8 ms·

If you do have leverage, and you don't use said leverage to help those that don't; then you are a bastard. And having policies ensures that your company, at hig

If you do have leverage, and you don't use said leverage to help those that don't; then you are a bastard. And having policies ensures that your company, at high levels is ONLY staffed with bastards because people who are not bastards won't want to work there. Granted, that might be exactly what Amazon et al are selecting for; but at some point, a company being anti-union will be a signal to prospective high-level employees that many of your potential co-workers will be entirely self-interested assholes and you will have to decide if such a work environment is for you.

peytn 6y ago
I like to keep business and charity separated. Mixing the two, in my opinion, simply adds a layer of indirection for the bastards to hide behind. Besides, if you’re in a working environment where people throw around terms like “total comp” and have mortgages denominated in millions of dollars, the self-interest ship has kinda sailed.
- tekromancr 6y ago
  > I like to keep business and charity separated. I don't know if that really tracks, tho. You still have ethical obligations in your day-to-day business. As an extreme example; if your business is "I sell fentinyl laced heroin to elementary school children" isn't really something you can make up with any amount charitable giving. But aside from that, I was making the self-interested argument that even complete sociopaths wouldn't necessarily want to work in an environment where "My coworkers can and will try to fuck me at the first opportunity" is a true statement.
  - nerdponx 6y ago
    I recently saw a post (maybe here on HN?) about a study where participants had the ability to choose between a strict-no-cheating game environment and a mostly-cheating-allowed game environment. Cheaters self-selected into the latter because it allowed them to cheat, even though they knew that others were also trying to cheat. Hopefully I'm paraphrasing/remembering correctly.
    - spamizbad 6y ago
      This perhaps explains the rationale you sometimes hear that more rules/regs will cause people to not even bother trying to start a business. If you set the business climate up in such a way that only permits fair participation and competition you're probably going to alienate a segment that would favor looser rules.
      - LordDragonfang 6y ago
        I'm having a hard time seeing the justification here. It's not that the cheaters refused to play if they couldn't cheat, it's that when given influence, they prefered to have things be worse for everyone so that they could cheat more freely. >If you set the business climate up in such a way that only permits fair participation and competition you're probably going to alienate a segment that would favor looser rules. The converse, that rules which allow profitable unethical behavior (and therefore prefer such unethical behavior, since profit is the measure of success) are going to alienate people who want to play fair, is exactly as well supported by that observation. And all other things being equal, it seems better to alienate the cheaters than the fair players, which in turn argues for stronger regulation. It just highlights that the people who want to cheat and make such arguments aren't arguing in good faith, they just want to cheat more easily.
    - lasagnaphil 6y ago
      Game environments usually means there aren't significant real-life consequences, so it's totally plausible that most people would pick the cheating-allowed game for just more fun and entertainment. When actual jobs and lives are on the line, and the penalty for losing requires most of the participants to give up your basic human needs (such as most of low-income wage workers, they don't have any fallbacks when they get scammed and go under), then things are going to be much different.
      - nerdponx 6y ago
        Very good point. I wish I knew the details of the study. I do wonder if, at a certain extreme level of cheaterness/selfishness, there is a minimum level of self-confidence that causes a cheater to self-select into a cheating-OK environment. It's an extension of the "survival of the fittest" mentality. If you believe you are one of the fittest, you might be willing to enter the survival scenario because you are confident that you will survive.
  - ericd 6y ago
    Using these false equivalences and “you’re for us or against us” type reasoning might rule up people who’re already convinced, but it likely makes those who aren’t on a side more suspicious of what you’re pushing, because it feels like you’re trying to trick or coerce.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  Unfortunately it's not physically possible to be neutral on this issue. It's not analogous to never giving people change on the street because you donate to soup kitchens and mutual aid orgs (or whatever). If you don't support unionization, you are effectively undermining it. This isn't meant to be some kind of woke purity test. It's just the facts of how a market operates. Every individual that is willing to work without supporting a union, is an employee that hurts the power of that union, because that's one less unit of labor that the employer has to rely on the union for.
  - mixedCase 6y ago
    Absolutely not. Not increasing its power is not undermining it. It's neutrality. Stop changing definitions to suit your political goals. We have enough "with us or against us" going on driving violence to let more slide.
    - nerdponx 6y ago
