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Having been a part of a union I was mandated to enter when I took the job until the supreme court ruled that wasn't legal, actual unions are a far cry from how

by anoxor 6y ago

Having been a part of a union I was mandated to enter when I took the job until the supreme court ruled that wasn't legal, actual unions are a far cry from how they are portrayed as helping the worker. I would honestly do anything in my power to not have to work in a union again. They are set up as antagonistic between administration and workers, and adds a layer of bureaucracy that I've only seen be negative. I've worked with people who effectively could never be fired and were so bad at their jobs they spread negativity with everyone they encountered.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Isn’t this kind of separate from Amazon’s actions though? Unless you’re positing that Amazon is actually acting in the interest of their employees, or thinks they are?
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  False dichotomy. Two things can both be true: Amazon is not acting in the interest of their employees, and unions are also not acting in the interest of the employees.
- bpodgursky 6y ago
  It's possible for unions to be bad for both the employees and the employer, and only good for professional middlemen bureaucrats and national parent union leadership.
api 6y ago
I've heard nothing but bad things about American unions from both management and many (but not all) workers. I strongly believe that we need labor organization, but I also wonder if someone needs to (cliche alert!) disrupt the space with a new model or just new unions that are not run by bureaucratic chair warmers or the mob. The biggest thing that always blows me away about unions is the work rules. Person A can't so much as lift a finger to do something outside their designated work area, etc. I can't even imagine running an organization with that kind of bureaucracy. How could you optimize process? It's a wonder any union shop with that kind of elephant on its back can get anything done, ever.
- delfinom 6y ago
  One of the biggest problems is honestly that. The existing unions are trying to expand into other industries. It only brings the existing mess, ducktapes on some new layers and fucks up more things. They aren't even expanding for the workers at that point, but to increase revenue for their administrative salaries. Rather than a new union specifically tailored for a industry/environment/location/job. And don't get me started about NY unions which are literally run by mafias as part of a long con. The LIRR union head (with suspiciously mafia ties) threw a shit fit because "HOW DARE" the LIRR have a modern time card system that requires an employee to scan a finger so to confirm they are actually present to avoid the billion dollar abuse of physical timecards they were replacing.
Accujack 6y ago
Some people like unions, I think because they're lucky enough to have had a good experience, or to be part of a union that was not decayed by age or special interests. Unions should not be needed... the governments who represent the people working should provide the necessary protections for workers without unions being needed. Unions are a way for some people to get what all workers should have by default.
- TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  The government will never be as in tune with the needs of the workers as the workers themselves. I think organized labor is a very good idea. We can see in the US how workers have been put in ever more precarious situations since the labor unions were significantly weakened 30-40 years ago. But actually I don’t think having a normal corporation with a board of directors and then a union at odds with that board really makes sense. To me, worker owned cooperatives make a lot of sense. I am coming to appreciate that there is however no one size fits all solution. So I look at this like “more of X would help Y”. And I do think more organized labor as unions or coops would help workers (in the USA where this is an issue). In the USA workers generally need better health care, maternity and paternity leave, predictable working hours and better pay. I did however recently learn that in Germany apparently the big companies have representatives from labor in the board, and then they have another board that supervises them which is half labor. I’m fuzzy on the details but it was described in the linked lecture below which is pretty good! https://youtu.be/8iHeh0iRykw https://youtu.be/8iHeh0iRykw
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    I think worker-owned cooperatives do make a ton of sense and bridge the interest gap between employers and employees. When the interests of the unions align with the interest of society at large in that we want to promote productivity, it fixes a lot of things.
    - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
      Agreed. Germany has kept so many factories (it would seem) because labor doesn’t want to offshore their own jobs, even if management is indifferent.
xnyan 6y ago
