7 ms·

Workers involved in union activities say Tesla is illegally intimidating them

66 points by dpc59 9y ago

exabrial 9y ago
Unions annoy me. Working conditions 75 years ago were truly deadly, and unions served a major purpose to humanize the work force. Nowadays we have "tax the robots" bills being sponsored by Unions and people somehow think it's "ok" to force someone to join a union to feed their family. When I see articles like this, I know what the right answer is but it's hard to empathetic at the same time.
- tabeth 9y ago
  couldn't you say the same thing about full time employment vs. being a contractor or part timer? why can't people organize themselves if they want to?
  - exabrial 9y ago
    I think people have a definitive right to organize! It disappoints me what they use it for sometimes
  - friedman23 9y ago
    > why can't people organize themselves if they want to? That's fine, don't force people to organize and pay "dues".
    - jhundal 9y ago
      At some point the majority of workers voted to organize. After that, anyone working there has made the choice to work a unionized job. I don't think it is fair to allow a single jobseeker to break the structure of a union this way. Why not consider asking these individuals to choose to work a different job if they object to paying union dues? In general, there's an information asymmetry between workers and employers that collective bargaining presumably helps alleviate (especially in the private sector), and union advocates would say that the value of this outweighs the drawbacks of unions. That's the right question to be debating rather than the fairness of closed shops.
      - pitaj 9y ago
        If the employer agrees that everyone should join a union, sure. Public sector unions are an entirely different beast though.
      - exabrial 9y ago
        > I don't think it is fair to allow a single jobseeker to break the structure of a union this way So it's fair to force them to put part of their paycheck towards something they have no interest in using? That's neither ethical nor fair.
        jhundal 9y ago
        EDIT: To try to keep the discussion focused, and the level of discourse high, let's try to find out exactly where we disagree: You asked: Why is ethical or fair force a worker to pay union dues as part of a job? My answer: Because the union's negotiation affects all employees it is ethical and fair to ask every employee to contribute. Allowing every employee to opt out greatly reduces the amount of resources the union has available to reach its aims. The assumptions behind my answer: - That the negotiation performed by the union does affect all workers in the job, whether union members or not. - That collective bargaining enabled by unions can in many cases be a positive thing for workers. - That right-to-work laws do indeed adversely affect the resources of a union. (The data shows that public sector union membership greatly dropped after Wisconsin's public sector right-to-work act passed: https://projects.jsonline.com/news/2016/11/27/for-unions-in-wisconsin-fast-and-hard-fall-since-act-10.html https://projects.jsonline.com/news/2016/11/27/for-unions-in-...) Let's move this debate forward: Which part of my response/assumptions do you disagree with, and why? (Aside: I'm actually not the biggest fan of public sector unions, but I think it's likely private sector laws would have a similar effect.) (Original comment preserved below.) ------------------------------------------------------------ The union asks for that contribution because they are negotiating for all employees, and no one can claim that they'd negotiate themselves because the union has fought for the baseline. If the union has won the right to require that contribution for all workers, what is the issue with this requirement? Again, why try to debate whether the employee should have this choice when they had the initial choice to work a different job? That said, I think that the right-to-work debate is a red herring. The first question we need to answer is whether collective bargaining can be a net benefit, and if so, how we can make it work. Stepping back even further, I think folks tend to forget that model of an optimal free market carries several assumptions, perfect information being the one most notably broken by a large employer to single employee relationship. That doesn't mean that free market model isn't useful, in fact we should be trying to aim for the results of a perfect free market in most cases. But it does mean that there can be areas where a bit of intervention does a huge amount of good.
    - aanm1988 9y ago
      If you don't like it then vote with your feet.
      - kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
        This is like saying if you don't like company parties leave the company, instead of just 'don't go to the parties', which is what OP is asking for.
        jhundal 9y ago
        Technically, I don't think there is anything to prevent an employer for forcing you to attend company parties as a condition of employment. Of course the vast majority of employers wouldn't do this, but in this case your only choice is to go to the parties or take a different job. Now an argument could be made that the employer-employee relationship is different from the union-employee relationship, but is there a reason that any such difference implies that a union can't set conditions for employment?
      - friedman23 9y ago
        I vote with my votes and I vote to kill unions.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
