https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
On the plus side, we paid like $15/month so I'm not sure why Amazon is trying to scare people with the "union dues" argument. And it was nice to have the option for "representation" in HR-like meetings.
There's definitely pluses and minuses, but (having worked on both sides) it's not for me.
To take government work as an example: you mentioned some minuses that are very obvious. But you didn't mention what I consider one of the biggest pluses: not having to fear losing your job because the mayor/governor/etc flipped parties. That still happens in leadership positions, but it used to happen to rank-and-file workers as well; I believe it's the public employee unions that stopped that.
I don't work for Amazon and I don't have a dog in this fight, but it would've been very interesting to see what happened if this site had unionized. It's not really clear to me whether/how much Amazon is jerking its workers around; are there plants really unsafe, are people really miserable, should they be paid more? Having one site unionize for a couple of years would probably answer those questions better than a million forum posts.
Rewarding supporters with cushy jobs (and firing the old workers) en mass is known as patronage and is a minor abuse of power, akin to corruption. Well-developed democracies take steps to prevent it, not because it's bad for the workers, but because it is bad for the fabric of government. The US enacted these reforms more than 100 years ago, starting with the Pendleton Civil Service Reform act. Public sector unions had very little to do with it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pendleton_Civil_Service_Reform...
In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like.
> your merits don't matter at all
They don't either in the non-union corporate world either. They pay as little as they can get away with. They'll assign as much work as you can possibly do, and then pile on more, and set unreasonable demands. The moment you surmount them, there's more work.... But here's your COLI for the year.
And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop. An employer who's paying you X knows that X is enough, and won't give any real merit raise increases.
> wayyy too much focus on seniority
At least that's measurable, and better than managerial decisions of "I like this person" or "I don't like you". Been there and done that. And with a crummy manager in a union job, you at least have the union steward to represent you. Non-union, you have the unemployment line.
> overall just too many rules (example: unlimited PTO)
Really? You use unlimited PTO as an example?!? It's complete utter trash it's unlimited by simply not showing up to work at all. That's unlimited, and we all know you'd get fired if you did that. You'd also likely get the axe if you took off every Friday as PTO.
I would much rather have fair delineated and straight-forward rules for all to see and vote on, than the touchy-feely sounds good but not real faux-rules like 'unlimited PTO'.
Are you serious? This line of thinking is exactly why I'm against union. It is really not that hard to tell who are the bad performers. There will be false judgement, but the rate is low. If you want to avoid any false results, well, I don't know what world you live in. And look at teacher's unions across the US. What kind of damage did they do to our kids? The infamous Principal's Ball as described in Waiting For Superman should make any sane person's blood boil.
What do you base this on?
My experience is that if you are perceived to be good you can get away with being a low performer for a lot longer than if you are not perceived to be good, I have seen it quite a few times.
A false positive would be when a high-performer is perceived as being a low-performer, and terminated for that reason despite their superior productivity.
I can certainly imagine this occurring, especially to employees who are socially deficient, but then you start to get into the quagmire of politically- and socially-motivated terminations, which I think is outside the scope of this discussion.
I went to a very similar school system as the one in Waiting For Superman and there are a whole litany of issues I would put before teacher unions in terms of what is afflicting our urban schools, top on the list is:
a. incompetent administration
b. failure to desegregate our schools.
Where as much of the rest of the country has had children in schools just fine for months.
You can damn well place a lot of blame on the unions because they are not there for the welfare of students and no action they have taken shows otherwise. If anything they guarantee the least needed teachers will ever end up in schools desperate to have them. They will go after any alternative means of education which includes home teaching, something they have effectively now forced on many minority families in our largest cities.
I think it is funny that outsiders on an anti-union crusade will continue dismiss what students & parents who actually go to schools like these say many of the problems are.
e: And I'm not saying unions are entirely unproblematic. I had a few (2 or so) teachers who were protected. But they are so far from the root cause of the dysfunction in our urban schools. Informal segregation is a much bigger piece of the puzzle.
If all media could list facts and stats, and lay out all kinds of reasons and assumptions. Unfortunately, both left and right media are doing the opposite. For instance, some right labels NYC teacher's union as a woke entity. The teacher union said that reopening school was racist. And Twitter, oh, the almighty righteous Twitter, simply bans the accounts who are opposing CDC's guidelines. It's just so hard to see influential medias and platforms to engage nuanced discussion.
* Randomly assigned poor & black students to socioeconomically diverse and non-diverse schools, found rich-poor achievement gap was halved in math (https://production-tcf.imgix.net/app/uploads/2010/10/1600543...)
* Systemic benefits in national tests for students in socioeconomically diverse schools, regardless of family background (https://tcf.org/content/facts/the-benefits-of-socioeconomica... along with a whole laundry list of other evidence).
* Evidence that minority parents in my school district favor distance learning while the pandemic continues. I couldn't find the original stat because the thread was deleted, but here is a similar poll showing the same thing (https://www.the74million.org/article/as-more-dcps-schools-op...)
Beyond the oblivious benefits of having different communities of students commingle, how does desegregation help poorer performing school? I was under the impression desegregation was more about providing more equal access to better run schools than improving poorer preforming school.
1. There are studies showing that socioeconomic and racial diversity in schools (which often go hand and hand in urban contexts) have huge measurable positive impacts on people from less advantaged backgrounds, and no impact on people from more advantaged backgrounds.
2. Affluent families often have more time to devote towards advocating for improvements in their school. Incompetent administrations get shielded when there aren't parent watchdogs.
3. Hate to say it, but high-quality teacher retention is very difficult in schools that are close to entirely black &/or poor.
It is much easier to create two high-quality socioeconomically diverse schools than it is to create two high-quality schools one which has mostly rich white students and one which has mostly poor black students.
I definitely do not have all the solutions though. I'm not really sure if desegregation in many coastal cities is even possible right now while private schools remain. White private school attendance is very related to school system diversity.
It's not just a problem of private schools - it's families having the ability to move to a different district.
If you're affluent enough, no one can force you to send your kid to a given school. They want to bus your kid? Move to the suburbs. They want to bus from the suburbs? Send your kid to private or religious school? Ban those? Hire a nanny/tutor. So forth and so on. As you pointed out, there's not benefit academically for these advantaged kids, so this understandable why there's push back. Some people aren't going to value being exposed to other communities enough to outweigh the inconvenience of busing their kids.
