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> Unions depress wages for top performers, and protect incompetent staff. Entertainers and sports professionals have unions which do not seem have this problem

> Unions depress wages for top performers, and protect incompetent staff. Entertainers and sports professionals have unions which do not seem have this problem.

0xy 6y ago
The best police officer and the best teacher in the entire United States are paid identically to the worst, most abusive ones. If you support police unions for example, you're inherently supporting the notion that a police officer who is courteous and cares about the community should be paid identically to the Chauvins of the force.
- paxys 6y ago
  Tech companies don't rely on public sector pay scales. Does LeBron James get paid the same as Darius Garland? Turns out he is free to negotiate his own contract, despite being part of a strong union. Imagine that.
  - renewiltord 6y ago
    Interestingly, that's not the kind of union that the OP has (disregarding the fact that LeBron James is underpaid because of union lobbying). So hypotheticals aren't useful. No one is really proposing any tech workers union that is like the one NBA players are in. All proposals are the other kind. And none of them encode equal rights for immigrants in their bylaws.
  - ipaddr 6y ago
    The way salary works in the nba is the top players like LeBron can only get paid a % of the salary cap. So half of the teams have a star or two like LeBron making 25-30% of the cap. So the best players all get paided the same. Older players have a min, teams have a cap. Based on skill/age players slot into pay ranges that match their output. These are the maximums for 2021 28,649,250 (players with less than 6 years experience) $40,108,95 (players with 10 years plus) The nba was a bad example.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- singhrac 6y ago
  This conflates too many issues; people dislike police unions because they are a powerful lobbying force against police reform. They prevent innovations like liability insurance [0] from gaining any traction. And no, I at least personally think the Chauvins of the force shouldn't be paid at all, because maybe their 18 cases of misconduct should lead them to being removed from the force. [0]: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/07/871751070/liability-insurance-could-hold-reckless-police-officers-accountable https://www.npr.org/2020/06/07/871751070/liability-insurance...
  - anchpop 6y ago
    The issue here is that police unions don't just represent good police officers, they represent every police officer. Every issue with police unions, like "they make it difficult to fire bad cops", has an analagous issue in every powerful union. Autoworker unions often negotiated terms where companies couldn't fire autoworkers without "just cause" (read: the same kind of absolutely airtight case it would take to fire a police officer; the sort of thing that in practice never happens). Unions have benefits for their employess of course, like making it impossible to fire them among other things, but then you have to work in the type of environment you get when everybody is impossible to fire.
- seoaeu 6y ago
  > The best police officer and the best teacher in the entire United States are paid identically to the worst, most abusive ones. The idea that all teachers and police officers in the US are paid exactly the same is wildly untrue. The pay for both those jobs varies based on all sorts of factors, especially including location and job title.
  - thayne 6y ago
    I know several teacher and can confirm this is true. If nothing else, where you work makes a big difference. The average salary of a teacher in california is about twice the average salary of a teacher in utah. Teacher pay is also often dependent on test scores of their students (which has its own problems, for example the best teachers might get assigned the worst students, because the teacher can help those students better, but that hurts the teachers test performance). The amount of education you have also makes a significant difference.
- drewg123 6y ago
  The danger of police unions is that the things they negotiate are very often not money, but rather regulations and laws that makes it harder to punish police violence and misconduct. Planet Money did a great podcast about this last year: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/05/871298161/police-unions-and-police-violence https://www.npr.org/2020/06/05/871298161/police-unions-and-p...
- jrockway 6y ago
  I think this is a good way to sow discontent about unions. Most people see themselves as above average, so stories like this will convince them that 50% of their coworkers are holding back their advancement opportunities. If there just wasn't all this dead weight around, they would be paying ME more! Now the employer doesn't have to fight the union -- the union fights itself! It's brilliant. Unions are not designed to maximize the effectiveness of each shareholder dollar. They exist to give all employees a safe and fair work environment. That probably means that some 40th %ile performer gets paid the same as an 80th %ile performer. But they both get water bottles when working in a hot datacenter, and they both get their bonus that was promised to them in writing. I don't think that's a bad deal. Without a union, people would be fired for complaining about unsafe working conditions, bonuses that were promised would never come, and people would be working 8 hour shifts in 85 degree datacenters with no water. That doesn't sound that great to me. If unions are so bad for workers, why do large corporations sink millions of dollars in anti-union ads in newspapers? Probably not because they really want to give their highest performers raises, but are hamstrung by regulation, and need the public to step in and protect them from the big bad union. They do it because they want to lower wages, make the job harder and more dangerous, and go back on promised bonuses when all the employees start asking where they were. The ads work, too. The seeds of doubt have been sown, and whenever Jeff Bezos reads a comment like yours, I'm sure he smiles a little.
  - mimon 6y ago
    > If unions are so bad for workers, why do large corporations sink millions of dollars in anti-union ads in newspapers? This is a false dichotomy, it is possible for unions to be bad for (a majority of) workers and employers at the same time. Employers don't want to be sandbagged with low performing staff any more than their coworkers do.
- ipaddr 6y ago
  The best are promoted into other positions like detective and get to work on bigger cases. Otherwise depending on how long you have been employed you will get more than someone just starting because experience is valuable. Imagine no union. Pressure from the mayor or council or the media or a connected criminal will get you fired possibility thrown in jail.
  - kortilla 6y ago
    > Otherwise depending on how long you have been employed you will get more than someone just starting because experience is valuable. This is exactly the problem with unions. Pay for time under your belt is a stupid idea. Experience isn’t actually worth more to anyone beyond an adequate amount to do the job competently. A police officer with 10 years of experience is not going to actually prevent more crime than one with 7 years. Additionally, an ambitious officer that takes training seriously, etc can be a much better officer than one with twice the experience. Rewarding seniority rather than merit is literally an incentive to do the bare minimum for as long as possible.
