5 ms·

I know close to nothing about unions or the KS story but I am from the US and myself along with almost everyone I know tend to associate unions with extreme was

by nickjj 7y ago

I know close to nothing about unions or the KS story but I am from the US and myself along with almost everyone I know tend to associate unions with extreme wasting of resources. This is coming at it from a spectator's point of view (ie. not a union worker / not a unionized business owner). For example, I've witnessed an overpass taking over 2 years to finish (it was blocked off / limited access / under construction the whole time) which involved fixing about 30 feet of road from a unionized crew. Every time workers were on the site it looked really inefficient. Over a dozen people there, but half of them were standing around on their phones, etc.. I've seen countless examples of this over my life time living in the US. If I were a company I would be terrified that such inefficiencies are protected by a union. Personally I wouldn't fire anyone due to trying to organize one but can someone more knowledgeable in this area explain how a unionized workforce benefits both employees and the business hiring them?

dmead 7y ago
that's an extremely biased point of view. I'm from the US and myself along with almost everyone i know tend to associate unions with the reason they have a decent standard of living. I'm sorry you had to see some construction workers being lazy. I hope you're able to recover someday.
drhodes 7y ago
I don't know much about unions either, but found this recent NPR interview to be informative. Like many interviews, the guest is selling a book. https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2019/08/14/labor-unions-beaten-down-worked-up-steven-greenhouse https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2019/08/14/labor-unions-beaten-... Steven Greenhouse, author of "Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor." Reporter at The New York Times for 31 years, who covered labor and the workplace for 19 years. (@greenhousenyt)
shakezula 7y ago
That type of inefficiency isn’t exclusive to unions, you realize that right? You realize that maybe there were other factors involved that caused the bridge to take that long? You realize that construction is often a very sequential process that can block other steps from being completed until the first is done? Every part of your comment is completely anecdotal and could be due to myriad other factors. > associate unions with extreme wasting of resources sounds like 30+ years of anti-union propaganda working its charm.
- nickjj 7y ago
  > Sounds like 30+ years of anti-union propaganda working its charm. I dunno. I see it all over the place. Look at the US government. Most of the govt. run customer facing services are abysmal when it comes to efficiency (DMV, etc.). From my quick Googling the DMV is unionized. It doesn't end at the DMV either. I know some types of construction jobs are usually sequential but I don't understand how in any circumstance it can take 2 years to fix 30 feet of road while it disrupted traffic the whole time. This isn't an isolated case either, I see similar things all the time.
  - SamReidHughes 7y ago
    That's state governments, but I haven't heard much better about non-unionized federal offices.
  - cannonedhamster 7y ago
    Yeah because Comcast, EA, Verizon, and there are numerous private today constructions crews that aren't unionized and they are all known for great service. Unions have zero impact on quality or speed of work. All unions do is create a group of individuals to balance the power that corporations have. If unions had any real power in the United States, then wages wouldn't have failed to rise with the rate of efficiency for the last 50 years. Since Reagan went union busting wages have barely increased for the average worker against inflation. You know who has been getting more money? The corporate owners who have devalued all the public stocks while keeping the private stock for themselves. We don't live in a republic in the US anymore, we live in an oligarchy. You know the single most efficient medical insurance? Medicare. Government doesn't need to be a bureaucratic mess, but when half of government is literally platformed on making government fail to prove government is broken, it's not really difficult to see why we're in the mess we're in. All I want is us to pay down our deficit instead of kicking the can down the road.
  - Apocryphon 7y ago
    Aren't government contractors, which are private corporations that probably don't have unions, also notorious for inefficiency?
jacquesm 7y ago
> If I were a company I would be terrified that such inefficiencies are protected by a union. You can't 'be' a company. You can run one, at best. And if unionized employees terrify you in a country where unionization is legal then maybe simply do not start a company? > can someone more knowledgeable in this area explain how a unionized workforce benefits both employees and the business hiring them In theory - not always in practice - unions create a more level playing field in the asymmetrical relationship between employer and employee, it restores some of the balance of power. Collective bargaining means that employers can no longer reduce negotiations by serially negotiating with one employee at the time, but have the negotiate with all employees at once. This has had a remarkable effect on the division of the value created by those employees over the years that we have had unions. Now, in practice, of course not everything is quite that simple and unions can be co-opted by the company, and there are plenty of examples of unions that ended up being self serving power structures in their own right but we - collectively, the voters - still believe in most countries that unions are such a big net effect that retaliation against employees for wanting to unionize is illegal under the law.
- nickjj 7y ago
