6 ms·

My father was a sheet metal worker for many years. He always described the union meetings as a bunch of drunk* old men voting down any spending on training, som

by dmm 10y ago

My father was a sheet metal worker for many years. He always described the union meetings as a bunch of drunk* old men voting down any spending on training, something that would generally benefit younger men. Even while the pension fund is underfunded and highly dependent on younger men to pay into it. My only direct experience with a union was when I was working for a federal govt agency. This org was steadily shrinking over the years as automated systems replaced what was once a highly labor intensive process. The leaders of the org worked hard to find a place for the techs who were slowly being displaced, literally offering them paid schooling and training programs. Those who didn't pursue these offers began to feel threatened and voted to join a union of federal employees. My wife is a teacher. The teachers union exists solely to protect teachers. She has colleagues who are terrible at their job, doing things like failing to teach math for six months. The principals of the school look into firing them and are told by HR it takes seven years to fire anyone. This is in an environment where education colleges are pumping out tons of enthusiastic fresh meat every year. Teachers unions protect the negligent and harm the young. Does this help you to understand why I am skeptical of unions? * Literally drunk. The meetings were in the evenings so working people could attend them. Men would get off work, start drinking and go to the meetings three hours later.

brianwawok 10y ago
This is the argument I can't solve. With union = No merit based pay. Protection for the incompetent. Worst and best teacher make identical pay, and both are near impossible to fire. Without union = race to the bottom. Where a union car assembly plant may pay workers $25 an hour, a non-union plant pays workers $10 an hour. We can't as a nation survive with so many jobs paying $10 an hour or less. So what is the actual right path? How do you get fair pay for all workers, but not promote and protect the lazy and the incompetent?
- pessimizer 10y ago
  Without caricaturing the position of bosses and unions, and constant good faith consultation and negotiation between them. And, honestly, a larger percentage of profits and productivity gains going to workers, instead of owners. If you haven't noticed, neither unions nor workers are winning; see Piketty.
- MacsHeadroom 10y ago
  More employee-friendly employment laws would go a long way in preventing unions from feeling the need to fight for ridiculous contract terms that ensure employees are basically unable to be let go. At-will employment is a joke. 2 weeks unpaid maternity leave is a joke. Reasonable public policy would prevent unions from completing with each other on these fronts to the demise of their own organizations.
  - pc86 10y ago
    > At-will employment is a joke. I will be the first to admit that I am generally pro-business. Earlier comments make it clear I am generally anti-union, or at best ambivalent. That being said, I can generally understand the argument of the other side, even if I disagree with it. But I don't understand at all the sentiment that at-will employment is negative. I believe if you're bad at your job, your boss should be able to fire you. That day. The obvious straw man here is "well at-will means you can be fired for anything, so if you wear yellow shoes and your boss doesn't like yellow he can fire you," which just never happens. So that nonsense aside, I honestly do not know what the opposition to at-will employment is.
    - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
      I think its something to do with, abuse by employers of vulnerable workers who can't stand up for themselves. Never mind yellow shoes; how about being critical of an abusive new rule by a sadistic manager? Unions were invented because of things like that and a hundred more; and yes I imagine somebody got fired for wearing the wrong color of shoes somewhere, sometime. And before unions, could do nothing about it.
    - jtbigwoo 10y ago
      > The obvious straw man here is "well at-will means you can be fired for anything, so if you wear yellow shoes and your boss doesn't like yellow he can fire you," which just never happens. I feel like you set up a straw man that supports your point rather than the opposing point. How about this: A company's owners resent paying for health insurance but know that they have to do it to attract employees. To lower health insurance costs, they invent infractions to fire women and anyone age 50 or older. Or a startup example: A company offers low pay and generous stock options that vest after 5 years of employment. Then they fire 90% of the employees in their fourth year.
- vidarh 10y ago
  You've set up a strawman. There is no requirement that for a union to behave the way you suggest anywhere that I'm aware of. A union will generally be expected to provide certain protections, but there's a vast gap from having nobody to help you to reasonable representation is provided to even your positions vs. your employer to making the worst employees near impossible to fire. E.g. the UK has plenty of strong unions, yet firing UK employees if you have good reason is shockingly easy for the most part seen with Scandinavian eyes. Some unions here are harder to deal with than others, sure, but it's also clearly possible to have unions that provide effective protection without making it impossible to get rid of people who do a bad job. Part of the problem is that "doing a bad job" is sometimes used to hide cases of getting rid of people management doesn't like. It takes very few abuses of trust like that before you have a hardline union on the other side of the table that will not give a shit what arguments you have because they don't know whether or not the employer is telling the truth. Once a relationship like that has soured, fixing it will be incredibly hard. Remember that lives literally used to get lost over workers rights in