      I was careful to explain my reasoning in my post, but maybe it wasn't stated clearly enough. Consider a company for which programmers are fungible, and 5 programmers are required to keep the company running at full efficiency. If one programmer quits in protest over union-busting activity, all it takes is one other equivalent programmer on the labor market to agree to take the job. The existence of 1,000 other pro-union programmers in the labor market are completely irrelevant, as long as the company knows they can find one union-neutral programmer. Morever, the union-neutral programmer is equivalent to an anti-union programmer from the perspective of the employer. It's "with us or against us" because of the nature of the labor market, not because of any desire to be toxic or exclusionary or whatever. This is literally the whole reason that picket lines exist. You're either a scab or you're not; that's definitional, not rhetorical.
      - Rule35 6y ago
        > You're either a scab or you're not; that's definitional, not rhetorical. No, I'm an unaffiliated potential worker. Scab is a derogatory term. It's not surprising unions are losing support with that attitude. You're thinking you have a right to the job and that by not supporting you I'm taking it away. You don't though and from my point of view a union is a threat of violence (try crossing a picket line) and is one tiny step away from domestic terrorism. You're demanding to take a job that could be mine but you're not willing to negotiate to win it. Turning a free-market opportunity for me into a political struggle where I'd need to win my way into the 1000 through your support. No thanks. Every little thing Unionists do is about punishment and control, you can't even not downvote someone's honest opinion. Imagine if your job was controlled by such politics and you had to kowtow to the right opinions just to keep it.
- LordDragonfang 6y ago
  >I like to keep business and charity separated. That sounds like a fancy way of saying, "I don't have an ethical responsibility to others."
  - fmajid 6y ago
    To be fair, a lot of corporate philanthropy is executives using their shareholders' money to buy themselves social capital.
- rualca 6y ago
  > I like to keep business and charity separated. Mixing the two, in my opinion, simply adds a layer of indirection for the bastards to hide behind. That's an awful lot of words to say "screw you, I got mine". Exploiters have it easy when the exploited see basic workers rights as "charity".
  - nerdponx 6y ago
    Some HN users are apparently very touchy about this, so maybe a gentler way to state it would be: > It is only possible to see labor solidarity as "charity" if you are privileged enough to not depend on that solidarity. Of course, accusations of privilege themselves are subject to pants-twisting and fits of downvoting moderation-flagging rage. "Please don't remind me that I'm privileged because it makes me feel icky feelings so I will get ANGRY instead" seems to be a natural human reaction.
    - DickingAround 6y ago
      I'm not going to down vote either of these at the moment. But the basic idea is to attack ideas not people. Any statements that name call (e.g. 'bastards') or attack the idea by attacking the author of it (e.g. 'dont remind me that I'm privileged') will not lead to an environment where we are all learning from each other.
- RobRivera 6y ago
  people often forget that subtlety of reality is NOT something every individual HAS to prioritize, and any amount of namecalling is really a refusal to open a dialogue and an excuse to grandstand. glad you feel safe enough to echo your opinions. it's important in championing dialogue.
robocat 6y ago
Rubbish. Your assumption is that unions are always a benefit to their members. I have seen enough actions by unions where the outcomes were detrimental to their members for me to believe that some unions are a net negative for their members. Someone can choose to not belong to a union because they are a good person that just believes that a union is bad for everyone. Edit: Disclaimer: I am not stating that I think unions are bad. However the few direct experiences I personally have had with unions have not been a clear positive for the members (as an employee or student, never as an employer). Edit 2: Or you could just believe unions are net neutral, so be against joining. Because who wants to voluntarily submit themselves to an organisation or people they don’t believe in?
- mjlawson 6y ago
  Using leverage isn't the same thing as belonging to a corrupt union. If anything, your leverage should be used to improve said union, if you have it. The same energy and fervor that goes into establishing a union presence and and should also be used to maintain it through positions of leadership and involvement within the union. I agree that not all unions are fantastic, but staying on the sidelines when you could use your position to influence for the betterment of everyone is a very privileged, selfish act.
- lmm 6y ago
  Much like democratic government, people get the unions they deserve. Empowering your colleagues is an ethical act, and if they use that power to do things that you paternalistically think are against their own interests, then that's proof that the power is genuinely theirs.
  - robocat 6y ago
    I think that is a misunderstanding of where the power of “democracy” comes from. I think voting mostly works in democracies by being able to vote a party out after the government has abused us against our wishes and their promises. In a first-past-the-post system, you often get to chose between two evils... Imagine you were forced to pick a partner for 3 years, one which you suspect will rape you and the other you think will beat you, and you must pick one or the other... And that is ignoring the fact that usually nearly 50% of the people that voted, voted against the party they got. It is ridiculous to think that the ~50% that voted against a party deserve what they get. That said, I like this version by H.L. Mencken better: "People deserve the government they get, and they deserve to get it good and hard."
oort-cloud9 6y ago
You know that business is nothing designed to be your babysitter, right? And it's designed to pay you more than your work deserves,right?
modularform123 6y ago
I will give up my life before I lick the boot of a union thug.

