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As a former member of a union, I honestly find it odd at how many people think that unions are always good. Of the two unions I was a part of and watching what

As a former member of a union, I honestly find it odd at how many people think that unions are always good. Of the two unions I was a part of and watching what my dad went through with his Union I'm actually fairly anti-union at this point in my life. I watched a guy get fired for sexual harassment, and rehired due to pressure from the Union. I watched my father not get a manager position, because of seniority ruling, and they gave it to a guy who was fired and then unfired (thanks to the union) for having a secret nap room behind some machines. I know unions have done a lot of great in the past, but I rarely see much good coming from them anymore. Of course this is all anecdotal, but I've had nothing but bad experiences with them in my life.

jorvi 9y ago
Unions aren't bad in itself. They largely solve the power asymmetry that exists between larger companies and their employees. Its only that at a certain point unions get so big there's actually a power asymmetry the other way: unions can strongarm the companies. How to restore the balance? I have no idea.
- Kocrachon 9y ago
  Living in Washington State, I've watched the Machinist Union almost cause Boeing to completely leave the state of Washington, and even though Boeing stayed, they moved a lot of their work to other plants. So yes it is a very dangerous game.
  - unionsarentgood 9y ago
    At least unions for private companies make a little sense. Unions for public agencies are a drain on society.
  - tclancy 9y ago
    Can you provide a little more detail on how the union caused them to leave and not tax incentives from other states?
    - Kocrachon 9y ago
      WA already provides massive tax incentives, and further increased them to get them to stay. To say the massive strike going on at the time had nothing to do with it would be disingenuous.
    - brightball 9y ago
      Pretty sure this didn't help: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/boeing-unions-move-to-end-strike/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/boeing-unions-move-to-end-strike... > Boeing's value has reportedly fallen by about $5.3 billion since the walkout began and that strikers have lost more than $125 million in wages Followed by this 8 years later... http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/06/news/companies/boeing_strike_begins/index.htm http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/06/news/companies/boeing_strike... And then this 5 years later... http://money.cnn.com/2013/02/20/news/companies/boeing-strike-threat/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2013/02/20/news/companies/boeing-strike... At some point, it's getting ridiculous.
      - tclancy 9y ago
        Unions exercising the one power they have 3x in 15 years (by your timeline; the url dates suggest otherwise) is ridiculous? What should they have done instead?
        brightball 9y ago
        This was a rejected offer from that 2008 article. The url without a date on it was March 17, 2000. > The company had offered union members raises over the next three years totaling 11% of current pay. Boeing also offered bonuses and pension improvements it said would give the typical worker about $34,000 in additional pay and benefits during that time. When you're given offers like that and rejecting them and it becomes a pattern that the company can expect to cost them billions of dollars every few years...what exactly do you expect company execs to do? Not have backup plans? This is a company that's literally handing out jobs throughout a lot of the worst periods of the US economy...and it warrants constant strikes? Look up some Airbus strikes for comparison. The articles I've seen are strikes over job cuts. There was a German strike at 4 plants that lasted...90 minutes. At some point...yes...it is ridiculous and there are a lot of other people who would be more than happy to have the jobs you're striking over.
  - deleted 9y ago
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- deleted 9y ago
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- epx 9y ago
  Solve a problem and create two?
- stale2002 9y ago
  The way that you restore balance is that you make it illegal to force people to join them, as it is in many right to work states. If unions are so great, then they can stand on their own. If they end up sucking, then people will leave them.
  - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    Except right-to-work laws allow non-union members to freeride. If we truly wanted to restore balance then people opting out of the union wouldn't be able to benefit from any of the union's negotiations. Of course then everyone would join the union so...
    - obstinate 9y ago
      And it's quite hard to do that. Companies tend not to want to negotiate with a union and have a separate compensation structure for non-union employees in the same job families. It's hard to have or benefit from one set of working conditions for union members and one for non-members. IMO, both employees and employers should be free to form what groups they please and negotiate what contracts they will. This includes contracts that forbid an employer from hiring non-union workers. But there should also be no law mandating such a provision. Of course subject to government regulation that supersedes contracts (health and safety, human rights provisions, others).
