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HN is very consistently anti-union. My question is this: Where did you get information about unions? Because people keep mentioning their "bad reputation" and

HN is very consistently anti-union. My question is this: Where did you get information about unions? Because people keep mentioning their "bad reputation" and then start listing off a bunch of "facts" that read like they're bullets straight out of one of those anti-union videos during onboard at several major employers (Walmart, Target, Amazon, etc). So anti-union people exactly where does your information come from? If it is grapevine, what was the original source?

legohead 6y ago
I was part of a small union. I joined the bargaining committee, and ever since I have hated unions. It was incredibly stressful, and made me hate my job. Fighting for better wages/vacation with upper management, who showed how much they don't care about you, is very disheartening. And in the end, all the bargaining didn't really get us any better than what we would have gotten without a union. So now I got a little raise and I hate my company and I'm telling everyone else how shitty the company is.
deleted 6y ago
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saas_sam 6y ago
My anti-union sentiment arrived from my experience working with a large established union in an industrial plant. The union protected some of the worst, laziest, most unsafe workers I had ever witnessed in any job before or sense. It blew my mind how difficult it was to remove obvious bad apples, and how the best workers were forced to wait in years-long "seniority" queues before they could get promoted. I would get threatened with grievances for trivial acts like carrying a single lightbulb myself without a union worker. Every institution has a STATED purpose and an ACTUAL effect. Institutions become inefficient, corrupt, decoupled from their original goals. What keeps institutions aligned with their stated--noble--purpose, is the institution's internal incentive structure. Unions often have very bad internal incentive structures. I would be SHOCKED if you could not find counter-examples where unions are great. It's a big round world we live on where silver linings abound. For anything. To me, right now, I do not find pro-union activists persuasive in the slightest. But I am open-minded.
- specialist 6y ago
  Which organizations have figured out how to handle their bad apples?
  - qeternity 6y ago
    It’s not a binary outcome. Of course all large organizations will have people of varying types. But it’s an order of magnitude easier to clean house outside of government and union shops.
    - specialist 6y ago
      Am big fan of Peter Drucker. Believe management is a technology. I'd LOVE for someone to research this. Case studies. Metrics. My experience with unions has been mixed. Same with non-union shops. Recognizing that I'm just a simple bear, I haven't been able to figure out any rules for what works, or doesn't. My hunch is governance. eg Unions that are more democratic, accountable perform better. I have zero notions about what might make non-union shops better or worse.
  - skynet-9000 6y ago
    All of the ones that last. If you don't handle your bad apples and your business requires generating a profit to survive, you will not prosper for long if you don't prune the bad apples (and you may not even survive, unless the business throws off such huge profits that it can afford to carry the dead weight). It's as simple as "Please clean out your desk". Have you never seen The Apprentice? Do you believe that people never get fired?
- shmolyneaux 6y ago
  What do you think of the Screen Actors Guild? That seems to have been a huge win for workers in the industry, seemingly without the negatives you describe.
  - hintymad 6y ago
    There might be a difference. Studios must first look for actors in the actors guild. That said, a studio has freedom not to use an actor. Similar, a studio does not need to use a bad script, and the studio does not need to pay a writer if it doesn't use the writer's work. In contrast, a factory has to pay for a worker, or even assign some work to the worker, no matter how bad this worker performs.
AlexTWithBeard 6y ago
Me personally is anti-monopoly. If a union can only operate by forming a workforce monopoly - something is wrong with the model itself.
- mschuster91 6y ago
  Amazon and Walmart are local monopolies as the sole employer resp. shop around where they establish their locations. It is only natural to put up a collective against that monopoly.
  - missedthecue 6y ago
    Can you point me to one Amazon fulfillment center or Walmart superstore that doesn't have any restaurants, grocers, autoparts stores, hardware stores, janitorial services, shopping centers, retailers, courier and delivery services, or warehouses within 20 miles? All of those businesses draw from the same labor pool and compete with each other. I don't think your claim that Walmart and Amazon have monopsony power is accurate.
- drivebycomment 6y ago
  By that definition, companies are workplace monopolies. So are you against companies ? If you want to argue you can choose a different company, by the same token you can choose a different union by choosing a different company.
  - Aunche 6y ago
    The economic term for is "monopsony," where a single buyer has disproportionate leverage. However, there isn't much evidence this occurs in most labor markets. People can and do often leave Amazon for another job. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony
    - drivebycomment 6y ago
      I agree - I was just pointing out the absurdity / inconsistency of the argument by AlexTWithBeard.
Fernicia 6y ago
I went to a school where the teacher's union made it impossible to remove incompetent teachers. Teachers who got consistently poor student results, didn't control the class, took several months of "sick" leave, etc.
parliament32 6y ago
Personally, it came from working for a massive union (government, not US) for many years. The downsides are real: hard to fire bad performers, your merits don't matter at all (the guy doing the bare minimum job description gets the same raises as you), wayyy too much focus on seniority (for promotions, vacation selection, etc), and overall just too many rules (for example, "unlimited vacation" works great with my current employer but would absolutely not work under a union.. sick days have to be tracked, PTO banks calculated down to the quarter hour, etc). On the plus side, we paid like $15/month so I'm not sure why Amazon is trying to scare people with the "union dues" argument. And it was nice to have the option for "representation" in HR-like meetings. There's definitely pluses and minuses, but (having worked on both sides) it's not for me.
- duckfang 6y ago
  > hard to fire bad performers In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like. > your merits don't matter at all They don't either in the non-union corporate world either. They pay as little as they can get away with. They'll assign as much work as you can possibly do, and then pile on more, and set unreasonable demands. The moment you surmount them, there's more work.... But here's your COLI for the year. And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop. An employer who's paying you X knows that X is enough, and won't give any real merit raise increases. > wayyy too much focus on seniority At least that's measurable, and better than managerial decisions of "I like this person" or "I don't like you". Been there and done that. And with a crummy manager in a union job, you at least have the union steward to represent you. Non-union, you have the unemployment line. > overall just too many rules (example: unlimited PTO) Really? You use unlimited PTO as an example?!? It's complete utter trash it's unlimited by simply not showing up to work at all. That's unlimited, and we all know you'd get fired if you did that. You'd also likely get the axe if you took off every Friday as PTO. I would much rather have fair delineated and straight-forward rules for all to see and vote on, than the touchy-feely sounds good but not real faux-rules like 'unlimited PTO'.
  - 6y ago
yibg 6y ago
Mine is experience working in an union. I generally really disliked the effects of the union and saw no benefit to me at all. My career progression was capped, lots of nepotism (eg manager holding a position for his son), people are generally coasting etc.
- newbie789 6y ago
  I absolutely abhor being passed up due to nepotism, it’s incredibly frustrating. When that sort of thing happens it makes me wish that there was a clear agreement between management and employees that codified when/how/why promotions happen so that people who have worked hard and performed well would be favored. It’s really awful that that union precluded that from happening.
sangnoir 6y ago
> So anti-union people exactly where does your information come from? HN is start-up-centric, so a good number of commenters, who may be workers themselves, are, to borrow from Steinbeck: "temporarily embarrassed employers"
ystad 6y ago
How did you conclude that HN is anti-union? Please cite refs
carmen_sandiego 6y ago
> HN is very consistently anti-union. Is it? It just seems to vary per thread.
option 6y ago
My parents had to be in union (during USSR days). In their experience, unless you are a buddy of union leadership you got to go on vacation during worst times of the year to the worst (if any!) places only. You are also getting the crappiest job assignments. And yes, you had to give up a non-trivial part of your already miserable salary as union fees. Basically being friends of union leadership was absolutely critical.
