Can you expand here?
perhaps i can shed some light. our union helps us negotiate for health insurance, dental, life insurance and a 401k contribution from our employer. in the first year we had it, we negotiated other things too. we de-gendered our shop floor bathrooms, made the company replace burned out overhead lights and exit sign "stickers" with real, light up exit signs. we made sure the break room was well lit (formerly all the lights were burned out) and there was a way to get our money back from the vending machines which were basicaly one armed bandits. we changed the way our facilities maintenance teams work to make sure they put down warning signs if theyve mopped and made sure the bathrooms got serviced once a day. we made a 2 year plan to provide functional safety guards on all the older equipment (met and done in 8 months by our awesome machine shop!) and finally fix the parking lot lights so employees felt safe going home on second shift.
these changes were also affected to non-union employees, mostly as a hold-the-line tactic to keep them from ever unionizing, but in the long run the company had to spend significant amounts of money on things that were traditionally deemed "non-essential" like toilet paper or exit signs.
a) Years at job = pay. Absolutely no pay increase or decrease for working harder or being better than average.
b) You are near impossible to fire unless you do something really dumb (caught watching porn at work multiple times, punch someone). You can be far below average and kinda sorta do your factory job and keep it for life.
Both are 1000000% against every fiber in my being, and would make me 100% never want to work at this kind of union. This is how like the autoworker and Police and teachers unions work.
There is no reason say a programmer union couldn't exist with different tools. And it could totally allow merit based pay and all of that. So by absolutely no means do I say that all unions are bad. I just know the standard American Union does not get along with my life goals.
IE - if you accept "work the least possible" as an individual, you yourself will do poorly. If the organization is forced to accept it, it will decline against other domestic competitors. If the country is forced to accept it, it will decline against international competitors.
In the US the biggest group complaining about lazy union employees are the other union employees.
What, where? In Sweden it's definitely not easy to get rid of workers. If you're doing layoffs rather than firing an individual you can't even pick and choose who to fire, you need to follow FIFO.
You're allowed to have a "trial period" for new employees though, during which it's easy to fire them.
Privileged Americans will do anything to steal labour and instead make the hard working people seem like the criminal. But the managers who steal money are completely safe and never accused by the privileged.
Only one of the reasons why unions are essential in US.
Rewards are distributed based off of merit and seniority. If you do more than what’s “expected”, there’s no guarantee it will lead to promotion. It’s more likely that you’ll just be given more work
I agree with you when you say that hard work is good for people, but doing this for your employer (as opposed to for FOSS or personal learning) will just screw you over in the long run
In the union mindset, there's no chance to do better - it's all been traded away for the chance to do "no worse than" which by definition benefits the less good/productive and hurts the best people.
This is part of the problem. If you work hard but don’t benefit, you’ve essentially fucked yourself because then you’ll get assigned more, you’ll be stuck carrying a bunch of people. Even if you factor in comp increases, how do you know there’s a net benefit to working hard? (specifically for your employer, on your own time is a different story)
It isn’t blind “probability”, it essentially turns into this little psychological game where management dangles promotions in front of people to manipulate them into doing more than is needed
> coupled with a good employee's ability to move to an employer that values someone like them.
Hasn’t aged well in the current job market
Ok so on a personal level, if this happened to me, my sequence of response would be (1) talk to my management to fix the situation (2) failing that, look for another place to work (3) failing that, dial down my level of engagement.
Right now, #3 is the worst case. With a union, #3 is the default case since the system is designed to prevent you from being rewarded.
Unions don't dictate your pay, they set a range and the company pays in that range for performance. It's no different than what your employer does to you today, except with a Union the ranges are known and negotiated collectively instead of the company dictating them.
Unions don't prevent people from being fired, they just require cause. Because the flip side of this is corporate firing people without cause days before the qualify for 401k matching, pension plan, or another stock vest or other such nonsense. You want to fire Bob because you don't like him? Tough luck, we're not here to be friends, we're here to work. Union says show evidence Bob isn't doing his job, then you can fire him.
To a certain extent, this is an explicit goal of unions. Where "working harder" means things like "unpaid overtime" and "taking shortcuts that risk your safety" we consider that a good thing.
Where "working harder" means "actually doing your job" we consider that a bad thing. Of course working 16 hours a day used to mean "actually doing your job" so there's considerable grey area here.
A specific job title would have a wage tied to the agreement, that increased based on years in the title and other negotiated increases. There were absolutely performance bonuses... as per the agreement, not at the whim of management.
Management gets to set a wide scope of performance requirements, and those he cannot meet them lose their jobs.
What I do see is that unions do a good job at preventing arbitrary abuses by management... and management really hates that.
*per friends who still work there
Furthermore, just look here in California to multiple successful white-collar unions: the WGA (writers), the DGA (directors), and SAG (actors). If you're bad at your job or people don't like to work with you, you won't get hired, yet meanwhile, the unions guarantee everything from health insurance to minimum pay to pension to residuals and therefore allow much greater mobility between studios, jobs, and shows.
It’s already like this
> b) You are near impossible to fire unless you do something really dumb (caught watching porn at work multiple times, punch someone). You can be far below average and kinda sorta do your factory job and keep it for life.
Good, the bullshit takes less time and leaves more time for foss or family life or whatever else
(many) European unions are collaborative with their employers and act like they fundamentally want to help the business grow so there's more to share. American unions, even when they are not outright corrupt mafia-eque organizations (ie, longshoresmen), are purely extractive.
Sure, I'll agree that our union system is not great, but I place the blame for this situation on employers.
It's OK to think that this is a good thing but this is not the same as a collaborative relationship, like you would have with coworkers or another team at a (non-dysfunctional) company.
Of course, it would be preposterous for workers to be elevating the needs of management over their own needs. After all, no one is looking out for them but them.
> They are attempting to extract as much as the labor market can support.
And what, precisely, do you think companies are doing?
In Europe it is often the case that companies and unions have a genuinely collaborative relationship where the unions will take the company's needs into consideration, and the company will take the worker's needs into consideration. It doesn't always work out, and each party has their own priorities of course. But it is often not nearly so adversarial as it is in the US. That it is like this is to a large extent a cultural peculiarity of the US rather than an immutable truth.
IF people (incl. those representing companies) were economically rational beings out to maximise their own short-term gain then that would be what would happen. But real people are not, and are often able to see that it creates a poorer, lower-trust society overall if they try to push for their immediate material needs too strongly.
This is of course all backed up by the legal and political systems (which will step in if either side oversteps the mark too far), and a long history in which these norms were established.
US unions can extract short-term benefits if the workers can hop to a comparable employer easily when the employer collapses. If workers in the EU are bound to an employer for 20 years, you need a long time-view.
Meanwhile you read about "All transit workers in <EU Country>" going on strike and causing widespread chaos (because no one else can get to work either) every 6 months or so. Usually, but not always, France.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_Romanian_teachers%27_stri... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_German_public_transport_s... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2023_French_pension_reform_unr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_French_labor_protests https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2019%E2%80%932020_French_pensi...