We could try to make these communities more desirable to live in, but 1) we're assuming we haven't tried making them desirable (and if not, why not), and 2) we risk pushing out the poorest of the community and negating the benefits for those families. It's a big, hard problem - how do you go about improving a failing school in a poor neighborhood without changing the neighbors in the neighborhood?
I was too young to remember the 70s, but, from what I understand, busing occurred mostly between neighborhoods in the city, often moving kids from one poor community to another. If you were in a neighborhood with nicer schools and busing was enforced, you moved. And the politicians and judges enforcing busing certainly didn't send their kids to these schools - if they lived in these communities at all.
Unless we start telling people where they can live and how they can raise their children, I don't think this path is viable.
Hm. It's not understandable to me - if there is no harm academically, why the pushback? If you look at recordings from Boston parents during the busing protests, they're quite clear about what their issue is ("n*****s").
> If you're affluent enough, no one can force you to send your kid to a given school
This sounds intuitive when you hear it for the first time. And I did alude to it in my previous comment. But I don't think we should overstate the effect. From 21st century data, at a macroscale, enrollment does not really drop when you integrate, even when that integration involves sending kids to schools that are not the closest neighborhood one.
Cambridge, MA has implemented a '21st-century busing' controlled choice approach and saw no decline in enrollment. [0] Parts of Brooklyn recently did the same and saw no change in the enrollment of white students. [1]
It's hard to say exactly why this is the case - perhaps racial animus has declined, perhaps there is a growing awareness that attending a racially diverse school is not actually harmful for educational outcomes, perhaps white flight in the 80s and 90s wasn't caused by busing in the first place, perhaps the benefits to remaining in cities are increasing, etc.
Moreover, busing didn't fail. By the 1980s, after concerted efforts to integrate, schools were more socioeconomically and racially diverse than ever before. Since about 1990, however, schools have re-segregated to the amount they were in 1974.
I don't buy that de facto segregation is an inevitable result of freedom of mobility. The evidence strongly suggests that it is related to policy choices and that it can be changed. Given the massive impacts that it seems to have on overall quality of education, shouldn't we try?
[0]: tcf.org/content/report/cambridge-public-schools/ [1]: https://ny.chalkbeat.org/2019/11/14/21121770/a-push-to-integ...
>Hm. It's not understandable to me - if there is no harm academically, why the pushback?
Not wanting to send your kid to a bad school in a bad neighborhood? Let's be specific here - these were parents in South Boston worried about sending their kids to Roxbury. (Yes, ironic given Southie was also a bad neighborhood.) Sure, plenty of them were racist as hell on top of that.
To the larger point - were these privileged kids living in Southie? No - they were also poor and working class, just like the kids in Roxbury. So where are these privileged kids living? In the suburbs. Which didn't have busing into inner city schools. And where affordable housing means paying half a million dollars for a condo instead of a million dollars. And there's very few POC who can afford living there. Are these families racist? Maybe not overtly, but they certainly aren't challenged to living along side POCs.
> Moreover, busing didn't fail. By the 1980s, after concerted efforts to integrate, schools were more socioeconomically and racially diverse than ever before. Since about 1990, however, schools have re-segregated to the amount they were in 1974.
So it failed in the 90s instead of the 80's. Roxbury and South Boston still have bad schools (although both are less crime-ridden than the 70's)
Interesting enough, Cambridge and Brooklyn have grown in affluence starting in the 90s, which more affluent families moving in. Lo and behold, the schools improve across the board as the city can bus kids and resources around to poorer preforming schools.
> "It is much easier to create two high-quality socioeconomically diverse schools than it is to create two high-quality schools one which has mostly rich white students and one which has mostly poor black students."
I could not disagree more, not with our current approach to inner city schools. Desegregation through busing among bad neighborhoods didn't improve bad schools. Affluent families moving into those neighborhoods did.
> Given the massive impacts that it seems to have on overall quality of education, shouldn't we try?
Given the current trends, I'm not seeing the interest in making these poorer communities less poor. It would be bold to see an attempt to bus kids from affluent communities into the city, but that is very unlikely to happen.
Yeah, right. It's all about racism. As for volumes of research on performance management and management in general, they are just charade by white supremacists, right? Oh, and what about Asian people, in particular Indians, going all the way to CEOs and college principals and high-ranking government officials? Let me guess, they are white? If you think so, well, let's just say some people are racists to the bone, no matter how "progressive" they say.
>unlimited PTO
This, exactly this, is the problem with people in the union-mindset. "Oh it's unlimited, that means we don't need to work at all, right?" It means you have a certain amount of accountability and responsibility: "Hey, we just finished project X so I'm going to take Fri+Mon off to go camping" is a regular thing, without having to book your vacation dates a year in advance or deduct quarter-hours from your various "PTO banks", or even have to document it anywhere. It means the company trusts you to do the right thing. You're not going to see that in a union shop where you constantly have an adversarial relationship with your management.
Well you also outlined the real problem in your way of refuting mine.
Obviously, taking 100% PTO is a joke. I think we can both agree on that. That was just a demonstration point that "Unlimited != Unlimited".
But I also said, "How about every Friday off?" and now we're talking about 52 days off a year. And that's starting to get in that really fuzzy realm of certainly doable, but is it 'allowed'? Or perhaps 30 days? Is taking a month off acceptable (5 x 4 = 20 days)?
The outlier is obviously ridiculous.. But what isn't? And that's where we see results like https://www.workforce.com/news/unlimited-paid-time-off-is-a-... where the "Unlimited PTO"
is more of a ploy of not having to *pay out* PTO, which is legally required on exiting a company. And with "Unlimimted PTO", my question about what is 'allowed' is also reflected by the numbers, that shows people under 'Unlimited' schemes take 2 days less than standard PTO.
But it's easy to say this is someone with "union-mindset" saying this. That, at best, is a strawman. "Unlimited PTO" isn't unlimited, and is a bad deal for the employee in all ways.*
> In a survey we conducted just before we hit the one-year mark, our employees ranked unlimited vacation third-highest among the benefits we offer, just behind health insurance and a 401(k). It beat out vision insurance, dental insurance, and even professional development, all of which ranked highly in their own rights.
Their Unlimited PTO policy didn't move the needle at all on how much vacation people took, but it had a huge impact on how people felt about it. In short, they appreciated being treated like adults.
How the author of that Workforce article got from the two sources they cite to the extremely negative article they wrote is beyond me.