Would you agree that there are some corrupt market-based economies in our world? Would you say that the fact that there are corrupt and inefficient market-based economies means that all market-based economies result in negative outcomes? Saying that support of organized labor = support of corrupt unions is a pretty weak strawman.
- MrStonedOne 6y ago
  I could ask you the same question, about unions. What I love are unions that set abnormally high union initiation fees, only offer payment plans on people who sign dues check off forms, then include language in that dues check off form that keeps you from cancelling it unless you do so during a 15 day window every year. As long as unions can forced on empolyees, unions can not be a market-based economy, it can not ever act against the interest of the empolyees it serves. Why is it harder for a workplace to leave a union that is no longer serving its interests (to none or another union) then it is for the union to form in the first place?
  - smnrchrds 6y ago
    > Why is it harder for a workplace to leave a union that is no longer serving its interests (to none or another union) then it is for the union to form in the first place? That's the case with essentially everything. Legally, it is much harder to get divorced than get married; it is much harder to break a lease than sign a lease; it is much harder to recall a judge than elect a judge, ... Unions are not the exception in this regard, this is pretty much the norm in everything.
    - MrStonedOne 6y ago
      >Unions are not the exception in this regard They must be. or all unions will just trend toward allowing corrupt incentives to take over over time.
  - heavyset_go 6y ago
    > As long as unions can forced on empolyees Nobody is forcing you to work a union job. You're free to take a non-union job or quit at any point.
mikestew 6y ago
Were I to base career choices on every one-off negative anecdote about a particular work scenario, I would have gone to live in a monastery years ago. Of course, I'm probably replying to a Pinkerton employee right now. But, yeah, unions bad.
- jariel 6y ago
  Except that it's not a single anecdote, and this issue is widespread. Ignoring the realities and complexities of established organized labour is not going to help the cause.
  - cool_dude85 6y ago
    It is, very literally, a single anecdote that they guy is responding to.
    - jariel 6y ago
      As I clearly stated: problems with unions are widespread and there are even quite a handful of examples right on this thread. "Racism doesn't exist just because one person used n-word! It's just one anecdote!" ... is not an argument. Anyone with any exposure unions knows they are far from perfect, many of them are quite terrible. This kind of ideological, wilful ignorance kills any goodwill people might otherwise have among the adult population who will invariably have come up against theses issue probably multiple times in their lives through either personal experiences or acquaintances.
      - Qwertious 6y ago
        "As I clearly stated: problems with unions are widespread and there are even quite a handful of examples right on this thread." The plural of anecdote is not data.
- sacks2k 6y ago
  The core of a union is bad for workers that excel You won't get paid what you are worth and will get held back when you want a raise. In almost all unions that I've encountered, if you want a raise, it's as a collective. They also prevent technological advances and it only makes things more expensive for the consumer (Who do you think is fighting Uber and Lyft in major cities? Taxicab unions that were fleecing customers for decades and didn't need to add any convenience to customeers due to massive monopolies and the medallion system). We also can't forget the police unions, which very system contributes to not firing bad cops..which results in brutality. This is never mentioned in our current discussions on race because the progressives in this country love unions and don't want anything to prevent their mass acceptance. Unions are great for low-performing workers that get guaranteed raises and can't be fired for complete and utter incompetence.
vkgfx 6y ago
Their benefits outweigh these anecdotal downsides.
sgillen 6y ago
As long as we’re offering anecdotes, I’m part of a union and I think they have a positive effect on workers and enjoy a generally positive opinion among the employees. This union is probably less powerful than the one you are talking about as no one is mandated to join, and no one is impossible to fire.
- umvi 6y ago
  The type of union business owners are terrified of aren't small local unions, but massive NEA-esque mega-unions.
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    Then they should help local unions (not that local unions would be useful for, say Amazon or Walmart) become a thing and give them incentives not to become part of a big union. Otherwise, substituting some compensation with part-ownership makes it so that the interests of big unions align more with the interests of other stakeholders.
    - umvi 6y ago
