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>Unions were powerful because they could limit access to labour, which was required for production. Now they are increasingly powerless. Given how little is ac

>Unions were powerful because they could limit access to labour, which was required for production. Now they are increasingly powerless. Given how little is actually automated right now, I'm always a little skeptical that automation drove the labor union extinct. It seems like politics, corruption, and mismanagement drove American unions near-extinct. A lot of countries still have very active trade-unions that take a strong hand in production and economics (Germany and Denmark, for instance).

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
One could argue that the shared prosperity created by automation/mechanization and distributed in part by unions raised people's living standards to the degree that they no longer believed that unions were necessary to maintain their lifestyle. As corporations sent jobs to other countries and Reagan fired the air traffic controllers, people were complacent enough to let it happen while they succumbed to their own pleasures.
- rhizome 10y ago
  I don't know, but I like the idea that prosperity took the workers' eyes off the ball and management[sic] took the opportunity to wage war against unions as a concept.
  - rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
    This was somewhat addressed in Adam Curtis' newest documentary, HyperNormalization. One line in the beginning really encapsulated the situation: "While we were dozing, the money crept in."
darpa_escapee 10y ago
Unions can and have negotiated for sharing the benefits of automation with workers and for compensation to workers whose jobs were automated away.
- canadian_voter 10y ago
  An old man told me that, once upon a time, every steam train would have two stokers aboard. Their job was to fuel the fire with coal; a hard, dirty job. They were replaced by mechanical stokers and their jobs made obsolete. But the union was strong and negotiated that the stokers would ride on each train, just as they had before; but of course now they could relax and not have to work. I suppose trains to this day must still have pairs of stokers, riding along, benefiting from labour saving technology. But of course it is not so. Eventually the dead weight gets cut. Sometimes it gets done slowly and with respect for the dignity of the workers. Sometimes they're just tossed out in the cold.
  - Rangi42 10y ago
    I'm all for some kind of social support system to help people through automation. Unemployment benefits, basic income, subsidized retraining, those have their merits. But how does giving someone a do-nothing job, where everyone (including the worker) knows they're dead weight, respect their dignity?
    - wott 10y ago
      > But how does giving someone a do-nothing job, where everyone (including the worker) knows they're dead weight, respect their dignity? I don't know, but ask your manager or your marketing team, they should know.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - bmelton 10y ago
      There are some jobs where the job is purely titular, and for those jobs, I would say that the people who work them are respected simply on their title, or perhaps jealousy of their do-nothing workload. The only real example that springs to mind is the job of casino riverboat captain. At least in Mississippi (and maybe it's changed since I left the area) -- gambling is illegal, at least on land, but out of respect for tradition, riverboat gambling is not illegal... or at least that's the stated reason, scuttlebutt indicates that the reason might have been to limit gambling to only the wealthy who could afford riverboat cruises, and to prevent the working class from falling prey to their own vices. The laws on riverboat gambling, as laws tend to do, slowly evolved. Nowadays, 'riverboat' gambling in Mississippi is done in massive casinos. They're actually very large buildings that look like this[1], but that technically float. The loopholes in the law that allowed for riverboat gambling have now morphed into 'river gambling', and that large, mall-sized building in the picture is technically a boat. It's effectively moored to land for practical reasons, but because the laws are the way they are, it has to