Then work for a company with fixed PTO. There are plenty of these; the vast majority, actually. Why are you so hell-bent on denying that choice to people who wish otherwise? Even worse, you're telling these people that they are wrong and that unlimited PTO cannot possibly be a good fit for them. How can you expect people not to disagree when they have first-hand experience of the contrary?
>In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like.
Personally I'll take risk of getting fired over having to spend 8 hours a day dealing with utter idiots. Not spending 8 hours a day miserable is worth a lot to me personally.
>And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop.
Exactly, you have the option and path for getting a better pay through your own efforts. In a union industry you don't. New job will pay the same as the old one based on union rules.
Are you a poet?
In every job I've worked, from manual labor to writing code, it's incredibly easy to figure out who is "performing badly".
And research in logs and events can either be quick or very slow, depending on what you're looking for.
And it's also easy to slop out slow bad code, and make it someone else's problem (dev side of things).
I know porn when I see it, but I can't (easily) make an automated system to detect it and I'd struggle even more to make that system make intelligent actions on successful detection.
The situation you're describing is going to be far more about the specific personalities and power dynamics than anything related to accurate performance estimation.
In the most absurd case, the best developer got a contract offer from another company with deadline to sign at the end of November. He wanted to stay at the current company, and the managers were telling him they wanted him... but he was unable to get the contract extension on paper. So at the end of November, he was like "okay, screw it, I wanted to stay here, but I am taking the other contract, to avoid the possibility that I would miss that other offer and this company would not extend my current contract here". So he signed that other contract (starting from January), and when towards the end of December this company finally offered him a contract extension, he was like "sorry guys, but I already signed a contract with someone else". He left, and the managers were all surprised "but we told him we wanted him, why couldn't he wait?" During the following year, a chain reaction started, when his closest coworkers left too, then more people left, most of them reasoning like "I was already considering a change of job, but I stayed here mostly because of good friends at workplace, now that the friends are no longer here, I might leave too". The company lost most of their developers... because there were not willing/able to extend their best developer's contract two months before expiration instead of the usual one month.
Another example, this was an internal employee, there was a super talented guy, freshly out of university, but incredibly experienced in some technologies. Also super helpful, whenever someone in the company had a technical problem, they usually asked him for help, and he always helped. The whole company changed their technological stack based on his recommendations. Then, one day, another company approached him and offered double of his current salary. He wanted to stay, so he went to management, described the situation, and asked them for 50% increase (which would still be only 3/4 of what the other company offered him). The managers refused; as I later learned, their conclusion was that "a person this young does not deserve such high salary". So the guy left.
Maybe this is "specific personalities", but those personalities seem quite frequent.
People have had bad experiences with unions protecting shitty employees far beyond what companies usually do, and the response amounts to, "NUH UHHH".
If that's what people have actually experienced, telling them "actually what you saw with your eyes isn't reality" is not effective messaging.
> They don't either in the non-union corporate world either.
Basically, people have seen for themselves that unions seem to be anti-meritocratic beyond what companies they've seen do, and that's simply dismissed.
"No, you didn't actually see that."
Have you not heard of The Rubber Room? Or the dance of the lemons? At least with respect to teachers unions, the problem is real and in a very detrimental way. Even when a schools district wants to fire a bad teacher, the process can take years and be costly enough to deter districts from even bothering.
Bad performers can absolutely be spotted, at least in the extreme. People that don't show up to work, or are chronically late (for work where this matters) or violate safety rules for example. They get protected by unions and are hard to remove.
They don't either in the non-union corporate world either. They pay as little as they can get away with. They'll assign as much work as you can possibly do, and then pile on more, and set unreasonable demands. The moment you surmount them, there's more work.... But here's your COLI for the year.
And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop. An employer who's paying you X knows that X is enough, and won't give any real merit raise increases.
Thinking otherwise is for people who aren't talented, lack the ability to negotiate and don't have any imagination.
I know several software engineers who have negotiated for $500k+ cash compensation at their employers because they had skills that are in demand and it was worth paying them that.
You would never be able to do this with collective bargaining arrangements.
This has not been my experience. Every employer I've worked for has offered me reasonable raises before I had to ask, and consistently sought my input to estimate how much time and effort tasks will take, usually adding buffer onto what I suggest.
We can use seniority, but why not get creative and rank employees by height, moustache density, or digits of pi memorized?
You can also take the fixed PTO allocated by the company, and then elect to not do any useful work the rest of the time either. What's your solution to that? And why can't this solution work in an unlimited PTO environment?
Note: I don't think that unlimited PTO is a good fit for all industries (it certainly isn't), but your position seems to be that unlimited PTO is never a good fit, which I disagree with.
Then either you and all your coworkers so far have been amazing, or you're the bad one. Either way consider yourself lucky!
Granted, I have seen the other side of things, and free riders are a problem. It sucks when you care about doing things right and don't get anything better than the people who just dial it in. But there are always going to be free riders: either people who figure out how to game the system because they're just there for a paycheck, or people who run the system and soak up all the value while delivering little, because their family knows the right people at the country club.
Now, when a company is new, small, and nimble like a startup, you can control the nepotism and free riding somewhat, but any bigger shop it's just going to get baked into the system either way. Try to really solve this problem, and you'll threaten those with real power and get shut down.
Sometimes you get leapfrog moments from companies like SpaceX that demonstrate just how much drag the corruption has caused on progress, but they're more the exception that proves the rule. And, any comments about Elon as an individual aside, the powers that be have not been shy about using a bunch of media mouthpieces to spread FUD about disruptors like SpaceX and Tesla. (Again, not going to even touch on whether those are good or bad companies, or whether Elon is a good or bad person. But they are causing a ruckus in their respective industries.)
So again, you may be doing a lot better than some people at your job, and that's commendable. But it will be used to manipulate you more often than not, because you care.
I’m not qualified to say if they have a place still, but I know anyone pretending it’s all rainbows hasn’t actually suffered like I have.
By every metric, unions provide massive, tangible benefits to most members. The question should be, how can we retain or enhance those benefits while also minimizing the well-known downsides?
Mind citing your source or perhaps one example of a good union? I'm genuinely curious
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/04/art2full.pdf
This report from. US House committee has a bunch of links too... https://edlabor.house.gov/imo/media/doc/PRO%20ACT%20-%20By%2...
Which work environments are merit based?
Which employers fire bad performers?
I’ve worked for orgs where this wasn’t true and I avoid those orgs and prefer environments that are merit based.
I feel bad if people really have never experienced this as it’s really disheartening to work in an org where performance doesn’t matter. That must really suck.
