Workers deserve representation and protections. But American unions are still closely tied to organized crime and are effectively a form of rent-seeking (you must pay us a percentage of your earnings or you can't work here). As recently as 2017 the FBI arrested members of the Lucchese crime family and members of the LIUNA Local 66 for applying a "mob tax" to new construction projects. SDNY settled RICO charges against the Teamsters in 2015.
Perhaps highly educated knowledge workers can better manage salary/benefits and quality of work life better than a slate of hired guns?
Maybe because the skill sets and work output is generally more unique, knowledge workers can more easily move jobs than those who work in traditional union shops?
Possible, but unionization rates are also down in industries that used to be unionized, such as manufacturing. This strongly implies that the issue is less “unions are bad” and more “unions were good, so bosses fought to get rid of them”. Companies wouldn’t need to hire anti-union firms if unions weren’t at least attractive to laborers, right?
After all, it’s not like life in those sectors has gotten so comfortable that laborers don’t think they need unions anymore.
> Perhaps highly educated knowledge workers can better manage salary/benefits and quality of work life better than a slate of hired guns?
Huh?
I think you’re calling union reps “hired guns”, which is deeply ironic given the history of bosses hiring actual men with actual guns to actually shoot labor activists.
> Maybe because the skill sets and work output is generally more unique, knowledge workers can more easily move jobs than those who work in traditional union shops?
I mean, unequal professions do unionize all the time. Take a look at professional sports. Unions are extremely useful in negotiating between labor and capital about things other than just pay. Length of contracts, benefits, safety regulations, etc.
Regardless, it’s pretty silly to argue that unions are useless because “they’ve had no impact” for this crowd when this crowd has never really had the opportunity to join a union. Hell, even quitting software and finding a union shop to join would actually be very hard in any field, given the low rates of unionization in this country.
It's also worth noting that "unions were good" doesn't necessarily mean "unions are good". It's entirely possible that most of the things unions can do to help works has already been accomplished and enshrined in law (osha, breaks, overtime, etc). While I believe that there's still good unions can accomplish, the cap on how much good is much lower than it used to be.
Well that and there’s Frito Lay workers striking to end “suicide shifts” that literally killed people from exhaustion. It’s kind of hard to argue that labor won these issues when they’re dragging the corpse of a worker off the assembly line of the potato chip factory after working 12 hour days for weeks on end without a day off finally killed them. That it took a strike to fix that also implies that labor law needs some more work.
The Frito Lay workers issue is a prime example of "in _this_ situation" mentioned above. Some places are greatly benefited by unions, some are/would not, some are gray areas. And, to a large extent, there's a personal opinion component to it, too.
Only if you ignore pay. Most workers pay has remained flat adjusted for inflation, while housing, education, and medical costs are growing faster than inflation.
> So unions are able to do less for workers. That doesn't they're obsolete, just that the line for the decision for "are they worth it in _this_ situation" has moved.
You’re ignoring the other possibility: the fear that unionizing will draw retaliation from the bosses that’ll make life worse. It’s not like we haven’t seen plants close down and move in response to unionization before.
Of course if that’s true, it implies that unions could help and bosses fear that.
> The Frito Lay workers issue is a prime example of "in _this_ situation" mentioned above. Some places are greatly benefited by unions, some are/would not, some are gray areas.
Right, but the original thesis was “labor activists got all their non-pay related demands codified into law, making unions less desirable”. The frito lay situation obviously disproves that.
I think there’s a persuasive story to be told about the slow change of how startup options work and the changing mood of the tech scene.
- not being allowed to plug in your monitor at conference center or vacuum your area; instead needing to pay a union member a minimum of 30 minutes of time for 2 minutes of work.
- union members verbally and even physically abusing people that are just minding their own business, trying not to get involved; you're either with them or against them.
Unions have done great good for the American worker, and continue to do so in many cases. But they also do great harm and, when leadership is looking out for itself over it's members, can provide very little practical benefit.
It's a rough topic because it's VERY polarizing. It seems like the vast majority of people fall into 1 of 2 camps; they either love everything about unions and can't see the negatives, or vice versa. It's very hard to improve on the situation when that's the case.
And the workers there seem to think it's valuable. Here's the oral history I've been listening to.
