4 ms·

But this actually brings up a good question about the role of unions to begin with. Everything you just said could be equally said about worker's unions, so why

by idrios 6y ago

But this actually brings up a good question about the role of unions to begin with. Everything you just said could be equally said about worker's unions, so why do we have worker's unions either instead of just using the government? I like OP's suggestion of having a consumer's union. In an analogy to a software stack, having the government responsible for this is analogous to building a monolith, while making unions is analogous to a microservices solution. Integrating this role into the government could become bureaucratic and comlicated, maybe ineffective because of it, but a consumer's union might work but with it's own set of particularities.

silexia 6y ago
A consumer union is a fantastic idea! If you give government this power, they will not listen to consumers or the business... Government only listens to politicians. Google wants more revenue and is highly motivated to work with a consumer group.
- Chant-I-CRW 6y ago
  When a workers' union calls for a strike it only works if most of the members support the strike. The potential benefits must outweigh the risk of hardship and inconvenience. Often the majority of workers support the strike because they are in a shared situation and will all receive some level of benefit if it works. A consumer union, to have enough momentum to actually make the Googles and Amazons even blink, would need hundreds of thousands of members. That vast quantity would need to agree to collective action and then follow through. If the consumer union reps determined the best way to convince Google to make a change was to hit them in the pocket book then the majority of the union members would have to cancel subscriptions and deal with the inconvenience. It is my pessimistic opinion that the general consumer base would not follow through on whatever action the union selected. In the unlikely event they did follow through, even a hundred thousand users dropping a Google product or leaving Amazon Prime would barely impact those companies enough to make them alter their policies or improve their service levels.
  - vagrantJin 6y ago
    But if it were 100K of their biggest/highest paying consumers who make up the bulk of the union, they would at least come to the table. I share your pessimism of inaction.
lefrenchy 6y ago
Well workers unions represent the workers more directly than the government does, and specifically for that workplace.
mschuster91 6y ago
> Everything you just said could be equally said about worker's unions, so why do we have worker's unions either instead of just using the government? Mostly for historical reasons - it was workers unions who fought and paid in blood for worker rights, and no one (other than the Nazi regime and various real-Communist countries) tried to have governments assimilate unions. Another reason is that governments are slow as molasses to react to changes. A union is way faster and it has (by its existence) a direct connection to the immediate needs of the workers.
p4bl0 6y ago
> Everything you just said could be equally said about worker's unions, so why do we have worker's unions either instead of just using the government? Why not ask the reverse question? “Why do we have a government instead of just having a workers union?”. This is actually the political project of anarcho-syndicalists [1]: workers could self-organize the production and the collective life through democratic federalist instances. The idea has been theorized since at least 1906 in the Charter of Amiens [2], an historical text of syndicalism [3]: https://www.marxists.org/history/france/cgt/charter-amiens.htm https://www.marxists.org/history/france/cgt/charter-amiens.h... where we can read “the union, today a resistance group will be, in the future, a group for production and redistribution, the basis of social reorganization.”. At least in France, the biggest workers union (CGT) is still organized in a way that would allow this, by having both geographical and per-industry-branch instances (sorry I lack the proper words to describe this in English). It is also what the Spanish CNT did during and after the Spnish Revolution of 1936 [4,5]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_Amiens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_Amiens [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicalism [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Revolution_of_1936 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Revolution_of_1936 [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia
- lhorie 6y ago
  > Why do we have a government instead of just having a workers union? By "instead", do you mean having no government whatsoever? Who'd be responsible for traditional government responsibilities in that case? (such as police, firefighters, water/sewage, garbage collection, etc.) I don't think unions can take on any of those tasks in any meaningful sense (e.g. do you get 5 firefighter corps from different unions to come to the same fire in an apartment complex?)
lhorie 6y ago
There's one big structural problem with the idea of a consumer union: what happens when negotiations break down. Typically for a worker union, that means the union tells workers to go on strike. Imagine being told by your union that no one should use google.com/gmail/maps/docs/etc until further notice. It wouldn't fly no matter how you slice it.
- rocqua 6y ago
  Addblock usage / private mode / not being logged in, could be seen as a strike?
- jfengel 6y ago
  Striking is the last resort of unions, but it's not their main mode of operation. Some unions can't strike at all. But they are often supported by laws which give them leverage without having to strike. Strikes are bad for everyone concerned. The union also has agreements with the company that give it power, again, precisely because strikes hurt everybody. Unions are mainly about giving workers a unified voice, in the democratic sense -- this is what most of us want, and we all agree to abide by it. The main job of a union is doing that voice, rather than having to leave that up to the many individuals, who usually lack the experience to do it well. It's nearly always routine, and if the word "strike" is even mentioned it's because things have seriously gone off the rails. Google could theoretically empower a users union to represent users, in the same way, and the government could beef that up with laws. It's not impossible. The impossible part is how you elect union leadership. Not with hundreds of millions of people. Unions are fractious enough as it is with tens of thousands of workers all united by similar work environments. The election would be nearly as hard as electing a US President -- more so than any individual Senator.
- toper-centage 6y ago
  People striking by not using Google would save Google money. Instead, people should all do a coordinated DDoS on Google, send thousands of mails per second, click on all ads, etc
- at-fates-hands 6y ago
  People boycott products all the time. This would be no different. If you really wanted to have an impact, you get a few hundred businesses together and they all drop their contracts with said companies and find new vendors. Happens every day in business. People switch vendors all the time. Saying that Google is too big and it would never happen is a bit myopic don't you think?
proverbialbunny 6y ago
It has to do with size. On one end of the spectrum, there is unions which represent just a single company. On the other end of the spectrum there are governments that represent the consumers (and workers in theory) of an entire country. In the middle between the two extremes tend to be where the local maxima is. The ideal setup is industry wide governmental organizations and industry wide unions, so there is a fast food union that regulates the price all fast food companies pay their workers, an industry minimum wage instead of a global minimum wage. This is how Switzerland does it, and it works quite well. This way different industries get tailored results for their workers and businesses that works best for them. Likewise, because all companies have to follow these regulations, new non-union companies can't swoop in and undercut the older unionized companies running them out of business, which is what happened in the US and one of the reasons we have so few unions today. In this ideal setup there is industry wide governments representing consumers, so there is a fast food government that works on food regulations for customers. These governments have a larger federal government that passes guidelines smaller governments can follow. So eg, there is a country wide FDA that sets guidelines, and each kind of smaller government can choose to follow it or modify it as necessary to meet their specific situation. However, for this to work, customers exclusively need to be represented in the government, not businesses. Likewise, for this to work unions need to be represented by just the workers. There has to be a way to balance the demands of the workers vs the demands of the customers vs the demands of the businesses. If business fail over this, it's not handled well, so there needs to be some sort of pro business oversight as well (usually handled by a court system of some sort, but it doesn't have to be handled this way). For this to work properly there has to be severe limits and regulations on the power of unions and governmental organizations. Too much power to unions and goverments and businesses are restricted, which can be harmful to the larger economic economy, similar to how fishermen are limited in how many fish they can catch to not squash the ecosystem. Because of this there needs to be a government for businesses, eg minimum profit margin laws and what not. Workers and consumers can not milk the cow to its death, it needs to be healthy and happy too, so much so others are inspired to create a business. This kind of system does exist today, in part in many European countries. Switzerland and Nordic countries are the closest. The only difference is governments are based on party, and those larger governments have strong power over smaller industry regulators. If the larger government has too much power over industry regulators it opens the door for corruption. There needs to be a balance of power to hit a local maxima.