What type of data? Nothing but qualitative analysis of devs work gives any hint on performance IMHO.
Note that "bad performance" is very team specific, if I'm shoved into a spaghetti DS code base and told to not write tests or refactor, then I will definitely end up as a poor performer.
And unfortunately, people being people, lots of managers/leads make decisions based on unexamined emotional states, which tends not to lead to rewarding merit.
Trading/finance, because it's either outsmart the rival trading firms, or lose your entire stack in 1 day.
The economics book Design Rules: The Power of Modularity suggests orgs use something like NPV to assemble as a basket of competing efforts to tackle problems. The strategy of prematurely picking winners, come hell or high water, always struck me as sub-optimal.
Why do you care about this as an employee? You get nothing when somebody else makes the company more money.
More practically, if I'm working at a place where my team has fixed head count I'd rather us have the ability to replace someone who's not contributing to the success of the team.
Thankfully my workplace is not unionized and I have great team members. Whether union or non-union workplaces can encourage that, I don't know, but that is an example of why an employee would care.
Compensation often includes stock; so you do get something when somebody else makes the company money. And if nothing else, the company doing well may help you feel job security and be better able to make plans for your future.
You also may enjoy making the best product you can. When another employee gets in the way of that, it can make it harder to enjoy your work.
https://twitter.com/RBReich/status/1369433256907710470/photo...
There's plenty of other variables to consider here and he just graphed two of them. Corporate taxes were much higher. Also it looks like share of income going to the top 10% hasn't really changed much at all in the last 100 years. 40% +/- 10%. That needle hasn't moved very far.
https://www.epi.org/publication/labor-day-2019-collective-ba...
Correlation != Causation.
This is data cherry-picked to support a conclusion and published by a lobby group (a pro-union one and publihed on labor day, no less. It's flashy!). You may agree with said conclusion, but this is research presenting a theory not a proof.
There is no causation being shown here. It's a possible theory, but that is all that it is.
Every institution has a STATED purpose and an ACTUAL effect. Institutions become inefficient, corrupt, decoupled from their original goals. What keeps institutions aligned with their stated--noble--purpose, is the institution's internal incentive structure. Unions often have very bad internal incentive structures.
I would be SHOCKED if you could not find counter-examples where unions are great. It's a big round world we live on where silver linings abound. For anything. To me, right now, I do not find pro-union activists persuasive in the slightest. But I am open-minded.
That whole thing about requiring union workers to do tasks is stupid. One year I was attending a fan convention and decided to check out the rules for vendors. The convention center used unionized labor so one of the rules was that the vendors were limited to carrying like one case of stuff over to their spot. All other moving and setting up had to be done by the union workers. I get what the protection here is, it prevents loopholes for getting around using union workers at all (which, if it was possible to do, would make a union ineffective). But hell, why can't they pay the union workers as if they would have to do all the work but then let people decide if they want the union workers to actually do something or not?
If I, as a vendor, could have my people do the work of moving and set up and elect not to use the convention center staff, then there's a way to circumvent the convention center staff and fire them all.
You just hire a "vendor" with their own crew to do all the stuff. With no actual work to do, it's justifiable to fire the convention center staff.
If people weren't bastards, we wouldn't need such weird rules. But then again, if people weren't bastards, we wouldn't need unions either.
If there's a downside, it's that they used to act as a bit of a moat for the incumbent studios. Studios have entire departments devoted to processing issues raised by union members, which is of course expensive to do. And union members can only work on union productions, which meant tiny indie films could have problems getting talented people budget-wise. It's not just pay, it's meeting the requirements of the dictionary-sized "Basic Agreement" in terms of other aspects of production. That said, SAG has led the way to finding ways to accommodate smaller budgets and it's not as difficult as it once was.
You will have to pay it just to do a short television appearance. It is certainly not worth that to everybody.
Then there are annual dues, whether or not you actually earned any money.
Then there's recent discussions of them kicking out long-standing members over their political views.
I'd LOVE for someone to research this. Case studies. Metrics.
My experience with unions has been mixed. Same with non-union shops. Recognizing that I'm just a simple bear, I haven't been able to figure out any rules for what works, or doesn't. My hunch is governance. eg Unions that are more democratic, accountable perform better. I have zero notions about what might make non-union shops better or worse.
It's as simple as "Please clean out your desk". Have you never seen The Apprentice? Do you believe that people never get fired?
I'm sure those aren't valid examples anyway, as the only unions that matter in discussions on this hellsite are the ones that also exist in Randian works of fiction.
You are only considering one side of the question -- and actually a limited form of that one side (namely, the material benefits/pay for the unionized employees).
What about the productivity of the firm and workers? The profits? The cohesiveness of the market strategy? The sense that the workers were participating in the success of the firm itself (and not the success of the union)? The creation of healthy relationships between management and labor?
It's probably beyond dispute that unions introduce a "middleman" between management and labor, but we are probably arguing about whether or not that middleman is (most often) a good or bad thing. (I do not dispute that sometimes unions can be healthy and might align its incentives with company success, but I tend to believe that this middleman is not usually a good thing except in extremely unhealthy companies -- perhaps like Amazon, and I must confess that in working with about 50 companies, of which less than 10 were union shops, I've never actually seen a union shop where labor didn't put union goals over company goals, to the detriment of both.)
https://files.epi.org/charts/img/172988-21725.png
https://www.epi.org/publication/labor-day-2019-collective-ba...
For example, just in the replies to your comment people are saying they dislike unions because they protect the incompetent, stifle progression, give preferential treatment purely on seniority, etc.
But then go look at Hollywood, with the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild, the PGA, etc. These are unions that have some of the most highly paid and richest people in the world as members. The same is true in the sports world.
And sure, these unions are not perfect by a long shot, but they are doing a huge amount to hold what is ultimately a very exploitative industry to account.
Of course, companies like Google, Amazon, and the like would much prefer software engineers continued to think that all unions were like the Teamsters. They don't want you to know that there's a whole class of professional unions serving some of the most highly paid people and engaging in collective bargaining.
It's also a challenge to get into a guild, SAG has minimum requirements for having already performed. A union is generally just something you have to join when you take a job at a unionized company.
This is not a value judgment, just wanted to point out the differences.
Other unions do the same, such as longshoremen. You can work next to unionized longshoremen, doing the same type of job, yet not be part of the union because it strictly controls who can be a member in order to keep membership low and compensation high.