    - ipaddr 6y ago
      So a police officer with 1 year experience should be equal to one with 14 years? I think you underestimate what experience gives you in terms of decision making, community contacts and nerves of steel.
      - esyir 6y ago
        Way to take the maximally uncharitable interpretation.
    - Kostchei 6y ago
      Most police services/forces have a ceiling on that. I worked in one where there was a combination. Not in the US, but the issues are similar and we had a union. The union absolutely could not protect sworn officers who broke the law. And if a member was in legal trouble, the local branch voted on whether to provide legal support ( good lawyers paid by the union for as long as needed). I saw an officer charged with stealing (from a found wallet) where the branch voted not to provide that support. My advice- pay police more and expect them to behave as professionals. As a teenager in Thailand I saw police (1990) who didn't get paid enough to live- they relied on local community giving them rice, blankets, weapons.. or they ripped off folks -mostly from outside the community. Speeding tickets for foreigners etc. I was paid ok to do my digital forensics- but doubled then tripled my wage in 2 years of leaving- doing ~ the same stuff (what people call incident response is built into your blood after a few years of policing). I would also argue that I was much better as a police officer after 7 years than after 2, and much better at the specialization that I choose in the police- digital forensics- after 9 years, much better... and when i left @15 years I was much, much more valuable to the service than when I joined (skilled in forensics, understood the court process, could well react to emergencies, could write policy not just follow it etc)- but my pay had gone up maybe 30%. But I didn't go up in rank because I didn't want to manage people, so my wage mostly capped. And if anything- that is the issue with time based seniority- you force people to stop doing what they are good at and make them managers, with predictable results. (ie poor management) Edited to not be a single wall of text
jariel 6y ago
"Entertainers and sports professionals have unions which do not seem have this problem. " Entertainment and Sports unions exist for completely different reasons. Traditional unions exist because of an asymmetric power dynamic between workers and labour, at least, historically. Sports Unions exist so that fairly highly paid athlete's can squeeze even more money out of their employers by gaining leverage. Actors work in an aspirational industry that is massively oversubscribed with talent, and wherein the work is generally ad-hoc or contractual and conditions vary greatly. The vast majority of actors earn very little and probably are not full-time actors. Their Union sets a 'floor' for basic comp and expectations because otherwise there wouldn't be one - but they generally don't get into controlling roles for talent, they don't control job definitions etc.. I have a neighbour who worked at an auto-plant and his job was to sit in a room and does nothing, observing the floor. A role with kafkaesque bureaucracy and roles that simply should not exist. Family members have priority for jobs. In a nutshell - that union has considerable control and influence over the operating nature of the company whereas I don't think that's a long term benefit of unions. My sister in law works for a government sector union and their hiring practices have almost nothing to do with merit or qualifications, it's shocking. Again, a situation wherein I think the power of the union is a detriment to the system overall. That said it seems clear that after a wave of 'getting along' in the US, surpluses are not being shared and unions at Wallmart, Google, Amazon etc. seem like a good way to develop better equity. But I suggest it would be better for everyone if those companies just did a better job with their staff and were more gracious and generous.
- triceratops 6y ago
  > Sports Unions exist so that fairly highly paid athlete's can squeeze even more money out of their employers by gaining leverage. Why can't tech workers unions do that?
  - jariel 6y ago
    In the fight between Athlete's and Team Owner's 'it doesn't matter' to any of us. It's a zero-sum game, they're rich people arguing over surpluses. For commodity workers in industry, without unions it's possible they are mistreated, in which case, it's better for everyone if there were to be unions (although I think some kind of agreement would be better than unions). But workers unions can also leverage considerably more power than is better for everyone and make the company and industry struggle. Unions are a form of power, they work differently in different scenarios, and the scale and relative power matters a lot. It's just not sufficient to say 'there's a union over there therefore we should have one' or 'unions are all evil' or 'unions are always better than not' etc..
Aunche 6y ago
Unions can only raise wages by constricting the supply of labor. SAG does this by forcing productions to hire a certain percentage of SAG members. This works out fine because are essentially a infinite number of potential actors, so the market wage of an actor in a competitive market is close to $0. In all other industries, unions incentivize stagnation.
- wpietri 6y ago
  That might be true sometimes, but it isn't the general rule. SAG is more akin to the way medical and legal organizations constrict supply. But most unions instead fix a structural problem. One of the fundamental asymmetries of our corporate age is that employees have ~1 company, but companies have many employees. That gives a company enormous negotiating power: it's easier for them to find another employee than for you to find another job. Unions act to restore balance so that companies and workers have more equal negotiating power. That doesn't come through supply restriction. E.g., in high school I worked for a grocery store and we were unionized. They could have fired all the stockers at once if they wanted, as it was not particularly hard to learn the job. But what they couldn't do was pressure me into taking less money by threatening to fire me.
  - nradov 6y ago
    The supply of physicians is primarily restricted by limits on federal government funding for residency slots in teaching hospitals. Every year there are students who graduate from medical school but are unable to practice medicine because they can't get matched to a residency program. The supply of lawyers isn't restricted at all, as shown by stagnant or falling median wages. Almost anyone who wants to become a lawyer can enroll in one of the "third tier toilet" private law schools, and states don't impose any limits on the number of law school graduates allowed to take the Bar exam.
    - wpietri 6y ago
      I'm surprised to hear the AMA has no influence over the size of residency funding, but if that's what you're saying, I'll take your word for it. The supply of lawyers is restricted through onerous education and licensing requirements. You could argue that the fall in wages means they are no longer as effective in controlling supply. But if you think the supply "isn't restricted at all" I encourage you to start offering legal advice for money and let me know how that goes for you.