I’m not anti union. I mean union do provide slightly better pay conditions for members but they seem to be super corrupt as well. They are like a mafia, they provide services for members and Mafia members do slightly better but it no co-op.
It's not their heyday anymore, though. We need new structures and leadership for labor rights to prevent the (admittantly rare) abuses like this.
Of course, this doesn't mean that all unions' fees are justifiable for the value they produce, nor does it mean that all unions which impose mandatory fees improve working conditions for all workers. But I think it's hyperbole to call mandatory fees "rent-seeking" when there might be a perfectly rational explanation in some instances.
[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/em....
Off-hand, I'm not convinced. I'm leaning more and more against systems designed to prevent free riders—our culture is so primed to value "fairness" that we're willing to impose significant net harm to achieve it. I usually think about this in terms of public policy (free public transport, subsidizing the unemployed/homeless/etc...) but I think it applies here too.
I would not be surprised if a union that had to justify its dues to workers would be more effective for workers than one with mandatory dues because there would be more direct pressure for the union to be transparent and effective. I am not entirely confident in this though, in large part because I don't understand the politics around unions in practice! Mandatory dues do seem like a viable point of leverage against union-busting attempts from management, which could be a more important effect.
For a trivial example, if a union makes no profit and its actions provide more utility to its employees than their mandatory payments, then it is not receiving any economic rent.
> I'm leaning more and more against systems designed to prevent free riders—our culture is so primed to value "fairness" that we're willing to impose significant net harm to achieve it.
I'm not sure if you fully understand what free rider problems are. The whole point of preventing free riders is that by imposing a tax or mandatory payment, you increase net utility. If imposing a tax truly imposed significant net harm, then the problem wouldn't be a free rider problem by definition!
Free rider problems are really coordination problems. Essentially, there are situations where if everyone cooperated, then everyone would be happier. But there is no incentive for any one person to cooperate because they can choose to defect, yet still receive the benefits of cooperation.
> free public transport, subsidizing the unemployed/homeless/etc...
First of all, these are not solutions to free rider problems. Second of all, it is not clear that they impose significant net harm. For example, you might claim that welfare reduces the incentive to work and or educate themselves. This is the typical conservative market-fundamentalist argument.
But practically speaking, humans need to take care of basic needs before they can start working or learn. The positive effect of nutrition, taking care of basic needs, etc. might overwhelm the negative effects from reduced incentive to work. So you need a lot of sophisticated analysis on real data before you can claim that these policies actually impose net harm.
Rent seeking usually refers to creating new income streams for yourself without providing any benefit by acting as a middle person, and unions do provide benefits to workers, in the form of collective negotiation for individual benefits, but also a seat at the table when it comes to how the business is run.
I also get the sense that the organized crime connections of unions are overblown. Like that settlement was I believe a way to end the consent decree that's been in existence since 1989.
And the arrest of the Lucchese crime family in 2017 didn't seem to include any members of liuna local 66. I believe the mob tax is actually a reference to crimes that happened back in the late 90s involving the Scalamandres brothers. If they were doing anything with the union it was exploiting it, and blaming the victim doesn't seem fair.
Here are my references for the above
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/manhattan-us-attorney-a...
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/alleged-street-boss-and...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/15/nyregion/brothers-plead-g...
Corruption happens everywhere, including every major corporation and every government. Singling out unions for the same problems is a smearing tactic, not a moral stance.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/paul-manafort-money-laundering-ar...
This is an underrated point actually. I've thought about this for a while and there's a case to be made both for and against some of the adversarial and arguably antisocial aspects of American ethos.
Pretty soon though, the team started to see issues with the update, up to and including a major LoB system going down. They immediately rolled back the update but found they had a problem- they needed some servers restarted to pick up the update, and the sole person who by union rules could restart the server had left for the day and wasn't picking up the phone.
Now there were people who technically had permissions to restart the server, but they couldn't cross the union rules. They spent over an hour (with the major LoB, business critical system down) trying to get in touch with the people who were allowed to restart the server until they finally convinced the physically datacenter ops people (who were still on duty) go physically unplug and replug the servers in question.
He couldn't disclose the total cost of the outage, but I was lead to believe it was in the millions of dollars.