  I'm pretty ambivalent about this. In some sectors you hear the story "he got paid $40 an hour to change light bulbs" but in other sectors (teachers?) workers are still chronically underpaid and mistreated. In short: you can't make black and white generalizations about these things. In some cases a union still makes sense, in others they've become dead weight or obsolete.
  - an_account 9y ago
    The teachers unions keeps terrible teachers employed. In California some school districts have pulled teachers from classrooms because they are unfit to teach, but they can't fire them because of union rules. They are literally paid to do nothing [1]. Many of the teachers I've talked to hate the union, but it's a very strong union and not much can be done about it. [1] http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/06/local/me-teachers6 http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/06/local/me-teachers6
    - emodendroket 9y ago
      Uh-huh. All the people who tell me about this think the solution is kids straight out of school teach in charter schools for a couple years and then leave, which it seems to me would not really result in better education.
    - thatswrong0 9y ago
      Public unions and private unions are entirely different beasts IMO. I don't like the idea of public unions because they can essentially bleed taxpayers dry. See California or Illinois unfounded liabilities for the result of that. Not to mention the atrocity that is police unions.
      - thephyber 9y ago
        unfunded (sp) liabilities. And be careful where you wave your wand. Illinois pensions are very underfunded while California pensions are not even close to as bad, we just have a much larger denominator. Also, the rate of funding in California is set by the employer (the city / county, etc) and not the state, the union, or the unionized employee. The pension organizations (CalPERS and CalSTERS) have unreasonable rates of return projected in the system (7.5% annual last I heard) and the employers, not the state, are on the hook if those pensions are underfunded due to that high rate of anticipated compounded interest. Stockton went bankrupt soon after the 1999 bubble burst because there was no possible way they could make that level of anticipated returns in 2000-2001 (in addition to other bad investments the city made). > I don't like the idea of public unions because they can essentially bleed taxpayers dry. Private sector unions can bleed companies dry just the same. GM had negotiated itself into a corner pre-2008 and was less than 60 days from bankruptcy if not for US Government intervention (which helped them renegotiate their labor contracts). You can argue that a city in bankruptcy can't shed its pension liabilities the same way a company in bankruptcy can, but it's heavily dependent on the state law and the contracts. The problem isn't that "they can essentially bleed taxpayers dry". They problems are that government jobs are largely undesirable for high-performing employees (with a few notable exceptions) and that government union jobs in the states you named mandate union dues by law. The latter was challenged at the SCOTUS during the Scalia absence[1]. [1] http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/friedrichs-v-california-teachers-association/ http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/friedrichs-v-cali...
- jxf 9y ago
  > Unions annoy me. Working conditions 75 years ago were truly deadly, and unions served a major purpose to humanize the work force. Just because a company isn't literally trying to kill you or introduce hazardous conditions for the sake of maximizing profits doesn't mean that unions aren't useful. In a lot of cases, their very presence is inhibitory to regressions in the rights of employees. Do unions have problems? Yes, absolutely, and we shouldn't neglect those either. At the same time, scrapping them would be a very bad idea.
  - pg_is_a_butt 9y ago
    do morons ask themselves questions so they can attempt a stale point in reverse? you're all idiots.
  - ThrowawayR2 9y ago
    > Do unions have problems? Yes, absolutely, and we shouldn't neglect those either. At the same time, scrapping them would be a very bad idea. Existing unions are not taking much in the way of steps to address those problems or clean up their image in the eyes of the public. Until unions can once again demonstrate openly and conclusively that their primary concern is the welfare of the worker rather than just being another power player jockeying to get their share of the pie, scrapping them would be a very good idea.
    - jxf 9y ago
      > Until unions can once again demonstrate openly and conclusively that their primary concern is the welfare of the worker rather than just being another power player jockeying to get their share of the pie, scrapping them would be a very good idea. As I said, their presence is an inhibitor to regressions in employee rights. If you scrap them, the inhibition is removed, so you'd have to replace it with stronger employee protections in the form of regulations if you wanted to keep the status quo for rights. That's a bell that can't be easily unrung. I would think carefully about whether we want to introduce government-mandated rules into each industry about what is appropriate, as opposed to having the efficiency of self-regulation and negotiations.
- aanm1988 9y ago
  Comments like this annoy me. A few decades ago unions were powerful forces for worker rights, and served a major purpose by allowing collective bargaining. Nowadays we have "right to work" laws being sponsored by companies and people somehow think it's "wrong" to join unions and bargain collectively. When I see posts like this, I shake my head and wonder where we went wrong.
