But could you imagine if we spoke about corporations in this manner? "I've worked for corporations and they are a mixed bag. In practice, they often abuse their employees. I've personally witnessed bosses who contributed nothing for years and just played politics."
For some reason we hold unions to an incredibly high standard of "no problems, ever" but this is never used to discourage all participation in the labor force because employers are often shitty.
Unions are democratically controlled worker organizations. Like democratic nations, they can contain abusers, they can be inefficient, and they can fail to solve problems effectively. But like democratic nations, they provide a powerful resistance to authoritarian abuse and on balance improve the quality of life for their people.
We definitely talk about corporations in this way. All the time, in fact!
(We can take that comparison further: people on HN sometimes do suggest that Uber drivers might be better off if they could only be hired as salaried employees but almost never say that about highly paid freelance developers. It's pretty similar when we're looking at the respective cost/benefit of collective bargaining arrangements for local bus drivers vs highly skilled developers earning two orders of magnitude more than bus drivers in an job market that offers practically unrivalled opportunities for people with their skillset.)
Edit: For those who disagree, how many modern societies are there without corporations running a majority of the economy? Not a single one. So as far as we know it doesn't work. It can work in theory, but it has never worked in practice. There are however many examples of modern economies with very little union influence, USA is an example, and USA is a better place to live than most countries. Unions can help, but countries that focused on strengthening unions and banning corporations did much worse than for example USA. Strengthening corporations and weakening unions however might have had some small negative effects but nearly not at the same level.
The US is arguably pretty subpar in terms of quality of life compared to other developed nations (little vacation, really expensive school system, poor health system for the masses leading to a lower life expectancy, high criminality rate, etc.). Of course, not all of it is due to unions, but they are all the consequences of policies being “pro business” instead of “pro people”.
Taxes are "hostile to corporations", but you wouldn't categorize a country as "hostile to corporations" based solely on the corporate tax rates. There's much more to the corporate landscape than just taxes.
Canada, the UK, Sweden, Germany [1]— there's plenty of countries that have higher union membership than the USA and are also arguably better places to live.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/chart/9919/the-state-of-the-unions/
This is a very subjective conclusion that is likely very dependent on what economic class you fall into. Many folks on HN (myself included) fall into the category white collar or professional workers. For many other parts of the labor market, you're literally trading sweat and toil for money.
Add to this that labor intensive jobs tend to lead to a lot of physical wear and tear with less medical benefits than white collar professionals typically receive, then just by quality of life and welfare alone most people doing physical labor would come to opposite conclusions re: pro union vs pro cooperation economic/governmental policies.
Corporations are just a vehicle for organizing work and profit around a venture. There are many other ways to organize work that have nothing to do with corporations or unions. Consider partnerships, sole proprietorships, cottage industries, co-ops, and more specific arrangements within those vehicles like profit sharing, limited partnerships, and employee ownership (not to be confused with stocks/options, though they are similar in concept).
Capitalism can take many forms, and not all of them require we turn the way we organize work and wealth generation into a zero-sum game between entrepreneurs and laborers. It's just the first thing we've found that's worked out in the environments it's been attempted in. I think there's room for businesses and economies to try out novel models for organizing work, and I suspect many of them could get us better or more efficient trade-offs between profit, productivity, and general welfare for all parties involved.
None of those have proven to work at scale though. So as far as we know corporations is how you have to do it. You can believe that there are other ways, but you cannot know that there are other ways as nothing else has proven to work.
[0] https://www.mittelstandsbund.de/themen/internationalisierung...
In the US, we have:
1. A poor social net, meaning employers need to take on the onus of providing many basic benefits like health care.
2. A political environment that conflates communism/socialism/collectivism, which really muddies the waters around organizations that aren't hierarchical.
3. A work culture that prizes profits over all else. Orgs do not have to be this way, and if you look at expectations/obligations of similar entities in other countries they're expected to balance profitability with things like social welfare.
I think you're right in that within the US, corporations have shown the best ability to scale, but I believe this is a consequence of the economic/regulatory/political environment of the US than inherent superiority of corporate governance.
There are too little countries hostile to corporations remaining today to compare, but I'd still argue that today's US has subpar QoL compared to France in the 80s which was arguably on the anti-corporation side (with price control and a state-owned monopoly for most economic activities – or, when it wasn't a monopoly, the biggest actor was state-owned)
Anyway, I'm not arguing that we should get rid of corporations, but we should dramatically reduce their power and influence on the economy, which is now at a level far above what's desirable.