  > Collective bargaining means that employers can no longer reduce negotiations by serially negotiating with one employee at the time, but have the negotiate with all employees at once. Now I understand why my original comment is the most down voted comment I ever made on HN in about 5 years. Based on what you wrote it sounds like union vs non-union seems very much related to a political topic of socialism vs capitalism which is usually a good idea to avoid talking about on public forums. With that said, I'm bowing out on this conversation!
  - jacquesm 7y ago
    Unions are present in just about every capitalist society, in fact I'd wager they are far more effective there than they would be on the opposite side of that particular fence, simply because most capitalist societies have somewhat functional legal systems as well as democratic institutions. In other countries union bosses are found dead with alarming regularity.
moogly 7y ago
I'm sure a construction worker could write an unflattering paragraph like your second, observing isolated flashes of workdays at a software company from his perspective, and, with equally broad strokes, paint the software world in a (IMO not entirely undeserved) bad light.
Teknoman117 7y ago
Unions exist to improve the lives of workers and provide more work opportunities for their members, not necessarily improve the organizations said workers are employed by. Unions are responsible for some of the benefits we tend to take for granted - weekends, 8 hours workdays, corporate healthcare, retirement plans, etc. At the same time, any organization with power can become corrupt, or at least have its interests diverge. Some examples that come to mind are the myriad of stories my mom tells me about working as a teacher. One thing that annoyed her to no end was the IT labor union at her school. Teachers, even ones with technical skills, were forbid from touching any of the computers (even so much as plugging keyboards back in if students unplugged them). When computer Labs were being set up, one worker would put in all the computers, but a separate worker would come in the plug them in. Seriously, they'd come in for two hours to attach power cables. However, when the school started 'not renewing contracts' after 3 years of continuous employment but then 'rehiring' after a month, so that teachers wouldn't get tenure, the union got the school to stop. The union's power base came mainly from holding the school hostage - you 'couldn't' work there without joining the teachers union, else the union would have the teachers strike...
- aksss 7y ago
  I got the crap grieved out of me (well mgmt and my teams) multiple times over work protection and “past practice” issues. Won most of them, but it’s a good example of how I can understand the theory, but how the practice doesn’t support a nimble work force, evolution of skills, responsiveness, etc. plus the union habit of eating their young during layoffs means the codgers are the ones sticking around. Like, the company has a mission and it will die if we do not do a good job at it. We don’t have time to wait for crap like finding the computer plug-in guy. I think much of that stuff can be put back on management for not being involved and educated enough in crafting equitable bargaining agreements. It takes a lot, lot, lot of management involvement to get a good one, and you can’t just rely on counsel and execs, but you often need a lot of middle managers providing input on daily operations to avoid situations like the one you describe. Most private companies, much less public sector organizations, don’t put that kind of forethought into their agreements.
daddylonglegs 7y ago
I think German industry is a good example, it is strongly unionised and the unions have representatives in the board that supervises the running of companies. Apparently the result has been better cooperation between employers and workers: where the employers invest in and are mindful of employees and the employees in turn see the "big picture" and are committed to making sure their employer is competitive. My German colleagues are happy to point out that the more unionised Germany has retained it's manufacturing industry while the UK's has withered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination#Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination#Germany The union I'm part of in the UK regularly arranges on-site events for all employees and pushes for improvements on environmental issues as well as working conditions.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago
  Yes German unions work really well. I think part of it is that after WW2 the whole system was designed to be a market economy with social elements (“soziale Marktwirtschaft “).
  - claudeganon 7y ago
    And because the Nazis explicitly went after trade unions. Postwar, people understood that preserving democracy in the workplace was an equally important bulwark against the return of fascism. Nazism wouldn’t have been nearly as powerful and horrendous without its business allies (in both Germany and the US), which is why it was important to check their authoritarianism.
    - claudeganon 7y ago
      Weird to get downvoted for a historical truth. Trade unions had their assets seized and their leaders thrown in concentration camps. But here’s the reference anyway... “The Trade Union Movement and the Redistribution of Power in Postwar Germany” Clark Kerr The Quarterly Journal of Economics Vol. 68, No. 4 (Nov., 1954), pp. 535-564 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1881876?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/1881876?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
hysan 7y ago
My father was the owner of his company. My mother was in the union whose workers he employed. I’ve grown up around both sides and understand quite deeply that there are no absolutes in this. You can have good and bad unions just like you can have good and bad companies in the world. I don’t have much else other than anecdotes to add about the benefits of unions for both sides. What I would like to point out is that if you flip your post and replace union with company, it still holds 100% true. Just food for thought.