marcinzm 6y ago
I know a number of people in a large teacher's union and the stories indicate the union is bad for both good teachers and students. I've personally seen many great teachers leave for private schools and other public systems. The union rewarded the incompetent and did little for rampant administrator abuse.
- dwater 6y ago
  I was a public teacher for 9 years, 2 years in a union and 7 years in a right to work state. The union experience was better as an employee. I find it hard to believe great teachers would go to private schools in large numbers as a result of being in a union, private schools generally have lower pay, lower benefits, and lower standards. The one thing you gain going to a private school is freedom to do as you want, and no standardized testing. Anecdotally the people I know who went to private schools had someone else to support them financially and could choose the easiest route available.
  - PragmaticPulp 6y ago
    > I find it hard to believe great teachers would go to private schools in large numbers as a result of being in a union, private schools generally have lower pay, lower benefits, and lower standards. I don't know where you lived, but this is the opposite of the situation in most places. Private schools attract people who will pay private school tuition because they offer higher standards. In my limited experience with private schools, it was relatively easy to poach good teachers away from unionized jobs precisely because the school had freedom to offer them higher wages and better benefits. Many of them were also sick of dealing with the issues that come with unionized labor and union membership.
    - dwater 6y ago
      They have higher standards for decorum and appearance, but not higher academic standards. One of the advantages of private schools is that they are essentially exempt from standards. Their students are generally not required to take standardized tests, and the schools generally are not required to follow prescribed curricula. I agree that private schools generally have a higher standard of cleanliness and facility upkeep. And although the families have to pay more for students to attend compared to (free) public schools, teachers as a broad class are paid less, not more, at private schools. There are numerous reasons for this. For one, a prospective employee has even less leverage than they do when seeking employment at a public school.
exabrial 6y ago
Show me a well run union in the USA where they successfully compete against union union workers, their industry isn't being shipped overseas, and workers can optionally participate without having wages garnished.
- shuntress 6y ago
  The screen actors guild
  - exabrial 6y ago
    well played.
  - ayende 6y ago
    You mean, the one were it is actually easy to fire people?
    - exabrial 6y ago
      yes, the one where being white and good looking is valued most.
- objclxt 6y ago
  > Show me a well run union in the USA where they successfully compete against union union workers, their industry isn't being shipped overseas, and workers can optionally participate without having wages garnished. Writers Guild of America East (for journalism), or the Authors Guild (novelists). You can become a journalist or a novelist without being a member. But both guilds have collective bargaining agreements with publishers.
- jolux 6y ago
  >workers can optionally participate without having wages garnished. This is the direct purpose of so-called "right-to-work" laws. Unions are required to represent employees regardless of whether or not they pay dues, meaning other members shoulder the costs of collective bargaining. This is called the "free rider" problem and is one of the biggest ones facing unions today. It's also one of the main targets of the PRO Act.
belval 6y ago
It started during a student summer job. I was taking care of lending canoes to people in a park. One canoe got visibly dirty so I brought a rag and some cleaner from home and just cleaned it. I was reprimanded by another worker because according to whatever union full-time employee had, cleaning a canoe was a union job and by bringing my own rag and cleaner I was violating the union's chart of some shit.
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TheCapn 6y ago
I'm pro-union, but I think its worth noting that the type of average commenter here isn't in a position where unions provide large tangible benefit. Unions work extremely well in places where the employer holds a disproportionate amount of power to the worker. Fortunately, as things currently stand for the tech industry, the worker maintains a lot of power in that they can easily find new work of sufficiently equal pay/benefits. For us, if the employer is shit, we move up the street, but in places like factories where the employer can re-train labour on a whim, the union provides far more benefit. So merely by nature of the type of individual you'll encounter on HN, you'll get a strong bias towards the anti-union.
bradleyjg 6y ago
On the flip side I wonder how many of the pro union voices I see on Facebook or elsewhere, especially millennials & gen z, have ever worked a union job and seen what a seniority system or non-at-will employment actually looks like in practice. Of the people I know that have direct experience with US unions, even those that ultimately come down on the side of supporting them have lots of stories to illustrate the warts. That’s a kind of nuance I’m not seeing from the “eat the rich” crowd which makes me think they don’t have direct experience.
- disgruntledphd2 6y ago
  I've seen what non at-will employment leads to in Europe, and it's pretty good.
  - bradleyjg 6y ago
    I’ve heard similar things from others (though less so in Southern Europe). However, I don’t think you get there from here by just expanding existing US unions. It would take a bigger culture shift.
    - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      You don't need unions for that, just legislation. In Ireland, you are essentially at-will for the first six months of any role, and after that you are "permanent". This essentially means that there needs to be a process to fire you. You need to supply at least one verbal warning on stated grounds (backed up as a written), then another one and then you can fire someone. It works reasonably well (not always, obviously) and it's super bizarre to me that you don't have that in the US. To be honest, when my previous employer wanted to move me to the US, this was one of my concerns, especially when you're dependent on the job for a visa. It just seems that its a bad trade-off for US people in general, and it's odd to me that it appears to be mostly unquestioned.
      - seibelj 6y ago
        US companies fear lawsuits and firing employees includes a lot of data to back it up, from what I’ve observed. There are so many protected classes and reasons why firing is illegal, and people are so litigious, that months of documentation, warnings, improvement plan, etc. is required to fire someone with HR’s approval. And even then usually you give some severance to ensure lawsuit isn’t filed.
burtonator 6y ago
If my children want to work in coal mines I'll be damned if some union is going to take that away from them! /s
objclxt 6y ago
From what I can tell, a lot of people in tech are anti blue collar union, but mistakenly assume that blue-collar unions are all unions. For example, just in the replies to your comment people are saying they dislike unions because they protect the incompetent, stifle progression, give preferential treatment purely on seniority, etc. But then go look at Hollywood, with the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild, the PGA, etc. These are unions that have some of the most highly paid and richest people in the world as members. The same is true in the sports world. And sure, these unions are not perfect by a long shot, but they are doing a huge amount to hold what is ultimately a very exploitative industry to account. Of course, companies like Google, Amazon, and the like would much prefer software engineers continued to think that all unions were like the Teamsters. They don't want you to know that there's a whole class of professional unions serving some of the most highly paid people and engaging in collective bargaining.
- function_seven 6y ago
  The union Amazon warehouse voted against (the RWDSU) is a blue collar union. Your point is a good one when we see the backlash against unions in software engineering and related fields. I just wanted to bring it back around to why anti-union comments on this story specifically would be right to cite their problems you listed in the 2nd sentence.
- qeternity 6y ago
  And conversely there are plenty of good employers who don’t require unionization to treat employees well. The point is that these situations are often framed as the angelic unions vs the evil capitalist employer. In reality, there are plenty of bad unions just as there are plenty of bad employers.
- brianwawok 6y ago
  So, do you know anyone say 20 something and trying to get into the SAG? Dealing with the drama of union vs off union jobs in NYC? It's usually something like: Work the union job for $10 an hour, earn credit towards joining the SAG. In 10 years I can actually join the SAG and make actual decent paying jobs, and actually get health insurance. vs Work a non-union job for $20. It feels very much like a way to exploit people to let them someday get the magic card. The numbers are very approximate, but the sentiment I have gotten from people actually with boots on the ground. Do I want this as a developer? No way!