> Unions depress wages for top performers, and protect incompetent staff. Entertainers and sports professionals have unions which do not seem have this problem.

0xy 6y ago

The best police officer and the best teacher in the entire United States are paid identically to the worst, most abusive ones. If you support police unions for example, you're inherently supporting the notion that a police officer who is courteous and cares about the community should be paid identically to the Chauvins of the force.

paxys 6y ago
Tech companies don't rely on public sector pay scales. Does LeBron James get paid the same as Darius Garland? Turns out he is free to negotiate his own contract, despite being part of a strong union. Imagine that.
- renewiltord 6y ago
  Interestingly, that's not the kind of union that the OP has (disregarding the fact that LeBron James is underpaid because of union lobbying). So hypotheticals aren't useful. No one is really proposing any tech workers union that is like the one NBA players are in. All proposals are the other kind. And none of them encode equal rights for immigrants in their bylaws.
- ipaddr 6y ago
  The way salary works in the nba is the top players like LeBron can only get paid a % of the salary cap. So half of the teams have a star or two like LeBron making 25-30% of the cap. So the best players all get paided the same. Older players have a min, teams have a cap. Based on skill/age players slot into pay ranges that match their output. These are the maximums for 2021 28,649,250 (players with less than 6 years experience) $40,108,95 (players with 10 years plus) The nba was a bad example.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
singhrac 6y ago
This conflates too many issues; people dislike police unions because they are a powerful lobbying force against police reform. They prevent innovations like liability insurance [0] from gaining any traction. And no, I at least personally think the Chauvins of the force shouldn't be paid at all, because maybe their 18 cases of misconduct should lead them to being removed from the force. [0]: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/07/871751070/liability-insurance-could-hold-reckless-police-officers-accountable https://www.npr.org/2020/06/07/871751070/liability-insurance...
- anchpop 6y ago
  The issue here is that police unions don't just represent good police officers, they represent every police officer. Every issue with police unions, like "they make it difficult to fire bad cops", has an analagous issue in every powerful union. Autoworker unions often negotiated terms where companies couldn't fire autoworkers without "just cause" (read: the same kind of absolutely airtight case it would take to fire a police officer; the sort of thing that in practice never happens). Unions have benefits for their employess of course, like making it impossible to fire them among other things, but then you have to work in the type of environment you get when everybody is impossible to fire.
seoaeu 6y ago
> The best police officer and the best teacher in the entire United States are paid identically to the worst, most abusive ones. The idea that all teachers and police officers in the US are paid exactly the same is wildly untrue. The pay for both those jobs varies based on all sorts of factors, especially including location and job title.
- thayne 6y ago
  I know several teacher and can confirm this is true. If nothing else, where you work makes a big difference. The average salary of a teacher in california is about twice the average salary of a teacher in utah. Teacher pay is also often dependent on test scores of their students (which has its own problems, for example the best teachers might get assigned the worst students, because the teacher can help those students better, but that hurts the teachers test performance). The amount of education you have also makes a significant difference.
drewg123 6y ago
The danger of police unions is that the things they negotiate are very often not money, but rather regulations and laws that makes it harder to punish police violence and misconduct. Planet Money did a great podcast about this last year: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/05/871298161/police-unions-and-police-violence https://www.npr.org/2020/06/05/871298161/police-unions-and-p...
jrockway 6y ago