  - steanne 9y ago
    oh, that's easy, the unions fought for what was fair, and when they got it they KEPT GOING. we need a good balance, not for the side who happens to have the power at the moment taking all they can get.
    - aanm1988 9y ago
      As opposed to corporations who stopped at a fair point when they started to kill unions off?
      - steanne 9y ago
        that would be addressed by the second sentence you completely ignored.
- mikeash 9y ago
  I don't understand why collective bargain is expected on the employer side and reviled on the employee side. If employers can band together to form a company and present a unified front to the people they pay, why can't the people they pay band together to form a union and also present a unified front? Why do we trash the very concept of unions because bad ones want to tax robots and such, but don't apply the same standard to companies, when so many of them kill people and poison the planet? If unions are bad because the Teamsters abuse their power, what do entities like Koch Industries, Mylan, or BP tell us about companies?
  - Jabanga 9y ago
    Collective bargaining is never mandatory on the employee side. The employee is not forced to work for a particular collective. The employer on the otherhand is forced, by law, to only hire people who are part of some government-recognized collective, known as a bargaining unit. In other words, employees can monopolize the employer's hiring options, using anti-free-market laws inspired by the 'labour' movement and socialism.
    - mikeash 9y ago
      Being forced to join a union looks like equality to me. If I want to work at a particular place, I have to join that company. I can't come in on my own, expect to get paid, but not be a part of the company that runs the place. Why should the union be any different? If an employee doesn't want to work for a particular company, they have to find a different place to work. If an employee doesn't want to join a particular union, they have to find a different place to work. Why is the former reasonable but not the latter? If an employer really wants to hire non-union labor, they can leave their company and join a different one that doesn't have a union. You're playing an interesting semantic trick here where you use "employee" to refer to the individual, but "employer" to refer to the company. You thereby paint the asymmetry as unfair, when in fact there's no expectation that they should be the same. Let's compare individuals to individuals (laborers to management, say) and groups to groups (companies to unions). Why do the arguments against unions not also apply to companies? Give me something where if I replace "union" with "company" the result isn't an equally compelling argument against not letting employers organize collectively.
- chrismealy 9y ago
  The share of national income going to labor (people who work for a living) has declined ever since capital's triumph over unions. You might not like unions we know what happens without them.
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Wages are stagnant or falling in most industries and Tesla and other auto plants have fairly significant rates of injury. I don't see how it's a solved problem.
- InclinedPlane 9y ago
  They're still deadly: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-23/inside-alabama-s-auto-jobs-boom-cheap-wages-little-training-crushed-limbs https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-23/inside-al... People are still being taken advantage of. In some ways it's worse because 75 years ago if you managed to struggle through a shitty assembly line job for enough years you could afford to own a home, retire comfortably, send your kids through college, and hopefully ensure a better future for them. Today these jobs don't pay as well comparatively, and a lot of key expenses needed to get ahead are much, much more expensive. So instead of getting ahead working these dangerous jobs is like being on a treadmill.
- Certhas 9y ago
  Criticisms of existing unions might be valid, but you seem to be attacking the very concept. Most of us are forced to sell our labour or starve. Therefore the labour market can not be a free and fair market. Having unions and collective bargaining makes it a more efficient and fair market. Otherwise, unless you are one of very few workers (who are over-represented on HN) that have considerable power in the job market, you will get shafted.
Safety1stClyde 9y ago
> Tesla CEO Elon Musk ... promised to install both a roller coaster and free frozen yogurt machines throughout the facility. I had to double-check that I was not reading a satirical website after reading the above statement.
- vacri 9y ago
  I get an even bigger laugh imagining the same sentence being used in an article about a different industry. Imagine "A nurses' strike today was averted when management agreed to install a rollercoaster and free frozen yoghurt machines"...
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Well, in fairness, it does not seem to be the case that that mollified the workers.
- mcguire 9y ago
  ""There will also be little things that come along like free frozen yogurt stands scattered around the factory and my personal favorite: a Tesla electric pod car roller coaster (with an optional loop the loop route, of course!) that will allow fast and fun travel throughout our Fremont campus, dipping in and out of the factory and connecting all the parking lots," Musk wrote. "It’s going to get crazy good."" I sometimes wonder what happened to functioning adults.