A functioning owner/management/worker relationship might fight over how the earnings of a company might be split, and even how or what to invest in, but they should all be working to making a company successful as a whole. An adversarial relationship prevents the sort of cooperation and good-faith assumptions that allow the different parties to collaborate and work to everyone's benefit.
That being said, that non-adversarial relationship is a two way street, and ownership+management need to be participating in good-faith as well.
It's management's responsibility to make sure they have the right people on hand when they roll out an update to a major system. It's also their responsibility to come out of union negotiations with the right contracts, which would have at the very least included some sort of force majeure clause to account for technical disasters.
Unless workers own equity this is not at all as much of a truism as it sounds. Could be rephrased as “but they should all be working to enrich their bosses”.
On the contrary, that's a two-sided negotiation and if management have failed to protect their interests then that's on them. I've heard plenty of stories like this where it turned out the real reason was that management's own rule was that anyone who touched that server without that certification became personally liable for damages, and management had been warned about their lack of certified people but refused to send more people on the xyz server training course, and or something on those lines.
But to answer your broader question, the reason unions sometimes point for seemingly narrow job specs is to prevent management picking and choosing titles in a way to keep pay and membership down.
Let's say that in this situation, you have 5 Server Janitors and 1 Sysadmin, with corresponding pay rates of course. Maybe the janitors have the skills to turn on the server, but the spec says only the sysadmin can. Whose fault is it that there's just one sysadmin? And if the job spec says anyone can turn the server on, why give anyone the sysadmin title?
Not to mention the history of labor battles (actual fisticuffs) and police departments in many parts of the country... talk about adversarial!
The negotiation of specified work duties resulted in an agreement between the company and the union representing the employee. If that doesn't matter, then why negotiate at all? Do employees get to decide that they're not going to do something because they don't feel like it?
If you want flexibility, you negotiate flexibility. You don't negotiate the reduction of work duties against wages, and then demand that employees do whatever they have the technical ability to do. If I have the technical ability to do accounting, but I'm employed as a bus driver, can my employer demand that I balance the books?
Employers don't own employees. There's a contract that promises specific wages for specific work.
And if the floor was really dirty and he had a good reason (showing off the office to a visitor and nobody else was available), I'd be like "sure thing, lets get the place nice for the visitor; I'm not busy". Or, if he was just a neat freak and constantly asking people to do work they weren't hired to do like that, I'd say no.
> Do employees get to decide that they're not going to do something because they don't feel like it?
Generally, you're hired with a job description. Anything outside that description is up for discussion. I mean, I'm a software developer, but if I had to have a union contract that said I wasn't _allowed_ to empty my own garbage when it annoyed me that it was full... I'd go elsewhere.
I don't expect the owner of the company to prioritize my interests over those of the company or his own. But I do expect him to consider my happiness and well being when making decisions that effect me (or, more generally, groups). And, along the same lines, I prioritize my well being over that of the company, but the well being of the company matters to me, and I'm willing to be flexible to help it succeed.
It's just an exclusivity clause. The employees and management willingly entered into a contractual agreement containing a provision that management ostensibly understood and then completely failed to account for.
If I sign an employment contract that explicitly says "I will be your exclusive provider of X service, I am not available on weekends", the employer shouldn't be surprised when I refuse to come in on Saturday and Sunday or sue them for breach when they hire a second service provider.
It's also suboptimal for the employee not to get paid twice as much, or work half the hours.
Tech has realized this and as an industry hands out a good amount of shares of the business to employees. I can’t really empathize with businesses who cry for the need for labor to care about the success of the business but refuse to hand out anything but the minimum of rewards
There's an issue with one of my servers at 3am and I'm pretty sure it just needs a physical reboot.
No chance they'll let me into their data centre to fix it myself. Even though in this specific scenario I might be able to solve the problem with no cost to them.
I can also think of a lot of reasons why I wouldn't want just anyone to be able to restart my servers.
Sure this sucks, but maybe I accepted the terms of the agreement because I figured there was a low chance of having the issue and I wanted to save a few bucks.
Having 24hr operations without adequate technical support is 100% the fault of management.
This is why on call exists. What if their worker had been drinking, or awake for 36 hours, but decided to head into the office to help out the team? There is plenty of caselaw on this very circumstance when people are killed or get arrested.
