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CTRL+F union No results. How many lawyers does your employer have? How many do you have? Equalise things. Join a union! Don't have the clout to change someth

by edent 9y ago

CTRL+F union No results. How many lawyers does your employer have? How many do you have? Equalise things. Join a union! Don't have the clout to change something yourself? Join a union! Worried that the boss will retaliate and you won't be able to do anything? Join a union! Want a friendly, non-judgemental ear to give you advice? Join a union! Want to gather lots of information about working conditions in a safe a anonymous way? Join a union! Worried that you're being discriminated against? Join a union! Need to bargain for better rights or pay? JOIN A UNION! Want to improve the way the "lazy fat cat union bosses" work? Guess what - unions are democratic! Join a union and improve it! I'm in a senior(ish) position in the tech industry and I'm a proud member of https://www.prospect.org.uk/ https://www.prospect.org.uk/ When I've had problems, my union has given me top-notch advice. They've provided expensive legal support. They've trained me up. They've helped me out. I pay ~£18/month to be a member. I consider it a form of legal insurance - and it is bloody cheap. Oh, bonus points, the settlement they got me when my position was made redundant has paid for the union dues for many years to come. tl;dr Unions work.

ManFromUranus 9y ago
I disagree, just ask the manufacturing industry how well unions work. They worked well at getting employers to relocate their production facilities.
- minikites 9y ago
  Automation killed more jobs than either unions or free trade by orders of magnitude.
- crpatino 9y ago
  In an ideal world, union leadership should work with management team to make the company succeed and share the fruits of that success with the rank and file employees. A corollary of this is that if the company fails to succeed, there will be no goodies to share. In practice, American unions failed to see that. Even if we ignore the cases where leadership just enriched themselves, unions concerned themselves mostly with extracting as much value as the employer would bear, and to a lesser degree to shield employees from the consequences of their mistakes. On the other hand, fluid capitals means jobs would have gotten outsourced regardless of union's stance. In Mexico, which is far from having the cheapest labor in the world, minimum wage is less than $5USD per day. There are loads of social problems derived from that, but the fact that this is feasible at all relies on a much lower cost of living compared with USA. Try to implement that on the other side of the border and you'd be facing bread riots in no time.
  - s73ver 9y ago
    This is wrong. Back in the day, unions did see that, and were happy to work with the companies. However, the companies were the ones that broke that social contract first, trying to frame negotiations as adversarial. And, so what if the employees are trying to extract as much value as they can out of their employer? Isn't that what capitalism is all about? Isn't that what the employer is doing to the employees, and anyone else they deal with? Why do we see it as acceptable for the company to do so, but not the workers?
- majormajor 9y ago
  They worked very well for decades, fighting hard for a lot of things that we take for granted now, and then corporations found a legal loophole to get around them. Probably some laurels-resting too. Same basic thing with automation. So toss out the idea of giving workers more leverage entirely, or try to adapt with the times? The relocation example shows that the business isn't on your side. How many jobs has not having a union prevented from being outsourced? Even when not fully outsourced, how many of us work at companies that have foreign offices in certain regions that pay a fraction of the US going rate? Or that invest much heavier in lobbying for increased immigration than in worker training/re-training programs?
- s73ver 9y ago
  And I disagree with you. Just ask the Director's Guild, the Screen Actor's Guild, the Writer's Guild, or any of the pro athlete unions.
HarryHirsch 9y ago
That's the theory. The practice is that unions worry more about campus carry than about treatment of adjuncts (yeah, I'm an academic scientist and can speak only from observations) and that they serve more as a shield from accountability than anything else. After the local public-sector union made brief noises about unionizing postdocs - my then-supervisor, himself protected from accountability by the double shield of tenure and union, tried to discourage us from supporting the effort - and retreated quickly I changed my position. The local union boss graduated one (1) PhD student during his 30 years on the faculty. Other faculty members were on the record of saying they are ashamed to be represented by such a lazybag. American unions somehow painted themselves into a corner.
- Retric 9y ago
  While I don't discount your example. In the wider context there is a vast pressure to paint unions as a bad thing because they cost people with power money. Work unlike normal products has a fuzzy relationship to market forces because people are not quite fungible. If you pay relative to the lowest common denominator, then the surplus from over performers ends up with the company. Ratchet up the pay and that surplus ends up with under performers.
- chongli 9y ago
  American unions somehow painted themselves into a corner. They became too focused on an adversarial relationship with the company. Germany has the right of things. Unions there have guaranteed board seats [0]. This gives the employees more of a say in the direction of the company. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany
  - mercer 9y ago
    I'm trying to think of a good word to use instead of 'union', any thoughts? I think the word's been poisoned as much as socialism, so perhaps using a different term can help (in the US?).
    - 9y ago
colemannugent 9y ago
I think unions are a great way of balancing the power of the employer and employee, but there are some major drawbacks. I'm not sure how it is in Europe, but in the public higher education space here in the U.S. the unions are way to powerful. An example of this imbalance: All faculty and staff members for the California State University system are part of the same union. That means that the union has the collective bargaining power of all 50,000 employees. The union is very good at their job of protecting employees, and will always resist any disciplinary action by the administration, even if the employee is clearly in the wrong. This leads to a situation where administration will simply ignore extremely low-performing individuals because they would have to fight the union to do so. Also, all CSU employees must pay the union dues, even if you are not part of the union, which is insane. When unions are this big and this focused, their collective bargaining power, IMO, exceeds what is necessary to protect workers. With the union you mentioned your a part of things seem to be better structured. Though it is large at around 140,000 members, they seem to be spread across many companies and I imagine that not every company is made up of 100% union employees. Also the fact that your union encompasses a wide variety of professions is definitely a big positive. That seems more like a fairer balance of power to me.
- ashark 9y ago
  > Also, all CSU employees must pay the union dues, even if you are not part of the union, which is insane. This is to avoid the free rider problem. Removing this requirement basically kills a union. Right-to-work laws, for example, are 100% about neutering unions, and they do so by precisely this mechanism. Voluntary associations have serious problems that severely limit their effectiveness. Same reason e.g. taxes can't be voluntary.
  - colemannugent 9y ago
    That was not so much a commentary about right-to-work as it was about the absurdity of the situation. California is decidedly against right-to-work laws, so why in this case you are allowed to opt out of the benefits of the union while still having to pay for it is what I take issue with. If you are allowed to choose not to join the union then you shouldn't have to pay union dues.
Consultant32452 9y ago
>Oh, bonus points, the settlement they got me when my position was made redundant I'm curious why you felt you deserved a settlement just because your employer didn't need you anymore. Did your employer violate relevant laws in your country regarding termination of employment or perhaps violate a contractual obligation on their part that you negotiated when you were hired?
- RobertoG 9y ago
  Well, it's obvious that he deserved the settlement, otherwise, why the employer pay it? I find that idea, that we hear so frequently, that employees should not extract all the possible value of their employers very uncapitalistic.
  - strictnein 9y ago
    Because it was cheaper to do so than have to pay lawyers to deal with him.
    - RobertoG 9y ago
      Yes, my point was that when corporations extract all the possible value of a deal inside the legality, rarely you hear the question of why "they felt that they deserved" it.
      - Consultant32452 9y ago
        We are constantly questioning whether lawsuits are fair/justified around here. The first that comes to mind are patent trolls. Settlement implies at least the threat of a lawsuit, so it's reasonable to question what a potential lawsuit was about, isn't it?
        RobertoG 9y ago
        Sure, only that the question was not "what was the dispute about", but: "why you felt you deserved a settlement just because your employer didn't need you anymore. " I read in those words an implied moral position that I wanted to criticize. My excuses if read it wrong.
strictnein 9y ago
> tl;dr Unions work for me. Fixed. There's a lot of bad unions out there as well. My wife dealt with one as a cashier at a grocery store in high school. They did less than nothing for her and her coworkers. Never visited the store, never responded to significant issues including discrimination and harassment, never met with management. But they did make sure they got their cut of her pay which, as a poor girl who had to buy her own clothes and pay for everything from the money she earned, she desperately needed. And vote the union bosses out? How was she to do that exactly? Maybe it's different over there, but unions can cover tens if not hundreds of locations at different businesses in the US.
- Bartweiss 9y ago
  > And vote the union bosses out? How was she to do that exactly? Maybe it's different over there, but unions can cover tens if not hundreds of locations at different businesses in the US. I resent "it's democratic, so vote instead of complaining" in 100% of its incarnations. Democratic systems are a bit more responsive than most others, but they're not actually subject to the desires of any one voter. It's entirely reasonable to look at a system and say "the fixes I think this needs are completely unattainable" or even "I think the voting process of this system is incapable of producing change". Calling unions - or anything - fixable simply because they count up votes feels like a way to silence uncomfortable criticism.