Aloha 9y ago
I think a union is something you earn - not something foisted upon you. If you dont want workers to join a union, treat them well, pay them significantly above market rates, give good benefits.
- chronic940 9y ago
  Or just replace them with robots? That is what's happening across various industries today. Nurses will be replaced soon too (in the next 10 years). No union can stop that. Not everyone is entitled to a job. If you complain, then get out. Automation will help enforce this.
- almostApatriot1 9y ago
  the major appeal of the union is that you can't get fired or laid off. This type of job security is crucial because it gives you massive leverage when it comes to fighting for those other things. No matter how good the pay is, you can probably get better via striking, etc.
  - ThomPete 9y ago
    No one choose a job based on the union. How many unions in the private market can really claim you wont get fired.
    - metaphor 9y ago
      >> No one choose a job based on the union. Unfortunately, that's an overreaching statement. I personally know a few people who have accepted pay cuts to leverage the type of job security afforded by certain unions. >> How many unions in the private market can really claim you wont get fired. Certainly none, but does it really matter? There's exists a threshold where the difference between won't get fired and very difficult to get fired are pragmatically indistinguishable.
      - ThomPete 9y ago
        So was the one I was responding to. And I doubt that whatever personal anecdotes you have can be applied to unions in general as parent did. And yes it matters as the parent wanted to dismiss unions based on these false claims. Unions are neither good nor bad. Some of them have too much power, others have too little. Some should have a union (like uber drivers) etc. My own father tried to start a kind of union for a group of self-employed drivers working for one company. The result was that the company he worked for simply stopped his contract and scared everyone else off from backing him and a few others up. I have seen unions be both really bad, really good, unnecessary and not existing where they should. They are no different than consumer interest groups and other collections of people trying to reach some sort of balance. In many industries today they aren't needed but in some they still are.
Jabanga 9y ago
If collective bargaining wasn't mandatory, and employers were free to decide who to hire and fire, the manufacturing sector in the US would be vastly larger, and offer millions more jobs to Americans. There is very little that does more damage to society than the so-called labour movement.
- gnu8 9y ago
  Without the labour movement we'd have Triangle Shirtwaist fires and Ludlow massacres every week. I don't blame you for not knowing that, because our educational system is designed to produce obedient workers, not class agitators. You might want to pick up a history book though.
  - chimeracoder 9y ago
    > Without the labour movement we'd have Triangle Shirtwaist fires and Ludlow massacres every week It's a little disingenuous to conflate the labor movement with NLRA-regulated unions, especially in the context of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the response to it. They're not one and the same, although modern unions have done their best to erase that distinction from the historical narrative. You might also want to consider the other things unions of the time were involved with. Early 20th century unions passed bylaws excluding non-white members from their ranks, and then (successfully) lobbied for federal laws excluding them from the country altogether. Without the AFL, we may not have had the Chinese Exclusion Act, and we might not have stripped Americans of Chinese and Indian descent of their naturalized citizenship, seized the homes they legally bought with the money they earned, and then given the land to white Americans.
  - Jabanga 9y ago
    You're wrong. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire was a result of the economy being primitive at the time, with very little resources available per capita for risk reduction. Work place accidents were decreasing every single decade before cookie-cutter work safety standards were mandated. The world today would be extremely safe in and out of the workplace in the absence of such mandates. This bias toward central economic planning and mandated standards is a consequence of the great complexity of a modern economy not being appreciated by the typical person. Central economic planning is based on oversimplifications that are easier to reason about. As for the Ludlow Massacre, that was largely a result of illegal and violent actions by unions. We don't have those anymore, because unions impose their will through political decree nowadays. Most teachers in the United States are unionized, and an increasing percentage are under collective bargaining agreements, to the great detriment of education: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839935/How-Teachers-Unions-Affect-Education-Production https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839... The education system is consequently heavily biased toward unions and their dishonest narrative. Here in BC, teachers openly tell their students they hate the governing party (which stood up to the teachers union) and kids almost uniformly hate the governing party as well. It's absolutely ridiculous.
0898 9y ago
Why has nobody made a union you join through an app?