the US (and still are many places in the world) - many unions today have a long institutional memory of people who died trying to gain concessions for their members. E.g. AFL, now a part of the AFL-CIO was the instigator behind May Day as the international day for workers demonstrations, in part to continue the demonstrations for the 8 hour working day, in part in tribute to those who lost their lives in the Chicago Haymarket Massacre. US unions in particular used to be on the forefront of this, and bore some of the worst brunts of violence, and many of the older US unions early became very much hardline for good reason. Compare to unions many places in Europe where electoral success for left wing parties meant many of their demands where implement by law, allowing many unions to take a much softer approach and taking a lot of contentious issues off the table for union<->employer interactions because the hard stuff was dealt with by government.
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    > You've set up a strawman. There is no requirement that for a union to behave the way you suggest anywhere that I'm aware of. A union will generally be expected to provide certain protections, but there's a vast gap from having nobody to help you to reasonable representation is provided to even your positions vs. your employer to making the worst employees near impossible to fire. Why do most/all Unions in the US end up this way? I am not sure you can say something is a straw man when literally most unions in a country act the same way. A straw man would be if I simply chose 1 union at random, like the Chicago Teachers Union. But choose more, look at the UAW or your local town teachers union. Seems pretty common.
- crdoconnor 10y ago
  >With union = No merit based pay. Unions aren't inherently against merit based pay. They're against merit based pay where managers get to unilaterally decide what counts as merit. When managers (especially non-specialist managers) are in charge, fealty normally trumps competence anyway. >So what is the actual right path? Either come up with an objective standard for merit that unions and management can agree on or go for the closest objective approximation - seniority and accept that some incompetent people are going to take a paycheck (the horror!).
  - brianwawok 10y ago
    > Either come up with an objective standard for merit that unions and management can agree on or go for the closest objective approximation - seniority and accept that some incompetent people are going to take a paycheck (the horror!). But better people deserve more pay, not just older people. If that is the only argument, I would argue to just get rid of unions.
    - crdoconnor 10y ago
      The norm in most corporate and non-corporate environments that don't have unions is that the better person doesn't get better pay: the kiss ass does. Getting rid of unions does nothing to further merit based pay.
      - brianwawok 10y ago
        With unions - It literally does not matter what you do, you can't get fired, you get paid a set rate. Without unions - You negotiate a fair market value for your wage. You see no reason how without union could lead to better pay? How much could DHH get a job consulting Ruby for, vs someone who can hardly code?
    - vidarh 10y ago
      Do you have any evidence that "better people" (according to what measurement?) generally are the ones who get better pay? The places I've worked it has generally seemed pretty arbitrary and largely down to who are best at negotiating. I've yet to work anywhere that have taken an anything remotely objective stance to measuring productivity and rewarding staff accordingly. The closest I've gotten was working for Yahoo, which at least tried to gather feedback, but the system was still inherently flawed by being based on managers ranking staff members without any kind of formalized system to ensure the rankings were objective. One year I was told that the group my team was in had too many "above expectations", and since two out of four on my team were ranked above expectations they had to arbitrarily drop one down to "meets expectations". (Not at any time while I was there did I see any kind of attempt at creating a uniform definition of what "meets expectations" or "exceeds expectations" meant; had a manager with high expectations? sucked to be you) Since that directly affected the raises I was allowed to allocate, and since the ranges were in percent of salary, that decision cost that person several thousand pounds a year on an ongoing basis that I was unable to adjust for the following years, because some HR drone was making the reports from line managers fit his idealised curve without making any attempt at verifying whether or not the reports matched reality. (as an aside: the origin of socialism, from Saint Simon, was the idea of a meritocracy)
- cmrdporcupine 10y ago
  My mother was a teacher, and was unionized, and got paid a good middle class income. But from my perspective one thing her union did really well was professional development. As well as advocating for the students in terms of capping class sizes, pushing the school on various initiatives, etc.. My mother was able to complete her masters while she worked, and professional development was something the union had negotiated with management and took very seriously. It's trendy to pick on teachers unions. And definitely it seems like where I am now, in Ontario, the teacher's unions do some dubious things. But I mostly only saw good things from my mother's union growing up.
- TheCoelacanth 10y ago
  > With union = No merit based pay. Protection for the incompetent. Worst and best teacher make identical pay, and both are near impossible to fire. I don't think any of that is true of all unions. NFL players and Hollywood actors are essentially 100% unionized. Both have highly merit-based pay and have very little protection from being fired.
- specialist 10y ago
  I'm optimistic about the rise of employee owned co-ops. Moots the (American style) management vs labor war. Can add better governance thru greater transparency and accountability.