be capable of casting off. Some casinos have a small, detachable section that isn't a part of the permanent mooring, others are detachable from their moorings, etc., but basically, you've got a casino that meets some technical definition of 'boat' upon which it is legal to gamble, whereas if it were incapable of being definable as a boat, it would be illegal to gamble in. That's a long story, but here's the interesting part -- because it's technically a riverboat, by law, it must have a captain. The captain has few duties; he must be able to ensure that the boat is capable of passing a coast guard inspection, and on exceedingly rare occasions where the casino must aweigh, he will pilot the boat as it does so. The other 363 days of the year he does effectively nothing but sit in his pilot house and stay on payroll, for which he makes a pretty handsome sum. I don't know what the industry average is, but a friend of mine (the only reason I know these details) actually got a job for one of the smaller casinos in Tunica Mississippi based on his experience as a dinner cruise captain. His was a 'junior captain' for years, and then got promoted to actual captain, for which he did nothing and made almost 6 figures a year, which is a damn lot of money in Mississippi. He passed the time by learning programming on the internet. [1] - http://www.mississippi.com/portals/0/casino%20images/Harrah's%20Tunica/Harrahs_casino_tunica_mississippi.jpg http://www.mississippi.com/portals/0/casino%20images/Harrah'...
e40 10y ago
If you think about how many people, 300 years ago, were involved in farming.. it was a lot. How many today? In 1st world countries, very few. Farming has massive automation.
- cstejerean 10y ago
  Sure, but what does this have to do with trade unions?
  - hijik 10y ago
    Every discussion forum these days feels like walking into a classroom of second graders talking about things they have heard grad students talk about.
- rdlecler1 10y ago
  Modern farming reduced labor needs with chemicals and (large) mechanization, not automation.
  - e40 10y ago
    The delivery of the chemicals is almost completely automated.
AndrewKemendo 10y ago
Given how little is actually automated right now Your time horizon is likely too short. Compare today to 1900. 117 years is basically nothing in history. We even still have someone that was alive then [1]. Compared to then, everything has some proportion of it's labor automated. In fact I struggle to know one profession that has not been impacted by some form of automation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Morano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Morano
- eli_gottlieb 10y ago
  I agree there, but there were waves of automation in agriculture that were then followed up by the peak of union strength. My point here is that I don't think labor competes zero-sum with automation. I think that how automation gets deployed and how revenues get spent down are bargained over between workers and owners.
  - AndrewKemendo 10y ago
    I mean unions really came about as a response to automation, as labor forces were centralized, homogeneous and non-seasonal. Previously it wasn't really possible to unionize because labor wasn't as consistent. My point here is that I don't think labor competes zero-sum with automation. I concede that so far as we can tell that may be true, but I'm highly skeptical that it will stay that way. Remember, wide scale industrial automation is less than 250 years old. I think that how automation gets deployed and how revenues get spent down are bargained over between workers and owners. Nah. Do you know why? Software engineers will never unionize. The guy or gal who is the type to organize, isn't building/writing the thing that is going to replace him/her. We're going to get to the point (hopefully) where our machine systems "apprentice" with our skilled laborers to take over their roles. The only way that this won't happen is if it's physically impossible to replicate skilled work by machine. Which I think we all would agree is ridiculous. Timeline? Not sure, but it's going to happen.
    - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
      >Software engineers will never unionize. If my local Wobblies branch wasn't a mess of infighting, I would already be unionized. You probably don't even have that excuse. Organize now!