I think this is a good way to sow discontent about unions. Most people see themselves as above average, so stories like this will convince them that 50% of their coworkers are holding back their advancement opportunities. If there just wasn't all this dead weight around, they would be paying ME more! Now the employer doesn't have to fight the union -- the union fights itself! It's brilliant. Unions are not designed to maximize the effectiveness of each shareholder dollar. They exist to give all employees a safe and fair work environment. That probably means that some 40th %ile performer gets paid the same as an 80th %ile performer. But they both get water bottles when working in a hot datacenter, and they both get their bonus that was promised to them in writing. I don't think that's a bad deal. Without a union, people would be fired for complaining about unsafe working conditions, bonuses that were promised would never come, and people would be working 8 hour shifts in 85 degree datacenters with no water. That doesn't sound that great to me. If unions are so bad for workers, why do large corporations sink millions of dollars in anti-union ads in newspapers? Probably not because they really want to give their highest performers raises, but are hamstrung by regulation, and need the public to step in and protect them from the big bad union. They do it because they want to lower wages, make the job harder and more dangerous, and go back on promised bonuses when all the employees start asking where they were. The ads work, too. The seeds of doubt have been sown, and whenever Jeff Bezos reads a comment like yours, I'm sure he smiles a little.
- mimon 6y ago
  > If unions are so bad for workers, why do large corporations sink millions of dollars in anti-union ads in newspapers? This is a false dichotomy, it is possible for unions to be bad for (a majority of) workers and employers at the same time. Employers don't want to be sandbagged with low performing staff any more than their coworkers do.
ipaddr 6y ago
The best are promoted into other positions like detective and get to work on bigger cases. Otherwise depending on how long you have been employed you will get more than someone just starting because experience is valuable. Imagine no union. Pressure from the mayor or council or the media or a connected criminal will get you fired possibility thrown in jail.
- kortilla 6y ago
  > Otherwise depending on how long you have been employed you will get more than someone just starting because experience is valuable. This is exactly the problem with unions. Pay for time under your belt is a stupid idea. Experience isn’t actually worth more to anyone beyond an adequate amount to do the job competently. A police officer with 10 years of experience is not going to actually prevent more crime than one with 7 years. Additionally, an ambitious officer that takes training seriously, etc can be a much better officer than one with twice the experience. Rewarding seniority rather than merit is literally an incentive to do the bare minimum for as long as possible.
  - ipaddr 6y ago
    So a police officer with 1 year experience should be equal to one with 14 years? I think you underestimate what experience gives you in terms of decision making, community contacts and nerves of steel.
    - esyir 6y ago
      Way to take the maximally uncharitable interpretation.
  - Kostchei 6y ago
    Most police services/forces have a ceiling on that. I worked in one where there was a combination. Not in the US, but the issues are similar and we had a union. The union absolutely could not protect sworn officers who broke the law. And if a member was in legal trouble, the local branch voted on whether to provide legal support ( good lawyers paid by the union for as long as needed). I saw an officer charged with stealing (from a found wallet) where the branch voted not to provide that support. My advice- pay police more and expect them to behave as professionals. As a teenager in Thailand I saw police (1990) who didn't get paid enough to live- they relied on local community giving them rice, blankets, weapons.. or they ripped off folks -mostly from outside the community. Speeding tickets for foreigners etc. I was paid ok to do my digital forensics- but doubled then tripled my wage in 2 years of leaving- doing ~ the same stuff (what people call incident response is built into your blood after a few years of policing). I would also argue that I was much better as a police officer after 7 years than after 2, and much better at the specialization that I choose in the police- digital forensics- after 9 years, much better... and when i left @15 years I was much, much more valuable to the service than when I joined (skilled in forensics, understood the court process, could well react to emergencies, could write policy not just follow it etc)- but my pay had gone up maybe 30%. But I didn't go up in rank because I didn't want to manage people, so my wage mostly capped. And if anything- that is the issue with time based seniority- you force people to stop doing what they are good at and make them managers, with predictable results. (ie poor management) Edited to not be a single wall of text