      > Then they should help local unions (not that local unions would be useful for, say Amazon or Walmart) become a thing and give them incentives not to become part of a big union. Or, even easier, just pay your workers well, give them decent benefits, and do union busting to prevent them from forming in your company. Why outsource treating workers well to a bureaucratic middleman when you can just treat workers well yourself? (keep in mind this is for small businesses, not mega-corporations) > Otherwise, substituting some compensation with part-ownership makes it so that the interests of big unions align more with the interests of other stakeholders. Wouldn't that corrupt union leadership over time?
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        >Or, even easier, just pay your workers well, give them decent benefits, and do union busting to prevent them from forming. Never going to happen, there will always be a point where the company will try to minimize worker salaries as far as it can get away with. >Wouldn't that corrupt union leadership over time? No, you would pay employees using profits in part, and implicate them into the decision-making process. That way the incentives of union-leadership, workers, and stakeholders align. You can also push for union structures that minimize the power of union leadership and instead give it to the rank and file. Basically, making your company a bit more into a worker-coop fixes the issue.
jimbob45 6y ago
The fact is that there are effective unions. There are also corrupt unions. The problem is that each side will only acknowledge one of those sentences as being correct.
diebeforei485 6y ago
I think unions are only helpful when employers are particularly bad and have no intention of improving. In most other cases, unions are generally harmful, including most public-sector unions.
- AlexandrB 6y ago
  The problem is that the needle for "particularly bad" gets moved every year if there's no countervailing force. Short (<3hr) shifts and JiT scheduling were "particularly bad" a few years ago. Now they're probably the norm in the service/retail industry. The new innovation(s) thanks to Amazon seem to be unpaid security screenings and hidden performance metrics. How long until these are just SOP for all large retail companies?
mc32 6y ago
They treat part timers the worst. You get to pay dues but get little of the benefits. As a professional interacting with with unions has been frustrating too. No, sorry, I can’t turn that screw for you. The union guy left and won’t be back till Monday, sorry. Yes, yes, I know it’s only turning a screw, but I’m not allowed to do it. It will have to wait till Monday.
hh3k0 6y ago
Nice anecdata. Unions are necessary to ensure fair negotiations between employees and their employer, though. Any negotiation between a single employee and their employer is inherently unfair, as the latter holds far more power. Unions are a tried and true concept almost everywhere in the world, the Nordic Countries being a particulary good example. It'd seem that being unable to provide basic rights for workers is part of the fabled American exceptionalism -- together with the inability to provide universal healthcare, the monthly school shooting, and war in perpetuity.
- kmlx 6y ago
  > Any negotiation between a single employee and their employer is inherently unfair wow! what a statement. you are of course entirely wrong. you are generalising when in reality your statement is true only for some employees in some jobs. i think the time for these kinds of statements died in the 80s. the more we progress thru time the less we need unions because of all the new wealth that is created via the internet.
  - hh3k0 6y ago
    > You are of course entirely wrong. you are generalising when in reality your statement is true only for some employees in some jobs. I am not wrong: "According to Nielsen data, the American Payroll Association, CareerBuilder and the National Endowment for Financial Education, somewhere between 50 percent and 78 percent of employees earn just enough money to pay their bills each month. Should they miss a paycheck, some of those bills would go unpaid." -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/17/breakdown-what-living-paycheck-to-paycheck-looks-like/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/17/breakdown... > I think the time for these kinds of statements died in the 80s. They are as relevant as they were in 1776: "It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate." -- Adam Smith
nraynaud 6y ago
I live in France, being a union member here is incredibly dull, all day long people come with their employment contract, and you pore over the labor code and the various unions contracts to check the legality of various allegations. at the top level the workers unions manage the unemployment insurance with the employers unions, and talk to the government before labor laws are changed.
- kmlx 6y ago
  a lot of useless bureaucracy that culminates in yearly standstills via strikes. no wonder unions in France are slowly losing members: > A survey published by France’s human rights defender, an independent administrative authority, revealed that a “fear of reprisal” was cited as the most common reason for employees’ low-engagement in trade unions. A large majority of those surveyed said their trade union activities had a negative impact for their professional growth and said they felt discriminated against by their employers. The survey highlighted the main causes for the decrease of trade union membership in France since the 1950's, which is now one of the lowest rates of unionised employees in the European
