's generally not what unions do.

> they negotiate directly using the power of being able to shut down production

This is true, but they would slowly lose their leverage if they didn't constrict the labor supply.

In order to join SAG you have meet certain requirements (e.g. speak a certain number of lines). The vast majority of actors in a union production have to SAG members, so this effectively acts as a rate limit to the number of new members.

The same goes for other powerful unions. Ford would love to build a new factory that employs non-union workers, but they aren't allowed to.

The best police officer and the best teacher in the entire United States are paid identically to the worst, most abusive ones.

If you support police unions for example, you're inherently supporting the notion that a police officer who is courteous and cares about the community should be paid identically to the Chauvins of the force.

I think this is a good way to sow discontent about unions. Most people see themselves as above average, so stories like this will convince them that 50% of their coworkers are holding back their advancement opportunities. If there just wasn't all this dead weight around, they would be paying ME more! Now the employer doesn't have to fight the union -- the union fights itself! It's brilliant.

Unions are not designed to maximize the effectiveness of each shareholder dollar. They exist to give all employees a safe and fair work environment. That probably means that some 40th %ile performer gets paid the same as an 80th %ile performer. But they both get water bottles when working in a hot datacenter, and they both get their bonus that was promised to them in writing. I don't think that's a bad deal. Without a union, people would be fired for complaining about unsafe working conditions, bonuses that were promised would never come, and people would be working 8 hour shifts in 85 degree datacenters with no water. That doesn't sound that great to me.

If unions are so bad for workers, why do large corporations sink millions of dollars in anti-union ads in newspapers? Probably not because they really want to give their highest performers raises, but are hamstrung by regulation, and need the public to step in and protect them from the big bad union. They do it because they want to lower wages, make the job harder and more dangerous, and go back on promised bonuses when all the employees start asking where they were. The ads work, too. The seeds of doubt have been sown, and whenever Jeff Bezos reads a comment like yours, I'm sure he smiles a little.

> If unions are so bad for workers, why do large corporations sink millions of dollars in anti-union ads in newspapers?

This is a false dichotomy, it is possible for unions to be bad for (a majority of) workers and employers at the same time. Employers don't want to be sandbagged with low performing staff any more than their coworkers do.

The danger of police unions is that the things they negotiate are very often not money, but rather regulations and laws that makes it harder to punish police violence and misconduct.

Planet Money did a great podcast about this last year: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/05/871298161/police-unions-and-p...

This conflates too many issues; people dislike police unions because they are a powerful lobbying force against police reform. They prevent innovations like liability insurance [0] from gaining any traction.

And no, I at least personally think the Chauvins of the force shouldn't be paid at all, because maybe their 18 cases of misconduct should lead them to being removed from the force.

[0]: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/07/871751070/liability-insurance...

The issue here is that police unions don't just represent good police officers, they represent every police officer. Every issue with police unions, like "they make it difficult to fire bad cops", has an analagous issue in every powerful union. Autoworker unions often negotiated terms where companies couldn't fire autoworkers without "just cause" (read: the same kind of absolutely airtight case it would take to fire a police officer; the sort of thing that in practice never happens).

Unions have benefits for their employess of course, like making it impossible to fire them among other things, but then you have to work in the type of environment you get when everybody is impossible to fire.

Tech companies don't rely on public sector pay scales. Does LeBron James get paid the same as Darius Garland? Turns out he is free to negotiate his own contract, despite being part of a strong union. Imagine that.

The way salary works in the nba is the top players like LeBron can only get paid a % of the salary cap. So half of the teams have a star or two like LeBron making 25-30% of the cap. So the best players all get paided the same. Older players have a min, teams have a cap. Based on skill/age players slot into pay ranges that match their output.

These are the maximums for 2021 28,649,250 (players with less than 6 years experience) $40,108,95 (players with 10 years plus)

The nba was a bad example.

Interestingly, that's not the kind of union that the OP has (disregarding the fact that LeBron James is underpaid because of union lobbying). So hypotheticals aren't useful. No one is really proposing any tech workers union that is like the one NBA players are in.

All proposals are the other kind. And none of them encode equal rights for immigrants in their bylaws.

> The best police officer and the best teacher in the entire United States are paid identically to the worst, most abusive ones.

The idea that all teachers and police officers in the US are paid exactly the same is wildly untrue. The pay for both those jobs varies based on all sorts of factors, especially including location and job title.

I know several teacher and can confirm this is true. If nothing else, where you work makes a big difference. The average salary of a teacher in california is about twice the average salary of a teacher in utah. Teacher pay is also often dependent on test scores of their students (which has its own problems, for example the best teachers might get assigned the worst students, because the teacher can help those students better, but that hurts the teachers test performance). The amount of education you have also makes a significant difference.

The best are promoted into other positions like detective and get to work on bigger cases. Otherwise depending on how long you have been employed you will get more than someone just starting because experience is valuable.

Imagine no union. Pressure from the mayor or council or the media or a connected criminal will get you fired possibility thrown in jail.