    - stale2002 9y ago
      I don't want your union negotiation benefits, though. I don't want to be covered by the union contract. You should be able to negotiate with your own group of people to get certain benefits, and I should be able to negotiate on my own. And then we could see who really gets the better deal. Personally I am confident that my own deal would be better, but I have no problem with other people deciding for themselves that they would prefer whatever deal that a union was able to negotiate.
      - deleted 9y ago
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unionsarentgood 9y ago
Finally. A voice of reason. Unions are not inherently good. They were good in the past. They're terrible these days.
stale2002 9y ago
The biggest problem with unions is that they try and force everyone to join them. Fine, join whatever private organization that you want. But please leave me out of it. I do not want to follow your ill thought out rules and I want to be able to negotiate myself. I can get a better deal on my own, and I do not want your collective bargaining that they try to force on everyone.
- emcrazyone 9y ago
  a few years back in Michigan, governor Snyder signed into law the right-to-work legislation. Indiana did the same earlier that same year (2012 I think). Giving employees to opt out of any unions
- elicash 9y ago
  Maybe you're special. And contracts can even be negotiated with a group to recognize individual performance! But the data is pretty clear that when workers bargain collectively, they can negotiate higher pay and better benefits.
  - tomjakubowski 9y ago
    Indeed, collective bargaining doesn't mean that an individual has no ability to negotiate their own contract with their employer, there are just certain restrictions. See, for example, the collective bargaining done on behalf of professional athletes by unions, like the NBPA or MLBPA.
    - DrScump 9y ago
      All such contracts are subordinate to the CBA and can't have conflicting elements. For example, a ballplayer can't waive a CBA_specified contrast constraint (e.g. many performance incentives are disallowed, can't work for less than the CBA-mandated minimum, etc.).
      - elicash 9y ago
        You're both saying the same thing. What workers negotiate and agree to for their CBA is a contract and they can choose to not include certain things so that individuals can create a second contract individually.
mc32 9y ago
When I was putting myself thru college I took a couple of Union jobs during that time. They both left me with a poor impression. There was little positive for the company (always looking for ways to be _less_ productive) and they took my dues and I had nothing to gain from it. When I got hurt on the job (nothing serious, but still) they didn't bother to help. My impression was they were multi-parasitic, they sapped productivity from the employer and they offered little in return to members except for some pro-forma stuff.
flukus 9y ago
What did your father do within the union? Did he vote for reps that were against practices like this? Did he stand for election himself? Did he advocate that the union adopt a policy sexual harassment being a valid firing offence?
kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
What industry were / are you in? I'd really like to hear about this from people in blue-collar jobs, with small incomes, and smaller bargaining power. I am not sure if a Silicon Valley perspective about this is necessarily representative or useful.
- elicash 9y ago
  I actually think this is the wrong way of thinking about it. While Silicon Valley may be unique, that just means the things workers in those jobs want to focus their collective bargaining around may be unique, too. Not working in Silicon Valley, I won't pretend to know what those things are, but I certainly know that every workplace has issues and that without unions, the power structure is completely unbalanced in favor of management. OP mentions sexual harassment. But if the workers wanted, they could actually collectively bargain even STRONGER sexual harassment policies than management wanted!
throw2016 9y ago
This is a bit like saying the wealthy are all bad or the poor are lazy. Sure some could be but if one takes the worst examples to draw a conclusion then it becomes idealogical. The demonization of unions in the country is a pointless exercise and seems ideological. Unions are an organizational structure, like industry groups or lobbying groups. Just like the latter exist to represent industry interests, unions need to exist to represent workers rights and interests. Like any other organization they can do good or bad depending on their management and objectives.
- RandomOpinion 9y ago
  > The demonization of unions in the country is a pointless exercise and seems ideological. Ideological? A vast multitude of people have cited ongoing examples of misbehavior and abuse that they themselves have personally witnessed, which you casually handwave away by saying it's just "ideological". How about unions start actually cleaning up their act and making themselves respected champions of the worker again?
  - frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
    It is ideological. The same people decrying the wholesale existence of unions due to bad unions are very rarely willing to decry the wholesale existence of corporations due to bad corporations. Unions and corporations are just flipsides of the same coin. They exist to balance one another.
    - chimeracoder 9y ago
      > The same people decrying the wholesale existence of unions due to bad unions are very rarely willing to decry the wholesale existence of corporations due to bad corporations. Unions and corporations are just flipsides of the same coin. Unions are corporations, in every sense of the word, both legally and conceptually. Unions are just a special type of corporation that has been granted a special right: the exclusive, irrevocable[0] right to dictate the terms of employment of its members. In some states, the union even literally acts as the employing entity, creating a de facto subcontractor relationship. [0] In theory, the NLRA allows for members to deunionize. In practice, this is almost impossible - once a union forms, there is almost no way it's members can feasibly remove it if they decide they don't want to be represented by it anymore.
deleted 9y ago
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tanderson92 9y ago
> I know unions have done a lot of great in the past, but I rarely see much good coming from them anymore. Of course this is all anecdotal, but I've had nothing but bad experiences with them in my life. This post includes the work NYTWA did to resist the travel ban at JFK (but is otherwise irrelevant to the current discussion, so search for the relevant parts): https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/all-worked-up-nowhere-to-go-frost https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/all-worked-up-nowhere-to-go... What did your company do to show solidarity?
camus2 9y ago
> As a former member of a union, I honestly find it odd at how many people think that unions are always good. Unions are made of people, like any group, there are as good or as bad as the people they are made of. Unions absolutely can make the difference for underpaid workers. Unions have lawyers workers can get advisce from and they level the playing field between the employer and the worker. What I find odd is you pretending a lot of people think that unions are always good. In US the majority of people think unions are bad.
deleted 9y ago
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formula1 9y ago
Unions are meant to be a democracy. If you and others had a problem with the way it was run, ideally you could change it. The fact that you felt it was an organizational issue leads me to believe there is an issue with the leadetship
elihu 9y ago
I think I hear more negative anecdotes about unions than positive ones. I can think of three reasons why this may be the case. One is that there's a great deal at stake and most companies are going to resist unions any way that can, and we can reasonably expect that to include negative propaganda. A second is that unions really are terrible because corporate interests have succeeded in subverting the unions they couldn't destroy and have influenced them in ways that render them dysfunctional in hopes that that will discourage employees from joining. A third is that unions have an inherent tendency to become terrible due to internal dynamics. I suspect all three of these are true to some degree. It seems like a good way to defend against the second and third is to have multiple competing unions and allow employees to move freely from one to the other, or start up a new union if none of the ones that exist are any good. Like most HN readers, I don't have any experience working in a unionized industry or know much about how rules governing unions vary from state to state or which unions are better than others or what kind of checks and balances exist internally to prevent unions from become corrupt or ineffectual. I do expect that if the tech industry were to become unionized, we would need a different kind of union. It makes sense for unions to force people to work slowly in industries where employees are at risk of ruining their joints and then being discarded by the company when they can no longer shovel their daily quota of coal. In software development, anything that slows you down is frustrating and I think most of us would rather work in an environment where under-performing employees can be fired than one where they can't. We could borrow plenty of ideas from existing successful unions, though.
bryanlarsen 9y ago
Counter-anecdote: my uncle died on a non-union construction site.
pm24601 9y ago
> I watched my father not get a manager position, because of seniority ruling, and they gave it to a guy who was fired and then unfired (thanks to the union) for having a secret nap room behind some machines. So the guy should have been fired for taking a nap? Jez man, you and I so don't see eye-to-eye on this one. If someone is tired, they are not functioning well. If a manager is tired, they are not going to be at their best for handling employees without saying something improper. But just based on your statement, he should have been rehired.