peytn 6y ago

I like to keep business and charity separated. Mixing the two, in my opinion, simply adds a layer of indirection for the bastards to hide behind. Besides, if you’re in a working environment where people throw around terms like “total comp” and have mortgages denominated in millions of dollars, the self-interest ship has kinda sailed.

tekromancr 6y ago
> I like to keep business and charity separated. I don't know if that really tracks, tho. You still have ethical obligations in your day-to-day business. As an extreme example; if your business is "I sell fentinyl laced heroin to elementary school children" isn't really something you can make up with any amount charitable giving. But aside from that, I was making the self-interested argument that even complete sociopaths wouldn't necessarily want to work in an environment where "My coworkers can and will try to fuck me at the first opportunity" is a true statement.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  I recently saw a post (maybe here on HN?) about a study where participants had the ability to choose between a strict-no-cheating game environment and a mostly-cheating-allowed game environment. Cheaters self-selected into the latter because it allowed them to cheat, even though they knew that others were also trying to cheat. Hopefully I'm paraphrasing/remembering correctly.
  - spamizbad 6y ago
    This perhaps explains the rationale you sometimes hear that more rules/regs will cause people to not even bother trying to start a business. If you set the business climate up in such a way that only permits fair participation and competition you're probably going to alienate a segment that would favor looser rules.
    - LordDragonfang 6y ago
      I'm having a hard time seeing the justification here. It's not that the cheaters refused to play if they couldn't cheat, it's that when given influence, they prefered to have things be worse for everyone so that they could cheat more freely. >If you set the business climate up in such a way that only permits fair participation and competition you're probably going to alienate a segment that would favor looser rules. The converse, that rules which allow profitable unethical behavior (and therefore prefer such unethical behavior, since profit is the measure of success) are going to alienate people who want to play fair, is exactly as well supported by that observation. And all other things being equal, it seems better to alienate the cheaters than the fair players, which in turn argues for stronger regulation. It just highlights that the people who want to cheat and make such arguments aren't arguing in good faith, they just want to cheat more easily.
  - lasagnaphil 6y ago
    Game environments usually means there aren't significant real-life consequences, so it's totally plausible that most people would pick the cheating-allowed game for just more fun and entertainment. When actual jobs and lives are on the line, and the penalty for losing requires most of the participants to give up your basic human needs (such as most of low-income wage workers, they don't have any fallbacks when they get scammed and go under), then things are going to be much different.
    - nerdponx 6y ago
      Very good point. I wish I knew the details of the study. I do wonder if, at a certain extreme level of cheaterness/selfishness, there is a minimum level of self-confidence that causes a cheater to self-select into a cheating-OK environment. It's an extension of the "survival of the fittest" mentality. If you believe you are one of the fittest, you might be willing to enter the survival scenario because you are confident that you will survive.
- ericd 6y ago
  Using these false equivalences and “you’re for us or against us” type reasoning might rule up people who’re already convinced, but it likely makes those who aren’t on a side more suspicious of what you’re pushing, because it feels like you’re trying to trick or coerce.
nerdponx 6y ago
Unfortunately it's not physically possible to be neutral on this issue. It's not analogous to never giving people change on the street because you donate to soup kitchens and mutual aid orgs (or whatever). If you don't support unionization, you are effectively undermining it. This isn't meant to be some kind of woke purity test. It's just the facts of how a market operates. Every individual that is willing to work without supporting a union, is an employee that hurts the power of that union, because that's one less unit of labor that the employer has to rely on the union for.
- mixedCase 6y ago
  Absolutely not. Not increasing its power is not undermining it. It's neutrality. Stop changing definitions to suit your political goals. We have enough "with us or against us" going on driving violence to let more slide.
  - nerdponx 6y ago
    I was careful to explain my reasoning in my post, but maybe it wasn't stated clearly enough. Consider a company for which programmers are fungible, and 5 programmers are required to keep the company running at full efficiency. If one programmer quits in protest over union-busting activity, all it takes is one other equivalent programmer on the labor market to agree to take the job. The existence of 1,000 other pro-union programmers in the labor market are completely irrelevant, as long as the company knows they can find one union-neutral programmer. Morever, the union-neutral programmer is equivalent to an anti-union programmer from the perspective of the employer. It's "with us or against us" because of the nature of the labor market, not because of any desire to be toxic or exclusionary or whatever. This is literally the whole reason that picket lines exist. You're either a scab or you're not; that's definitional, not rhetorical.
    - Rule35 6y ago
      > You're either a scab or you're not; that's definitional, not rhetorical. No, I'm an unaffiliated potential worker. Scab is a derogatory term. It's not surprising unions are losing support with that attitude. You're thinking you have a right to the job and that by not supporting you I'm taking it away. You don't though and from my point of view a union is a threat of violence (try crossing a picket line) and is one tiny step away from domestic terrorism. You're demanding to take a job that could be mine but you're not willing to negotiate to win it. Turning a free-market opportunity for me into a political struggle where I'd need to win my way into the 1000 through your support. No thanks. Every little thing Unionists do is about punishment and control, you can't even not downvote someone's honest opinion. Imagine if your job was controlled by such politics and you had to kowtow to the right opinions just to keep it.
LordDragonfang 6y ago
>I like to keep business and charity separated. That sounds like a fancy way of saying, "I don't have an ethical responsibility to others."
- fmajid 6y ago
  To be fair, a lot of corporate philanthropy is executives using their shareholders' money to buy themselves social capital.
rualca 6y ago
> I like to keep business and charity separated. Mixing the two, in my opinion, simply adds a layer of indirection for the bastards to hide behind. That's an awful lot of words to say "screw you, I got mine". Exploiters have it easy when the exploited see basic workers rights as "charity".
- nerdponx 6y ago
  Some HN users are apparently very touchy about this, so maybe a gentler way to state it would be: > It is only possible to see labor solidarity as "charity" if you are privileged enough to not depend on that solidarity. Of course, accusations of privilege themselves are subject to pants-twisting and fits of downvoting moderation-flagging rage. "Please don't remind me that I'm privileged because it makes me feel icky feelings so I will get ANGRY instead" seems to be a natural human reaction.
  - DickingAround 6y ago
    I'm not going to down vote either of these at the moment. But the basic idea is to attack ideas not people. Any statements that name call (e.g. 'bastards') or attack the idea by attacking the author of it (e.g. 'dont remind me that I'm privileged') will not lead to an environment where we are all learning from each other.
RobRivera 6y ago
people often forget that subtlety of reality is NOT something every individual HAS to prioritize, and any amount of namecalling is really a refusal to open a dialogue and an excuse to grandstand. glad you feel safe enough to echo your opinions. it's important in championing dialogue.

