Something I don't like whenever these discussions come up is the condescending tone, from white collar workers. "Don't these poor people know what's good for them????"

Working class people are capable of thinking for themselves and it's not that uncommon for people to move from a union shop to a non-union shop due to the reasons outlined above.

Exhibit A of poorly informed: grandparent poster seriously thinking he has more individual bargaining power against trillion dollar corporations than a collective bargaining agreement would.

Exhibit B: grandparent poster thinking collective bargaining _must_ entail many aspects like seniority based compensation that are totally optional.

Tom Brady is in the NFL players association. Tom Cruise is in the Screen Actors guild. Naive techies think being good at leetcode hard gives them bargaining power. A lot of ex Tweeps are getting a wake up call.

The only reason techies had the illusion of negotiation leverage is that they were generating such absurdly high revenue for their employer, the slice they got seemed huge compared to the rest of the country’s gutted middle class. Factor in inflation, housing, and that Wall St is now gunning hard to bring tech compensation down, and you’ll realize techies are the last gasp of Americas dying middle class, and that really pisses off activist hedge funds . See Elliott Managements recent takeover of Pinterest so they could “re-level” employees.

Read the emails between Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin w.r.t high tech class action lawsuit. Read about Google hiring union busting consultant firms.

If unions didn’t work, tech execs wouldn’t be so terrified of them.

Yes, poor people should also unionize. And yes, unfortunately a lot of their options are as broken and corrupt as their employers.

That doesn’t change the fundamental fact that collective bargaining is the _only_ answer .

Worse still is that these firms have been caught collectively bargaining against workers through illegal secretive non-compete clauses. Wage suppression has been going on for years, even while these companies have been at the very top of thriving businesses.

It’s simply not a question of affordability. These companies did it because they could.

I’d also like to point out that much of the union activity of a hundred years ago was also about poor working conditions, and not just compensation. Much of that was quelled by increasing government regulations that protected workers against exploitation. Is the government adequately performing this job?

You think that has anything to do with their compensation? Tom Brady has won how many Super Bowls? Tom Cruise has had how many blockbuster movies?

The opposite should be true if unions were the great equalizers, no single actor/athlete would be making hundreds of millions a year and all of them would be making enough to buy a house in Beverly Hills.

This makes no sense. Two people that are in unions are doing the thing you say they can't. What in the world?

They were responding to a post specifically asking about Americans' feelings toward unions. That made it pretty clear to me where his points were coming from.

If they were responding from Finland I'd be a little confused why they were responding at all.

In general, nobody is constrained to just discussing USA unions but the particular subthread[1] that you're in which was started by gp (Zeyka) was asking specifically about America. And that's probably because this thread's article is about American unions.

That's why your clarification (to poster wallawe) was perceived as redundant and out of place.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34028480

With your unionized coworkers that might be a possibility. With the business owners that’s a certainty. Do you feel differently about these two groups of people?

lol

-in most cases, the employer is able to fire with cause. The union keeps the employer from using layoffs as a weapon.

- pay scales reward loyalty and keeps the workplace stable.

- without the union, you have almost no bargaining power. The union usually gets a better rate for everyone than any one person could have negotiated. This is in fact the point of collective bargaining. Even the presence of a union job site can lift wages across industries. I see this in Oshawa, where the CAW jobs making car bits helps waitresses and sales associates draw higher wages.

-the employer is rent-seeking on their capital. The union balances this.

-unions are not criminal organizations. The teamsters have done some things in the past. If we didn't have so much union busting, there would be more unions competing for workplaces, and this would drive bad unions out of business.

-unions are political, and need legal protections for workers. Tesla will eventually have to deal with a union or treat their workers better than the UAW.

-I don't like that the state grants asymmetric privileges to the employer class, like never prosecuting white collar crimes, and not clawing back exec severances during bankruptcy, and giving them a lower tax rate than their employees.

-there are many things wrong with policing in the us, but all could be fixed with fedral legislation. The unions are aligned with their membership, and doing great work. The wider outcomes are horrible, but that's a good union doing good work.

The tech industry has arguably developed quickly because people move around a lot, taking best practices with them. Workplace stability might appear locally great, but it hurts the industry as a whole.

/s

You absolutely do. The most powerful bargaining power of all: the power of the alternative. It's also called "pay me, or I leave" (most often accompanied by "I have an outside offer"). I exercised this power a few times in my career. I did not need any union to bargain for me.

Why would you want a less powerful version of the same thing? Even if you don't involve your union, you can still do what you're describing.

You've gained nothing unique by avoiding the union.

I doubt you can. Your boss will tell you he can't pay you more than what's on the grid negotiated with the union. My wife works in a place with a union (and is a member of it), and there is such a grid. Nobody even thinks individual bargaining is a possibility.

If you are in a union shop, you can't get paid more than what's on the grid. If you want more, you need to resign and get somewhere else. But don't pretend you have a choice to do "individual bargaining".

Unions eliminate the individual bargaining power of people.

Except, of course, if we choose to use your definition, and call resigning and moving to another job "bargaining".

You not liking their choice doesn't mean there was no choice.

Just join the union, you'll get paid more anyways.

You don't.

If you were to come to my company and try to convince me to start a union, I'd say "thanks, but no thanks".

Just now, you are trying to convince me that I'd be retaining my individual bargaining power, if I accept to use a different definition.

Well, I was born in a Communist country, where they were fond of changing definitions. We were free to vote for whomever we wanted, as long as it was someone on the list presented to us. We had no say in who was on that list. Of course, we were free to not vote at all, right? Boys had to do mandatory military service. You know how they were called when they were conscripted? "Volunteers". That was the official name.

So, yes, I'm used to the tactic of changing definitions. But if you are serious about presenting an argument, you should no use this tactic.

- I don't want free speech because it is unfair to award lazy thinking free riding off established publications.

- I don't want free speech because it is often exploited by terrorists.

- I think people should be free to say things but I don't think it should grant them special protection from the government.

etc.

It isn't an exact comparison but that also isn't the point.

You’ve proven the point about inequality.

If you mean the federal tax credit, it was the OLD one that stopped going to Tesla (due to the per-model caps in place; caps that any competitor could also reach after enough sales, mind you). The new credit that was signed into law this year does not exclude Tesla (instead, it excludes cars manufactured overseas).

Fortunately for your ability to empathize with the plebeians in the regular world, Musk has shown that software companies are probably employing at least twice as many programmers as they need, so this job market should be turning south soon.

After ten-twenty years of being employed half the time and your salary going down with every new job I'm sure you'll be mentally broken down enough to empathize with the blue collar pro-union perspective.

No, he hasn’t; he hasn’t even shown that Twitter was doing that.