by idrios 6y ago

silexia 6y ago

A consumer union is a fantastic idea! If you give government this power, they will not listen to consumers or the business... Government only listens to politicians. Google wants more revenue and is highly motivated to work with a consumer group.

Chant-I-CRW 6y ago
When a workers' union calls for a strike it only works if most of the members support the strike. The potential benefits must outweigh the risk of hardship and inconvenience. Often the majority of workers support the strike because they are in a shared situation and will all receive some level of benefit if it works. A consumer union, to have enough momentum to actually make the Googles and Amazons even blink, would need hundreds of thousands of members. That vast quantity would need to agree to collective action and then follow through. If the consumer union reps determined the best way to convince Google to make a change was to hit them in the pocket book then the majority of the union members would have to cancel subscriptions and deal with the inconvenience. It is my pessimistic opinion that the general consumer base would not follow through on whatever action the union selected. In the unlikely event they did follow through, even a hundred thousand users dropping a Google product or leaving Amazon Prime would barely impact those companies enough to make them alter their policies or improve their service levels.
- vagrantJin 6y ago
  But if it were 100K of their biggest/highest paying consumers who make up the bulk of the union, they would at least come to the table. I share your pessimism of inaction.

lefrenchy 6y ago

Well workers unions represent the workers more directly than the government does, and specifically for that workplace.

mschuster91 6y ago

> Everything you just said could be equally said about worker's unions, so why do we have worker's unions either instead of just using the government? Mostly for historical reasons - it was workers unions who fought and paid in blood for worker rights, and no one (other than the Nazi regime and various real-Communist countries) tried to have governments assimilate unions. Another reason is that governments are slow as molasses to react to changes. A union is way faster and it has (by its existence) a direct connection to the immediate needs of the workers.