robocat 6y ago

Rubbish. Your assumption is that unions are always a benefit to their members. I have seen enough actions by unions where the outcomes were detrimental to their members for me to believe that some unions are a net negative for their members. Someone can choose to not belong to a union because they are a good person that just believes that a union is bad for everyone. Edit: Disclaimer: I am not stating that I think unions are bad. However the few direct experiences I personally have had with unions have not been a clear positive for the members (as an employee or student, never as an employer). Edit 2: Or you could just believe unions are net neutral, so be against joining. Because who wants to voluntarily submit themselves to an organisation or people they don’t believe in?

mjlawson 6y ago
Using leverage isn't the same thing as belonging to a corrupt union. If anything, your leverage should be used to improve said union, if you have it. The same energy and fervor that goes into establishing a union presence and and should also be used to maintain it through positions of leadership and involvement within the union. I agree that not all unions are fantastic, but staying on the sidelines when you could use your position to influence for the betterment of everyone is a very privileged, selfish act.
lmm 6y ago
Much like democratic government, people get the unions they deserve. Empowering your colleagues is an ethical act, and if they use that power to do things that you paternalistically think are against their own interests, then that's proof that the power is genuinely theirs.
- robocat 6y ago
  I think that is a misunderstanding of where the power of “democracy” comes from. I think voting mostly works in democracies by being able to vote a party out after the government has abused us against our wishes and their promises. In a first-past-the-post system, you often get to chose between two evils... Imagine you were forced to pick a partner for 3 years, one which you suspect will rape you and the other you think will beat you, and you must pick one or the other... And that is ignoring the fact that usually nearly 50% of the people that voted, voted against the party they got. It is ridiculous to think that the ~50% that voted against a party deserve what they get. That said, I like this version by H.L. Mencken better: "People deserve the government they get, and they deserve to get it good and hard."

oort-cloud9 6y ago

You know that business is nothing designed to be your babysitter, right? And it's designed to pay you more than your work deserves,right?

modularform123 6y ago

I will give up my life before I lick the boot of a union thug.