by edent 9y ago

ManFromUranus 9y ago

I disagree, just ask the manufacturing industry how well unions work. They worked well at getting employers to relocate their production facilities.

minikites 9y ago
Automation killed more jobs than either unions or free trade by orders of magnitude.
crpatino 9y ago
In an ideal world, union leadership should work with management team to make the company succeed and share the fruits of that success with the rank and file employees. A corollary of this is that if the company fails to succeed, there will be no goodies to share. In practice, American unions failed to see that. Even if we ignore the cases where leadership just enriched themselves, unions concerned themselves mostly with extracting as much value as the employer would bear, and to a lesser degree to shield employees from the consequences of their mistakes. On the other hand, fluid capitals means jobs would have gotten outsourced regardless of union's stance. In Mexico, which is far from having the cheapest labor in the world, minimum wage is less than $5USD per day. There are loads of social problems derived from that, but the fact that this is feasible at all relies on a much lower cost of living compared with USA. Try to implement that on the other side of the border and you'd be facing bread riots in no time.
- s73ver 9y ago
  This is wrong. Back in the day, unions did see that, and were happy to work with the companies. However, the companies were the ones that broke that social contract first, trying to frame negotiations as adversarial. And, so what if the employees are trying to extract as much value as they can out of their employer? Isn't that what capitalism is all about? Isn't that what the employer is doing to the employees, and anyone else they deal with? Why do we see it as acceptable for the company to do so, but not the workers?
majormajor 9y ago
They worked very well for decades, fighting hard for a lot of things that we take for granted now, and then corporations found a legal loophole to get around them. Probably some laurels-resting too. Same basic thing with automation. So toss out the idea of giving workers more leverage entirely, or try to adapt with the times? The relocation example shows that the business isn't on your side. How many jobs has not having a union prevented from being outsourced? Even when not fully outsourced, how many of us work at companies that have foreign offices in certain regions that pay a fraction of the US going rate? Or that invest much heavier in lobbying for increased immigration than in worker training/re-training programs?
s73ver 9y ago
And I disagree with you. Just ask the Director's Guild, the Screen Actor's Guild, the Writer's Guild, or any of the pro athlete unions.

HarryHirsch 9y ago

That's the theory. The practice is that unions worry more about campus carry than about treatment of adjuncts (yeah, I'm an academic scientist and can speak only from observations) and that they serve more as a shield from accountability than anything else. After the local public-sector union made brief noises about unionizing postdocs - my then-supervisor, himself protected from accountability by the double shield of tenure and union, tried to discourage us from supporting the effort - and retreated quickly I changed my position. The local union boss graduated one (1) PhD student during his 30 years on the faculty. Other faculty members were on the record of saying they are ashamed to be represented by such a lazybag. American unions somehow painted themselves into a corner.

Retric 9y ago
While I don't discount your example. In the wider context there is a vast pressure to paint unions as a bad thing because they cost people with power money. Work unlike normal products has a fuzzy relationship to market forces because people are not quite fungible. If you pay relative to the lowest common denominator, then the surplus from over performers ends up with the company. Ratchet up the pay and that surplus ends up with under performers.
chongli 9y ago
American unions somehow painted themselves into a corner. They became too focused on an adversarial relationship with the company. Germany has the right of things. Unions there have guaranteed board seats [0]. This gives the employees more of a say in the direction of the company. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany
- mercer 9y ago
  I'm trying to think of a good word to use instead of 'union', any thoughts? I think the word's been poisoned as much as socialism, so perhaps using a different term can help (in the US?).
  - 9y ago