The comment you're replying to didn't say anything about hostility to corporations, just hostility to unions, which are categorically not the same measurements. Germany, for example, is extremely pro-union while also being very pro-corporation. Their quality of life metrics are generally much higher than the US as well.
No there aren't. USA is not an example, every significant aspect of modern employment in the US has been shaped by unions.
Edit: Labor movements often called themselves unions though, but that was just a group of people getting together to protest and demand rights and has nothing to do with how modern unions works.
For example: "an organization of workers formed to protect the rights and interests of its members" - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/union
Honestly I think this is just continuing a very uninteresting semantics discussion - now we have to decide what "labor party" means. The point here is that you seem to have a different definition of "union" than the average person, which is fine, you should just be aware of that and watch out for misunderstandings when you're discussing with someone so you aren't talking past each other.
What you wrote in your edit is what a Union means in Europe, it's just formalized as an entity.
Playing devil's advocate, what you say is probably true on the supply side. However, the other side, consumer demand, is mostly driven by people unaffiliated with corps. That is, families arguably drive the majority of the economy. (That said this argument feels more than a little pedantic, but it must be made!)
I know in context you don't intend that but just a pejorative based around the fact corporations are a legal structure. Although I'm always puzzled by what the actual problem with this is. And I'll go on a tangent from the topic.
The legal system is fictional in basically the same way a corporation is. So is all other aspects of a government. Even the legal rights that a real person has are just about as far removed from flesh and blood as the legal entity of a corporation is from the brick and mortar and people that make up a corporation (for those corporations that have such corporeal bodies).
Having almost no appreciation for legal systems or their history, I would also guess that the idea a stroke of the pen suddenly gives birth to corporations which spread their ruin across the earth is backward, or at least much more complicated. Usually it is the legal system catching up with reality, solving problems like regulating existing practice of the time. Laws are shaped by society as much or maybe more than society is is shaped by laws, in my opinion.
I mean, argue specific problems of corporate law, but the general disparagement of "legal make-believe" I don't understand. The entire legal system is built on it, there's a lot of good things that are done with it.
But even if I was right there, I would agree I was trying to be overly pedantic and ended up distracting from the point I was trying to make.
There's no metaphysical Lockean value production going on inside of a corporation. When it produces value, the value it produces is the value that its employees produce. Waxing poetic about the value of corporations is thusly mostly a game of smoke and mirrors that obscures the real source of that value (the humans doing the work), and detracts from the actual advantage that comes from incorporation (i.e., solving the coordination game and thereby extracting more value from workers).
In my experience the value of incorporating has not been to hire people but the legal protections and ability to create certain tax structures for retirement planning that benefit the owners.
> A corporation doesn't require any employees.
In reality some employees are required in order to keep the corporate designation that allows the use of certain retirement plans.
Likewise, unions aren't "politically created structure": they're not created in a top-down manner by the state. They're a form of collective organization and bargaining, the sort that is singularly responsible for the quality of life and workplace protections that we all take for granted.
Then why are you so upset that people don't want to create the "politically created structure" version of unions? Why not just organize as workers and call yourself a union? Can even create a workers party, like they have in basically every other single other developed country, and then that workers party can stand up for your rights. But that workers party isn't a union. Basically every single developed country except USA has labor parties. Democrats aren't a labor party, they are a party of mostly lawyers.
I'm not. I'm not a communist, and I don't think I asserted that I wanted a state-enforced union anywhere. Stronger protections for collective organization and bargaining would suffice in my book.
Edit: And, for what it's worth, you can't just create a union in the US. You need to be recognized by the NLRB for any collective action to be considered legitimate and protected under the law.
It's fair trade in the beginning because of high risk during the founding of the company but the tradeoff becomes less fair as the risk lowers and the company becomes more mature.
If we were truly looking for more advanced forms of organization beyond the status quo, I would expect that economic imperialism would not exist. Instead, even more aspects of basic society are capitalized and in recent decades also codified using the inflexible mechanisms of computer code. The last remaining hold outs do so at their own expense[3]. So no, I don't think we're exploring the possibility space of superior economic technology, we're stagnating.
1. As a self-preservation principle
2. See M. Fisher, Capital Realism - https://libcom.org/files/Capitalist%20Realism_%20Is%20There%...
3. Market, political, cultural, economic forces all contribute to the complete and total capture of universal capitalism. Those who wish not to comply face political, social, and economic sanctions from the individual to national levels.