blululu 6y ago
I would not say that I’m anti-union but my experience working with a large union was pretty universally negative. It was just one more layer of bureaucracy that never really advocated for anything good. They consistently failed to deliver pay or benefits increases but would tote meaningless symbolic victories. The union was generally out of touch with the workers. Personally I really like the idea of a workers association that would actually bring benefits to employees and focus on personally and community development as well but I don’t see a lot of innovation in how labor unions treat their constituents.
throwinawaysoon 6y ago
are you surprised shills run narrative on this and any other popular open forums and social networking sites?
rayiner 6y ago
All my information on unions comes from people who have worked in unionized industries. My father in law is a former educator for example.
wernercd 6y ago
> Where do you get your information from History and reality. Look at union run cities like Chicago and union run industries like the auto-industry that got demolished by foreign companies. Personally, I think unions have their places... but in 99% of cases these days? The bureaucracy, red tape, added expenses and other assorted BS are more net negative than the few positives that unions offer.
8bithero 6y ago
Maybe a controversial or skewed observation - But as a European looking (from outside) into the US, it looks like everyone has the impression that they're all millionaires who just haven't made it yet. They don't seem to want to disrupt the status quo, even if it benefits them, incase they're next inline to make it big :/
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > But as a European looking (from outside) into the US, it looks like everyone has the impression that they're all millionaires who just haven't made it yet. The "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" trope gets repeated often online, but it's largely unfounded cynicism. It's true that we need to fix our health care system and bolster our safety nets, but the reality is that average Americans are relatively wealthy and even the median worker has significant career opportunities that are harder to come by in some other countries. Look toward the professional trades like software engineering and the differences are even more pronounced. I worked at a company with US and European offices for a while, and the European employees were routinely stunned to learn that the US office had to pay employees so much more for the same work. > They don't seem to want to disrupt the status quo, even if it benefits them, The situation is more nuanced than what you read online. The reality is that these moves aren't as unilaterally good as presented. It's more honest to approach them as tradeoffs. In this case, I'm inclined to believe that the workers casting these votes did more research and have a better understanding of the situation than the internet gives them credit for. The idea that they're all voting against their self interest because they're dumb, or that we know what's better for them than they do, is very presumptuous. Why can't we accept that these people are really voting for what they believe is in their best interests? Why do we have to conclude that they're not smart or that they're voting against helping themselves? The reality isn't so simple, and we're not in a position to judge after reading a few paragraphs on the internet.
  - 8bithero 6y ago
    Yeah, those are valid points. That's why I was a bit apprehensive to post my original comment. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good things about the US! I wouldn't hesitate to move over there if I had the chance - know anyone who could sponsor a visa, by any chance? ;p But it does seem like an exceptionally easy place to slip through the cracks of society, but if you're not in the lower percentile you've probably got it better than most people in the world. The one point I would have to disagree with the the reasons for voting against their interests. And the only reason for this is seeing the results of the Brexit referendum in 2016. What happened there is people who set themselves up as figures of authority and told the people Brexit was in their interest. They made the fishing industry into the poster child of their campaigns and convinced them they would benefit. The fishing communities in particular where overwhelmingly in support. Perhaps some did try do their own research, but a large part of social media and the mass-media where all pushing the agenda and using scare tactics and any concerns were batted away as "project fear". When you have figures of authority pushing an agenda it's understandable that people will believe them - Why would they lie? But as Jan 2021 rolled around, the fishing industry in the UK is all but decimated (YoY Salmon exports were down 98% in January). So from that perspective, I wouldn't call the voters dumb because it's easy to get caught out by the disinformation that's out there, but for the most part I would say many were naively trusting ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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christophilus 6y ago
For me, it is all anecdotes from my dad (some of which I observed first hand). He worked for unions for half of his career and then intentionally uprooted us to move to a right to work state purely to escape the unions. He moved up the ranks and ended his career as the general manager of a manufacturing facility. The next county over was heavily unionized. The contrast in the two counties was notable. The industry in the unionized county was run-down, falling apart, constantly in and out of bankruptcy. The industry in the non-unionized county was literally some of the best in the world in what it does. The plants were clean and well run. Early on in the management-part of his career, my dad hired some formerly unionized workers who had moved up from the unionized county in order to find work (jobs were disappearing in that county due to the bankruptcies). They were fired in a few months because they wouldn't show up on time, were constantly dropping the ball, etc. In his opinion, their work ethic had been ruined. I'm actually not anti-union, but I'm mostly anti US union. I think if we adopted a non-antagonistic model similar to Germany, it'd be alright.
- DonnyV 6y ago
  What were the 2 counties and in what state. I'm sure this is all true but I like verify.
  - christophilus 6y ago
    They were Horry and Georgetown, SC.
- CameronNemo 6y ago
  How much of that difference was due to capital preferring to invest in the right to work environment while deliberately neglecting the unionized jurisdiction? It is hard to use purely observational evidence to determine causation. You need sophisticated statistical techniques, and many observations, to conduct meaningful observational studies.
slibhb 6y ago
Unions are employee cartels. They are a tool for correcting an imbalance between employers and employees. Sometimes unions are good, because the employees have no leverage. Other times unions are bad, because employees have plenty of leverage. Workers are not saints. When given leverage, they use it to advance their own interests, which are not always reasonable. People disagree over whether Amazon is a situation where unions would be a benefit or a detriment. Make an argument instead of diminishing people who disagree with as you misinformed.
hnburnsy 6y ago
Saw this at r/Costco from an employee who worked at a unionized store, straight from the source... "Next, the union dues. I know this isn't a problem at every location but mine is part of the local teamsters union, and having to pay $450 in initiation fees and $40 on the regular adds up, especially for someone who is in real need of the income. I wouldn't be complaining if I saw the tangible benefits the union provides, but after speaking to several coworkers, many of whom have worked at my location for 20+ years, I am of the impression that the union does not actually do anything to improve working conditions at Costco. If anything, it seems to me that the union locations simply serve to protect the wages of those who are not unionized by playing into Costco's desire to prevent the unionization of said locations. Yes, the union makes it harder to arbitrarily fire people, "guarantees" you won't get scheduled for 7 days straight (have seen otherwise at my location), etc. In my view, this only contributes to my previously mentioned point that many long-time employees feel protected from termination regardless of how they perform or act, and as such they bring subpar attitudes, service, and effort into their work."
tablespoon 6y ago
> My question is this: Where did you get information about unions? Because people keep mentioning their "bad reputation" and then start listing off a bunch of "facts" that read like they're bullets straight out of one of those anti-union videos during onboard at several major employers (Walmart, Target, Amazon, etc). Realistically? Probably libertarian advocacy literature coupled with a few confirmatory anecdotes that may or may not be from first hand experience. When I was anti-union, that's where it came from. You also have to keep in mind the HN is run by a VC firm, and a lot of its culture was set by aspiring capitalists hoping to win the startup lottery. That's going to lead to certain predicable biases (e.g. taking the perspective of a business owner even if you're unlikely to ever successfully be one).