He pointed out that not all unions are the doom and gloom version where you can't carry lightbulbs (seriously people, don't ever use that example, it's right out of the anti-union video, obvious tell) and good people can't get promotions because of blah blah blah.
You then responded by saying it doesn't count because it's different.
Yeah, that's the point. A "union" isn't a thing like gravity. It doesn't only work one way. It a collection of workers who want to collectively bargain with an employer to bring some balance to the power dynamic between huge companies and individual workers. Whatever rules the union wants to set out are up to them.
Contract provisions that screw over newcomers, and set up additional barriers to entry are not good.
I do not want the tech industry to discriminate against new comers, or developers who don't have a CS degree, or H1Bs more than it is already doing so.
And that is what those kinds of unions do to the industry. They setup barriers to entry to target these groups.
Work the union job for $10 an hour, earn credit towards joining the SAG. In 10 years I can actually join the SAG and make actual decent paying jobs, and actually get health insurance.
vs
Work a non-union job for $20.
It feels very much like a way to exploit people to let them someday get the magic card. The numbers are very approximate, but the sentiment I have gotten from people actually with boots on the ground. Do I want this as a developer? No way!
Your point is a good one when we see the backlash against unions in software engineering and related fields. I just wanted to bring it back around to why anti-union comments on this story specifically would be right to cite their problems you listed in the 2nd sentence.
Things like the actors guild are simple rent seeking at the expense of newcomings. They are setup in a way where only insiders are allowed to get jobs at certain places, and there are large barriers to entry to becoming an insider.
If we were to apply this to tech, it would be contract provisions that keep out engineers that dont have degree, or discrimination against H1B immigrants.
And I don't want the tech industry to have contractual provisions that discriminate against these groups, and would be willing to spend a huge amount of effort fighting people who want to do that. (And based on comments that I have read on hacker news, there really are a lot of people who want to screw over self-taught developers, or immigrants)
I understand that you want to retaliate against immigrants and people from other countries.
But if that is your opinion then don't expect anyone who has an H1B visa to ever agree with you.
You should probably expect people who don't hate immigrants to fight against your efforts though, and to take actions to sabotage the union.
Don't expect to ever get those other people on your side, if your argument is that you just don't want foreign workers to be able to get jobs here.
The point is that these situations are often framed as the angelic unions vs the evil capitalist employer. In reality, there are plenty of bad unions just as there are plenty of bad employers.
The industry in the non-unionized county was literally some of the best in the world in what it does. The plants were clean and well run. Early on in the management-part of his career, my dad hired some formerly unionized workers who had moved up from the unionized county in order to find work (jobs were disappearing in that county due to the bankruptcies). They were fired in a few months because they wouldn't show up on time, were constantly dropping the ball, etc. In his opinion, their work ethic had been ruined.
I'm actually not anti-union, but I'm mostly anti US union. I think if we adopted a non-antagonistic model similar to Germany, it'd be alright.
So merely by nature of the type of individual you'll encounter on HN, you'll get a strong bias towards the anti-union.
Of the people I know that have direct experience with US unions, even those that ultimately come down on the side of supporting them have lots of stories to illustrate the warts. That’s a kind of nuance I’m not seeing from the “eat the rich” crowd which makes me think they don’t have direct experience.
That's probably the most absurd thing I've read in these comments.
And it's worth noting that the EU is very, very different from country to country, so it's a bad idea to generalise.
None of them have at-will employment though, so it's an appropriate comparison to make.
I think the real difference here is what people value. Personally, I value having some advance notice that the boss hates me and wants me gone. This reduces my stress, and allows me to find another job before I stop earning money.
Perhaps other people value the efficiency that comes from being able to change staffing on a whim. I don't think either of these is wrong, they're just different statements of values.
And note that if we're talking about tech people founding US companies, it's driven predominantly by access to capital rather than anything else.
> Like your smartest citizens leaving to start companies in the US?
Do you have any examples of this?
(Maybe look at my reply which gives more details).
This essentially means that there needs to be a process to fire you. You need to supply at least one verbal warning on stated grounds (backed up as a written), then another one and then you can fire someone.
It works reasonably well (not always, obviously) and it's super bizarre to me that you don't have that in the US. To be honest, when my previous employer wanted to move me to the US, this was one of my concerns, especially when you're dependent on the job for a visa.
It just seems that its a bad trade-off for US people in general, and it's odd to me that it appears to be mostly unquestioned.
Sounds like it might be a good idea.
So partly whether or not it would be a good idea would depend on the details of the proposed law, and how they would end up being interpreted by judges.
My position is that given all this HR dance to prevent lawsuits, at-will doesn't really exist in professional jobs, so it might be worth ensuring that this is standard across all roles rather than just those where the fired employee might sue.
- Do something egregious like steal or curse out a customer and you’ll be escorted off the premises
- For poor performance you can get a write up and a meaningful chance to improve before being fired
- You can be laid off just because your department / function / office isn’t needed anymore but they do something for you severance-wise
I’d support a legal change.
I worked about a decade in industry and never felt like management was the enemy. We didn't expect management to coddle us, though. We knew we were there to do a job and if being there wasn't worth the benefit, we'd leave. Being in union, it feels like an artificial wall between management and union has been erected; that it's us versus them. Like the vice presidents are fat cats smoking cigars in their high rise offices while we, the proletariat, fight to get what's fair. Its as if union members think there's some reservoir of money we could get in salary if only we could break down the dam that management is using to hoard all the money.
I'm in a right to work state and technically don't have to pay union dues. But, I pay my dues because if you don't, your name gets published publicly and there is a lot union members can legally do to make life difficult for you if you don't want to join the club.
From speaking with family members who work or worked for Unions.
From a management perspective it is untenable to not be able to hire who you want (because you must offer the job to any "qualified" union employee before you can hire externally), not be able to fire who you want (because you must meet arbitrary requirements set by the union).
From an employee perspective I've seen situations where they want specific or custom arrangements with their boss and their boss would like to give them but they violate union rules so they are either forced to work around it (and face repercussions if they are found out) or refuse to accommodate situations that both the manager and the employee agree upon.
I will also say that I find the anti-anti-union rhetoric very distasteful. I fundamentally agree that employees have the right to discuss their desire to join or form a union but I think that companies have the fundamental right to advocate their position as well. Virtually all of this get's called out as "anti-union" propaganda and I find that very distasteful and disingenuous. Most of the "propaganda" videos I've seen I found to be actually quite reasonable arguments, while most of the anti-anti commentary I find to be disingenuous appeals to emotion.