No? Do you consider the fact that very few people have working conditions like those outlined above an enormously valuable thing for society?
Great. Then you agree that Unions have created enormous amounts of value as well.
I'm all for labor engaging in politics, but they can do that without paying union dues for working at a company. The problem USA's workers face today isn't lack of unions, it is lack of proper representation in their democracy.
Ahahaha, do you also think that voting rights and anti-segregation laws were due to the 'civil rights movement', and not civil rights activists such as MLK jr or civil rights organizations such as the NAACP?
And so if the people in these movements made smaller organizations to advance the goals of the movement at their workplace, in their local communities, and the national level... we might even credit those organizations, yes? Just like we do with the civil rights movement?
>Labor organized in every single democracy regardless if there were unions or not.
Some economies skipped steam power too, but every early industrial economy had labor unions predate modern labor standards.
For example, why even have a vote? Why have enforced term limits for unions that you can't kick them out before the limit is up? Why no bargaining as a group without a vote?
A movement that hopes to continue must become an organization, that is, a collection of humans who agree to engage with each other according to an agreed upon set of rules.
Your whole “movement != union” is a distinction without a difference.
> what we call unions today are not that.
Unions don't involve organizing, protesting, or fixing problems? How do you think unions ever get a contract?
Your comment makes frustratingly little sense to me.
Unions don't have to be bad. I'd just argue that the labor law system in the US is pure awful.
Just like the US has three branches of government there are really four fundamental organizations in society: government, corporations, religion and unions.
They work best by keeping each other in check. Right now unions have been decimated and corporations have bought out the government and religion.
Unions aren't optional, we're just slowly and corrosively finding out why, despite their flaws, they need to exist (and they don't work if people aren't involved in them).
"running a majority of the economy" doesn't seem to necessarily be the relevant metric to be optimizing for. But I'll cede that many of the largest countries in the world do not have solid union rights.
There's reasons other than being an absolute requirement for why everyone's currently using something
But it is always about individual bad actors, not "corporations".
When MacDonald's franchises get press showing they're stealing employees' wages, people blame MacDonald's, or the individual franchises.
When some union leader embezzles money, people talk about "those unions".
There really aren't. Perhaps if there were, union representation wouldnt be so desperately needed.
Edit: I would like to reiterate that I am pro-union. I am just saying that unions are optional, but businesses (or the government as some have pointed out) are more necessary from the standpoint you don’t usually form a union and then start a business. I like unions, but they are technically optional and I think that fact is what leads to people being more critical of them. When businesses/government sucks, there’s kind of a “well that’s how it is I guess.” When a union sucks, there’s a “why even do this then?”
So you need to separate the more conceptual parts of unions - that maybe we should value sustainable and secure employment over shareholder value, that laborers should be able to negotiate collectively and not individually, that you can do good work that is beneficial to the public by prioritizing happy laborers - from the very specific implementation of unions that we happen to have. Without our current model of for-profit businesses, the implementation of unions would not be a coherent concept (and admittedly they are a bit less coherent now and when applied to e.g. tech companies than they were in the past for the businesses for which they were designed - which isn't to say they're the wrong answer, just that they're an awkward fit). But the values are still valid.
As a sibling comment said, worker-owned cooperatives are one model here. Another similar option is very small companies: the concept of a solo founder unionizing makes no sense, but the solo founder of a bootstrapped "lifestyle business" has most of the benefits one generally wants from unions, and communities of such businesses can choose to federate for a better voice in the market. There are certainly a lot of other options besides the idea of a large business owned by its founders or publicly traded.
But really developers would be better off with something along the lines of a trade guild. Something that enforces standards on employers and employees.
But we do.
I'd argue that if you hop into other threads about how everyone is worried about financial/societal collapse in the US that it is the end result of decimating unions in the 80s.
You just don't notice right away that you need unions when you lose them, corrosively much later you notice that society has gone off the rails.
Support and call center staff? Certainly can use a union. Developers? Far too diverse conditions.
I guess we dont necessarily need child labor laws or the weekend...
Remember when the cacophony of calls to "End the Olympics Now" when the IOC was found to be grossly corrupt? No, me neither. The investor owned media called for reform. As it will for literally any other institution.
Tennis is necessary.
I could point to a hundred nonluxuries America doesnt have because it doesnt have enough union density, too - e.g. paid maternity leave.