scarmig 6y ago
It's always interesting to see the anti-union arguments on threads like these. Half the people say that unions are anarchist thugs who beat people up and bash their heads in with bricks, and half say they're gray bureaucratic paper pushing middlemen. Different unions are different, just as different companies are different. Plenty of companies have positive, constructive relationships with unions; you have no particular reason to say that the union is what made the relationship antagonistic and not the employer, except for an implicit assumption that companies have a right to exist and push for their interests while unions don't.
xiler 6y ago
> actual unions are a far cry from how they are portrayed as helping the worker. I think it's a fairly well established industry trend that, on average, union membership is a net positive for the worker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_wage_premium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_wage_premium
- umvi 6y ago
  Couldn't this just be because unions can have a deteriorating effect on meritocracy? Say you have 10 workers - 2 are rock stars and make $50/hr, 6 are average and make $20/hr, and 2 are bad and make $10/hr (min wage - because they are never promoted). Average "non-union" pay is: $24/hr Now say you unionize and the union forces you to start paying the bad employees $20/hr like all the other average ones. So now you pay the 2 bad employees $20 each. Well, you still want to incentivize good work so you bump average employees to $25/hr. But dang, that's a lot of money, time to reign in rock star budget a bit. Now rock stars make $30/hr, average make $25/hr, bad make $20/hr. Average "union" pay is: $25/hr So yes, the "average pay" will be higher for "the worker"... but at a cost. Your average high performers will now be paid less, and your average low performers will now be paid more... which creates perhaps undesirable incentive structures ("why work my butt off to get ahead when it really won't make that much of a difference? I'd rather switch to a non-union company where my pay is directly tied to my output").
  - steffandroid 6y ago
    This is a pointless thought experiment that has practically no basis in reality.
    - umvi 6y ago
      I disagree. Unions tend to favor seniority-based promotion over merit-based promotion[0] for obvious reasons (unions can't tell how much merit an employee has without deferring judgment to company managers/execs, but unions can tell how long someone has been working without deferring judgment to anyone). [0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2523767 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2523767
paxys 6y ago
> I've worked with people who effectively could never be fired and were so bad at their jobs they spread negativity with everyone they encountered. Same, and my workplace doesn't even have a union.
ardy42 6y ago
> actual unions are a far cry from how they are portrayed as helping the worker. But that's life. Real capitalism is also a far cry from the fairy tale capitalism presented by many popular economics books and articles (e.g. the beautiful self-regulating system where everyone is better off in the end by definition). > They are set up as antagonistic between administration and workers, and adds a layer of bureaucracy that I've only seen be negative. I've worked with people who effectively could never be fired and were so bad at their jobs they spread negativity with everyone they encountered. You could say the same about democracy. Wouldn't it be better to replace our actual democratic system with an idealized autocracy? There'd be far less interpersonal strife over politics, and we wouldn't have to waste our time with voting or political participation, and could devote our energies to more productive things instead! The union debate is weird like that. There's all kinds of negative discussion about specific instances of unions, considered in isolation. But that's rarely balanced against the specific problems unions are meant to solve or mitigate, so the effect is to compare the negatives of unions against an unspecified but implied positive management/shareholder-led status quo.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  I am no fan of unions, but I think they were necessary to force business owners to treat workers decently - to make them pay better than starvation wages, and have decent working conditions. Then came the Cold War, and business owners had an extra incentive to treat workers decently: it undercut communist propaganda, and business owners did not want communism in the country where they owned a business. And so workers didn't think unions were necessary, because they were getting a decent enough deal. Then the Cold War ended. And about the same time, union membership went into a steep decline. And the business owners have been slurping up all the money in the economy, and paying workers closer and closer to starvation wages. (And there's the working conditions at Amazon, which are... not treating employees decently.) This sounds more and more like the conditions where unions grew strong, because the workers found them to be necessary.