unionanswer 6y ago
Worked in a union for a few years.
strictnein 6y ago
My "original source" is my wife who grew up poor and started working at 14 to pay for things like clothes for school. Every dollar her union took was money she couldn't use to pay for necessities and they never once did a single thing for her or any of her coworkers, no matter how egregious the discrimination or behavior of the store's management. Their union rep would 100% ignore every single complaint. But they always got a cut of her meager paycheck. Is that a good enough source for you, or does that not count? I'll never understand the people who think "You have a differing opinion. It must be because you don't know what you're talking about and have just consumed a bunch of propaganda".
anm89 6y ago
Are you questioning the source of a specific piece of data you interpret to be anti-union or you questioning what is the source of peoples opinion on why they are anti union. If you are questioning the source of a specific piece of data than be clear about what that data is. If you are asking people to cite a source for a general opinion they personally hold, they don't owe you that.
adamrezich 6y ago
I posted the story here before but my only experience with unions was when my friend and then-roommate was waiting for his teaching license to transfer over from SD to WA, so he had to have multiple part-time jobs to survive in the interim. one of the places he got a job at was one of the Redmond QFCs. he worked there as a cheese monger and was paid minimum wage for doing so. (it's statistically likely that a nonzero number of readers of this comment bought cheese from him sometime in 2015–2016 lol). we both had worked at various Walmarts in the past so we were familiar with their explicitly anti-union rhetoric, but it had never affected us, so we didn't think much of it. my friend was shocked to discover that union membership was mandatory in order to work at QFC (this has been since made illegal in WA apparently), which included a union initiation fee of like a hundred dollars iirc, in addition to the monthly union due. my friend was not looking for some kind of long-term employment with Kroger (QFC), he just wanted a short-term part-time job that would help him get cash quick, to stay afloat. yet, the union literally did nothing for him but take money from his minimum wage income while he was employed there. like I said, mandatory union membership is apparently illegal in WA now, which is great. and there are probably situations where unions are helpful and productive. but I have seen a lot of people have this opinion that unions are unassailably forces of good in all situations, and that just seems silly to me.
AdamJacobMuller 6y ago
> So anti-union people exactly where does your information come from? From speaking with family members who work or worked for Unions. From a management perspective it is untenable to not be able to hire who you want (because you must offer the job to any "qualified" union employee before you can hire externally), not be able to fire who you want (because you must meet arbitrary requirements set by the union). From an employee perspective I've seen situations where they want specific or custom arrangements with their boss and their boss would like to give them but they violate union rules so they are either forced to work around it (and face repercussions if they are found out) or refuse to accommodate situations that both the manager and the employee agree upon. I will also say that I find the anti-anti-union rhetoric very distasteful. I fundamentally agree that employees have the right to discuss their desire to join or form a union but I think that companies have the fundamental right to advocate their position as well. Virtually all of this get's called out as "anti-union" propaganda and I find that very distasteful and disingenuous. Most of the "propaganda" videos I've seen I found to be actually quite reasonable arguments, while most of the anti-anti commentary I find to be disingenuous appeals to emotion. There are also many industries where unions are massively corrupt. I know nothing about the union here so I won't speak about it, but I do have personal experience with this. Finally, I will also say that my opinion of unions skews heavily against larger and more diverse ones. Had this been Amazon Warehouse workers choosing to form their own union vs join an existing union, I feel that would have been more successful by virtue of being smaller in scope and more targeted.
01100011 6y ago
Personal experience with unions. The unions at Boeing protect workers who do drugs and sleep on the job. The teamsters union in Boston prevented my small company from unloading a small amount of equipment from our truck ourselves(enforced with veiled threats). The longshoreman's union hands out jobs to well connected members and runs a racket. I'm not saying all unions are bad. I think many industries might benefit from well run, transparent, regulated unions. But I have seen many examples where they are bad.
- winkeltripel 6y ago
  Compare the scale of the harm that you see to the direct benefits: these huge unions getting each and every member a solid benefits package, and better pay rates, overtime or limited hours. Even non-union jobs pay better in areas with high union membership. Its one of the only tools with broad benefits to working-poor and lower-class at the cost of the non-working rich. I think it's an unfair argument to say that unions need further regulation. Regulating them is how we've lost millions of union jobs to contractors, and where we keep seeing large strikes broken up by governments. Regulations often benefit large players over small ones. We'd rather see a plethora of smaller, niche unions, than just one massive union. Competition breeds capability.
missedthecue 6y ago
I don't like them on the basis of principle. It is my belief that monopoly cartels are a net cost for society whether they deal in oil like OPEC or in labor like the UAW.
Shivetya 6y ago
I replied to another poster but let me double down the fun. Well first off, especially in low wage jobs, there is little they do for you and it can cost nearly two hours of your pay per month for the benefit. You get this wonderful set of rules which spells out what your employer can and cannot do but it also limits you as well. I got first hand experience in a union shop from late 1980s to early 1990s. My reward was seeing our rep once a quarter if we were lucky in her Mercedes which cost more than we made. However for every complaint about people being anti union and listing off "Bunch of facts" you never see those same people list their facts that support a pro union stance. Most of the time its little more than what people already have with some variation of something they won't even get when unionized. The simple fact is, in the US they are more political than worker oriented. They feed a ridiculous amount of dues and even state funds into political coffer so they come replete with lots of wonderful political supporters and press who love to lay the claim that workers will be better for representation. The benefactors are political appointees, elected officials, and union leadership. The workers are mostly pawns. What I read about European unions would be very nice to see in the states but what I experienced, family members have experienced, is not this fantasy that some people have of what its like here.
brandonmenc 6y ago
There are pros and cons to unionization, but imo not all workers should unionize. Most of my hardcore union friends think I'm "anti union", even though I think some workers should unionize for their own good (I'm looking at you, non-tenured college professors.) I come from a union town. My grandfather was a union organizer and disowned his sister for crossing a picket line. My mother worked in a union her whole life. My father was a union steward, then halfway through his career entered management and had grievances filed against him. I was - briefly - a dues-paying member of a union as a teenager (IBEW) for my summer job. I have many friends in trade unions (plumbing, electrician, etc.) and I have friends in SAG. The relatively high standard of living I enjoyed as a child was in large part the result of my parents being in unions. Sure, mom had to sometimes see less skilled co-workers get promoted before her due to seniority, but she wouldn't have had the good pay, benefits, or job security without the union. That's the trade-off, and for her it was worth it in the long run. However, the downside of a union encouraging low productivity can be very real. Case in point - where my father worked, the union was so entrenched that the high seniority factory workers were making as much as local software developers (nothing necessarily wrong with that), but their productivity was far below workers doing the same job in a non-unionized factory being paid far less in another state. When they were asked to increase productivity to meet that level, they balked. For years. Then went on strike. And as a result, at least partly, that business was sold off and a lot of them were laid off. It's always a set of trade-offs but I think plug-and-play workers should organize. They need to be able to collectively bargain. They just don't have the same individual leverage like say, software developers. The problem is that we're not in the heyday of unionization anymore. Few industries are unionized nationwide, so companies can just move to another state. Unions don't have the leverage they used to, so organizing can end up being a footgun. That might mean that business has too much of an advantage, not that unionization is bad, but it depends on your worldview. But without unions, it's just always going to be a race to the bottom for unskilled labor. How could it not be? Trade unions and guilds (like SAG) are a totally different animal. SAG is great because you work for an ephemeral production, not a company. Game development should definitely adopt this model, because games are really just movies now. You get your benefits through the union when you're not actively working, etc. Not a bad deal, and probably better for the production companies. Trade unions - they restrict the supply of labor, driving prices up, but they police themselves and maintain quality. I would be uncomfortable hiring a non-union plumber for anything non-trivial. Anyways, like I said, it's all a set of trade-offs, and those vary depending on the industry.