But that's not inherent to a union. Cities shouldn't cede these extraordinary powers to the union in the first place, and if they already have, they should take them back.
Who doesn't talk about corporations in this manner? Doesn't everyone?
> Unions are democratically controlled worker organizations. Like democratic nations, they can contain abusers, they can be inefficient, and they can fail to solve problems effectively. But like democratic nations, they provide a powerful resistance to authoritarian abuse and on balance improve the quality of life for their people.
Democracy doesn't make sense in every situation. It makes sense for countries because we are born into citizenship. If you dislike a company you can just leave.
In situations where you can't "just leave," unions may make sense. Google is not an example of this. Everyone who works at Google could leave and find a job elsewhere tomorrow.
Corporations are usually horrendously corrupt so we should abolish them all?
No. Bit of a fringe view, that.
The rule is, if it's a court, company, government, NGO or serbian tennis club then corruption should be met with reform.
In the predominantly investor owned media, corruption in unions leads to calls to abolish them. It's standard.
People voluntarily don't work for corporations whose mission or behavior is incompatible with their values; they do not have that option with unionization. If the union allows workers to not join the union, not charge dues for being an non-member, and not support them, then nobody would have a problem with them.
It's really really easy to work in a non unionized workplace if thats what you want.
> People voluntarily don't work for corporations whose mission or behavior is incompatible with their values
And so if that corporation has signed a security clause agreement with a union, they are free to not work with that corporation.
Unions do not force workers to join a union shop, just as those people are free to not work for corporations whose mission is incompatible with their values, they are also free to not work for corporations subject to a union security clause that their owners voluntarily signed.
Because they are democratic institutions. They can be held to a no-problems standard because every time a problem occurs then those involved can be sacked and replaced. The level of acceptable corruption is set by the membership. Rules should therefore focus on openness and member participation in leadership selection. Everyone who hates unions because of X or Y, to them I say join the leadership and run the union the way you think it should be run. Tearing down the system doesn't fix anything.
This is like saying if you don't like the gangs in your area you should join them and try to reform them to do social work instead.
Why isn't it valid to say you don't like unions and so don't want anything to do with them?
Because you can't possibly have personally experienced every union, and the media isn't good at covering unions generally, so whatever bias you're (or anyone else making this statement is) presenting here feels unearned.
This is similar to the bias of racism or homophobia, right? Like, "I saw a Black person steal something, so now I think that all Black people are untrustworthy." Or, "I saw a gay man hit on a straight guy and now I think all gay men are sex pests." These are declarative statements about all people in those groups based on a small amount of information and on societal bias.
And these biases rarely go the other way – do you also end up saying, "I don't like corporations and don't want anything to do with them?" Corporations are, by far, have a vastly worse record on theft, corruption, anti-environmental practices, etc.
And nobody has to earn the right to decline to be pulled into a political organisation they don't want anything to do with. If someone doesn't want to join your club the right response is to think about how to attract them, not to ask them to justify why they don't want to join. Otherwise do you join every single political party? They all claim to represent your interests!
I'm not realistically able to live my life without working with a corporation. I am demonstrably able to live my life without a union. So the bar for the union entering my life, adding that extra complexity, taking some of my money and borrowing the little power I have, is of course far higher.
It's right to be extremely skeptical of anyone who claims to want to represent your interests. Because usually they really want to use your power to represent their own interests.
A lot of people view corporations in a justifiably negative light (very few people say that corporations are an unalloyed good, and I have never heard anyone wish that they could work for an LLC). But a corporation is chartered to make money - we expect it to act accordingly and for the most part companies do make money (when they fail to make money, they cease existing and the general consensus is 'good riddance').
A union on the other hand is chartered to advocate for the rights and needs of workers. The standards and expectations for a union are fundamentally different than for a corporation. It depends on the union, but a lot unions don't really carry out their core function and there are no consequences for this failure. Given that Unions claim a democratic mandate to advocate for labor, people are justifiably upset when they see their union doing nothing to represent their interests.
They are supposed to serve a higher purpose than just make money.
If you were being equivalently fair to unions you would say that their sole purpose is to take dues.
>a lot unions don't really carry out their core function and there are no consequences for this failure
Yes, they do, they lose members.
And they often use violence or threat of violence to try to stop this - see their reaction to 'scabbing'.
If I say I don't want to work for my company any more they'd either say 'farewell' or even offer me money to stay.