colemannugent 9y ago

I think unions are a great way of balancing the power of the employer and employee, but there are some major drawbacks. I'm not sure how it is in Europe, but in the public higher education space here in the U.S. the unions are way to powerful. An example of this imbalance: All faculty and staff members for the California State University system are part of the same union. That means that the union has the collective bargaining power of all 50,000 employees. The union is very good at their job of protecting employees, and will always resist any disciplinary action by the administration, even if the employee is clearly in the wrong. This leads to a situation where administration will simply ignore extremely low-performing individuals because they would have to fight the union to do so. Also, all CSU employees must pay the union dues, even if you are not part of the union, which is insane. When unions are this big and this focused, their collective bargaining power, IMO, exceeds what is necessary to protect workers. With the union you mentioned your a part of things seem to be better structured. Though it is large at around 140,000 members, they seem to be spread across many companies and I imagine that not every company is made up of 100% union employees. Also the fact that your union encompasses a wide variety of professions is definitely a big positive. That seems more like a fairer balance of power to me.

ashark 9y ago
> Also, all CSU employees must pay the union dues, even if you are not part of the union, which is insane. This is to avoid the free rider problem. Removing this requirement basically kills a union. Right-to-work laws, for example, are 100% about neutering unions, and they do so by precisely this mechanism. Voluntary associations have serious problems that severely limit their effectiveness. Same reason e.g. taxes can't be voluntary.
- colemannugent 9y ago
  That was not so much a commentary about right-to-work as it was about the absurdity of the situation. California is decidedly against right-to-work laws, so why in this case you are allowed to opt out of the benefits of the union while still having to pay for it is what I take issue with. If you are allowed to choose not to join the union then you shouldn't have to pay union dues.

Consultant32452 9y ago

>Oh, bonus points, the settlement they got me when my position was made redundant I'm curious why you felt you deserved a settlement just because your employer didn't need you anymore. Did your employer violate relevant laws in your country regarding termination of employment or perhaps violate a contractual obligation on their part that you negotiated when you were hired?

RobertoG 9y ago
Well, it's obvious that he deserved the settlement, otherwise, why the employer pay it? I find that idea, that we hear so frequently, that employees should not extract all the possible value of their employers very uncapitalistic.
- strictnein 9y ago
  Because it was cheaper to do so than have to pay lawyers to deal with him.
  - RobertoG 9y ago
    Yes, my point was that when corporations extract all the possible value of a deal inside the legality, rarely you hear the question of why "they felt that they deserved" it.
    - Consultant32452 9y ago
      We are constantly questioning whether lawsuits are fair/justified around here. The first that comes to mind are patent trolls. Settlement implies at least the threat of a lawsuit, so it's reasonable to question what a potential lawsuit was about, isn't it?
      - RobertoG 9y ago
        Sure, only that the question was not "what was the dispute about", but: "why you felt you deserved a settlement just because your employer didn't need you anymore. " I read in those words an implied moral position that I wanted to criticize. My excuses if read it wrong.

strictnein 9y ago

> tl;dr Unions work for me. Fixed. There's a lot of bad unions out there as well. My wife dealt with one as a cashier at a grocery store in high school. They did less than nothing for her and her coworkers. Never visited the store, never responded to significant issues including discrimination and harassment, never met with management. But they did make sure they got their cut of her pay which, as a poor girl who had to buy her own clothes and pay for everything from the money she earned, she desperately needed. And vote the union bosses out? How was she to do that exactly? Maybe it's different over there, but unions can cover tens if not hundreds of locations at different businesses in the US.

Bartweiss 9y ago
> And vote the union bosses out? How was she to do that exactly? Maybe it's different over there, but unions can cover tens if not hundreds of locations at different businesses in the US. I resent "it's democratic, so vote instead of complaining" in 100% of its incarnations. Democratic systems are a bit more responsive than most others, but they're not actually subject to the desires of any one voter. It's entirely reasonable to look at a system and say "the fixes I think this needs are completely unattainable" or even "I think the voting process of this system is incapable of producing change". Calling unions - or anything - fixable simply because they count up votes feels like a way to silence uncomfortable criticism.