7 ms·

> So low performers accumulate over the time. This is an incredibly offensive statement against unions and I want to see some proof from you for this. All larg

by foepys 8y ago

> So low performers accumulate over the time. This is an incredibly offensive statement against unions and I want to see some proof from you for this. All large corporations in Germany have unions and Germany is still one of the world's economic powerhouses.

AmericanChopper 8y ago
There are plenty of unions that make it nearly impossible to fire bad employees. Teachers and cops are notorious for it.
- zaarn 8y ago
  In Germany firing a teacher or cop isn't hard because unions but because they're state employees which makes it hard to fire them at all (though it does happen).
  - AmericanChopper 8y ago
    http://ftp.iza.org/dp5222.pdf http://ftp.iza.org/dp5222.pdf >union members are less likely to lose their jobs than non-members. In particular, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel we can show that roughly 50% of the observed raw differential in individual dismissal rates can be explained by the estimated average partial effect of union membership. If you read the whole thing you’ll also see that it’s significantly more expensive to fire a union member. It’s much harder and more expensive to fire union members. The natural result of this is that bad or underperforming employees are more likely to remain in the workforce. Like unions or don’t, but this is one of the costs they impose on the workforce.
    - zaarn 8y ago
      In part the lower firing rate can be explained by other means, unions do try to work with companies when they're in a financial crisis (for example instead of firing people, they'd reduce working hours). That's sort of the point of a union really; give workers better leverage to work with the company to ensure they'll keep their jobs and have fair wages and compensations+benefits. Of course, you'll get freeloaders but I'd argue that this is a price worth paying for because the workers benefit a lot and the company can benefit a lot too. Plus, this isn't the point either, teachers and cops aren't hard to fire because of unions. They are civil servants, they can't negotiate their wages via unions or even strike. They also lack a number of other rights. However, they are also incredibly hard to fire if they didn't commit serious crimes or felonies, otherwise they hold their job for life. So teachers and cops in germany have little to nothing to do with unions when it comes to being hard to fire.
      - AmericanChopper 8y ago
        >In part the lower firing rate can be explained by other means, unions do try to work with companies when they're in a financial crisis The study was of dismissal rates, not redundancies. So none of the 50% reduction found in dismissals can be explained by redundancies. Your speculation about cops and teachers is also irrelevant, as the data very convincingly shows that it’s much harder and more expensive to fire union members.
        zaarn 8y ago
        >The study was of dismissal rates, not redundancies. So none of the 50% reduction found in dismissals can be explained by redundancies. The paper you linked specifically points out that unions reduce employee turnover, as mentioned because unions do try to work with companies, and as mentioned, try to keep workers employed. This fully explains a lower turnover rate. The paper however doesn't really go deep into that territory so I'm afraid you can't simply say that the explanation is invalid. Specifically the paper mentions "Our data does not allow us to explicitly test for the channel by which individual trade union membership alters dismissal probabilities." So again, saying the paper finds that redundancy can't explain the reduction is simply incorrect. >Your speculation about cops and teachers is also irrelevant, It's not speculation, it's german employment and civil servant law, but thanks anyway. I'm merely raising the point that using teachers and cops are bad examples considering they don't have unions here.
        AmericanChopper 8y ago
        >The paper you linked specifically points out that unions reduce employee turnover, as mentioned because unions do try to work with companies, and as mentioned, try to keep workers employed. It actually sites union representation in labor court as a key factor: >German employment protection legislation gives workers the entitlement to contest a dismissal at a labour court. Trade unions generally support their members in such legal conflicts. According to a recent survey, 12% of all union members have been represented by their union in court and almost 50% have obtained legal advice from union staff at least once during their membership. Furthermore, in 2008 for example, the German Trade Union Federation (DGB) represented union members in more than 70,000 proceedings in labour courts, of which about 26,000 were directly related to dismissal conflicts.21 In addition, we know that the probability of obtaining a severance payment will be higher if a labour court is involved >This fully explains a lower turnover rate. Again, the paper is not about turnover rate or redundancy as you keep saying, it’s about dismissals: >The differences in the dismissal rates are striking: the raw dismissal rate of non-members amounts to about 3.6% and is almost three times as high as that of union members in sample I. It is still more than twice the dismissal rate of non-members in sample II, which covers the longer time span. >saying the paper finds that redundancy can't explain the reduction is simply incorrect. It seems you didn’t read the paper: >A key advantage of the SOEP data is that information on the type of job termination is available. Since 1985, respondents have been asked to classify their job termination from a list of items, such as "fired by the employer", "quit on one's own", "time-limited work contract", "apprenticeship had been completed", "entering pre-retirement programme" or "other reasons". The items "fired by the employer" and "quit on one's own" are included in every wave of the SOEP. Some of the other reasons have been included irregularly and additional types of job separations, such as "plant closed", have been added later on. This last item has been sporadically included in questionnaires since 1991. Furthermore, multiple answers were allowed only until 1998. Since we are concerned with whether union membership is associated with a reduced risk of being individually dismissed, we focus on "fired by the employer" as the self-reported reason for a job termination. The fact is plain as day, union membership makes it harder and more costly to fire bad employees. You can think it’s worth it if you like, but there’s no way to deny it. It’s also worth noting that this cost isn’t taken by the employer, but by the employee. As they all have collective contracts, the wages fleeced by low productivity employees are simply made up by higher productivity employees.
    - Someone 8y ago
      One could also argue that non-union members are less likely to have decent legal support, making it easier for employers to exploit them.
      - AmericanChopper 8y ago