If you don't want to be part of a union or a strike, you better be prepared to be harassed and intimidated.
If it's a competition for who has managed the most extreme violence in relation to an industrial dispute in America the prize would go to the manager of a coal mine in west virginia who brought in a private air force to bomb strikers (battle of blair mountain).
I somehow doubt youll find a union that has managed that level of unbridled violence.
The most extreme violence isnt in defence of livelihoods, it's in the service of profit.
But it is a routine occurrence to have picket lines in industrial disputes today, and to deliberately harass people who choose to go into work.
In the coal mining strikes in the UK in the 80s it got to the point where union members literally killed a taxi driver for taking a worker past a picket line.
Google aren't going to kill an Uber driver for taking me to work at Facebook instead.
The united fruit company paid for paramilitaries to assassinate strikers in Central America.
This is a world away from dropping a brick on a taxi because your livelihood is under threat.
But membership is mandatory if there is a union at that corp. A union is like a service they can't ever unsubscribe from without changing jobs.
For government work especially, unions can start to take over management functions. So employees end up wanting a second union to protect them from abuses by their main union.
This is untrue in every state. In some states you have to pay dues even if your aren't a member, but closed shops aren't legal.
We don't expect a corporation to abuse workers, even if it makes them money.
when they fail to make money, they cease existing and the general consensus is 'good riddance'
The history of bailouts would suggest otherwise.
One Slight Difference - Corporations are supposed to serve their owners' financial interests. Unions are supposed to serve their members. How 'bout we speak just as harshly of mission-failure unions as we do of mission-failure corporations?
OTOH, I certainly agree with your 4th para - "...Like democratic nations, they can contain abusers, they can be inefficient, and they can fail...".
My ability to negotiate salaries with my boss is one of them.
The scope of my job (some unions get to decide what you are allowed to do).
Who should get fired (teachers unions make it impossible for bad teachers to be fired, so students are forced to put up with them)
If you should be allowed to work. Some unions forbid you to work during strikes. Often by force and by threat. Some unions manage to lobby for regulations that make it harder to get into a job. Then you need certifications and/or degrees to even consider a job.
Unfortunately many use the "democratic union" argument to control your ability to make personal decisions. Unions that get to channel power from the government (commonly through regulations) can easily abuse their power. When unions are not voluntary they easily become HOAs for jobs
If you are an at-will employee in the US, your ability to do any of that is entirely at the discretion of your employer. You have no rights to do any of the above. You might have more leverage or better treatment in specific scenarios, but again, the hard truth is that all of this is entirely at the whim of management.
If you are in SAG you are not allowed to work on non-union productions.
In addition, it's quite possible that in the future someone like me could not get my current job due to regulation. I know people in the same line of work as me that is forced to pay union dues because of his degree. The unions associated with the undergrad course he took forced him to pay union dues unless he can prove his current job does not relate to his degree. This is just absurd but still happens. I'd rather not have other people have even more control over me, no matter how much the word "democratic" is added to the argument
To be clear - I absolutely agree that these are all important and these powers need to be exercised wisely. But without democratically controlling them, every single one of them is controlled by management/HR. Why do you feel that management/HR is going to do a better job of controlling those things?
That's not the standard. The standard is "are unions worth the trouble they cause?". I've worked in industries, as a union employee doing manual labor, where I would say yes. I don't think unions are worth the trouble for tech workers.
> But like democratic nations, they provide a powerful resistance to authoritarian abuse and on balance improve the quality of life for their people.
The fact that I can easily switch employers is a more effective protection against an abuse than a union ever could be.
Because not working is not a viable option for any significant number of people. But you can certainly work without union representation.
There are approximately 93 million adults (civilian noninstitutional population) that don't work[0]. I'm sure it's not all because of the employers themselves, but surely a lot don't want to deal with the politics and culture imposed on them by managerial talent [maybe some study on this portion of the population's reason for not working would be useful].
0: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.t01.htm (Men, 20 years and over->Not in labor force + Women, 20 years and over->Not in labor force)
Which includes retired people, people with disabilities who can't work, stay at home spouses (who arguably are working, but not for an employer), students. Those reasons have nothing to do with avoiding "politics and culture imposed on them by managerial talent"
> maybe some study on this portion of the population's reason for not working would be useful
See above
Unions fundamentally redistribute the value that's been captured. That's not universal -- there's unions that make workers happier and result in more productivity, unions that are not adversarial and take on an HR function that's more in tune with employees -- but it is fundamentally why there can be successful companies with no unions, but of course no successful unions with no companies. Arguably, U.S. unions are more adversarial than European unions, and in many manufacturing, automobile, shipping industries have prevented their parent companies from adopting new technology, rolling out new practices, etc. to the extent that said parent companies were no longer competitive.