rm_-rf_slash 10y ago

One could argue that the shared prosperity created by automation/mechanization and distributed in part by unions raised people's living standards to the degree that they no longer believed that unions were necessary to maintain their lifestyle. As corporations sent jobs to other countries and Reagan fired the air traffic controllers, people were complacent enough to let it happen while they succumbed to their own pleasures.

rhizome 10y ago
I don't know, but I like the idea that prosperity took the workers' eyes off the ball and management[sic] took the opportunity to wage war against unions as a concept.
- rm_-rf_slash 10y ago
  This was somewhat addressed in Adam Curtis' newest documentary, HyperNormalization. One line in the beginning really encapsulated the situation: "While we were dozing, the money crept in."

darpa_escapee 10y ago

Unions can and have negotiated for sharing the benefits of automation with workers and for compensation to workers whose jobs were automated away.

canadian_voter 10y ago
An old man told me that, once upon a time, every steam train would have two stokers aboard. Their job was to fuel the fire with coal; a hard, dirty job. They were replaced by mechanical stokers and their jobs made obsolete. But the union was strong and negotiated that the stokers would ride on each train, just as they had before; but of course now they could relax and not have to work. I suppose trains to this day must still have pairs of stokers, riding along, benefiting from labour saving technology. But of course it is not so. Eventually the dead weight gets cut. Sometimes it gets done slowly and with respect for the dignity of the workers. Sometimes they're just tossed out in the cold.
- Rangi42 10y ago
  I'm all for some kind of social support system to help people through automation. Unemployment benefits, basic income, subsidized retraining, those have their merits. But how does giving someone a do-nothing job, where everyone (including the worker) knows they're dead weight, respect their dignity?
  - wott 10y ago
    > But how does giving someone a do-nothing job, where everyone (including the worker) knows they're dead weight, respect their dignity? I don't know, but ask your manager or your marketing team, they should know.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - bmelton 10y ago
    There are some jobs where the job is purely titular, and for those jobs, I would say that the people who work them are respected simply on their title, or perhaps jealousy of their do-nothing workload. The only real example that springs to mind is the job of casino riverboat captain. At least in Mississippi (and maybe it's changed since I left the area) -- gambling is illegal, at least on land, but out of respect for tradition, riverboat gambling is not illegal... or at least that's the stated reason, scuttlebutt indicates that the reason might have been to limit gambling to only the wealthy who could afford riverboat cruises, and to prevent the working class from falling prey to their own vices. The laws on riverboat gambling, as laws tend to do, slowly evolved. Nowadays, 'riverboat' gambling in Mississippi is done in massive casinos. They're actually very large buildings that look like this[1], but that technically float. The loopholes in the law that allowed for riverboat gambling have now morphed into 'river gambling', and that large, mall-sized building in the picture is technically a boat. It's effectively moored to land for practical reasons, but because the laws are the way they are, it has to be capable of casting off. Some casinos have a small, detachable section that isn't a part of the permanent mooring, others are detachable from their moorings, etc., but basically, you've got a casino that meets some technical definition of 'boat' upon which it is legal to gamble, whereas if it were incapable of being definable as a boat, it would be illegal to gamble in. That's a long story, but here's the interesting part -- because it's technically a riverboat, by law, it must have a captain. The captain has few duties; he must be able to ensure that the boat is capable of passing a coast guard inspection, and on exceedingly rare occasions where the casino must aweigh, he will pilot the boat as it does so. The other 363 days of the year he does effectively nothing but sit in his pilot house and stay on payroll, for which he makes a pretty handsome sum. I don't know what the industry average is, but a friend of mine (the only reason I know these details) actually got a job for one of the smaller casinos in Tunica Mississippi based on his experience as a dinner cruise captain. His was a 'junior captain' for years, and then got promoted to actual captain, for which he did nothing and made almost 6 figures a year, which is a damn lot of money in Mississippi. He passed the time by learning programming on the internet. [1] - http://www.mississippi.com/portals/0/casino%20images/Harrah's%20Tunica/Harrahs_casino_tunica_mississippi.jpg http://www.mississippi.com/portals/0/casino%20images/Harrah'...

e40 10y ago

If you think about how many people, 300 years ago, were involved in farming.. it was a lot. How many today? In 1st world countries, very few. Farming has massive automation.

cstejerean 10y ago
Sure, but what does this have to do with trade unions?
- hijik 10y ago
  Every discussion forum these days feels like walking into a classroom of second graders talking about things they have heard grad students talk about.
rdlecler1 10y ago
Modern farming reduced labor needs with chemicals and (large) mechanization, not automation.
- e40 10y ago
  The delivery of the chemicals is almost completely automated.

AndrewKemendo 10y ago

Given how little is actually automated right now Your time horizon is likely too short. Compare today to 1900. 117 years is basically nothing in history. We even still have someone that was alive then [1]. Compared to then, everything has some proportion of it's labor automated. In fact I struggle to know one profession that has not been impacted by some form of automation. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Morano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emma_Morano

eli_gottlieb 10y ago
I agree there, but there were waves of automation in agriculture that were then followed up by the peak of union strength. My point here is that I don't think labor competes zero-sum with automation. I think that how automation gets deployed and how revenues get spent down are bargained over between workers and owners.
- AndrewKemendo 10y ago
  I mean unions really came about as a response to automation, as labor forces were centralized, homogeneous and non-seasonal. Previously it wasn't really possible to unionize because labor wasn't as consistent. My point here is that I don't think labor competes zero-sum with automation. I concede that so far as we can tell that may be true, but I'm highly skeptical that it will stay that way. Remember, wide scale industrial automation is less than 250 years old. I think that how automation gets deployed and how revenues get spent down are bargained over between workers and owners. Nah. Do you know why? Software engineers will never unionize. The guy or gal who is the type to organize, isn't building/writing the thing that is going to replace him/her. We're going to get to the point (hopefully) where our machine systems "apprentice" with our skilled laborers to take over their roles. The only way that this won't happen is if it's physically impossible to replicate skilled work by machine. Which I think we all would agree is ridiculous. Timeline? Not sure, but it's going to happen.
  - eli_gottlieb 10y ago
    >Software engineers will never unionize. If my local Wobblies branch wasn't a mess of infighting, I would already be unionized. You probably don't even have that excuse. Organize now!