jorvi 9y ago

Unions aren't bad in itself. They largely solve the power asymmetry that exists between larger companies and their employees. Its only that at a certain point unions get so big there's actually a power asymmetry the other way: unions can strongarm the companies. How to restore the balance? I have no idea.

Kocrachon 9y ago
Living in Washington State, I've watched the Machinist Union almost cause Boeing to completely leave the state of Washington, and even though Boeing stayed, they moved a lot of their work to other plants. So yes it is a very dangerous game.
- unionsarentgood 9y ago
  At least unions for private companies make a little sense. Unions for public agencies are a drain on society.
- tclancy 9y ago
  Can you provide a little more detail on how the union caused them to leave and not tax incentives from other states?
  - Kocrachon 9y ago
    WA already provides massive tax incentives, and further increased them to get them to stay. To say the massive strike going on at the time had nothing to do with it would be disingenuous.
  - brightball 9y ago
    Pretty sure this didn't help: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/boeing-unions-move-to-end-strike/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/boeing-unions-move-to-end-strike... > Boeing's value has reportedly fallen by about $5.3 billion since the walkout began and that strikers have lost more than $125 million in wages Followed by this 8 years later... http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/06/news/companies/boeing_strike_begins/index.htm http://money.cnn.com/2008/09/06/news/companies/boeing_strike... And then this 5 years later... http://money.cnn.com/2013/02/20/news/companies/boeing-strike-threat/index.html http://money.cnn.com/2013/02/20/news/companies/boeing-strike... At some point, it's getting ridiculous.
    - tclancy 9y ago
      Unions exercising the one power they have 3x in 15 years (by your timeline; the url dates suggest otherwise) is ridiculous? What should they have done instead?
      - brightball 9y ago
        This was a rejected offer from that 2008 article. The url without a date on it was March 17, 2000. > The company had offered union members raises over the next three years totaling 11% of current pay. Boeing also offered bonuses and pension improvements it said would give the typical worker about $34,000 in additional pay and benefits during that time. When you're given offers like that and rejecting them and it becomes a pattern that the company can expect to cost them billions of dollars every few years...what exactly do you expect company execs to do? Not have backup plans? This is a company that's literally handing out jobs throughout a lot of the worst periods of the US economy...and it warrants constant strikes? Look up some Airbus strikes for comparison. The articles I've seen are strikes over job cuts. There was a German strike at 4 plants that lasted...90 minutes. At some point...yes...it is ridiculous and there are a lot of other people who would be more than happy to have the jobs you're striking over.
- deleted 9y ago
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deleted 9y ago
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epx 9y ago
Solve a problem and create two?
stale2002 9y ago
The way that you restore balance is that you make it illegal to force people to join them, as it is in many right to work states. If unions are so great, then they can stand on their own. If they end up sucking, then people will leave them.
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  Except right-to-work laws allow non-union members to freeride. If we truly wanted to restore balance then people opting out of the union wouldn't be able to benefit from any of the union's negotiations. Of course then everyone would join the union so...
  - obstinate 9y ago
    And it's quite hard to do that. Companies tend not to want to negotiate with a union and have a separate compensation structure for non-union employees in the same job families. It's hard to have or benefit from one set of working conditions for union members and one for non-members. IMO, both employees and employers should be free to form what groups they please and negotiate what contracts they will. This includes contracts that forbid an employer from hiring non-union workers. But there should also be no law mandating such a provision. Of course subject to government regulation that supersedes contracts (health and safety, human rights provisions, others).
  - stale2002 9y ago
    I don't want your union negotiation benefits, though. I don't want to be covered by the union contract. You should be able to negotiate with your own group of people to get certain benefits, and I should be able to negotiate on my own. And then we could see who really gets the better deal. Personally I am confident that my own deal would be better, but I have no problem with other people deciding for themselves that they would prefer whatever deal that a union was able to negotiate.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]

unionsarentgood 9y ago

Finally. A voice of reason. Unions are not inherently good. They were good in the past. They're terrible these days.

stale2002 9y ago

The biggest problem with unions is that they try and force everyone to join them. Fine, join whatever private organization that you want. But please leave me out of it. I do not want to follow your ill thought out rules and I want to be able to negotiate myself. I can get a better deal on my own, and I do not want your collective bargaining that they try to force on everyone.

emcrazyone 9y ago
a few years back in Michigan, governor Snyder signed into law the right-to-work legislation. Indiana did the same earlier that same year (2012 I think). Giving employees to opt out of any unions
elicash 9y ago
Maybe you're special. And contracts can even be negotiated with a group to recognize individual performance! But the data is pretty clear that when workers bargain collectively, they can negotiate higher pay and better benefits.
- tomjakubowski 9y ago
  Indeed, collective bargaining doesn't mean that an individual has no ability to negotiate their own contract with their employer, there are just certain restrictions. See, for example, the collective bargaining done on behalf of professional athletes by unions, like the NBPA or MLBPA.
  - DrScump 9y ago
    All such contracts are subordinate to the CBA and can't have conflicting elements. For example, a ballplayer can't waive a CBA_specified contrast constraint (e.g. many performance incentives are disallowed, can't work for less than the CBA-mandated minimum, etc.).
    - elicash 9y ago
      You're both saying the same thing. What workers negotiate and agree to for their CBA is a contract and they can choose to not include certain things so that individuals can create a second contract individually.

mc32 9y ago

When I was putting myself thru college I took a couple of Union jobs during that time. They both left me with a poor impression. There was little positive for the company (always looking for ways to be _less_ productive) and they took my dues and I had nothing to gain from it. When I got hurt on the job (nothing serious, but still) they didn't bother to help. My impression was they were multi-parasitic, they sapped productivity from the employer and they offered little in return to members except for some pro-forma stuff.

flukus 9y ago

What did your father do within the union? Did he vote for reps that were against practices like this? Did he stand for election himself? Did he advocate that the union adopt a policy sexual harassment being a valid firing offence?

kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago

What industry were / are you in? I'd really like to hear about this from people in blue-collar jobs, with small incomes, and smaller bargaining power. I am not sure if a Silicon Valley perspective about this is necessarily representative or useful.

elicash 9y ago
I actually think this is the wrong way of thinking about it. While Silicon Valley may be unique, that just means the things workers in those jobs want to focus their collective bargaining around may be unique, too. Not working in Silicon Valley, I won't pretend to know what those things are, but I certainly know that every workplace has issues and that without unions, the power structure is completely unbalanced in favor of management. OP mentions sexual harassment. But if the workers wanted, they could actually collectively bargain even STRONGER sexual harassment policies than management wanted!

throw2016 9y ago

This is a bit like saying the wealthy are all bad or the poor are lazy. Sure some could be but if one takes the worst examples to draw a conclusion then it becomes idealogical. The demonization of unions in the country is a pointless exercise and seems ideological. Unions are an organizational structure, like industry groups or lobbying groups. Just like the latter exist to represent industry interests, unions need to exist to represent workers rights and interests. Like any other organization they can do good or bad depending on their management and objectives.