        There’s no benefit to employers in firing good employees. Firing them is expensive and full of liability and hiring replacements is also very expensive. If you accept that employers are self interested, then they’ll want to keep good employees and get rid of bad ones. Making it hard and costly to fire bad employees doesn’t benefit anybody except bad and unproductive employees.
    - Firadeoclus 8y ago
      When you mention cost the underlying assumption is that being able to easily fire employees makes the workforce more efficient. What if it doesn't? What if perceived job stability increases performance? What if decisions to fire someone are often poorly thought out, and forcing employees to consider alternatives first is actually a good thing?
      - AmericanChopper 8y ago
        The ability to fire unproductive or toxic employees will undoubtedly improve the productivity of the company. Companies will nearly always attempt to improve poor performance before dismissing employees because it simply costs less. What you're suggesting is that they are forced to retain them, at their own cost, and at the cost of the good employees. Workplaces that retain bad employees not only have to pay for their lack of productivity, but they must also pay in the form of churning out good employees. People know when their colleagues aren't being productive, and they really can't stand carrying them. There are few things that push people out the door faster than bad team mates. Being forced to retain them is the dead sea effect on steroids.
  - blattimwind 8y ago
    Police officers are state officials/servants (not employees) and can't be let go. New teachers often don't get appointed to that status any more, they're regular employees. They do have a union though (officials/servants are legally unable to unionize and can't go on strikes).
    - zaarn 8y ago
      Interesting that teachers are no longer officials, I think I missed that development. Quite sad though then again some teachers are quite ... different in my experience so it might improve things a bit too.
      - majewsky 8y ago
        Actually, the trend has reversed: Teachers now get hired as officials again because there are not enough teachers and states are competing for them. Especially the East German states hire teachers as officials since salaries are not as competitive there.
      - pluma 8y ago
        The special status of "Beamter" is officially granted after a fixed time of service. However schools have avoided this by hiring teachers on temporary contracts, usually initially as substitute teachers. The contracts are then renewed as needed so some teachers ended up working for years but never reaching the threshold because they never had a permanent contract.
        blattimwind 8y ago
        There's actually an even "better" twist on that done by some private school carriers (Schulträger); they simply hire teachers only for the teaching period (excluding school holidays) and re-hire before holidays end.
dmichulke 8y ago
Sometimes statements of facts may seem incredibly offensive. Others should be able to mention those in a related discussion, even if offensive, because otherwise the discussion is biased. I use the word "fact" above because I think it is obvious that if firing is hard, low performers accumulate. I'm happy to elaborate if you wish.
- Firadeoclus 8y ago
  So where do low performers come from and where do they go to when you fire them? What is their flow through the economy? A fired low performer will still look for, and likely find, another job. The assumption there might be that they will learn and try harder, but whether that is the actual effect is much less obvious than you might think. It's also not obvious at all that churn is good for overall productivity of an economy. Can you show that making firing harder or easier causally affects average productivity (or the productivity distribution) in a specific direction?
- pluma 8y ago
  > I use the word "fact" above because I think it is obvious that Then it's not a fact. That you think "if A then B" is obvious just means you take it for granted and betrays your bias. EDIT: Making it easy to fire people doesn't mean "low performers" won't "accumulate". Case in point: the infamous Microsoft strategy of always firing the bottom 10%, which led to a toxic culture that in turn resulted in talent leaving. Or the apparent necessity for "anti-poaching" agreements between major tech companies.
- wirrbel 8y ago
  Oh my, someone is doing a little Milchmädchenrechnung here it seems. Of course your "fact" isn't completely wrong in the sense that low performers cannot easily be fired if firing is difficult. You ignore, however, all kinds of other effects: Even high-performers value working at a company, where one is safe from being fired. So you accumulate not only low-performers, but all kinds of performers. Organizations have a high rate of confusion when they try to separate high-performers from low-performers. I once stumbled in a situation where during a reorg I could observe team leads pull their prefered employees from the pool. This were two team leads, and in the same department so everyone knew each other quite well. It was revealing. For one, some of the colleagues I consider most competent (and performing) were actively ruled out by some team leads. Others, that I felt were not contributing much were fought over. Of course, the two team leads had differing opinions on a couple of employees, which made assignment easy. Since you mention firing. I rarely see firing happen due to on-average lower performance. I have seen people being layed off (to polish the budget) but it never seemed to be the case that the people layed-off were really low performers. Only a handful of people I have seen being actively pushed out of a company for performance reasons, and usually this was by offering them a compensation package.
lnsru 8y ago
Highly overpaid people, that can’t be fired and whose performance cannot be evaluated are not really interested in doing this boring thing called work. You know, that IG Metall’s “Leistungszulage” cannot be cut? Please look here on page 3: https://www.igmetall-schaeffler.de/uploads/media/LBU_Flyer__2.pdf https://www.igmetall-schaeffler.de/uploads/media/LBU_Flyer__... “Quervergleiche sind nicht zulässig“ <- it’s a hatchery for low performers!!!
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- foepys 8y ago
  I swear, everybody on HN thinks they are a "high performer". In reality, most of us aren't. Unions mostly only cover the lower hierarchies (like IG Metall does) while managers (even middle management) have to negotiate their salary by themselves. So, if you are a "high performer", you will easily get a management job and get all the money you are able to negotiate.
  - majewsky 8y ago
    Many high performers in technical positions will stop being high performers when promoted to a management position. (I know that I would.) See also the Peter Principle.
  - lnsru 8y ago
    I am not high performer. It doesn’t give me real benefit. +5% salary isn’t worth working evenings and weekends silently from home.
  - wirrbel 8y ago
    That is not exactly how it works in my IG Metall-run company. Although the range of jobs bound to unionized salary level, if you are außertariflich (i.e. above the union-negotiated salary level) you have a similar system with steps. Of course at one point in the hierarchy people probably earn heaps of money, but middle management and even senior management still is in a similar system.
- 8y ago