by dmm 10y ago

brianwawok 10y ago

This is the argument I can't solve. With union = No merit based pay. Protection for the incompetent. Worst and best teacher make identical pay, and both are near impossible to fire. Without union = race to the bottom. Where a union car assembly plant may pay workers $25 an hour, a non-union plant pays workers $10 an hour. We can't as a nation survive with so many jobs paying $10 an hour or less. So what is the actual right path? How do you get fair pay for all workers, but not promote and protect the lazy and the incompetent?

pessimizer 10y ago
Without caricaturing the position of bosses and unions, and constant good faith consultation and negotiation between them. And, honestly, a larger percentage of profits and productivity gains going to workers, instead of owners. If you haven't noticed, neither unions nor workers are winning; see Piketty.
MacsHeadroom 10y ago
More employee-friendly employment laws would go a long way in preventing unions from feeling the need to fight for ridiculous contract terms that ensure employees are basically unable to be let go. At-will employment is a joke. 2 weeks unpaid maternity leave is a joke. Reasonable public policy would prevent unions from completing with each other on these fronts to the demise of their own organizations.
- pc86 10y ago
  > At-will employment is a joke. I will be the first to admit that I am generally pro-business. Earlier comments make it clear I am generally anti-union, or at best ambivalent. That being said, I can generally understand the argument of the other side, even if I disagree with it. But I don't understand at all the sentiment that at-will employment is negative. I believe if you're bad at your job, your boss should be able to fire you. That day. The obvious straw man here is "well at-will means you can be fired for anything, so if you wear yellow shoes and your boss doesn't like yellow he can fire you," which just never happens. So that nonsense aside, I honestly do not know what the opposition to at-will employment is.
  - JoeAltmaier 10y ago
    I think its something to do with, abuse by employers of vulnerable workers who can't stand up for themselves. Never mind yellow shoes; how about being critical of an abusive new rule by a sadistic manager? Unions were invented because of things like that and a hundred more; and yes I imagine somebody got fired for wearing the wrong color of shoes somewhere, sometime. And before unions, could do nothing about it.
  - jtbigwoo 10y ago
    > The obvious straw man here is "well at-will means you can be fired for anything, so if you wear yellow shoes and your boss doesn't like yellow he can fire you," which just never happens. I feel like you set up a straw man that supports your point rather than the opposing point. How about this: A company's owners resent paying for health insurance but know that they have to do it to attract employees. To lower health insurance costs, they invent infractions to fire women and anyone age 50 or older. Or a startup example: A company offers low pay and generous stock options that vest after 5 years of employment. Then they fire 90% of the employees in their fourth year.
vidarh 10y ago
You've set up a strawman. There is no requirement that for a union to behave the way you suggest anywhere that I'm aware of. A union will generally be expected to provide certain protections, but there's a vast gap from having nobody to help you to reasonable representation is provided to even your positions vs. your employer to making the worst employees near impossible to fire. E.g. the UK has plenty of strong unions, yet firing UK employees if you have good reason is shockingly easy for the most part seen with Scandinavian eyes. Some unions here are harder to deal with than others, sure, but it's also clearly possible to have unions that provide effective protection without making it impossible to get rid of people who do a bad job. Part of the problem is that "doing a bad job" is sometimes used to hide cases of getting rid of people management doesn't like. It takes very few abuses of trust like that before you have a hardline union on the other side of the table that will not give a shit what arguments you have because they don't know whether or not the employer is telling the truth. Once a relationship like that has soured, fixing it will be incredibly hard. Remember that lives literally used to get lost over workers rights in the US (and still are many places in the world) - many unions today have a long institutional memory of people who died trying to gain concessions for their members. E.g. AFL, now a part of the AFL-CIO was the instigator behind May Day as the international day for workers demonstrations, in part to continue the demonstrations for the 8 hour working day, in part in tribute to those who lost their lives in the Chicago Haymarket Massacre. US unions in particular used to be on the forefront of this, and bore some of the worst brunts of violence, and many of the older US unions early became very much hardline for good reason. Compare to unions many places in Europe where electoral success for left wing parties meant many of their demands where implement by law, allowing many unions to take a much softer approach and taking a lot of contentious issues off the table for union<->employer interactions because the hard stuff was dealt with by government.