p4bl0 6y ago

> Everything you just said could be equally said about worker's unions, so why do we have worker's unions either instead of just using the government? Why not ask the reverse question? “Why do we have a government instead of just having a workers union?”. This is actually the political project of anarcho-syndicalists [1]: workers could self-organize the production and the collective life through democratic federalist instances. The idea has been theorized since at least 1906 in the Charter of Amiens [2], an historical text of syndicalism [3]: https://www.marxists.org/history/france/cgt/charter-amiens.htm https://www.marxists.org/history/france/cgt/charter-amiens.h... where we can read “the union, today a resistance group will be, in the future, a group for production and redistribution, the basis of social reorganization.”. At least in France, the biggest workers union (CGT) is still organized in a way that would allow this, by having both geographical and per-industry-branch instances (sorry I lack the proper words to describe this in English). It is also what the Spanish CNT did during and after the Spnish Revolution of 1936 [4,5]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-syndicalism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_Amiens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_Amiens [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syndicalism [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Revolution_of_1936 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Revolution_of_1936 [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia

lhorie 6y ago
> Why do we have a government instead of just having a workers union? By "instead", do you mean having no government whatsoever? Who'd be responsible for traditional government responsibilities in that case? (such as police, firefighters, water/sewage, garbage collection, etc.) I don't think unions can take on any of those tasks in any meaningful sense (e.g. do you get 5 firefighter corps from different unions to come to the same fire in an apartment complex?)

lhorie 6y ago

There's one big structural problem with the idea of a consumer union: what happens when negotiations break down. Typically for a worker union, that means the union tells workers to go on strike. Imagine being told by your union that no one should use google.com/gmail/maps/docs/etc until further notice. It wouldn't fly no matter how you slice it.

rocqua 6y ago
Addblock usage / private mode / not being logged in, could be seen as a strike?
jfengel 6y ago
Striking is the last resort of unions, but it's not their main mode of operation. Some unions can't strike at all. But they are often supported by laws which give them leverage without having to strike. Strikes are bad for everyone concerned. The union also has agreements with the company that give it power, again, precisely because strikes hurt everybody. Unions are mainly about giving workers a unified voice, in the democratic sense -- this is what most of us want, and we all agree to abide by it. The main job of a union is doing that voice, rather than having to leave that up to the many individuals, who usually lack the experience to do it well. It's nearly always routine, and if the word "strike" is even mentioned it's because things have seriously gone off the rails. Google could theoretically empower a users union to represent users, in the same way, and the government could beef that up with laws. It's not impossible. The impossible part is how you elect union leadership. Not with hundreds of millions of people. Unions are fractious enough as it is with tens of thousands of workers all united by similar work environments. The election would be nearly as hard as electing a US President -- more so than any individual Senator.
toper-centage 6y ago
People striking by not using Google would save Google money. Instead, people should all do a coordinated DDoS on Google, send thousands of mails per second, click on all ads, etc
at-fates-hands 6y ago
People boycott products all the time. This would be no different. If you really wanted to have an impact, you get a few hundred businesses together and they all drop their contracts with said companies and find new vendors. Happens every day in business. People switch vendors all the time. Saying that Google is too big and it would never happen is a bit myopic don't you think?

proverbialbunny 6y ago

It has to do with size. On one end of the spectrum, there is unions which represent just a single company. On the other end of the spectrum there are governments that represent the consumers (and workers in theory) of an entire country. In the middle between the two extremes tend to be where the local maxima is. The ideal setup is industry wide governmental organizations and industry wide unions, so there is a fast food union that regulates the price all fast food companies pay their workers, an industry minimum wage instead of a global minimum wage. This is how Switzerland does it, and it works quite well. This way different industries get tailored results for their workers and businesses that works best for them. Likewise, because all companies have to follow these regulations, new non-union companies can't swoop in and undercut the older unionized companies running them out of business, which is what happened in the US and one of the reasons we have so few unions today. In this ideal setup there is industry wide governments representing consumers, so there is a fast food government that works on food regulations for customers. These governments have a larger federal government that passes guidelines smaller governments can follow. So eg, there is a country wide FDA that sets guidelines, and each kind of smaller government can choose to follow it or modify it as necessary to meet their specific situation. However, for this to work, customers exclusively need to be represented in the government, not businesses. Likewise, for this to work unions need to be represented by just the workers. There has to be a way to balance the demands of the workers vs the demands of the customers vs the demands of the businesses. If business fail over this, it's not handled well, so there needs to be some sort of pro business oversight as well (usually handled by a court system of some sort, but it doesn't have to be handled this way). For this to work properly there has to be severe limits and regulations on the power of unions and governmental organizations. Too much power to unions and goverments and businesses are restricted, which can be harmful to the larger economic economy, similar to how fishermen are limited in how many fish they can catch to not squash the ecosystem. Because of this there needs to be a government for businesses, eg minimum profit margin laws and what not. Workers and consumers can not milk the cow to its death, it needs to be healthy and happy too, so much so others are inspired to create a business. This kind of system does exist today, in part in many European countries. Switzerland and Nordic countries are the closest. The only difference is governments are based on party, and those larger governments have strong power over smaller industry regulators. If the larger government has too much power over industry regulators it opens the door for corruption. There needs to be a balance of power to hit a local maxima.