66 points by dpc59 9y ago

Unions annoy me. Working conditions 75 years ago were truly deadly, and unions served a major purpose to humanize the work force. Nowadays we have "tax the robots" bills being sponsored by Unions and people somehow think it's "ok" to force someone to join a union to feed their family. When I see articles like this, I know what the right answer is but it's hard to empathetic at the same time.

tabeth 9y ago
couldn't you say the same thing about full time employment vs. being a contractor or part timer? why can't people organize themselves if they want to?
- exabrial 9y ago
  I think people have a definitive right to organize! It disappoints me what they use it for sometimes
- friedman23 9y ago
  > why can't people organize themselves if they want to? That's fine, don't force people to organize and pay "dues".
  - jhundal 9y ago
    At some point the majority of workers voted to organize. After that, anyone working there has made the choice to work a unionized job. I don't think it is fair to allow a single jobseeker to break the structure of a union this way. Why not consider asking these individuals to choose to work a different job if they object to paying union dues? In general, there's an information asymmetry between workers and employers that collective bargaining presumably helps alleviate (especially in the private sector), and union advocates would say that the value of this outweighs the drawbacks of unions. That's the right question to be debating rather than the fairness of closed shops.
    - pitaj 9y ago
      If the employer agrees that everyone should join a union, sure. Public sector unions are an entirely different beast though.
    - exabrial 9y ago
      > I don't think it is fair to allow a single jobseeker to break the structure of a union this way So it's fair to force them to put part of their paycheck towards something they have no interest in using? That's neither ethical nor fair.
      - jhundal 9y ago
        EDIT: To try to keep the discussion focused, and the level of discourse high, let's try to find out exactly where we disagree: You asked: Why is ethical or fair force a worker to pay union dues as part of a job? My answer: Because the union's negotiation affects all employees it is ethical and fair to ask every employee to contribute. Allowing every employee to opt out greatly reduces the amount of resources the union has available to reach its aims. The assumptions behind my answer: - That the negotiation performed by the union does affect all workers in the job, whether union members or not. - That collective bargaining enabled by unions can in many cases be a positive thing for workers. - That right-to-work laws do indeed adversely affect the resources of a union. (The data shows that public sector union membership greatly dropped after Wisconsin's public sector right-to-work act passed: https://projects.jsonline.com/news/2016/11/27/for-unions-in-wisconsin-fast-and-hard-fall-since-act-10.html https://projects.jsonline.com/news/2016/11/27/for-unions-in-...) Let's move this debate forward: Which part of my response/assumptions do you disagree with, and why? (Aside: I'm actually not the biggest fan of public sector unions, but I think it's likely private sector laws would have a similar effect.) (Original comment preserved below.) ------------------------------------------------------------ The union asks for that contribution because they are negotiating for all employees, and no one can claim that they'd negotiate themselves because the union has fought for the baseline. If the union has won the right to require that contribution for all workers, what is the issue with this requirement? Again, why try to debate whether the employee should have this choice when they had the initial choice to work a different job? That said, I think that the right-to-work debate is a red herring. The first question we need to answer is whether collective bargaining can be a net benefit, and if so, how we can make it work. Stepping back even further, I think folks tend to forget that model of an optimal free market carries several assumptions, perfect information being the one most notably broken by a large employer to single employee relationship. That doesn't mean that free market model isn't useful, in fact we should be trying to aim for the results of a perfect free market in most cases. But it does mean that there can be areas where a bit of intervention does a huge amount of good.
  - aanm1988 9y ago
    If you don't like it then vote with your feet.
    - kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
      This is like saying if you don't like company parties leave the company, instead of just 'don't go to the parties', which is what OP is asking for.
      - jhundal 9y ago
        Technically, I don't think there is anything to prevent an employer for forcing you to attend company parties as a condition of employment. Of course the vast majority of employers wouldn't do this, but in this case your only choice is to go to the parties or take a different job. Now an argument could be made that the employer-employee relationship is different from the union-employee relationship, but is there a reason that any such difference implies that a union can't set conditions for employment?