> Otherwise depending on how long you have been employed you will get more than someone just starting because experience is valuable.

This is exactly the problem with unions. Pay for time under your belt is a stupid idea. Experience isn’t actually worth more to anyone beyond an adequate amount to do the job competently.

A police officer with 10 years of experience is not going to actually prevent more crime than one with 7 years. Additionally, an ambitious officer that takes training seriously, etc can be a much better officer than one with twice the experience.

Rewarding seniority rather than merit is literally an incentive to do the bare minimum for as long as possible.

Most police services/forces have a ceiling on that. I worked in one where there was a combination. Not in the US, but the issues are similar and we had a union.

The union absolutely could not protect sworn officers who broke the law. And if a member was in legal trouble, the local branch voted on whether to provide legal support ( good lawyers paid by the union for as long as needed). I saw an officer charged with stealing (from a found wallet) where the branch voted not to provide that support.

My advice- pay police more and expect them to behave as professionals.

As a teenager in Thailand I saw police (1990) who didn't get paid enough to live- they relied on local community giving them rice, blankets, weapons.. or they ripped off folks -mostly from outside the community. Speeding tickets for foreigners etc.

I was paid ok to do my digital forensics- but doubled then tripled my wage in 2 years of leaving- doing ~ the same stuff (what people call incident response is built into your blood after a few years of policing).

I would also argue that I was much better as a police officer after 7 years than after 2, and much better at the specialization that I choose in the police- digital forensics- after 9 years, much better... and when i left @15 years I was much, much more valuable to the service than when I joined (skilled in forensics, understood the court process, could well react to emergencies, could write policy not just follow it etc)- but my pay had gone up maybe 30%. But I didn't go up in rank because I didn't want to manage people, so my wage mostly capped.

And if anything- that is the issue with time based seniority- you force people to stop doing what they are good at and make them managers, with predictable results. (ie poor management)

Edited to not be a single wall of text

So a police officer with 1 year experience should be equal to one with 14 years?

I think you underestimate what experience gives you in terms of decision making, community contacts and nerves of steel. 

Way to take the maximally uncharitable interpretation.

"Entertainers and sports professionals have unions which do not seem have this problem. "

Entertainment and Sports unions exist for completely different reasons.

Traditional unions exist because of an asymmetric power dynamic between workers and labour, at least, historically.

Sports Unions exist so that fairly highly paid athlete's can squeeze even more money out of their employers by gaining leverage.

Actors work in an aspirational industry that is massively oversubscribed with talent, and wherein the work is generally ad-hoc or contractual and conditions vary greatly.

The vast majority of actors earn very little and probably are not full-time actors. Their Union sets a 'floor' for basic comp and expectations because otherwise there wouldn't be one - but they generally don't get into controlling roles for talent, they don't control job definitions etc..

I have a neighbour who worked at an auto-plant and his job was to sit in a room and does nothing, observing the floor. A role with kafkaesque bureaucracy and roles that simply should not exist. Family members have priority for jobs. In a nutshell - that union has considerable control and influence over the operating nature of the company whereas I don't think that's a long term benefit of unions.

My sister in law works for a government sector union and their hiring practices have almost nothing to do with merit or qualifications, it's shocking. Again, a situation wherein I think the power of the union is a detriment to the system overall.

That said it seems clear that after a wave of 'getting along' in the US, surpluses are not being shared and unions at Wallmart, Google, Amazon etc. seem like a good way to develop better equity. But I suggest it would be better for everyone if those companies just did a better job with their staff and were more gracious and generous.

> Sports Unions exist so that fairly highly paid athlete's can squeeze even more money out of their employers by gaining leverage.

Why can't tech workers unions do that?

In the fight between Athlete's and Team Owner's 'it doesn't matter' to any of us. It's a zero-sum game, they're rich people arguing over surpluses.

For commodity workers in industry, without unions it's possible they are mistreated, in which case, it's better for everyone if there were to be unions (although I think some kind of agreement would be better than unions). But workers unions can also leverage considerably more power than is better for everyone and make the company and industry struggle.

Unions are a form of power, they work differently in different scenarios, and the scale and relative power matters a lot.

It's just not sufficient to say 'there's a union over there therefore we should have one' or 'unions are all evil' or 'unions are always better than not' etc..

1) Teachers unions protect everyone

Somehow people who talk about "child predators" always ignore the fact that a bunch of people who get falsely charged also get protected. That's REALLY important. My anecdata knows far more teachers who were falsely accused than actual child predators (ratio: 12 to 1).

A single teacher can't possibly corral the amount money required for a defense against a school board funded lawyer.

2) Almost all of the "incompetent" teachers left in place are there because the school adminstration won't file the paperwork.

School administrators are politicians. They are always looking for their next job. The one thing administrators hate is bad press because it will dog them when they jump jobs.

Actually firing a teacher is fraught with opportunities for bad press. No matter how distasteful the teacher's behavior--somebody in the community will likely be on their side. If those people are vocal, firing that teacher dooms your political career--probably forever thanks to Google.