by foepys 8y ago

AmericanChopper 8y ago

There are plenty of unions that make it nearly impossible to fire bad employees. Teachers and cops are notorious for it.

zaarn 8y ago
In Germany firing a teacher or cop isn't hard because unions but because they're state employees which makes it hard to fire them at all (though it does happen).
- AmericanChopper 8y ago
  http://ftp.iza.org/dp5222.pdf http://ftp.iza.org/dp5222.pdf >union members are less likely to lose their jobs than non-members. In particular, using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel we can show that roughly 50% of the observed raw differential in individual dismissal rates can be explained by the estimated average partial effect of union membership. If you read the whole thing you’ll also see that it’s significantly more expensive to fire a union member. It’s much harder and more expensive to fire union members. The natural result of this is that bad or underperforming employees are more likely to remain in the workforce. Like unions or don’t, but this is one of the costs they impose on the workforce.
  - zaarn 8y ago
    In part the lower firing rate can be explained by other means, unions do try to work with companies when they're in a financial crisis (for example instead of firing people, they'd reduce working hours). That's sort of the point of a union really; give workers better leverage to work with the company to ensure they'll keep their jobs and have fair wages and compensations+benefits. Of course, you'll get freeloaders but I'd argue that this is a price worth paying for because the workers benefit a lot and the company can benefit a lot too. Plus, this isn't the point either, teachers and cops aren't hard to fire because of unions. They are civil servants, they can't negotiate their wages via unions or even strike. They also lack a number of other rights. However, they are also incredibly hard to fire if they didn't commit serious crimes or felonies, otherwise they hold their job for life. So teachers and cops in germany have little to nothing to do with unions when it comes to being hard to fire.
    - AmericanChopper 8y ago
      >In part the lower firing rate can be explained by other means, unions do try to work with companies when they're in a financial crisis The study was of dismissal rates, not redundancies. So none of the 50% reduction found in dismissals can be explained by redundancies. Your speculation about cops and teachers is also irrelevant, as the data very convincingly shows that it’s much harder and more expensive to fire union members.
      - zaarn 8y ago
        >The study was of dismissal rates, not redundancies. So none of the 50% reduction found in dismissals can be explained by redundancies. The paper you linked specifically points out that unions reduce employee turnover, as mentioned because unions do try to work with companies, and as mentioned, try to keep workers employed. This fully explains a lower turnover rate. The paper however doesn't really go deep into that territory so I'm afraid you can't simply say that the explanation is invalid. Specifically the paper mentions "Our data does not allow us to explicitly test for the channel by which individual trade union membership alters dismissal probabilities." So again, saying the paper finds that redundancy can't explain the reduction is simply incorrect. >Your speculation about cops and teachers is also irrelevant, It's not speculation, it's german employment and civil servant law, but thanks anyway. I'm merely raising the point that using teachers and cops are bad examples considering they don't have unions here.
        AmericanChopper 8y ago
        >The paper you linked specifically points out that unions reduce employee turnover, as mentioned because unions do try to work with companies, and as mentioned, try to keep workers employed. It actually sites union representation in labor court as a key factor: >German employment protection legislation gives workers the entitlement to contest a dismissal at a labour court. Trade unions generally support their members in such legal conflicts. According to a recent survey, 12% of all union members have been represented by their union in court and almost 50% have obtained legal advice from union staff at least once during their membership. Furthermore, in 2008 for example, the German Trade Union Federation (DGB) represented union members in more than 70,000 proceedings in labour courts, of which about 26,000 were directly related to dismissal conflicts.21 In addition, we know that the probability of obtaining a severance payment will be higher if a labour court is involved >This fully explains a lower turnover rate. Again, the paper is not about turnover rate or redundancy as you keep saying, it’s about dismissals: >The differences in the dismissal rates are striking: the raw dismissal rate