There are also many industries where unions are massively corrupt. I know nothing about the union here so I won't speak about it, but I do have personal experience with this.
Finally, I will also say that my opinion of unions skews heavily against larger and more diverse ones. Had this been Amazon Warehouse workers choosing to form their own union vs join an existing union, I feel that would have been more successful by virtue of being smaller in scope and more targeted.
People disagree over whether Amazon is a situation where unions would be a benefit or a detriment. Make an argument instead of diminishing people who disagree with as you misinformed.
I don't know where you lived, but this is the opposite of the situation in most places. Private schools attract people who will pay private school tuition because they offer higher standards.
In my limited experience with private schools, it was relatively easy to poach good teachers away from unionized jobs precisely because the school had freedom to offer them higher wages and better benefits. Many of them were also sick of dealing with the issues that come with unionized labor and union membership.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_211.10.a...
Sometimes I've seen them push back against bad management, but it is frightfully rare. Bullying, discrimination, favouritism, giving young/non-clique staff the worst jobs: all good.
I don't think public sector unions are very good stewards, partly because everyone is in the union. They push against govt objectives (control wages) and politics (push whatever rhetoric of the day is) and seek to gain public support (teaching/learning is essential for society etc). Unless you're a cog in the union machine, they won't be present except to prevent you being fired or make you work extra hours.
This became very evident during the pandemic: unions stuck with (1) better pay, (2) keep leave. While (1) is essential, the real problem was (3) death. But adjusting the school year, virtual teaching, classroom ventilation, support for students: nothing, except opposition. They wanted nothing to change. It was bonkers.
I'm not saying all unions are bad. I think many industries might benefit from well run, transparent, regulated unions. But I have seen many examples where they are bad.
I think it's an unfair argument to say that unions need further regulation. Regulating them is how we've lost millions of union jobs to contractors, and where we keep seeing large strikes broken up by governments. Regulations often benefit large players over small ones. We'd rather see a plethora of smaller, niche unions, than just one massive union. Competition breeds capability.
Is that a good enough source for you, or does that not count?
I'll never understand the people who think "You have a differing opinion. It must be because you don't know what you're talking about and have just consumed a bunch of propaganda".
When that sort of thing happens it makes me wish that there was a clear agreement between management and employees that codified when/how/why promotions happen so that people who have worked hard and performed well would be favored. It’s really awful that that union precluded that from happening.
"Next, the union dues. I know this isn't a problem at every location but mine is part of the local teamsters union, and having to pay $450 in initiation fees and $40 on the regular adds up, especially for someone who is in real need of the income. I wouldn't be complaining if I saw the tangible benefits the union provides, but after speaking to several coworkers, many of whom have worked at my location for 20+ years, I am of the impression that the union does not actually do anything to improve working conditions at Costco. If anything, it seems to me that the union locations simply serve to protect the wages of those who are not unionized by playing into Costco's desire to prevent the unionization of said locations. Yes, the union makes it harder to arbitrarily fire people, "guarantees" you won't get scheduled for 7 days straight (have seen otherwise at my location), etc. In my view, this only contributes to my previously mentioned point that many long-time employees feel protected from termination regardless of how they perform or act, and as such they bring subpar attitudes, service, and effort into their work."
If a union can only operate by forming a workforce monopoly - something is wrong with the model itself.
Imagine if most employees bring a contract of their choosing from one employer to the rest, and employers are the ones maybe hagling over specific provisions. Really imagine that. Totally different world right?
That's what it would be like if employees had more market power.
GM, Ford, and Chrysler on the other hand can do practically nothing to prevent a machinist or welder from leaving to work at literally thousands of other companies in dozens of industries across the country that require those skills.
> I believe what GP was alluding to is that if a workplace is unionized, the worker does not have a choice of wanting to be a part of the union or not(in a non right to work state), and so essentially a monopoly.
That's a distinction without a difference. If you don't want to work for the union that's at a particular workplace, you can always choose another workplace. It's just another condition of employment, just like all the other conditions of employment you'd have to abide by without a union.
> If you don't want to work for the union that's at a particular workplace, you can always choose another workplace.
Or, if unions weren't forced down onto the workers, they might choose to work with the same employer and not deal with the union.
Why can't workers have a choice - whoever sees the union's being a better fit can join the n number of unions operating at a single employer. Whoever wants to remain free from the union can choose not to join, and negotiate with the employer directly.
Let me put it this way: if managers weren't forced down onto workers, maybe I'd work with a different manager or no manager at all. The employer used its "monopoly" over its workplace to force management on me. That's cured by my ability to try to get a different job at a different workplace, yet somehow a closed union shop is different. It's a double standard.
Most employers will allow changing teams/managers internally. Also, you can discuss it with your employer and if you can convince them that you will be able to be productive and relevant without the need for a manager, some employers will actually entertain this request. Several startups actually have a very flattish structure and very loosely defined hierarchy.
> The employer used its "monopoly" to force management on me. That's cured by my ability to try to get a different job at a different workplace, yet somehow a closed union shop is different. It's a double standard.
It isn't a double standard. A closed union shop is clearly different, because it is not the employer's choice/will, but rather a legal binding. In the absence of such a binding, there wouldn't be any closed union shops. There is no legal binding on employers to assign managers to employees. It is an employer's choice/will/culture.
In a closed union shop, the worker who doesn't want to deal with the union isn't happy, and the employer isn't happy either. Both, the worker and the employer cannot do anything to change that. In your "forced management" example, it is just you who are unhappy, and you can try to make changes in your existing workplace with the possibility of some success, or find a new workplace.
So? It's totally at the employer's discretion, and there are a million other things that are non-negotiable.
> It isn't a double standard. A closed union shop is clearly different, because it is not the employer's choice/will, but rather a legal binding. In the absence of such a binding, there wouldn't be any closed union shops. There is no legal binding on employers to assign managers to employees. It is an employer's choice/will/culture.
Do you oppose all labor law? If it's "the employer's choice/will" to employ young children in dangerous conditions, do you oppose the "legal binding" prevents them from doing that?
> In a closed union shop, the worker who doesn't want to deal with the union isn't happy, and the employer isn't happy either. Both, the worker and the employer cannot do anything to change that. In your "forced management" example, it is just you who are unhappy, and you can try to make changes in your existing workplace with the possibility of some success, or find a new workplace.