- brianwawok 10y ago
  > You've set up a strawman. There is no requirement that for a union to behave the way you suggest anywhere that I'm aware of. A union will generally be expected to provide certain protections, but there's a vast gap from having nobody to help you to reasonable representation is provided to even your positions vs. your employer to making the worst employees near impossible to fire. Why do most/all Unions in the US end up this way? I am not sure you can say something is a straw man when literally most unions in a country act the same way. A straw man would be if I simply chose 1 union at random, like the Chicago Teachers Union. But choose more, look at the UAW or your local town teachers union. Seems pretty common.
crdoconnor 10y ago
>With union = No merit based pay. Unions aren't inherently against merit based pay. They're against merit based pay where managers get to unilaterally decide what counts as merit. When managers (especially non-specialist managers) are in charge, fealty normally trumps competence anyway. >So what is the actual right path? Either come up with an objective standard for merit that unions and management can agree on or go for the closest objective approximation - seniority and accept that some incompetent people are going to take a paycheck (the horror!).
- brianwawok 10y ago
  > Either come up with an objective standard for merit that unions and management can agree on or go for the closest objective approximation - seniority and accept that some incompetent people are going to take a paycheck (the horror!). But better people deserve more pay, not just older people. If that is the only argument, I would argue to just get rid of unions.
  - crdoconnor 10y ago
    The norm in most corporate and non-corporate environments that don't have unions is that the better person doesn't get better pay: the kiss ass does. Getting rid of unions does nothing to further merit based pay.
    - brianwawok 10y ago
      With unions - It literally does not matter what you do, you can't get fired, you get paid a set rate. Without unions - You negotiate a fair market value for your wage. You see no reason how without union could lead to better pay? How much could DHH get a job consulting Ruby for, vs someone who can hardly code?
  - vidarh 10y ago
    Do you have any evidence that "better people" (according to what measurement?) generally are the ones who get better pay? The places I've worked it has generally seemed pretty arbitrary and largely down to who are best at negotiating. I've yet to work anywhere that have taken an anything remotely objective stance to measuring productivity and rewarding staff accordingly. The closest I've gotten was working for Yahoo, which at least tried to gather feedback, but the system was still inherently flawed by being based on managers ranking staff members without any kind of formalized system to ensure the rankings were objective. One year I was told that the group my team was in had too many "above expectations", and since two out of four on my team were ranked above expectations they had to arbitrarily drop one down to "meets expectations". (Not at any time while I was there did I see any kind of attempt at creating a uniform definition of what "meets expectations" or "exceeds expectations" meant; had a manager with high expectations? sucked to be you) Since that directly affected the raises I was allowed to allocate, and since the ranges were in percent of salary, that decision cost that person several thousand pounds a year on an ongoing basis that I was unable to adjust for the following years, because some HR drone was making the reports from line managers fit his idealised curve without making any attempt at verifying whether or not the reports matched reality. (as an aside: the origin of socialism, from Saint Simon, was the idea of a meritocracy)
cmrdporcupine 10y ago
My mother was a teacher, and was unionized, and got paid a good middle class income. But from my perspective one thing her union did really well was professional development. As well as advocating for the students in terms of capping class sizes, pushing the school on various initiatives, etc.. My mother was able to complete her masters while she worked, and professional development was something the union had negotiated with management and took very seriously. It's trendy to pick on teachers unions. And definitely it seems like where I am now, in Ontario, the teacher's unions do some dubious things. But I mostly only saw good things from my mother's union growing up.
TheCoelacanth 10y ago
> With union = No merit based pay. Protection for the incompetent. Worst and best teacher make identical pay, and both are near impossible to fire. I don't think any of that is true of all unions. NFL players and Hollywood actors are essentially 100% unionized. Both have highly merit-based pay and have very little protection from being fired.
specialist 10y ago
I'm optimistic about the rise of employee owned co-ops. Moots the (American style) management vs labor war. Can add better governance thru greater transparency and accountability.