by nickjj 7y ago

dmead 7y ago

that's an extremely biased point of view. I'm from the US and myself along with almost everyone i know tend to associate unions with the reason they have a decent standard of living. I'm sorry you had to see some construction workers being lazy. I hope you're able to recover someday.

drhodes 7y ago

I don't know much about unions either, but found this recent NPR interview to be informative. Like many interviews, the guest is selling a book. https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2019/08/14/labor-unions-beaten-down-worked-up-steven-greenhouse https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2019/08/14/labor-unions-beaten-... Steven Greenhouse, author of "Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor." Reporter at The New York Times for 31 years, who covered labor and the workplace for 19 years. (@greenhousenyt)

shakezula 7y ago

That type of inefficiency isn’t exclusive to unions, you realize that right? You realize that maybe there were other factors involved that caused the bridge to take that long? You realize that construction is often a very sequential process that can block other steps from being completed until the first is done? Every part of your comment is completely anecdotal and could be due to myriad other factors. > associate unions with extreme wasting of resources sounds like 30+ years of anti-union propaganda working its charm.

nickjj 7y ago
> Sounds like 30+ years of anti-union propaganda working its charm. I dunno. I see it all over the place. Look at the US government. Most of the govt. run customer facing services are abysmal when it comes to efficiency (DMV, etc.). From my quick Googling the DMV is unionized. It doesn't end at the DMV either. I know some types of construction jobs are usually sequential but I don't understand how in any circumstance it can take 2 years to fix 30 feet of road while it disrupted traffic the whole time. This isn't an isolated case either, I see similar things all the time.
- SamReidHughes 7y ago
  That's state governments, but I haven't heard much better about non-unionized federal offices.
- cannonedhamster 7y ago
  Yeah because Comcast, EA, Verizon, and there are numerous private today constructions crews that aren't unionized and they are all known for great service. Unions have zero impact on quality or speed of work. All unions do is create a group of individuals to balance the power that corporations have. If unions had any real power in the United States, then wages wouldn't have failed to rise with the rate of efficiency for the last 50 years. Since Reagan went union busting wages have barely increased for the average worker against inflation. You know who has been getting more money? The corporate owners who have devalued all the public stocks while keeping the private stock for themselves. We don't live in a republic in the US anymore, we live in an oligarchy. You know the single most efficient medical insurance? Medicare. Government doesn't need to be a bureaucratic mess, but when half of government is literally platformed on making government fail to prove government is broken, it's not really difficult to see why we're in the mess we're in. All I want is us to pay down our deficit instead of kicking the can down the road.
- Apocryphon 7y ago
  Aren't government contractors, which are private corporations that probably don't have unions, also notorious for inefficiency?

jacquesm 7y ago

> If I were a company I would be terrified that such inefficiencies are protected by a union. You can't 'be' a company. You can run one, at best. And if unionized employees terrify you in a country where unionization is legal then maybe simply do not start a company? > can someone more knowledgeable in this area explain how a unionized workforce benefits both employees and the business hiring them In theory - not always in practice - unions create a more level playing field in the asymmetrical relationship between employer and employee, it restores some of the balance of power. Collective bargaining means that employers can no longer reduce negotiations by serially negotiating with one employee at the time, but have the negotiate with all employees at once. This has had a remarkable effect on the division of the value created by those employees over the years that we have had unions. Now, in practice, of course not everything is quite that simple and unions can be co-opted by the company, and there are plenty of examples of unions that ended up being self serving power structures in their own right but we - collectively, the voters - still believe in most countries that unions are such a big net effect that retaliation against employees for wanting to unionize is illegal under the law.

nickjj 7y ago
> Collective bargaining means that employers can no longer reduce negotiations by serially negotiating with one employee at the time, but have the negotiate with all employees at once. Now I understand why my original comment is the most down voted comment I ever made on HN in about 5 years. Based on what you wrote it sounds like union vs non-union seems very much related to a political topic of socialism vs capitalism which is usually a good idea to avoid talking about on public forums. With that said, I'm bowing out on this conversation!
- jacquesm 7y ago
  Unions are present in just about every capitalist society, in fact I'd wager they are far more effective there than they would be on the opposite side of that particular fence, simply because most capitalist societies have somewhat functional legal systems as well as democratic institutions. In other countries union bosses are found dead with alarming regularity.

moogly 7y ago

I'm sure a construction worker could write an unflattering paragraph like your second, observing isolated flashes of workdays at a software company from his perspective, and, with equally broad strokes, paint the software world in a (IMO not entirely undeserved) bad light.