That's not actually true. If the worker's unhappy, they can work with their coworkers to decertify the union. However, if their coworkers are happy with it, then maybe that guy should just get another job. It's not like union shops are pervasive and unavoidable. They're actually pretty rare these days.
Sure. But it is between you and your employer, and it is not unilaterally dictated by you or by your employer. Also, an unrelated third party doesn't have a say in the agreement you have between you and your employer. If there are some things that are unacceptable to you(for eg, having a manager to report to), you and the potential employer can shake hands and go away from each other.
> Do you oppose all labor law? If it's "the employer's choice/will" to employ young children in dangerous conditions, do you oppose the "legal binding" prevents them from doing that?
From discussing a legal binding around closed union shops to opposing "all labor laws" is quite a leap and also a strawman. But to answer your question, no I don't oppose such a law that says children cannot be employed in dangerous conditions like mines etc.
> That's not actually true. If the worker's unhappy, they can work with their coworkers to decertify the union.
Yeah so clearly something that can and should be between you and your employer has to now involve other colleagues and you end up with varying degrees of coercion basically.
> However, if their coworkers are happy with it, then maybe that guy should just get another job.
Or, the easier and simpler route is to leave the union and possibly join another union operating at the same place(if such a thing were to be allowed), or not join any union at all and still work for the employer. More freedom/choice for every worker, lesser or possibly no coercion and less disruptive for the employer, and more importantly, less disruptive for the worker.
It is absolutely absurd that just because set of workers are happy with their working arrangements, a different set of workers cannot get their working arrangements that are more suited to them. Or, in other words, two functioning adult parties are ready to come to a potential agreement that concerns just them, with both of them getting what they want, but some third party who is not and should not be privy to this agreement will not get what they want, and so the actual participants in the agreement cannot make the deal they want, and instead their options are to be coerced into a deal that they wouldn't want, or drop the deal altogether.
> It's not like union shops are pervasive and unavoidable. They're actually pretty rare these days.
Certainly unavoidable if its a closed union shop no? Which is the very thing that we are discussing. And I am glad that they are rare.
Once an employer can no longer hire non-unionized employees, it has to either surrender to the union requirements or close altogether. This is a monopoly in its best.
It is only natural to put up a collective against that monopoly.
It is absolutely a cancer of the place. Granted, I think that probably in a lot of places that have unions they can easily become a scapegoat to all of the organization's problems, but some of the ones that I deal with on a daily basis are really hard to pin on anything else.
In an idealized world, there would be infinite competition both on the demand and supply side of labor. The argument for unions, at least, is that in the real world the balance tips in favor of the demand side, and I'm sure in many organizations this makes a ton of sense. But at a place like a small learning organization where I work at, it just ensures that nothing ever happens. You have a fantastic faculty member that you want to compensate above and beyond market rate because they deserve it? Union will make that an issue. You want to fire a severe under-performer? Union will make that an issue. You are a non-union manager who has energy and wants to improve things? This sort of stuff will destroy your morale. Over time, the really good people who want to be recognized for their work individually leave, the people who care and want to actively promote change ALSO leave, and what you are left with is an assorted collection of folks going through the motions and heavily invested in not rocking the boat out in any direction. It sucks.
we both had worked at various Walmarts in the past so we were familiar with their explicitly anti-union rhetoric, but it had never affected us, so we didn't think much of it. my friend was shocked to discover that union membership was mandatory in order to work at QFC (this has been since made illegal in WA apparently), which included a union initiation fee of like a hundred dollars iirc, in addition to the monthly union due. my friend was not looking for some kind of long-term employment with Kroger (QFC), he just wanted a short-term part-time job that would help him get cash quick, to stay afloat. yet, the union literally did nothing for him but take money from his minimum wage income while he was employed there.
like I said, mandatory union membership is apparently illegal in WA now, which is great. and there are probably situations where unions are helpful and productive. but I have seen a lot of people have this opinion that unions are unassailably forces of good in all situations, and that just seems silly to me.
And in the end, all the bargaining didn't really get us any better than what we would have gotten without a union. So now I got a little raise and I hate my company and I'm telling everyone else how shitty the company is.
I was reprimanded by another worker because according to whatever union full-time employee had, cleaning a canoe was a union job and by bringing my own rag and cleaner I was violating the union's chart of some shit.
> HN is very consistently anti-union.
I'd say HN is more consistently anti-bullshit. It's important to separate the legitimate problems from the solutions taken to address them, else you fall for the false dichotomy. Being skeptical of unions as a solution to address workplace conditions is not irrational.
People like to shit all over Margaret Thatcher and her policies but they forget that it was the actions of the unions (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent) under a Labour government that got her elected in the first place.
Is it? It just seems to vary per thread.
Writers Guild of America East (for journalism), or the Authors Guild (novelists). You can become a journalist or a novelist without being a member. But both guilds have collective bargaining agreements with publishers.
This is the direct purpose of so-called "right-to-work" laws. Unions are required to represent employees regardless of whether or not they pay dues, meaning other members shoulder the costs of collective bargaining. This is called the "free rider" problem and is one of the biggest ones facing unions today. It's also one of the main targets of the PRO Act.
The value compromising was great for short term growth but here's where we are now.
I've long thought the Samuel Gompers strategy was the right approach to coalition building. I've really started to question it probably just this week.
The short term gains are substantial but it bites back hard
I mean look at all these comments. Most people want the political power dynamics of syndicalism. But our compromised manifestations soured their dreams
As for Amazon workers, since there was so much resistance coming from Amazon on this case, the workers probably feared that Amazon would have closed shop if they chose to unionize.
History and reality. Look at union run cities like Chicago and union run industries like the auto-industry that got demolished by foreign companies.
Personally, I think unions have their places... but in 99% of cases these days? The bureaucracy, red tape, added expenses and other assorted BS are more net negative than the few positives that unions offer.
Well first off, especially in low wage jobs, there is little they do for you and it can cost nearly two hours of your pay per month for the benefit. You get this wonderful set of rules which spells out what your employer can and cannot do but it also limits you as well. I got first hand experience in a union shop from late 1980s to early 1990s. My reward was seeing our rep once a quarter if we were lucky in her Mercedes which cost more than we made.
However for every complaint about people being anti union and listing off "Bunch of facts" you never see those same people list their facts that support a pro union stance. Most of the time its little more than what people already have with some variation of something they won't even get when unionized.