Workers labor mixed with capital creates value. Businesses are just a way of organizing that interaction that, if it succeeds, makes the interaction more efficient.
The businesses through the ownership of capital are the ones doing the redistributing of value, they are the ones writing the checks. Unions just negotiate that the redistribution allocates more of the pie to labor rather than the owners
Capital providers colluding to set a loan rate is illegal. We shouldn't allow them to collude legally; they are a small number of experienced actors operating with information asymmetry already.
Organizers (i.e. senior management) colluding is--I don't know the legality--just unnecessary. They often are paid based on value add (equity, bonuses, etc.), so they are already reasonably aligned and need no further protection.
Workers can exist and do exist with or without collusion (i.e. unions). As a society, we've reasonably decided that colluding is legal, because workers often add a lot of value but have individual low value-over-replacement (hard to organize because of numbers, often inexperienced, etc.). Unions exist to help raise individual value-over-replacement closer to value-add.
What's being discussed here is the pluses and minuses of unionization. What I disagree with is people in this thread--not specifically you--comparing the collusion of workers to the existence of capital or organization (i.e. corporations are sometimes bad! why doesn't anyone discuss that!).
First, obviously people complain about corporations all the time. But second, private companies (capital and organization and workers) add value, and no society has done well without a large component of this.
There are many pluses to unions. But, especially as currently implemented, the minuses exist too, including that many of them focus on raising VOR but wholly ignore value-add, in a way that forces the business into slower and poorer decisions; or shielding some workers from the consequences of adding little to no value.
Unions are just the workers colluding in the same fashion to increase their negotiating power
Whether you give me capital at a 1% interest rate of a 50% interest rate; whether you buy 1% of my company for $1,000 or 1% of my company for $100,000,000; are independently determined by each provider of capital. Collusion would be all banks working together to only provide me a loan for 30% interest even if it's obvious I can pay it back.
The use of capital is irrelevant to the question of collusion for providing capital. That's like saying all the workers on a factory line are inherently already colluding because they work towards producing the same car.
A union is merely the labor version of joining together to increase leverage and is not any special level of collusion greater than the investors is what I am getting at
And yes saying the workers are colluding because they are working on the same car is what’s happening if you are going to call banding together to negotiate rates is colluding. There is non union labor and other unions
No, most people are holding them to reasonable standards. Just like people hold medical doctors to not kill people by their negligence. Some might say it is incredibly high standard as well but I do not think so. I am afraid employers are shitty so union can be shitty is not a great advertisement for unions.
> Unions are democratically controlled worker organizations...
It would interesting to understand why these shining democratic organization don't directly provide work to people. Overall wouldn't it be much better than working for grubby capitalists. May be not in USA but other countries can eliminate the concept of corporations/companies and just simply have unions.
If unions had the same internal checks against abuse: Financial compliance, ability and desire to fire corrupt officials, ability to fire abusive members as well as management, were active in progress (rather than protect against progress), and acted as an arbiter for the best interest for all parties (worker, employer, self (union), and economy at large) I think I’d have a better experience with them. As they are they are parasitic to a significant degree.
That’s in no way turning a blind eye to the reforms they enabled in the first half of the XX century.
They are now like the non-profit whose original reason to be ceased to exist but now want to continue existing for the sake of the management structure who find themselves with an evaporated mission.
If not in the almost exclusively investor owned media then in the attendance-mandatory antiunion propaganda meetings you will be forced to attend if managment start to fret.
There's no danger of not hearing the cons.
We don't represent the public. Whether we're working on behalf of the public depends on whether you think the government's position represents 'the public', and which part of the public you're most interested in. (The interests of childless taxpayers who don't believe in the importance of university education are not well represented by lecturers and their unions, surprisingly enough...)
I think what I'm saying is that some of the conflicts between unions and management are zero-sum, but others are not. And while public sector unions can narrowly represent a producer interest, that certainly isn't true of all situations.
It would be wise to question why the military was brought in to get rid of them - both in the UK or the US.