remir 6y ago
The HN crowd are generally in an advantageous position regarding the job market. Most people here can negotiate their salary and conditions, so having a union negotiate these for them would not make much sense. As for Amazon workers, since there was so much resistance coming from Amazon on this case, the workers probably feared that Amazon would have closed shop if they chose to unionize.
jimmar 6y ago
I'm in academia at a university. I'm part of a union and I hate it. Union meetings are mostly members nitpicking minor contract issues and complaining about being underpaid. The union's purported main goal is to protect free speech, but everybody knows it really only exists to (unsuccessfully) negotiate for better pay. I worked about a decade in industry and never felt like management was the enemy. We didn't expect management to coddle us, though. We knew we were there to do a job and if being there wasn't worth the benefit, we'd leave. Being in union, it feels like an artificial wall between management and union has been erected; that it's us versus them. Like the vice presidents are fat cats smoking cigars in their high rise offices while we, the proletariat, fight to get what's fair. Its as if union members think there's some reservoir of money we could get in salary if only we could break down the dam that management is using to hoard all the money. I'm in a right to work state and technically don't have to pay union dues. But, I pay my dues because if you don't, your name gets published publicly and there is a lot union members can legally do to make life difficult for you if you don't want to join the club.
mekoka 6y ago
Your comment (like a few others) reads as though you've discarded the possibility of some in the HN crowd having first-hand experience with unions. > HN is very consistently anti-union. I'd say HN is more consistently anti-bullshit. It's important to separate the legitimate problems from the solutions taken to address them, else you fall for the false dichotomy. Being skeptical of unions as a solution to address workplace conditions is not irrational.
rubyist5eva 6y ago
Personally, I have no need for one as I've been perfectly capable of advancing in my career without the baggage that comes along with collective bargaining. I'm compensated very competitively, get raises, negotiate PTO, sick days, etc. I also do not like my freedom of association to be infringed, by being required to join a union and dues extorted from me that I do not want to pay for.
ChicagoBoy11 6y ago
I work at an institution that has a strong union presence (education). It is absolutely a cancer of the place. Granted, I think that probably in a lot of places that have unions they can easily become a scapegoat to all of the organization's problems, but some of the ones that I deal with on a daily basis are really hard to pin on anything else. In an idealized world, there would be infinite competition both on the demand and supply side of labor. The argument for unions, at least, is that in the real world the balance tips in favor of the demand side, and I'm sure in many organizations this makes a ton of sense. But at a place like a small learning organization where I work at, it just ensures that nothing ever happens. You have a fantastic faculty member that you want to compensate above and beyond market rate because they deserve it? Union will make that an issue. You want to fire a severe under-performer? Union will make that an issue. You are a non-union manager who has energy and wants to improve things? This sort of stuff will destroy your morale. Over time, the really good people who want to be recognized for their work individually leave, the people who care and want to actively promote change ALSO leave, and what you are left with is an assorted collection of folks going through the motions and heavily invested in not rocking the boat out in any direction. It sucks.
courtf 6y ago
HN is anti-union because HN is a weird little bubble of people who have bought the idea of meritocracy, mostly by being born wealthy and desperately needing to explain away the growing gap between them and the rest of the world. They have by and large managed to wriggle their way into careers that pay slightly above average (but still well below the actual earners), and need to believe this has some connection to actions or behaviors they personally undertook along the way. One only need to look back on the last hundred years of industrialization to see how briefly these kinds of professional, middle-class meritocracies can keep up the illusion. If it isn't slave labor abroad that undercuts them, it will be some innovation that makes them redundant. The music will stop, and it will become immediately clear that just because you've been the one building the chairs for the game doesn't entitle you to actually sit in one. This sort of thing is happening all the time, the law profession being one recent example. One day, your skills are valuable and command a good wage, the next, you're competing with thousands for a single position that comes with constant pressure to beat last quarter's results or be replaced by an intern. We could look at colleges and professorships as well for more middle-class devastation. Programmers, kind of like surgeons, sit in a unique position at the moment in that they are necessary for the imperial goals of the billionaire class and haven't yet been thoroughly replicated by cheap alternatives. That day is absolutely coming though, for both programmers and surgeons, and it isn't hard to find companies out there working full-time on those replacements. All the haranguing about performance and merit will stop, and we'll all be left with whatever table scraps we've managed to gather before the great hand of progress swept us into the trashbin. Of course, unions can't prevent this from happening, but they can help extract as much money from the sociopaths of industry as possible before our usefulness is over.
- grzm 6y ago
  > HN is anti-union because HN is a weird little bubble of people You are a member of HN. Please just elide such generalizations.
  - courtf 6y ago
    I'll say whatever the hell I please, this is well within forum guidelines. Take your busybody nitpicking elsewhere.
kristopolous 6y ago
The worst thing that ever happened to unionizing was the AFL and the CIO. The value compromising was great for short term growth but here's where we are now. I've long thought the Samuel Gompers strategy was the right approach to coalition building. I've really started to question it probably just this week. The short term gains are substantial but it bites back hard I mean look at all these comments. Most people want the political power dynamics of syndicalism. But our compromised manifestations soured their dreams
Izikiel43 6y ago
I'm from a country where unions are basically destroying the economy and progress.
Ericson2314 6y ago
The fundamental reasons is the entrepreneurial brain rot that is startup culture that makes all these "temporally embarrassed billionaires" also "temporally embarrassed business owners". Yes, there are people here that have had bad experiences with American unions, many of which do suck for a variety of reasons, but their stories confirm a prevailing narrative not create it.
bluedays 6y ago
People think I am being conspiratorial when I say this, but I think the majority of antiunion rhetoric online is astroturing
damagednoob 6y ago
I formed my opinion of unions from watching the news. Union bosses drawing exorbitant salaries while trying to negotiate wage increases completely divorced from reality and current market conditions. People like to shit all over Margaret Thatcher and her policies but they forget that it was the actions of the unions (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent) under a Labour government that got her elected in the first place.
dang 6y ago
Please don't post spurious generalizations about the community. The community is (pretty straightforwardly) divided on divisive topics, but everyone with a strong opinion thinks that it's "very consistently" against them. This is cognitive bias, not reality. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20notice%20dislike&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