Teknoman117 7y ago

Unions exist to improve the lives of workers and provide more work opportunities for their members, not necessarily improve the organizations said workers are employed by. Unions are responsible for some of the benefits we tend to take for granted - weekends, 8 hours workdays, corporate healthcare, retirement plans, etc. At the same time, any organization with power can become corrupt, or at least have its interests diverge. Some examples that come to mind are the myriad of stories my mom tells me about working as a teacher. One thing that annoyed her to no end was the IT labor union at her school. Teachers, even ones with technical skills, were forbid from touching any of the computers (even so much as plugging keyboards back in if students unplugged them). When computer Labs were being set up, one worker would put in all the computers, but a separate worker would come in the plug them in. Seriously, they'd come in for two hours to attach power cables. However, when the school started 'not renewing contracts' after 3 years of continuous employment but then 'rehiring' after a month, so that teachers wouldn't get tenure, the union got the school to stop. The union's power base came mainly from holding the school hostage - you 'couldn't' work there without joining the teachers union, else the union would have the teachers strike...

aksss 7y ago
I got the crap grieved out of me (well mgmt and my teams) multiple times over work protection and “past practice” issues. Won most of them, but it’s a good example of how I can understand the theory, but how the practice doesn’t support a nimble work force, evolution of skills, responsiveness, etc. plus the union habit of eating their young during layoffs means the codgers are the ones sticking around. Like, the company has a mission and it will die if we do not do a good job at it. We don’t have time to wait for crap like finding the computer plug-in guy. I think much of that stuff can be put back on management for not being involved and educated enough in crafting equitable bargaining agreements. It takes a lot, lot, lot of management involvement to get a good one, and you can’t just rely on counsel and execs, but you often need a lot of middle managers providing input on daily operations to avoid situations like the one you describe. Most private companies, much less public sector organizations, don’t put that kind of forethought into their agreements.

daddylonglegs 7y ago

I think German industry is a good example, it is strongly unionised and the unions have representatives in the board that supervises the running of companies. Apparently the result has been better cooperation between employers and workers: where the employers invest in and are mindful of employees and the employees in turn see the "big picture" and are committed to making sure their employer is competitive. My German colleagues are happy to point out that the more unionised Germany has retained it's manufacturing industry while the UK's has withered. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination#Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination#Germany The union I'm part of in the UK regularly arranges on-site events for all employees and pushes for improvements on environmental issues as well as working conditions.

Ididntdothis 7y ago
Yes German unions work really well. I think part of it is that after WW2 the whole system was designed to be a market economy with social elements (“soziale Marktwirtschaft “).
- claudeganon 7y ago
  And because the Nazis explicitly went after trade unions. Postwar, people understood that preserving democracy in the workplace was an equally important bulwark against the return of fascism. Nazism wouldn’t have been nearly as powerful and horrendous without its business allies (in both Germany and the US), which is why it was important to check their authoritarianism.
  - claudeganon 7y ago
    Weird to get downvoted for a historical truth. Trade unions had their assets seized and their leaders thrown in concentration camps. But here’s the reference anyway... “The Trade Union Movement and the Redistribution of Power in Postwar Germany” Clark Kerr The Quarterly Journal of Economics Vol. 68, No. 4 (Nov., 1954), pp. 535-564 https://www.jstor.org/stable/1881876?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/1881876?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

hysan 7y ago

My father was the owner of his company. My mother was in the union whose workers he employed. I’ve grown up around both sides and understand quite deeply that there are no absolutes in this. You can have good and bad unions just like you can have good and bad companies in the world. I don’t have much else other than anecdotes to add about the benefits of unions for both sides. What I would like to point out is that if you flip your post and replace union with company, it still holds 100% true. Just food for thought.