Consequently, administrators prefer to simply shunt bad teachers aside rather than risk their career.

So, put the blame for incompetent/horrible teachers where it belongs--square on the shoulders of the school administrators who have made a political calculation and refuse to fire people properly.

I could also post about how police unions protect abusers as well. I was thinking more about guaranteeing rights for Amazon warehouse workers and people like the woman in the article working in datacenters where basic expectations like being able to go and get water aren't going to jeopardize your job. The people who are FTEs at these companies dont need unions. It's the people working for contractors for these companies so they can hide a bunch of ugly practices and cost cutting who need it.

Every worker needs a union, professionals need associations.

There are huge power imbalances at work

You wrongly assumed that I think police unions are fine. Most unions end up proliferating toxic practices.

If you join a union you're protecting child molesters? I think you flew a little too close to the sun with this FUD. Dial it back a bit so it sounds a little more sincere next time.

Very true. You can say if you work for a rich person, you are protecting / enriching child molesters as well.

Many wealthy business owners have been convicted of all kinds of illegal activities, including child molestation.

What a crap straw man argument.

Your only citations against unions is the same situation reported by two news agencies about a union that is legally obligated to defend their members?

It’s amusing how quickly and often someone can emerge with FUD from the woodwork, ready to create a hellthread.

Hoping to avoid wading into the specifics of this issue, but have you considered that unions are unpopular among software engineers? I am the most pro-union person I know personally, and I am not pro-union.

As a European living in Europe I am more of the impression that anti-union sentiments are mainly widespread in the USA. But then again I haven’t really discussed unionization with anyone either. I just see more negativity towards it in public from Americans than from others.

In East Europe anti-union feelings are strong among the people that lived under the communist regimes (~ 45 years or older). Unions were widespread at that time and the negatives were very visible, hard to forget the huge negative influence they had in the period of 1990-2000 when the transition of these countries was slowed down or sabotaged by unions.

I don't think that's blanket true. What about Solidarnosc?

It was well regarded at some point, but the current membership numbers (4% of what it was at peak) is showing that the post-1990 evolution was not great. Providing support for closing stores on Sunday is not the purpose of a worker union.

Source?

Really everyone that I know in that age range. I am living in Eastern Europe and I worked in several countries in the region.

I know many software engineers who like unions actually, they tend to work at larger companies. There's definitely a lot of affinity for libertarianism I've observed amongst software engineers. I try not to psychoanalyze.

Please don't take HN threads into generic ideological flamewars. They're too repetitive to be on topic here.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26733237.

You aren't obligated to join a union (certainly not in tech at least)

Almost all unions rapidly try to transition employers into a union shop. Pretty quickly language starts to arrive about 'freeloaders' and 'scabs'. Simply put, I don't trust you when you say "you aren't obligated".

> Unions depress wages for top performers

Someone better let Lebron James know!

bit of an ironic example, lebron is considered one of the most undervalued athletes by contract value. mostly due to salary cap and wage scale restrictions in the nba, things the nba players union agreed to.

also see messi's contract for an example of what these athletes are worth in an open market: https://www.cbssports.com/soccer/news/lionel-messi-barcelona...

obviously soccer and basketball aren't apples to apples. but look around the nba and you see many salaries across the top of the scale that suggest the top performers are vastly underpaid.

https://www.businessinsider.com/lebron-james-makes-less-than...

> obviously soccer and basketball aren't apples to apples.

Which is why your comparison messi isn't very good. In fact if you read past the headline, your link explains why.

think it's an interesting data point nonetheless, Barcelona and the Lakers are worth about the same amount. Barcelona takes in a bit more than 2x the revenue, but Messi is paid about 5x more. both are arguably the best/most popular players in their sport. hard to find perfect comparisons, so take it all with a grain of salt. if there is a better comp would be really interested to see it, this is the best I could find.

If the NBA player union disappeared tomorrow and Lebron was able to renegotiate his contract he still wouldn't be paid close to messi. The player union isn't capping his salary, the salary cap is. One of the things the player union fights for is to increase the salary cap so all of its members can be paid more. This is an example of an union getting its top performers higher salaries, not the inverse like you're suggesting.

1. Would LeBron generate less money for his team/league the gap between him and the next best is slightly less?

2. Does the NBA give LeBron a platform to make 2x more than his NBA salary in endorsements? (Yes.)

don't understand the first question

as for the second point, not sure what this has to do with the original comment/point, specifically the fact that lebron is proof against the idea that "Unions depress wages for top performers". obviously a lot of complex dynamics here, and one could argue that the nba players union has helped make the nba more successful and all the money that came with that. just pointing out that using lebron as a counterargument to the original comment about wages (ie his nba salary) is a bit ironic.

Yeah my local school convicted a teacher after he was caught with a minor and his semen on her after she did a rape kit. Dude had been a well known and respected teacher for over 20 years.

Unions have shot themselves in the foot. They only benefit the workers and heavily fuck over customers more than they do companies. Unions were there to improve conditions and give fair wages. Not protect, like you said, incompetent workers. But it turned into that.