by anoxor 6y ago

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

Isn’t this kind of separate from Amazon’s actions though? Unless you’re positing that Amazon is actually acting in the interest of their employees, or thinks they are?

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
False dichotomy. Two things can both be true: Amazon is not acting in the interest of their employees, and unions are also not acting in the interest of the employees.
bpodgursky 6y ago
It's possible for unions to be bad for both the employees and the employer, and only good for professional middlemen bureaucrats and national parent union leadership.

api 6y ago

I've heard nothing but bad things about American unions from both management and many (but not all) workers. I strongly believe that we need labor organization, but I also wonder if someone needs to (cliche alert!) disrupt the space with a new model or just new unions that are not run by bureaucratic chair warmers or the mob. The biggest thing that always blows me away about unions is the work rules. Person A can't so much as lift a finger to do something outside their designated work area, etc. I can't even imagine running an organization with that kind of bureaucracy. How could you optimize process? It's a wonder any union shop with that kind of elephant on its back can get anything done, ever.

delfinom 6y ago
One of the biggest problems is honestly that. The existing unions are trying to expand into other industries. It only brings the existing mess, ducktapes on some new layers and fucks up more things. They aren't even expanding for the workers at that point, but to increase revenue for their administrative salaries. Rather than a new union specifically tailored for a industry/environment/location/job. And don't get me started about NY unions which are literally run by mafias as part of a long con. The LIRR union head (with suspiciously mafia ties) threw a shit fit because "HOW DARE" the LIRR have a modern time card system that requires an employee to scan a finger so to confirm they are actually present to avoid the billion dollar abuse of physical timecards they were replacing.

Accujack 6y ago

Some people like unions, I think because they're lucky enough to have had a good experience, or to be part of a union that was not decayed by age or special interests. Unions should not be needed... the governments who represent the people working should provide the necessary protections for workers without unions being needed. Unions are a way for some people to get what all workers should have by default.

TaylorAlexander 6y ago
The government will never be as in tune with the needs of the workers as the workers themselves. I think organized labor is a very good idea. We can see in the US how workers have been put in ever more precarious situations since the labor unions were significantly weakened 30-40 years ago. But actually I don’t think having a normal corporation with a board of directors and then a union at odds with that board really makes sense. To me, worker owned cooperatives make a lot of sense. I am coming to appreciate that there is however no one size fits all solution. So I look at this like “more of X would help Y”. And I do think more organized labor as unions or coops would help workers (in the USA where this is an issue). In the USA workers generally need better health care, maternity and paternity leave, predictable working hours and better pay. I did however recently learn that in Germany apparently the big companies have representatives from labor in the board, and then they have another board that supervises them which is half labor. I’m fuzzy on the details but it was described in the linked lecture below which is pretty good! https://youtu.be/8iHeh0iRykw https://youtu.be/8iHeh0iRykw
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  I think worker-owned cooperatives do make a ton of sense and bridge the interest gap between employers and employees. When the interests of the unions align with the interest of society at large in that we want to promote productivity, it fixes a lot of things.
  - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
    Agreed. Germany has kept so many factories (it would seem) because labor doesn’t want to offshore their own jobs, even if management is indifferent.

xnyan 6y ago

Would you agree that there are some corrupt market-based economies in our world? Would you say that the fact that there are corrupt and inefficient market-based economies means that all market-based economies result in negative outcomes? Saying that support of organized labor = support of corrupt unions is a pretty weak strawman.