Even if this weren't the case, if you're ripped off by a used car salesman you will tell every single person you know that they're a snake.
Even if you don't do that, there are arbitration courts you can take them to to both waste their time and force a refund (VCAT where I am, I'm sure there's something similar overseas).
I really don't think it's in a used car salesman's best interests to lie and swindle.
A collaborative approach is a lot more like when you ask you're knowledgeable friend "what kind of bike should I buy?" and they ask you about your needs, goals, and budget then guide you towards specific options. They're helping you make a purchase, without pressuring you into something that's not useful to you.
I get what you mean now. As someone who "does sales" a fair amount in my work (owner of a second-hand video games business) the adversarial stuff is actually really frustrating.
I always try to give the customers the same advice I'd give a friend or family, even "downselling" them from a $100 purchase to a $25 repair if that would be more suitable, yet still so many people are adversarial and distrustful.
From my experience, this distrust hurts (non-expert) consumers even more than it hurts the businesses. Ideally, you'd have an honest salesman pointing out the pros and cons of all the different products so that the consumer can make an informed choice. Maybe that product that costs $50 will last for 20 years of continuous use, whereas the $30 version will break after 18 months.
Instead, because salesmen can't be trusted, they rely on their own instincts and buy products whose prices are completely uncorrelated with quality.
At work you have or done have a job or even revenue if the only thing employer and employees are doing is trying to throw wrenches into the machinery to get the upper hand.
In an unending game of the prisoner's dilemma, either you all win or you all lose.
Now obviously all other things being equal, I'd rather pay less money (or charge more money)
But in most cases, neither the seller nor the buyer operating in good faith will really try to squeeze the other because losing a multi-hundred-thousand (or even million+) deal by being too anal about $1000 is in neither one's interest.
If a seller got very "adversarial" most buyers would say "fuck you, I'll keep looking."
It isn't businesses that want it, but unions demand it as a power move- power against the workers. By being forced into a particular union, workers lose their recourse against unions that behave badly.
For one thing, it undermines their ability to screw over new hires at the benefit of those with seniority, and allows them more wiggle room in wasting the money they collect in dues on things like retreats to remote islands.
There are a few instances of places throwing off bad unions, but it is a long process, unions will fight back in courts, and you have to be prepared for retribution from your coworkers who disagree.
Having union membership in any way tied to your employer is nothing but a way to abuse you, the worker.
They have to win at the opponent's expense.
Instead, both parties should be looking for win win solutions to all the problems they face.
At a friends workplace, the union recently fought management and prevented a prevent work from home policy from being implemented. This was something that both the workers wanted and management wanted, but the union saw it as leverage to push for other demands.
If you're in management, being 'the adversary' probably means being on the back foot in terms of negotiating and probably compliance with local labor laws.
An unenviable place to be (said with a wee bit of sarcasm).
These monolithic unions strike at one company or another according to what will most benefit the rest of the union. This means that the union is 'attacking' one company, and helping their competitors, subsidizing the costs to members at that company with money earned by members from the competitors. This is something like blackmail, and is bound to cause animosity with management.
A lot of the ones in Germany are as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_trade_unions_in_German...
The US should play around with board composition from both the legislation side, as well as a consequence for all fines and settlements and court orders.
Entirely different climate, sort of like life-long employment culture in Japan.
This is not true. DGB (comprising most unions and all major ones) reported less than 6M members last year [1] out of ~45M working population total or ~34M of dependently employed people [2].
A lot of people might end up benefiting from a union due to them often negotiating contracts for whole occupational groups, but they are not members.
[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/5837/umfrage/...
[2] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Arbeitsmarkt/Erwerb...
How does your culture "motivate" those who aren't interested in cooperating the way you'd want them to? Gulag?
In France it is only the government owned companies who can strike, strikes in private companies are rare. It only happens when they are all fired, but it is too late..
Not exactly powerless, some decisions and some changes need to be accepted by the worker's councils. But they cannot make decisions and force the company to go in a certain direction.
Interesting side note, in mining and steel companies by law the vote is split 50% between employee and owner representatives and there’s a neutral member as tie breaker. This is often justified by safety arguments but actually stems from the WW1 and WW2 experience of these industries were pushing for war (good for business) and a neutral member was thought to temper these tendencies.