legohead 6y ago

I was part of a small union. I joined the bargaining committee, and ever since I have hated unions. It was incredibly stressful, and made me hate my job. Fighting for better wages/vacation with upper management, who showed how much they don't care about you, is very disheartening. And in the end, all the bargaining didn't really get us any better than what we would have gotten without a union. So now I got a little raise and I hate my company and I'm telling everyone else how shitty the company is.

deleted 6y ago

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saas_sam 6y ago

My anti-union sentiment arrived from my experience working with a large established union in an industrial plant. The union protected some of the worst, laziest, most unsafe workers I had ever witnessed in any job before or sense. It blew my mind how difficult it was to remove obvious bad apples, and how the best workers were forced to wait in years-long "seniority" queues before they could get promoted. I would get threatened with grievances for trivial acts like carrying a single lightbulb myself without a union worker. Every institution has a STATED purpose and an ACTUAL effect. Institutions become inefficient, corrupt, decoupled from their original goals. What keeps institutions aligned with their stated--noble--purpose, is the institution's internal incentive structure. Unions often have very bad internal incentive structures. I would be SHOCKED if you could not find counter-examples where unions are great. It's a big round world we live on where silver linings abound. For anything. To me, right now, I do not find pro-union activists persuasive in the slightest. But I am open-minded.

specialist 6y ago
Which organizations have figured out how to handle their bad apples?
- qeternity 6y ago
  It’s not a binary outcome. Of course all large organizations will have people of varying types. But it’s an order of magnitude easier to clean house outside of government and union shops.
  - specialist 6y ago
    Am big fan of Peter Drucker. Believe management is a technology. I'd LOVE for someone to research this. Case studies. Metrics. My experience with unions has been mixed. Same with non-union shops. Recognizing that I'm just a simple bear, I haven't been able to figure out any rules for what works, or doesn't. My hunch is governance. eg Unions that are more democratic, accountable perform better. I have zero notions about what might make non-union shops better or worse.
- skynet-9000 6y ago
  All of the ones that last. If you don't handle your bad apples and your business requires generating a profit to survive, you will not prosper for long if you don't prune the bad apples (and you may not even survive, unless the business throws off such huge profits that it can afford to carry the dead weight). It's as simple as "Please clean out your desk". Have you never seen The Apprentice? Do you believe that people never get fired?
shmolyneaux 6y ago
What do you think of the Screen Actors Guild? That seems to have been a huge win for workers in the industry, seemingly without the negatives you describe.
- hintymad 6y ago
  There might be a difference. Studios must first look for actors in the actors guild. That said, a studio has freedom not to use an actor. Similar, a studio does not need to use a bad script, and the studio does not need to pay a writer if it doesn't use the writer's work. In contrast, a factory has to pay for a worker, or even assign some work to the worker, no matter how bad this worker performs.

AlexTWithBeard 6y ago

Me personally is anti-monopoly. If a union can only operate by forming a workforce monopoly - something is wrong with the model itself.

mschuster91 6y ago
Amazon and Walmart are local monopolies as the sole employer resp. shop around where they establish their locations. It is only natural to put up a collective against that monopoly.
- missedthecue 6y ago
  Can you point me to one Amazon fulfillment center or Walmart superstore that doesn't have any restaurants, grocers, autoparts stores, hardware stores, janitorial services, shopping centers, retailers, courier and delivery services, or warehouses within 20 miles? All of those businesses draw from the same labor pool and compete with each other. I don't think your claim that Walmart and Amazon have monopsony power is accurate.
drivebycomment 6y ago
By that definition, companies are workplace monopolies. So are you against companies ? If you want to argue you can choose a different company, by the same token you can choose a different union by choosing a different company.
- Aunche 6y ago
  The economic term for is "monopsony," where a single buyer has disproportionate leverage. However, there isn't much evidence this occurs in most labor markets. People can and do often leave Amazon for another job. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony
  - drivebycomment 6y ago
    I agree - I was just pointing out the absurdity / inconsistency of the argument by AlexTWithBeard.