    - friedman23 9y ago
      I vote with my votes and I vote to kill unions.
SOLAR_FIELDS 9y ago
I'm pretty ambivalent about this. In some sectors you hear the story "he got paid $40 an hour to change light bulbs" but in other sectors (teachers?) workers are still chronically underpaid and mistreated. In short: you can't make black and white generalizations about these things. In some cases a union still makes sense, in others they've become dead weight or obsolete.
- an_account 9y ago
  The teachers unions keeps terrible teachers employed. In California some school districts have pulled teachers from classrooms because they are unfit to teach, but they can't fire them because of union rules. They are literally paid to do nothing [1]. Many of the teachers I've talked to hate the union, but it's a very strong union and not much can be done about it. [1] http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/06/local/me-teachers6 http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/06/local/me-teachers6
  - emodendroket 9y ago
    Uh-huh. All the people who tell me about this think the solution is kids straight out of school teach in charter schools for a couple years and then leave, which it seems to me would not really result in better education.
  - thatswrong0 9y ago
    Public unions and private unions are entirely different beasts IMO. I don't like the idea of public unions because they can essentially bleed taxpayers dry. See California or Illinois unfounded liabilities for the result of that. Not to mention the atrocity that is police unions.
    - thephyber 9y ago
      unfunded (sp) liabilities. And be careful where you wave your wand. Illinois pensions are very underfunded while California pensions are not even close to as bad, we just have a much larger denominator. Also, the rate of funding in California is set by the employer (the city / county, etc) and not the state, the union, or the unionized employee. The pension organizations (CalPERS and CalSTERS) have unreasonable rates of return projected in the system (7.5% annual last I heard) and the employers, not the state, are on the hook if those pensions are underfunded due to that high rate of anticipated compounded interest. Stockton went bankrupt soon after the 1999 bubble burst because there was no possible way they could make that level of anticipated returns in 2000-2001 (in addition to other bad investments the city made). > I don't like the idea of public unions because they can essentially bleed taxpayers dry. Private sector unions can bleed companies dry just the same. GM had negotiated itself into a corner pre-2008 and was less than 60 days from bankruptcy if not for US Government intervention (which helped them renegotiate their labor contracts). You can argue that a city in bankruptcy can't shed its pension liabilities the same way a company in bankruptcy can, but it's heavily dependent on the state law and the contracts. The problem isn't that "they can essentially bleed taxpayers dry". They problems are that government jobs are largely undesirable for high-performing employees (with a few notable exceptions) and that government union jobs in the states you named mandate union dues by law. The latter was challenged at the SCOTUS during the Scalia absence[1]. [1] http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/friedrichs-v-california-teachers-association/ http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/friedrichs-v-cali...
jxf 9y ago
> Unions annoy me. Working conditions 75 years ago were truly deadly, and unions served a major purpose to humanize the work force. Just because a company isn't literally trying to kill you or introduce hazardous conditions for the sake of maximizing profits doesn't mean that unions aren't useful. In a lot of cases, their very presence is inhibitory to regressions in the rights of employees. Do unions have problems? Yes, absolutely, and we shouldn't neglect those either. At the same time, scrapping them would be a very bad idea.
- pg_is_a_butt 9y ago
  do morons ask themselves questions so they can attempt a stale point in reverse? you're all idiots.
- ThrowawayR2 9y ago
  > Do unions have problems? Yes, absolutely, and we shouldn't neglect those either. At the same time, scrapping them would be a very bad idea. Existing unions are not taking much in the way of steps to address those problems or clean up their image in the eyes of the public. Until unions can once again demonstrate openly and conclusively that their primary concern is the welfare of the worker rather than just being another power player jockeying to get their share of the pie, scrapping them would be a very good idea.
  - jxf 9y ago