of non-members amounts to about 3.6% and is almost three times as high as that of union members in sample I. It is still more than twice the dismissal rate of non-members in sample II, which covers the longer time span. >saying the paper finds that redundancy can't explain the reduction is simply incorrect. It seems you didn’t read the paper: >A key advantage of the SOEP data is that information on the type of job termination is available. Since 1985, respondents have been asked to classify their job termination from a list of items, such as "fired by the employer", "quit on one's own", "time-limited work contract", "apprenticeship had been completed", "entering pre-retirement programme" or "other reasons". The items "fired by the employer" and "quit on one's own" are included in every wave of the SOEP. Some of the other reasons have been included irregularly and additional types of job separations, such as "plant closed", have been added later on. This last item has been sporadically included in questionnaires since 1991. Furthermore, multiple answers were allowed only until 1998. Since we are concerned with whether union membership is associated with a reduced risk of being individually dismissed, we focus on "fired by the employer" as the self-reported reason for a job termination. The fact is plain as day, union membership makes it harder and more costly to fire bad employees. You can think it’s worth it if you like, but there’s no way to deny it. It’s also worth noting that this cost isn’t taken by the employer, but by the employee. As they all have collective contracts, the wages fleeced by low productivity employees are simply made up by higher productivity employees.
  - Someone 8y ago
    One could also argue that non-union members are less likely to have decent legal support, making it easier for employers to exploit them.
    - AmericanChopper 8y ago
      There’s no benefit to employers in firing good employees. Firing them is expensive and full of liability and hiring replacements is also very expensive. If you accept that employers are self interested, then they’ll want to keep good employees and get rid of bad ones. Making it hard and costly to fire bad employees doesn’t benefit anybody except bad and unproductive employees.
  - Firadeoclus 8y ago
    When you mention cost the underlying assumption is that being able to easily fire employees makes the workforce more efficient. What if it doesn't? What if perceived job stability increases performance? What if decisions to fire someone are often poorly thought out, and forcing employees to consider alternatives first is actually a good thing?
    - AmericanChopper 8y ago
      The ability to fire unproductive or toxic employees will undoubtedly improve the productivity of the company. Companies will nearly always attempt to improve poor performance before dismissing employees because it simply costs less. What you're suggesting is that they are forced to retain them, at their own cost, and at the cost of the good employees. Workplaces that retain bad employees not only have to pay for their lack of productivity, but they must also pay in the form of churning out good employees. People know when their colleagues aren't being productive, and they really can't stand carrying them. There are few things that push people out the door faster than bad team mates. Being forced to retain them is the dead sea effect on steroids.
- blattimwind 8y ago
  Police officers are state officials/servants (not employees) and can't be let go. New teachers often don't get appointed to that status any more, they're regular employees. They do have a union though (officials/servants are legally unable to unionize and can't go on strikes).
  - zaarn 8y ago
    Interesting that teachers are no longer officials, I think I missed that development. Quite sad though then again some teachers are quite ... different in my experience so it might improve things a bit too.
    - majewsky 8y ago
      Actually, the trend has reversed: Teachers now get hired as officials again because there are not enough teachers and states are competing for them. Especially the East German states hire teachers as officials since salaries are not as competitive there.
    - pluma 8y ago
      The special status of "Beamter" is officially granted after a fixed time of service. However schools have avoided this by hiring teachers on temporary contracts, usually initially as substitute teachers. The contracts are then renewed as needed so some teachers ended up working for years but never reaching the threshold because they never had a permanent contract.
      - blattimwind 8y ago
        There's actually an even "better" twist on that done by some private school carriers (Schulträger); they simply hire teachers only for the teaching period (excluding school holidays) and re-hire before holidays end.