The simple fact is, in the US they are more political than worker oriented. They feed a ridiculous amount of dues and even state funds into political coffer so they come replete with lots of wonderful political supporters and press who love to lay the claim that workers will be better for representation. The benefactors are political appointees, elected officials, and union leadership. The workers are mostly pawns.
What I read about European unions would be very nice to see in the states but what I experienced, family members have experienced, is not this fantasy that some people have of what its like here.
If you are questioning the source of a specific piece of data than be clear about what that data is.
If you are asking people to cite a source for a general opinion they personally hold, they don't owe you that.
I come from a union town. My grandfather was a union organizer and disowned his sister for crossing a picket line. My mother worked in a union her whole life. My father was a union steward, then halfway through his career entered management and had grievances filed against him. I was - briefly - a dues-paying member of a union as a teenager (IBEW) for my summer job. I have many friends in trade unions (plumbing, electrician, etc.) and I have friends in SAG.
The relatively high standard of living I enjoyed as a child was in large part the result of my parents being in unions.
Sure, mom had to sometimes see less skilled co-workers get promoted before her due to seniority, but she wouldn't have had the good pay, benefits, or job security without the union. That's the trade-off, and for her it was worth it in the long run.
However, the downside of a union encouraging low productivity can be very real.
Case in point - where my father worked, the union was so entrenched that the high seniority factory workers were making as much as local software developers (nothing necessarily wrong with that), but their productivity was far below workers doing the same job in a non-unionized factory being paid far less in another state. When they were asked to increase productivity to meet that level, they balked. For years. Then went on strike. And as a result, at least partly, that business was sold off and a lot of them were laid off.
It's always a set of trade-offs but I think plug-and-play workers should organize. They need to be able to collectively bargain. They just don't have the same individual leverage like say, software developers.
The problem is that we're not in the heyday of unionization anymore. Few industries are unionized nationwide, so companies can just move to another state. Unions don't have the leverage they used to, so organizing can end up being a footgun. That might mean that business has too much of an advantage, not that unionization is bad, but it depends on your worldview. But without unions, it's just always going to be a race to the bottom for unskilled labor. How could it not be?
Trade unions and guilds (like SAG) are a totally different animal.
SAG is great because you work for an ephemeral production, not a company. Game development should definitely adopt this model, because games are really just movies now. You get your benefits through the union when you're not actively working, etc. Not a bad deal, and probably better for the production companies.
Trade unions - they restrict the supply of labor, driving prices up, but they police themselves and maintain quality. I would be uncomfortable hiring a non-union plumber for anything non-trivial.
Anyways, like I said, it's all a set of trade-offs, and those vary depending on the industry.
Realistically? Probably libertarian advocacy literature coupled with a few confirmatory anecdotes that may or may not be from first hand experience. When I was anti-union, that's where it came from.
You also have to keep in mind the HN is run by a VC firm, and a lot of its culture was set by aspiring capitalists hoping to win the startup lottery. That's going to lead to certain predicable biases (e.g. taking the perspective of a business owner even if you're unlikely to ever successfully be one).
One only need to look back on the last hundred years of industrialization to see how briefly these kinds of professional, middle-class meritocracies can keep up the illusion. If it isn't slave labor abroad that undercuts them, it will be some innovation that makes them redundant. The music will stop, and it will become immediately clear that just because you've been the one building the chairs for the game doesn't entitle you to actually sit in one. This sort of thing is happening all the time, the law profession being one recent example. One day, your skills are valuable and command a good wage, the next, you're competing with thousands for a single position that comes with constant pressure to beat last quarter's results or be replaced by an intern. We could look at colleges and professorships as well for more middle-class devastation.
Programmers, kind of like surgeons, sit in a unique position at the moment in that they are necessary for the imperial goals of the billionaire class and haven't yet been thoroughly replicated by cheap alternatives. That day is absolutely coming though, for both programmers and surgeons, and it isn't hard to find companies out there working full-time on those replacements. All the haranguing about performance and merit will stop, and we'll all be left with whatever table scraps we've managed to gather before the great hand of progress swept us into the trashbin.
Of course, unions can't prevent this from happening, but they can help extract as much money from the sociopaths of industry as possible before our usefulness is over.
You are a member of HN. Please just elide such generalizations.
Yes, there are people here that have had bad experiences with American unions, many of which do suck for a variety of reasons, but their stories confirm a prevailing narrative not create it.
The "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" trope gets repeated often online, but it's largely unfounded cynicism. It's true that we need to fix our health care system and bolster our safety nets, but the reality is that average Americans are relatively wealthy and even the median worker has significant career opportunities that are harder to come by in some other countries.
Look toward the professional trades like software engineering and the differences are even more pronounced. I worked at a company with US and European offices for a while, and the European employees were routinely stunned to learn that the US office had to pay employees so much more for the same work.
> They don't seem to want to disrupt the status quo, even if it benefits them,
The situation is more nuanced than what you read online. The reality is that these moves aren't as unilaterally good as presented. It's more honest to approach them as tradeoffs.
In this case, I'm inclined to believe that the workers casting these votes did more research and have a better understanding of the situation than the internet gives them credit for. The idea that they're all voting against their self interest because they're dumb, or that we know what's better for them than they do, is very presumptuous.
Why can't we accept that these people are really voting for what they believe is in their best interests? Why do we have to conclude that they're not smart or that they're voting against helping themselves? The reality isn't so simple, and we're not in a position to judge after reading a few paragraphs on the internet.
The one point I would have to disagree with the the reasons for voting against their interests. And the only reason for this is seeing the results of the Brexit referendum in 2016. What happened there is people who set themselves up as figures of authority and told the people Brexit was in their interest. They made the fishing industry into the poster child of their campaigns and convinced them they would benefit. The fishing communities in particular where overwhelmingly in support. Perhaps some did try do their own research, but a large part of social media and the mass-media where all pushing the agenda and using scare tactics and any concerns were batted away as "project fear". When you have figures of authority pushing an agenda it's understandable that people will believe them - Why would they lie? But as Jan 2021 rolled around, the fishing industry in the UK is all but decimated (YoY Salmon exports were down 98% in January). So from that perspective, I wouldn't call the voters dumb because it's easy to get caught out by the disinformation that's out there, but for the most part I would say many were naively trusting ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
My question is this: Where did you get information about unions? Because people keep mentioning their "bad reputation" and then start listing off a bunch of "facts" that read like they're bullets straight out of one of those anti-union videos during onboard at several major employers (Walmart, Target, Amazon, etc).
So anti-union people exactly where does your information come from? If it is grapevine, what was the original source?