What's to say that founders, managers and execs bleeding people dry isn't also something equally "tired" given that in today's labor market, any such leadership will bleed out talent that will vote with their feet for greener pastures?
As a sibling comment said, unions have their pros and cons.
So yes, pros and cons with unions, but let's not forget where the balance of power is right now.
Me and my co-workers create wealth, a portion of which is sent off in dividends, the majority of which is going to heirs who have never worked a day in their life. I am more concerned about that than that the guy working next to me isn't killing himself more to fill that heir's pockets.
Organized labor is made up of the people working and creating wealth. Of course you don't mention the indolence of the idle class expropriators who the people doing the work are organizing to combat.
I love how people have an easier time imagining colonies on mars than giving labor a platform to express their interests.
Think about that while you’re bashing them.
Because you do not think that when employees get together as a single negotiating entity they have more negotiating power? I mean, I understand you don't like unions but I am sure you understand the principle of balance of power.
> Unions are compulsory in blue states (non-right-to-work). They are also political entities funding specific candidates, parties, and causes which means union dues is compelled political speech. It’s crazy.
In those states you can ask to only pay the part of the dues that concern bargaining activities.
Employees like that exist everywhere.
I've seen union stewards padding their own pockets with members dues through lavish "retreats" to five-star resorts.
Managers like that exist everywhere.
None of your complaints/experiences are about unions specifically, but rather they're about dishonest people who use unions for their own gain. Unions are certainly a mechanism that people can abuse to get away with being lazy or greedy, but let's not pretend that people who aren't unionized don't do that as well. If you include business owners who exploit workers then it's likely that it happens far more outside of unions than inside.
In practice, that's what power often does in any situation. So the question often boils down to "who do you want to benefit from the 'abuse, stagnation and corruption'?" because someone will.
> I've personally witnessed union employees who contributed nothing for years, get perpetually shifted from team to team to team and even promoted because it was too complex and costly to fire them.
And there are tons of examples of hardworking non-union employees getting shafted, so the do-nothing shareholders can collect more profits.
In almost all settings, shareholders are the group that contributes the absolute least to an organization (e.g. most didn't really even invest anything, they just bought a share that's long circulated in the stock market), yet their interests are the ones that are prioritized. A lot of people who are strongly against the mythically-large do-nothing union employee seem to have no problem with do-nothing shareholders.
Another railway union, the TSSA had a generally "no strike" policy but would still provide support for any disagreements with management.
I guess, as always, be careful for what you wish for, you might not be able to afford to go on strike for something you don't feel very strongly about because the union says so and if you don't strike, well, good luck continuing to work there.
1. I don't want pay banding based on job title, I am capable of negotiating this myself. This is especially true because I can remain at senior Dev level but based on contribution I can be compensated, not by title .
2. Historically there's evidence of damage to industry caused by unions.
3. The unionised work places I have heard about second hand, do not sound like places I want to work. For example unproductive employees not fired, promotions and internal job moves being extremely bureaucratic and check box oriented.
4. I do not want to be forced to pay union dues.
5. I do not want people telling me I must strike.
But I can tell you from experience - it's definitely not "one lazy guy" - it becomes endemic because the process for dismissal becomes so costly. It's extremely demoralizing working alongside people who are "working the system" and are lazy as fcuk. It's better to just leave.
Here in the US, corporations all over are making record profits! Buying back shares like never before! Unless you want to play definition games about what a "competitive market" is, plenty of companies in competitive markets have big pots of gold to hand to employees.
There's no pot of gold in most cases. But I still think there's a good case for unionization.
Also worth noting; companies pay taxes on their profits, so while there's a lot of incentive to report high profits when a company is looking for investors, there's also plenty of incentive to hide profits (and thus lower operating margins) or shift them to subsidiaries in countries with lower taxes when companies that don't need to inflate their value. I am curious wether the stats you found take this into account.
This typically translates to "the company's successfully lobbied for trade agreements that allow us to force our domestic labor to compete against impoverished foreign workers in a developing nation with nonexistent environmental and safety standards," which is a race to the bottom for everyone but aristocrats.
I think the problem in the US is that the country is deeply right-wing when it comes to labor policy. The union/management relationship in the US is designed to be adversarial. In Germany, it's legally mandated for unions to be represented at the board level, and that kind of cooperative relationship's results speak for themselves. Here, that idea would be considered tantamount to bolshevism.
This is anecdotal, but it reminds me on one of the main ISPs here, one of the union heads even gets a free house from the company and doesn't like even work. They just try to keep him happy to avoid causing trouble.