Fernicia 6y ago

I went to a school where the teacher's union made it impossible to remove incompetent teachers. Teachers who got consistently poor student results, didn't control the class, took several months of "sick" leave, etc.

parliament32 6y ago

Personally, it came from working for a massive union (government, not US) for many years. The downsides are real: hard to fire bad performers, your merits don't matter at all (the guy doing the bare minimum job description gets the same raises as you), wayyy too much focus on seniority (for promotions, vacation selection, etc), and overall just too many rules (for example, "unlimited vacation" works great with my current employer but would absolutely not work under a union.. sick days have to be tracked, PTO banks calculated down to the quarter hour, etc). On the plus side, we paid like $15/month so I'm not sure why Amazon is trying to scare people with the "union dues" argument. And it was nice to have the option for "representation" in HR-like meetings. There's definitely pluses and minuses, but (having worked on both sides) it's not for me.

duckfang 6y ago
> hard to fire bad performers In the jobs that I do, "bad performance" is super subjective and very hard to measure. It's also the common canard to use from the managerial class to get rid of someone they don't like. > your merits don't matter at all They don't either in the non-union corporate world either. They pay as little as they can get away with. They'll assign as much work as you can possibly do, and then pile on more, and set unreasonable demands. The moment you surmount them, there's more work.... But here's your COLI for the year. And, it's a common and well understood in the tech field that if you want better pay, you job hop. An employer who's paying you X knows that X is enough, and won't give any real merit raise increases. > wayyy too much focus on seniority At least that's measurable, and better than managerial decisions of "I like this person" or "I don't like you". Been there and done that. And with a crummy manager in a union job, you at least have the union steward to represent you. Non-union, you have the unemployment line. > overall just too many rules (example: unlimited PTO) Really? You use unlimited PTO as an example?!? It's complete utter trash it's unlimited by simply not showing up to work at all. That's unlimited, and we all know you'd get fired if you did that. You'd also likely get the axe if you took off every Friday as PTO. I would much rather have fair delineated and straight-forward rules for all to see and vote on, than the touchy-feely sounds good but not real faux-rules like 'unlimited PTO'.
- 6y ago

yibg 6y ago

Mine is experience working in an union. I generally really disliked the effects of the union and saw no benefit to me at all. My career progression was capped, lots of nepotism (eg manager holding a position for his son), people are generally coasting etc.

newbie789 6y ago
I absolutely abhor being passed up due to nepotism, it’s incredibly frustrating. When that sort of thing happens it makes me wish that there was a clear agreement between management and employees that codified when/how/why promotions happen so that people who have worked hard and performed well would be favored. It’s really awful that that union precluded that from happening.

sangnoir 6y ago

> So anti-union people exactly where does your information come from? HN is start-up-centric, so a good number of commenters, who may be workers themselves, are, to borrow from Steinbeck: "temporarily embarrassed employers"

ystad 6y ago

How did you conclude that HN is anti-union? Please cite refs

carmen_sandiego 6y ago

> HN is very consistently anti-union. Is it? It just seems to vary per thread.

option 6y ago

My parents had to be in union (during USSR days). In their experience, unless you are a buddy of union leadership you got to go on vacation during worst times of the year to the worst (if any!) places only. You are also getting the crappiest job assignments. And yes, you had to give up a non-trivial part of your already miserable salary as union fees. Basically being friends of union leadership was absolutely critical.

marcinzm 6y ago

I know a number of people in a large teacher's union and the stories indicate the union is bad for both good teachers and students. I've personally seen many great teachers leave for private schools and other public systems. The union rewarded the incompetent and did little for rampant administrator abuse.

dwater 6y ago
I was a public teacher for 9 years, 2 years in a union and 7 years in a right to work state. The union experience was better as an employee. I find it hard to believe great teachers would go to private schools in large numbers as a result of being in a union, private schools generally have lower pay, lower benefits, and lower standards. The one thing you gain going to a private school is freedom to do as you want, and no standardized testing. Anecdotally the people I know who went to private schools had someone else to support them financially and could choose the easiest route available.
- PragmaticPulp 6y ago
  > I find it hard to believe great teachers would go to private schools in large numbers as a result of being in a union, private schools generally have lower pay, lower benefits, and lower standards. I don't know where you lived, but this is the opposite of the situation in most places. Private schools attract people who will pay private school tuition because they offer higher standards. In my limited experience with private schools, it was relatively easy to poach good teachers away from unionized jobs precisely because the school had freedom to offer them higher wages and better benefits. Many of them were also sick of dealing with the issues that come with unionized labor and union membership.
  - dwater 6y ago
    They have higher standards for decorum and appearance, but not higher academic standards. One of the advantages of private schools is that they are essentially exempt from standards. Their students are generally not required to take standardized tests, and the schools generally are not required to follow prescribed curricula. I agree that private schools generally have a higher standard of cleanliness and facility upkeep. And although the families have to pay more for students to attend compared to (free) public schools, teachers as a broad class are paid less, not more, at private schools. There are numerous reasons for this. For one, a prospective employee has even less leverage than they do when seeking employment at a public school.

exabrial 6y ago

Show me a well run union in the USA where they successfully compete against union union workers, their industry isn't being shipped overseas, and workers can optionally participate without having wages garnished.

shuntress 6y ago
The screen actors guild
- exabrial 6y ago
  well played.
- ayende 6y ago
  You mean, the one were it is actually easy to fire people?
  - exabrial 6y ago
    yes, the one where being white and good looking is valued most.
objclxt 6y ago
> Show me a well run union in the USA where they successfully compete against union union workers, their industry isn't being shipped overseas, and workers can optionally participate without having wages garnished. Writers Guild of America East (for journalism), or the Authors Guild (novelists). You can become a journalist or a novelist without being a member. But both guilds have collective bargaining agreements with publishers.
jolux 6y ago
>workers can optionally participate without having wages garnished. This is the direct purpose of so-called "right-to-work" laws. Unions are required to represent employees regardless of whether or not they pay dues, meaning other members shoulder the costs of collective bargaining. This is called the "free rider" problem and is one of the biggest ones facing unions today. It's also one of the main targets of the PRO Act.

belval 6y ago

It started during a student summer job. I was taking care of lending canoes to people in a park. One canoe got visibly dirty so I brought a rag and some cleaner from home and just cleaned it. I was reprimanded by another worker because according to whatever union full-time employee had, cleaning a canoe was a union job and by bringing my own rag and cleaner I was violating the union's chart of some shit.

deleted 6y ago

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TheCapn 6y ago

I'm pro-union, but I think its worth noting that the type of average commenter here isn't in a position where unions provide large tangible benefit. Unions work extremely well in places where the employer holds a disproportionate amount of power to the worker. Fortunately, as things currently stand for the tech industry, the worker maintains a lot of power in that they can easily find new work of sufficiently equal pay/benefits. For us, if the employer is shit, we move up the street, but in places like factories where the employer can re-train labour on a whim, the union provides far more benefit. So merely by nature of the type of individual you'll encounter on HN, you'll get a strong bias towards the anti-union.