jariel 6y ago

"Entertainers and sports professionals have unions which do not seem have this problem. " Entertainment and Sports unions exist for completely different reasons. Traditional unions exist because of an asymmetric power dynamic between workers and labour, at least, historically. Sports Unions exist so that fairly highly paid athlete's can squeeze even more money out of their employers by gaining leverage. Actors work in an aspirational industry that is massively oversubscribed with talent, and wherein the work is generally ad-hoc or contractual and conditions vary greatly. The vast majority of actors earn very little and probably are not full-time actors. Their Union sets a 'floor' for basic comp and expectations because otherwise there wouldn't be one - but they generally don't get into controlling roles for talent, they don't control job definitions etc.. I have a neighbour who worked at an auto-plant and his job was to sit in a room and does nothing, observing the floor. A role with kafkaesque bureaucracy and roles that simply should not exist. Family members have priority for jobs. In a nutshell - that union has considerable control and influence over the operating nature of the company whereas I don't think that's a long term benefit of unions. My sister in law works for a government sector union and their hiring practices have almost nothing to do with merit or qualifications, it's shocking. Again, a situation wherein I think the power of the union is a detriment to the system overall. That said it seems clear that after a wave of 'getting along' in the US, surpluses are not being shared and unions at Wallmart, Google, Amazon etc. seem like a good way to develop better equity. But I suggest it would be better for everyone if those companies just did a better job with their staff and were more gracious and generous.

triceratops 6y ago
> Sports Unions exist so that fairly highly paid athlete's can squeeze even more money out of their employers by gaining leverage. Why can't tech workers unions do that?
- jariel 6y ago
  In the fight between Athlete's and Team Owner's 'it doesn't matter' to any of us. It's a zero-sum game, they're rich people arguing over surpluses. For commodity workers in industry, without unions it's possible they are mistreated, in which case, it's better for everyone if there were to be unions (although I think some kind of agreement would be better than unions). But workers unions can also leverage considerably more power than is better for everyone and make the company and industry struggle. Unions are a form of power, they work differently in different scenarios, and the scale and relative power matters a lot. It's just not sufficient to say 'there's a union over there therefore we should have one' or 'unions are all evil' or 'unions are always better than not' etc..

Aunche 6y ago

Unions can only raise wages by constricting the supply of labor. SAG does this by forcing productions to hire a certain percentage of SAG members. This works out fine because are essentially a infinite number of potential actors, so the market wage of an actor in a competitive market is close to $0. In all other industries, unions incentivize stagnation.

wpietri 6y ago
That might be true sometimes, but it isn't the general rule. SAG is more akin to the way medical and legal organizations constrict supply. But most unions instead fix a structural problem. One of the fundamental asymmetries of our corporate age is that employees have ~1 company, but companies have many employees. That gives a company enormous negotiating power: it's easier for them to find another employee than for you to find another job. Unions act to restore balance so that companies and workers have more equal negotiating power. That doesn't come through supply restriction. E.g., in high school I worked for a grocery store and we were unionized. They could have fired all the stockers at once if they wanted, as it was not particularly hard to learn the job. But what they couldn't do was pressure me into taking less money by threatening to fire me.
- nradov 6y ago
  The supply of physicians is primarily restricted by limits on federal government funding for residency slots in teaching hospitals. Every year there are students who graduate from medical school but are unable to practice medicine because they can't get matched to a residency program. The supply of lawyers isn't restricted at all, as shown by stagnant or falling median wages. Almost anyone who wants to become a lawyer can enroll in one of the "third tier toilet" private law schools, and states don't impose any limits on the number of law school graduates allowed to take the Bar exam.
  - wpietri 6y ago
    I'm surprised to hear the AMA has no influence over the size of residency funding, but if that's what you're saying, I'll take your word for it. The supply of lawyers is restricted through onerous education and licensing requirements. You could argue that the fall in wages means they are no longer as effective in controlling supply. But if you think the supply "isn't restricted at all" I encourage you to start offering legal advice for money and let me know how that goes for you.