Unions don't make sense in tech because everyone owns the means of production (a computer) and have widely different levels of output. 10x engineers are a thing. Plus tech workers have high leverage, high pay (top 5%? 1%?), can easily get a new job, or can start their own tech company by themselves with their laptop.
Trying to enforce a union structure in tech is counterproductive, extractive and entirely unnecessary.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/google-apple-wage-suppression...
I would rather have a system where a small percentage of the workers can be shitheads and lose their giant mega corporation employer money than a system where the company can just exploit ALL of its workers in any way it wants to.
My father, who did not finish high school, was able to earn a living as a construction worker that afforded us a computer in the 90’s. That is how I started programming which paved the way for to make $500k the last year I choose to work. This is absolutely survival-ship bias, but it’s my only experience with unions.
Disclaimer: My personal view is that union can work for private organizations, but unions of government employees are absolutely evil. The reason is that a private company can die, so the power of its unions is naturally limited. On the other hand, government won't die (or die slowly), so its unions can issue all kinds of unreasonable demand.
P.S., If we assume that an employer is "bad" because it opposes union, isn't it the typical case of attacking one's motive? Scott Adam calls it mind reading. To me, it's one of the most dangerous fallacy in mankind. Read the history of self-claimed do-gooders such as Chinese/French/Cambodian committing genocide, and we can see the progressives in those countries all started with attacking their political opponents' motive.
It's like when you're a kid and you win some sweets, and your parents decide you have to share them with your little brother. There may be a desire to do so, but does he get half your sweets?
Don't get me wrong. I'm for unions, but when people don't see an improvement, it'll leave a sour taste in their mouths.
If you consider the case of publicly-traded employers (there's a different argument for pre-exit startups that comes out to a similar conclusion): they could give you your compensation entirely in cash, because shares are pretty liquid. And you could buy stock in your own employer. But very few people think that's a good idea, because now you have correlated risk across your own actual job (both continued employment and things like the ability of the company to give large bonuses/raises) and your investments. So the company effectively forces you to buy some of their stock and not sell it for some period of time. You know exactly how much you're forced to buy because, again, the company is publicly traded and you know what that's worth; you just get it in illiquid form.
So, by giving you part of your compensation in this funny form instead of in normal cash, they get you to feel internally conflicted about policies that improve your cash compensation (and other intangible benefits) at the expense of a theoretical drop in your funny-cash compensation. That doesn't benefit you (even if you were the sort of person who wanted to invest in your own employer, you're still free to do that on your own if you want, so forcing you to do it is at best equivalent to giving you the option), but it does massively benefit the people who own way more shares in the company than you ever will.
What has always bothered me is that whenever I've been paid partly in shares, it has been non-voting shares or options (or both). Still no representation either way. If government was done with no representation we'd be within our rights to revolt - it gas always struck me as odd that even employee shareholders are denied that same representation.
Hold up that's actually a good idea. It would help a lot of entry level devs bulk up their resume and learn hands on skills. This would lead to an influx of sorely needed new talent to the entire tech industry and enable a lot more innovation than was possible before, if only due to HR red tape.
Look at the unions for professional athletes or for Hollywood writers for examples where unions are mostly doing very good work on behalf of their members.
Which is just too say that a healthy organization is hard. There are no panaceas.
I'm mixed on unions, all told. I don't like the dichotomy they enforce between management and workers. This often exists anyway, so I can't blame unions. And it is also true that individuals don't have the leverage for negotiation that groups do, such that it makes sense on why they can get better conditions when just between company and group.
Unions sound to me like just another layer of bureaucracy, with its own mind and interests. Any extra bureaucracy increases corruption and inefficiencies.
Why? I likewise have mixed feelings about unions, but I have repeatedly noticed this pattern in countries with strong (typically: constitutionally-protected) unions.
I'd be delighted to see data on this. My prior is that it is rather evenly mixed with no obvious cause.
It talks about other forms of worker representations in an company. I think it's provides a couple of decent alternatives to just having unions and their pros and cons
Corporations are (according to M.Friedman) Sociopaths guided by attorneys who define what's strictly legal, who's sole goal is to maximize profits.
I guess that means there are people in corporations too? Does the transitive property apply?
PS! If you work at google, don't pay the dues: ever. Give the money to domestic violence shelters instead. Put that receipt into your union due. Fuck unions.