    > Until unions can once again demonstrate openly and conclusively that their primary concern is the welfare of the worker rather than just being another power player jockeying to get their share of the pie, scrapping them would be a very good idea. As I said, their presence is an inhibitor to regressions in employee rights. If you scrap them, the inhibition is removed, so you'd have to replace it with stronger employee protections in the form of regulations if you wanted to keep the status quo for rights. That's a bell that can't be easily unrung. I would think carefully about whether we want to introduce government-mandated rules into each industry about what is appropriate, as opposed to having the efficiency of self-regulation and negotiations.
aanm1988 9y ago
Comments like this annoy me. A few decades ago unions were powerful forces for worker rights, and served a major purpose by allowing collective bargaining. Nowadays we have "right to work" laws being sponsored by companies and people somehow think it's "wrong" to join unions and bargain collectively. When I see posts like this, I shake my head and wonder where we went wrong.
- steanne 9y ago
  oh, that's easy, the unions fought for what was fair, and when they got it they KEPT GOING. we need a good balance, not for the side who happens to have the power at the moment taking all they can get.
  - aanm1988 9y ago
    As opposed to corporations who stopped at a fair point when they started to kill unions off?
    - steanne 9y ago
      that would be addressed by the second sentence you completely ignored.
mikeash 9y ago
I don't understand why collective bargain is expected on the employer side and reviled on the employee side. If employers can band together to form a company and present a unified front to the people they pay, why can't the people they pay band together to form a union and also present a unified front? Why do we trash the very concept of unions because bad ones want to tax robots and such, but don't apply the same standard to companies, when so many of them kill people and poison the planet? If unions are bad because the Teamsters abuse their power, what do entities like Koch Industries, Mylan, or BP tell us about companies?
- Jabanga 9y ago
  Collective bargaining is never mandatory on the employee side. The employee is not forced to work for a particular collective. The employer on the otherhand is forced, by law, to only hire people who are part of some government-recognized collective, known as a bargaining unit. In other words, employees can monopolize the employer's hiring options, using anti-free-market laws inspired by the 'labour' movement and socialism.
  - mikeash 9y ago
    Being forced to join a union looks like equality to me. If I want to work at a particular place, I have to join that company. I can't come in on my own, expect to get paid, but not be a part of the company that runs the place. Why should the union be any different? If an employee doesn't want to work for a particular company, they have to find a different place to work. If an employee doesn't want to join a particular union, they have to find a different place to work. Why is the former reasonable but not the latter? If an employer really wants to hire non-union labor, they can leave their company and join a different one that doesn't have a union. You're playing an interesting semantic trick here where you use "employee" to refer to the individual, but "employer" to refer to the company. You thereby paint the asymmetry as unfair, when in fact there's no expectation that they should be the same. Let's compare individuals to individuals (laborers to management, say) and groups to groups (companies to unions). Why do the arguments against unions not also apply to companies? Give me something where if I replace "union" with "company" the result isn't an equally compelling argument against not letting employers organize collectively.
chrismealy 9y ago
The share of national income going to labor (people who work for a living) has declined ever since capital's triumph over unions. You might not like unions we know what happens without them.
emodendroket 9y ago
Wages are stagnant or falling in most industries and Tesla and other auto plants have fairly significant rates of injury. I don't see how it's a solved problem.
InclinedPlane 9y ago
They're still deadly: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-23/inside-alabama-s-auto-jobs-boom-cheap-wages-little-training-crushed-limbs https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-03-23/inside-al... People are still being taken advantage of. In some ways it's worse because 75 years ago if you managed to struggle through a shitty assembly line job for enough years you could afford to own a home, retire comfortably, send your kids through college, and hopefully ensure a better future for them. Today these jobs don't pay as well comparatively, and a lot of key expenses needed to get ahead are much, much more expensive. So instead of getting ahead working these dangerous jobs is like being on a treadmill.
Certhas 9y ago
Criticisms of existing unions might be valid, but you seem to be attacking the very concept. Most of us are forced to sell our labour or starve. Therefore the labour market can not be a free and fair market. Having unions and collective bargaining makes it a more efficient and fair market. Otherwise, unless you are one of very few workers (who are over-represented on HN) that have considerable power in the job market, you will get shafted.