dmichulke 8y ago

Sometimes statements of facts may seem incredibly offensive. Others should be able to mention those in a related discussion, even if offensive, because otherwise the discussion is biased. I use the word "fact" above because I think it is obvious that if firing is hard, low performers accumulate. I'm happy to elaborate if you wish.

Firadeoclus 8y ago
So where do low performers come from and where do they go to when you fire them? What is their flow through the economy? A fired low performer will still look for, and likely find, another job. The assumption there might be that they will learn and try harder, but whether that is the actual effect is much less obvious than you might think. It's also not obvious at all that churn is good for overall productivity of an economy. Can you show that making firing harder or easier causally affects average productivity (or the productivity distribution) in a specific direction?
pluma 8y ago
> I use the word "fact" above because I think it is obvious that Then it's not a fact. That you think "if A then B" is obvious just means you take it for granted and betrays your bias. EDIT: Making it easy to fire people doesn't mean "low performers" won't "accumulate". Case in point: the infamous Microsoft strategy of always firing the bottom 10%, which led to a toxic culture that in turn resulted in talent leaving. Or the apparent necessity for "anti-poaching" agreements between major tech companies.
wirrbel 8y ago
Oh my, someone is doing a little Milchmädchenrechnung here it seems. Of course your "fact" isn't completely wrong in the sense that low performers cannot easily be fired if firing is difficult. You ignore, however, all kinds of other effects: Even high-performers value working at a company, where one is safe from being fired. So you accumulate not only low-performers, but all kinds of performers. Organizations have a high rate of confusion when they try to separate high-performers from low-performers. I once stumbled in a situation where during a reorg I could observe team leads pull their prefered employees from the pool. This were two team leads, and in the same department so everyone knew each other quite well. It was revealing. For one, some of the colleagues I consider most competent (and performing) were actively ruled out by some team leads. Others, that I felt were not contributing much were fought over. Of course, the two team leads had differing opinions on a couple of employees, which made assignment easy. Since you mention firing. I rarely see firing happen due to on-average lower performance. I have seen people being layed off (to polish the budget) but it never seemed to be the case that the people layed-off were really low performers. Only a handful of people I have seen being actively pushed out of a company for performance reasons, and usually this was by offering them a compensation package.

lnsru 8y ago

Highly overpaid people, that can’t be fired and whose performance cannot be evaluated are not really interested in doing this boring thing called work. You know, that IG Metall’s “Leistungszulage” cannot be cut? Please look here on page 3: https://www.igmetall-schaeffler.de/uploads/media/LBU_Flyer__2.pdf https://www.igmetall-schaeffler.de/uploads/media/LBU_Flyer__... “Quervergleiche sind nicht zulässig“ <- it’s a hatchery for low performers!!!

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
foepys 8y ago
I swear, everybody on HN thinks they are a "high performer". In reality, most of us aren't. Unions mostly only cover the lower hierarchies (like IG Metall does) while managers (even middle management) have to negotiate their salary by themselves. So, if you are a "high performer", you will easily get a management job and get all the money you are able to negotiate.
- majewsky 8y ago
  Many high performers in technical positions will stop being high performers when promoted to a management position. (I know that I would.) See also the Peter Principle.
- lnsru 8y ago
  I am not high performer. It doesn’t give me real benefit. +5% salary isn’t worth working evenings and weekends silently from home.
- wirrbel 8y ago
  That is not exactly how it works in my IG Metall-run company. Although the range of jobs bound to unionized salary level, if you are außertariflich (i.e. above the union-negotiated salary level) you have a similar system with steps. Of course at one point in the hierarchy people probably earn heaps of money, but middle management and even senior management still is in a similar system.
8y ago