RandomOpinion 9y ago
> The demonization of unions in the country is a pointless exercise and seems ideological. Ideological? A vast multitude of people have cited ongoing examples of misbehavior and abuse that they themselves have personally witnessed, which you casually handwave away by saying it's just "ideological". How about unions start actually cleaning up their act and making themselves respected champions of the worker again?
- frgtpsswrdlame 9y ago
  It is ideological. The same people decrying the wholesale existence of unions due to bad unions are very rarely willing to decry the wholesale existence of corporations due to bad corporations. Unions and corporations are just flipsides of the same coin. They exist to balance one another.
  - chimeracoder 9y ago
    > The same people decrying the wholesale existence of unions due to bad unions are very rarely willing to decry the wholesale existence of corporations due to bad corporations. Unions and corporations are just flipsides of the same coin. Unions are corporations, in every sense of the word, both legally and conceptually. Unions are just a special type of corporation that has been granted a special right: the exclusive, irrevocable[0] right to dictate the terms of employment of its members. In some states, the union even literally acts as the employing entity, creating a de facto subcontractor relationship. [0] In theory, the NLRA allows for members to deunionize. In practice, this is almost impossible - once a union forms, there is almost no way it's members can feasibly remove it if they decide they don't want to be represented by it anymore.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

tanderson92 9y ago

> I know unions have done a lot of great in the past, but I rarely see much good coming from them anymore. Of course this is all anecdotal, but I've had nothing but bad experiences with them in my life. This post includes the work NYTWA did to resist the travel ban at JFK (but is otherwise irrelevant to the current discussion, so search for the relevant parts): https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/all-worked-up-nowhere-to-go-frost https://thebaffler.com/outbursts/all-worked-up-nowhere-to-go... What did your company do to show solidarity?

camus2 9y ago

> As a former member of a union, I honestly find it odd at how many people think that unions are always good. Unions are made of people, like any group, there are as good or as bad as the people they are made of. Unions absolutely can make the difference for underpaid workers. Unions have lawyers workers can get advisce from and they level the playing field between the employer and the worker. What I find odd is you pretending a lot of people think that unions are always good. In US the majority of people think unions are bad.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

formula1 9y ago

Unions are meant to be a democracy. If you and others had a problem with the way it was run, ideally you could change it. The fact that you felt it was an organizational issue leads me to believe there is an issue with the leadetship

elihu 9y ago

I think I hear more negative anecdotes about unions than positive ones. I can think of three reasons why this may be the case. One is that there's a great deal at stake and most companies are going to resist unions any way that can, and we can reasonably expect that to include negative propaganda. A second is that unions really are terrible because corporate interests have succeeded in subverting the unions they couldn't destroy and have influenced them in ways that render them dysfunctional in hopes that that will discourage employees from joining. A third is that unions have an inherent tendency to become terrible due to internal dynamics. I suspect all three of these are true to some degree. It seems like a good way to defend against the second and third is to have multiple competing unions and allow employees to move freely from one to the other, or start up a new union if none of the ones that exist are any good. Like most HN readers, I don't have any experience working in a unionized industry or know much about how rules governing unions vary from state to state or which unions are better than others or what kind of checks and balances exist internally to prevent unions from become corrupt or ineffectual. I do expect that if the tech industry were to become unionized, we would need a different kind of union. It makes sense for unions to force people to work slowly in industries where employees are at risk of ruining their joints and then being discarded by the company when they can no longer shovel their daily quota of coal. In software development, anything that slows you down is frustrating and I think most of us would rather work in an environment where under-performing employees can be fired than one where they can't. We could borrow plenty of ideas from existing successful unions, though.

bryanlarsen 9y ago

Counter-anecdote: my uncle died on a non-union construction site.

pm24601 9y ago

> I watched my father not get a manager position, because of seniority ruling, and they gave it to a guy who was fired and then unfired (thanks to the union) for having a secret nap room behind some machines. So the guy should have been fired for taking a nap? Jez man, you and I so don't see eye-to-eye on this one. If someone is tired, they are not functioning well. If a manager is tired, they are not going to be at their best for handling employees without saying something improper. But just based on your statement, he should have been rehired.