MrStonedOne 6y ago
I could ask you the same question, about unions. What I love are unions that set abnormally high union initiation fees, only offer payment plans on people who sign dues check off forms, then include language in that dues check off form that keeps you from cancelling it unless you do so during a 15 day window every year. As long as unions can forced on empolyees, unions can not be a market-based economy, it can not ever act against the interest of the empolyees it serves. Why is it harder for a workplace to leave a union that is no longer serving its interests (to none or another union) then it is for the union to form in the first place?
- smnrchrds 6y ago
  > Why is it harder for a workplace to leave a union that is no longer serving its interests (to none or another union) then it is for the union to form in the first place? That's the case with essentially everything. Legally, it is much harder to get divorced than get married; it is much harder to break a lease than sign a lease; it is much harder to recall a judge than elect a judge, ... Unions are not the exception in this regard, this is pretty much the norm in everything.
  - MrStonedOne 6y ago
    >Unions are not the exception in this regard They must be. or all unions will just trend toward allowing corrupt incentives to take over over time.
- heavyset_go 6y ago
  > As long as unions can forced on empolyees Nobody is forcing you to work a union job. You're free to take a non-union job or quit at any point.

mikestew 6y ago

Were I to base career choices on every one-off negative anecdote about a particular work scenario, I would have gone to live in a monastery years ago. Of course, I'm probably replying to a Pinkerton employee right now. But, yeah, unions bad.

jariel 6y ago
Except that it's not a single anecdote, and this issue is widespread. Ignoring the realities and complexities of established organized labour is not going to help the cause.
- cool_dude85 6y ago
  It is, very literally, a single anecdote that they guy is responding to.
  - jariel 6y ago
    As I clearly stated: problems with unions are widespread and there are even quite a handful of examples right on this thread. "Racism doesn't exist just because one person used n-word! It's just one anecdote!" ... is not an argument. Anyone with any exposure unions knows they are far from perfect, many of them are quite terrible. This kind of ideological, wilful ignorance kills any goodwill people might otherwise have among the adult population who will invariably have come up against theses issue probably multiple times in their lives through either personal experiences or acquaintances.
    - Qwertious 6y ago
      "As I clearly stated: problems with unions are widespread and there are even quite a handful of examples right on this thread." The plural of anecdote is not data.
sacks2k 6y ago
The core of a union is bad for workers that excel You won't get paid what you are worth and will get held back when you want a raise. In almost all unions that I've encountered, if you want a raise, it's as a collective. They also prevent technological advances and it only makes things more expensive for the consumer (Who do you think is fighting Uber and Lyft in major cities? Taxicab unions that were fleecing customers for decades and didn't need to add any convenience to customeers due to massive monopolies and the medallion system). We also can't forget the police unions, which very system contributes to not firing bad cops..which results in brutality. This is never mentioned in our current discussions on race because the progressives in this country love unions and don't want anything to prevent their mass acceptance. Unions are great for low-performing workers that get guaranteed raises and can't be fired for complete and utter incompetence.

vkgfx 6y ago

Their benefits outweigh these anecdotal downsides.

sgillen 6y ago

As long as we’re offering anecdotes, I’m part of a union and I think they have a positive effect on workers and enjoy a generally positive opinion among the employees. This union is probably less powerful than the one you are talking about as no one is mandated to join, and no one is impossible to fire.

umvi 6y ago
The type of union business owners are terrified of aren't small local unions, but massive NEA-esque mega-unions.
- sudosysgen 6y ago
  Then they should help local unions (not that local unions would be useful for, say Amazon or Walmart) become a thing and give them incentives not to become part of a big union. Otherwise, substituting some compensation with part-ownership makes it so that the interests of big unions align more with the interests of other stakeholders.
  - umvi 6y ago
    > Then they should help local unions (not that local unions would be useful for, say Amazon or Walmart) become a thing and give them incentives not to become part of a big union. Or, even easier, just pay your workers well, give them decent benefits, and do union busting to prevent them from forming in your company. Why outsource treating workers well to a bureaucratic middleman when you can just treat workers well yourself? (keep in mind this is for small businesses, not mega-corporations) > Otherwise, substituting some compensation with part-ownership makes it so that the interests of big unions align more with the interests of other stakeholders. Wouldn't that corrupt union leadership over time?
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      >Or, even easier, just pay your workers well, give them decent benefits, and do union busting to prevent them from forming. Never going to happen, there will always be a point where the company will try to minimize worker salaries as far as it can get away with. >Wouldn't that corrupt union leadership over time? No, you would pay employees using profits in part, and implicate them into the decision-making process. That way the incentives of union-leadership, workers, and stakeholders align. You can also push for union structures that minimize the power of union leadership and instead give it to the rank and file. Basically, making your company a bit more into a worker-coop fixes the issue.