Seems like a nontrivial task.
You can go to your works council and request to see the salary and bonus structure for your peers that work the same job as you. Exactly the thing that is being shut down in the OP.
So instead of making a point about how a works council lowers tech workers' pay, you made a point for creating them.
Talents leaving the country is an actual problem (for Germany, not the software engineers), no wonder there’s a term for the shortage: The famous Fachkräftemangel.
The system we have (in north america) benefits a handful of individuals at the expense of MOST people. That's not a good system.
Also, speaking as a Canadian, we've got plenty of "brain drain" here, and it's not because we've got socialist labour laws - because for the most part we don't.
The US system can be summarised as "Fuck you, I got mine".
That said if we are honest we have to discover the positives of an individualist system vs a more collective system.
One of which is that exceptional people do on average do better than they would in a more collective system.
It's whether those people doing better is sufficient to offset all the people doing worse that is the debate and I think on balance no, it's not.
That said I'm also not one of those exceptional people either (not many of us here actually are) so that will colour my view, I'm a decent to good developer who writes stuff that works, provides value and gets paid so to me strong worker protections whether enforced by government or union make sense otherwise the power is all on the other side of the table.
(German) https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Viel-Arbeit-wenig-Mi...
Also, there is nothing special about software developers in Germany. They don't fare any worse than other technical staff. The biggest predictor for pay is the size of the company.
Having worked in the US for almost a decade, having seen a lot of different software companies because of my role, and now, long back in Germany, working for a new software company that I own a sizable part of (co-founded between "veterans" of the software industry), and looking at my country with new eyes after coming back from the US (and it took me quite a few years to come to the conclusions):
It seems obvious to me (now) that overall the US is quite a bit richer than Germany (questions about wealth distribution, inefficient health care, and education notwithstanding).
Software in particular is not exactly a strong suit of my country. We don't have the scale, we don't have the investments, we don't have the expertise (comparing the levels between US and Germany), we don't have the same kind of market outlooks to justify similar wages.
That last bit is just my own conclusion based on my own thoughts and observations, I did not study the subject. Even just walking around in what are supposed to be the best parts of my big city, after having seen much of the US where I traveled a lot and looked at many places and neighborhoods because I really liked exploring them, I am damn sure US "wealthy" is on another level to German wealth. I'm not looking at the top 1%, but top third or quarter. Below that it's harder to say, and when including questions of safety net or health the comparison is different - but we were talking about well-paid software engineers.
In my opinion, we (Germans) are not nearly in as good a position as we think or are told about ourselves. I think software engineers (and engineers in generell) simply can't be paid that much more here. It's not that all the money goes to somebody else, it's not there to begin with.
For example, the EU and the US as a market are not comparable. It is much easier to sell to all of the US than to even sell to just a few countries within the EU. It may be not too hard legally and logistically, but culturally the EU countries really are completely different countries. Germany is not exactly known as an exporter of software either, apart from SAP.
Looking at my company slack, we have a ton of channels with a "soc-" prefix, which we use to designate a channel that's there for social purposes rather than work. I think my employer would have a mutiny on their hands if tomorrow they decided to shut that down.
What would happen is Twitter the company employees tried to unionize and used the twitter service to organize. Could twitter ban them or suppress them? Would twitter have to let them do their thing regardless?
Of course twitter is a terrible medium for organizing anyway, so maybe Twitter would want them to use it! I hope if twitter employees do try to unionize they don't try and do it in tweets.
Let’s say it’s a rally: “Let’s organize and prevent Twitter from requiring proof of immunization status.”
It’s about unionization and demanding that Twitter not demand proof of immunization (if they were to require it), but it could be any number of things that are contrary to their liking including unionization.
However the specifics (e.g. what if there is a policy about what topics are OK, but some OK topics are non-work, or what if there is a general work-only policy that is selectively enforced against organizing) have gone back and forth depending on the administration.
Apple's behaviour is probably a result of a 2019 ruling [1] which opend the door to this kind of thing. Given that the administration has swung back to being fairly labor friendly, it'll be interesting if this gets to the NRLB to see if they find a way to make this illegal.
[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/labor-board...