Safety1stClyde 9y ago

> Tesla CEO Elon Musk ... promised to install both a roller coaster and free frozen yogurt machines throughout the facility. I had to double-check that I was not reading a satirical website after reading the above statement.

vacri 9y ago
I get an even bigger laugh imagining the same sentence being used in an article about a different industry. Imagine "A nurses' strike today was averted when management agreed to install a rollercoaster and free frozen yoghurt machines"...
- emodendroket 9y ago
  Well, in fairness, it does not seem to be the case that that mollified the workers.
mcguire 9y ago
""There will also be little things that come along like free frozen yogurt stands scattered around the factory and my personal favorite: a Tesla electric pod car roller coaster (with an optional loop the loop route, of course!) that will allow fast and fun travel throughout our Fremont campus, dipping in and out of the factory and connecting all the parking lots," Musk wrote. "It’s going to get crazy good."" I sometimes wonder what happened to functioning adults.

Aloha 9y ago

I think a union is something you earn - not something foisted upon you. If you dont want workers to join a union, treat them well, pay them significantly above market rates, give good benefits.

chronic940 9y ago
Or just replace them with robots? That is what's happening across various industries today. Nurses will be replaced soon too (in the next 10 years). No union can stop that. Not everyone is entitled to a job. If you complain, then get out. Automation will help enforce this.
almostApatriot1 9y ago
the major appeal of the union is that you can't get fired or laid off. This type of job security is crucial because it gives you massive leverage when it comes to fighting for those other things. No matter how good the pay is, you can probably get better via striking, etc.
- ThomPete 9y ago
  No one choose a job based on the union. How many unions in the private market can really claim you wont get fired.
  - metaphor 9y ago
    >> No one choose a job based on the union. Unfortunately, that's an overreaching statement. I personally know a few people who have accepted pay cuts to leverage the type of job security afforded by certain unions. >> How many unions in the private market can really claim you wont get fired. Certainly none, but does it really matter? There's exists a threshold where the difference between won't get fired and very difficult to get fired are pragmatically indistinguishable.
    - ThomPete 9y ago
      So was the one I was responding to. And I doubt that whatever personal anecdotes you have can be applied to unions in general as parent did. And yes it matters as the parent wanted to dismiss unions based on these false claims. Unions are neither good nor bad. Some of them have too much power, others have too little. Some should have a union (like uber drivers) etc. My own father tried to start a kind of union for a group of self-employed drivers working for one company. The result was that the company he worked for simply stopped his contract and scared everyone else off from backing him and a few others up. I have seen unions be both really bad, really good, unnecessary and not existing where they should. They are no different than consumer interest groups and other collections of people trying to reach some sort of balance. In many industries today they aren't needed but in some they still are.

Jabanga 9y ago

If collective bargaining wasn't mandatory, and employers were free to decide who to hire and fire, the manufacturing sector in the US would be vastly larger, and offer millions more jobs to Americans. There is very little that does more damage to society than the so-called labour movement.

gnu8 9y ago
Without the labour movement we'd have Triangle Shirtwaist fires and Ludlow massacres every week. I don't blame you for not knowing that, because our educational system is designed to produce obedient workers, not class agitators. You might want to pick up a history book though.
- chimeracoder 9y ago
  > Without the labour movement we'd have Triangle Shirtwaist fires and Ludlow massacres every week It's a little disingenuous to conflate the labor movement with NLRA-regulated unions, especially in the context of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the response to it. They're not one and the same, although modern unions have done their best to erase that distinction from the historical narrative. You might also want to consider the other things unions of the time were involved with. Early 20th century unions passed bylaws excluding non-white members from their ranks, and then (successfully) lobbied for federal laws excluding them from the country altogether. Without the AFL, we may not have had the Chinese Exclusion Act, and we might not have stripped Americans of Chinese and Indian descent of their naturalized citizenship, seized the homes they legally bought with the money they earned, and then given the land to white Americans.
- Jabanga 9y ago
  You're wrong. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire was a result of the economy being primitive at the time, with very little resources available per capita for risk reduction. Work place accidents were decreasing every single decade before cookie-cutter work safety standards were mandated. The world today would be extremely safe in and out of the workplace in the absence of such mandates. This bias toward central economic planning and mandated standards is a consequence of the great complexity of a modern economy not being appreciated by the typical person. Central economic planning is based on oversimplifications that are easier to reason about. As for the Ludlow Massacre, that was largely a result of illegal and violent actions by unions. We don't have those anymore, because unions impose their will through political decree nowadays. Most teachers in the United States are unionized, and an increasing percentage are under collective bargaining agreements, to the great detriment of education: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839935/How-Teachers-Unions-Affect-Education-Production https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839... The education system is consequently heavily biased toward unions and their dishonest narrative. Here in BC, teachers openly tell their students they hate the governing party (which stood up to the teachers union) and kids almost uniformly hate the governing party as well. It's absolutely ridiculous.

0898 9y ago

Why has nobody made a union you join through an app?