jimbob45 6y ago

The fact is that there are effective unions. There are also corrupt unions. The problem is that each side will only acknowledge one of those sentences as being correct.

diebeforei485 6y ago

I think unions are only helpful when employers are particularly bad and have no intention of improving. In most other cases, unions are generally harmful, including most public-sector unions.

AlexandrB 6y ago
The problem is that the needle for "particularly bad" gets moved every year if there's no countervailing force. Short (<3hr) shifts and JiT scheduling were "particularly bad" a few years ago. Now they're probably the norm in the service/retail industry. The new innovation(s) thanks to Amazon seem to be unpaid security screenings and hidden performance metrics. How long until these are just SOP for all large retail companies?

mc32 6y ago

They treat part timers the worst. You get to pay dues but get little of the benefits. As a professional interacting with with unions has been frustrating too. No, sorry, I can’t turn that screw for you. The union guy left and won’t be back till Monday, sorry. Yes, yes, I know it’s only turning a screw, but I’m not allowed to do it. It will have to wait till Monday.

hh3k0 6y ago

Nice anecdata. Unions are necessary to ensure fair negotiations between employees and their employer, though. Any negotiation between a single employee and their employer is inherently unfair, as the latter holds far more power. Unions are a tried and true concept almost everywhere in the world, the Nordic Countries being a particulary good example. It'd seem that being unable to provide basic rights for workers is part of the fabled American exceptionalism -- together with the inability to provide universal healthcare, the monthly school shooting, and war in perpetuity.

kmlx 6y ago
> Any negotiation between a single employee and their employer is inherently unfair wow! what a statement. you are of course entirely wrong. you are generalising when in reality your statement is true only for some employees in some jobs. i think the time for these kinds of statements died in the 80s. the more we progress thru time the less we need unions because of all the new wealth that is created via the internet.
- hh3k0 6y ago
  > You are of course entirely wrong. you are generalising when in reality your statement is true only for some employees in some jobs. I am not wrong: "According to Nielsen data, the American Payroll Association, CareerBuilder and the National Endowment for Financial Education, somewhere between 50 percent and 78 percent of employees earn just enough money to pay their bills each month. Should they miss a paycheck, some of those bills would go unpaid." -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/17/breakdown-what-living-paycheck-to-paycheck-looks-like/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/17/breakdown... > I think the time for these kinds of statements died in the 80s. They are as relevant as they were in 1776: "It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate." -- Adam Smith

nraynaud 6y ago

I live in France, being a union member here is incredibly dull, all day long people come with their employment contract, and you pore over the labor code and the various unions contracts to check the legality of various allegations. at the top level the workers unions manage the unemployment insurance with the employers unions, and talk to the government before labor laws are changed.

kmlx 6y ago
a lot of useless bureaucracy that culminates in yearly standstills via strikes. no wonder unions in France are slowly losing members: > A survey published by France’s human rights defender, an independent administrative authority, revealed that a “fear of reprisal” was cited as the most common reason for employees’ low-engagement in trade unions. A large majority of those surveyed said their trade union activities had a negative impact for their professional growth and said they felt discriminated against by their employers. The survey highlighted the main causes for the decrease of trade union membership in France since the 1950's, which is now one of the lowest rates of unionised employees in the European

scarmig 6y ago

It's always interesting to see the anti-union arguments on threads like these. Half the people say that unions are anarchist thugs who beat people up and bash their heads in with bricks, and half say they're gray bureaucratic paper pushing middlemen. Different unions are different, just as different companies are different. Plenty of companies have positive, constructive relationships with unions; you have no particular reason to say that the union is what made the relationship antagonistic and not the employer, except for an implicit assumption that companies have a right to exist and push for their interests while unions don't.

xiler 6y ago

> actual unions are a far cry from how they are portrayed as helping the worker. I think it's a fairly well established industry trend that, on average, union membership is a net positive for the worker. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_wage_premium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_wage_premium

umvi 6y ago
Couldn't this just be because unions can have a deteriorating effect on meritocracy? Say you have 10 workers - 2 are rock stars and make $50/hr, 6 are average and make $20/hr, and 2 are bad and make $10/hr (min wage - because they are never promoted). Average "non-union" pay is: $24/hr Now say you unionize and the union forces you to start paying the bad employees $20/hr like all the other average ones. So now you pay the 2 bad employees $20 each. Well, you still want to incentivize good work so you bump average employees to $25/hr. But dang, that's a lot of money, time to reign in rock star budget a bit. Now rock stars make $30/hr, average make $25/hr, bad make $20/hr. Average "union" pay is: $25/hr So yes, the "average pay" will be higher for "the worker"... but at a cost. Your average high performers will now be paid less, and your average low performers will now be paid more... which creates perhaps undesirable incentive structures ("why work my butt off to get ahead when it really won't make that much of a difference? I'd rather switch to a non-union company where my pay is directly tied to my output").
- steffandroid 6y ago
  This is a pointless thought experiment that has practically no basis in reality.
  - umvi 6y ago
    I disagree. Unions tend to favor seniority-based promotion over merit-based promotion[0] for obvious reasons (unions can't tell how much merit an employee has without deferring judgment to company managers/execs, but unions can tell how long someone has been working without deferring judgment to anyone). [0] https://www.jstor.org/stable/2523767 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2523767

paxys 6y ago

> I've worked with people who effectively could never be fired and were so bad at their jobs they spread negativity with everyone they encountered. Same, and my workplace doesn't even have a union.

ardy42 6y ago

> actual unions are a far cry from how they are portrayed as helping the worker. But that's life. Real capitalism is also a far cry from the fairy tale capitalism presented by many popular economics books and articles (e.g. the beautiful self-regulating system where everyone is better off in the end by definition). > They are set up as antagonistic between administration and workers, and adds a layer of bureaucracy that I've only seen be negative. I've worked with people who effectively could never be fired and were so bad at their jobs they spread negativity with everyone they encountered. You could say the same about democracy. Wouldn't it be better to replace our actual democratic system with an idealized autocracy? There'd be far less interpersonal strife over politics, and we wouldn't have to waste our time with voting or political participation, and could devote our energies to more productive things instead! The union debate is weird like that. There's all kinds of negative discussion about specific instances of unions, considered in isolation. But that's rarely balanced against the specific problems unions are meant to solve or mitigate, so the effect is to compare the negatives of unions against an unspecified but implied positive management/shareholder-led status quo.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
I am no fan of unions, but I think they were necessary to force business owners to treat workers decently - to make them pay better than starvation wages, and have decent working conditions. Then came the Cold War, and business owners had an extra incentive to treat workers decently: it undercut communist propaganda, and business owners did not want communism in the country where they owned a business. And so workers didn't think unions were necessary, because they were getting a decent enough deal. Then the Cold War ended. And about the same time, union membership went into a steep decline. And the business owners have been slurping up all the money in the economy, and paying workers closer and closer to starvation wages. (And there's the working conditions at Amazon, which are... not treating employees decently.) This sounds more and more like the conditions where unions grew strong, because the workers found them to be necessary.