bradleyjg 6y ago

On the flip side I wonder how many of the pro union voices I see on Facebook or elsewhere, especially millennials & gen z, have ever worked a union job and seen what a seniority system or non-at-will employment actually looks like in practice. Of the people I know that have direct experience with US unions, even those that ultimately come down on the side of supporting them have lots of stories to illustrate the warts. That’s a kind of nuance I’m not seeing from the “eat the rich” crowd which makes me think they don’t have direct experience.

disgruntledphd2 6y ago
I've seen what non at-will employment leads to in Europe, and it's pretty good.
- bradleyjg 6y ago
  I’ve heard similar things from others (though less so in Southern Europe). However, I don’t think you get there from here by just expanding existing US unions. It would take a bigger culture shift.
  - disgruntledphd2 6y ago
    You don't need unions for that, just legislation. In Ireland, you are essentially at-will for the first six months of any role, and after that you are "permanent". This essentially means that there needs to be a process to fire you. You need to supply at least one verbal warning on stated grounds (backed up as a written), then another one and then you can fire someone. It works reasonably well (not always, obviously) and it's super bizarre to me that you don't have that in the US. To be honest, when my previous employer wanted to move me to the US, this was one of my concerns, especially when you're dependent on the job for a visa. It just seems that its a bad trade-off for US people in general, and it's odd to me that it appears to be mostly unquestioned.
    - seibelj 6y ago
      US companies fear lawsuits and firing employees includes a lot of data to back it up, from what I’ve observed. There are so many protected classes and reasons why firing is illegal, and people are so litigious, that months of documentation, warnings, improvement plan, etc. is required to fire someone with HR’s approval. And even then usually you give some severance to ensure lawsuit isn’t filed.

burtonator 6y ago

If my children want to work in coal mines I'll be damned if some union is going to take that away from them! /s

objclxt 6y ago

From what I can tell, a lot of people in tech are anti blue collar union, but mistakenly assume that blue-collar unions are all unions. For example, just in the replies to your comment people are saying they dislike unions because they protect the incompetent, stifle progression, give preferential treatment purely on seniority, etc. But then go look at Hollywood, with the Screen Actors Guild, the Writers Guild, the PGA, etc. These are unions that have some of the most highly paid and richest people in the world as members. The same is true in the sports world. And sure, these unions are not perfect by a long shot, but they are doing a huge amount to hold what is ultimately a very exploitative industry to account. Of course, companies like Google, Amazon, and the like would much prefer software engineers continued to think that all unions were like the Teamsters. They don't want you to know that there's a whole class of professional unions serving some of the most highly paid people and engaging in collective bargaining.

function_seven 6y ago
The union Amazon warehouse voted against (the RWDSU) is a blue collar union. Your point is a good one when we see the backlash against unions in software engineering and related fields. I just wanted to bring it back around to why anti-union comments on this story specifically would be right to cite their problems you listed in the 2nd sentence.
qeternity 6y ago
And conversely there are plenty of good employers who don’t require unionization to treat employees well. The point is that these situations are often framed as the angelic unions vs the evil capitalist employer. In reality, there are plenty of bad unions just as there are plenty of bad employers.
brianwawok 6y ago
So, do you know anyone say 20 something and trying to get into the SAG? Dealing with the drama of union vs off union jobs in NYC? It's usually something like: Work the union job for $10 an hour, earn credit towards joining the SAG. In 10 years I can actually join the SAG and make actual decent paying jobs, and actually get health insurance. vs Work a non-union job for $20. It feels very much like a way to exploit people to let them someday get the magic card. The numbers are very approximate, but the sentiment I have gotten from people actually with boots on the ground. Do I want this as a developer? No way!

blululu 6y ago

I would not say that I’m anti-union but my experience working with a large union was pretty universally negative. It was just one more layer of bureaucracy that never really advocated for anything good. They consistently failed to deliver pay or benefits increases but would tote meaningless symbolic victories. The union was generally out of touch with the workers. Personally I really like the idea of a workers association that would actually bring benefits to employees and focus on personally and community development as well but I don’t see a lot of innovation in how labor unions treat their constituents.

throwinawaysoon 6y ago

are you surprised shills run narrative on this and any other popular open forums and social networking sites?

rayiner 6y ago

All my information on unions comes from people who have worked in unionized industries. My father in law is a former educator for example.

wernercd 6y ago

> Where do you get your information from History and reality. Look at union run cities like Chicago and union run industries like the auto-industry that got demolished by foreign companies. Personally, I think unions have their places... but in 99% of cases these days? The bureaucracy, red tape, added expenses and other assorted BS are more net negative than the few positives that unions offer.

8bithero 6y ago

Maybe a controversial or skewed observation - But as a European looking (from outside) into the US, it looks like everyone has the impression that they're all millionaires who just haven't made it yet. They don't seem to want to disrupt the status quo, even if it benefits them, incase they're next inline to make it big :/

PragmaticPulp 6y ago
> But as a European looking (from outside) into the US, it looks like everyone has the impression that they're all millionaires who just haven't made it yet. The "temporarily embarrassed millionaires" trope gets repeated often online, but it's largely unfounded cynicism. It's true that we need to fix our health care system and bolster our safety nets, but the reality is that average Americans are relatively wealthy and even the median worker has significant career opportunities that are harder to come by in some other countries. Look toward the professional trades like software engineering and the differences are even more pronounced. I worked at a company with US and European offices for a while, and the European employees were routinely stunned to learn that the US office had to pay employees so much more for the same work. > They don't seem to want to disrupt the status quo, even if it benefits them, The situation is more nuanced than what you read online. The reality is that these moves aren't as unilaterally good as presented. It's more honest to approach them as tradeoffs. In this case, I'm inclined to believe that the workers casting these votes did more research and have a better understanding of the situation than the internet gives them credit for. The idea that they're all voting against their self interest because they're dumb, or that we know what's better for them than they do, is very presumptuous. Why can't we accept that these people are really voting for what they believe is in their best interests? Why do we have to conclude that they're not smart or that they're voting against helping themselves? The reality isn't so simple, and we're not in a position to judge after reading a few paragraphs on the internet.
- 8bithero 6y ago
  Yeah, those are valid points. That's why I was a bit apprehensive to post my original comment. Don't get me wrong, there are a lot of good things about the US! I wouldn't hesitate to move over there if I had the chance - know anyone who could sponsor a visa, by any chance? ;p But it does seem like an exceptionally easy place to slip through the cracks of society, but if you're not in the lower percentile you've probably got it better than most people in the world. The one point I would have to disagree with the the reasons for voting against their interests. And the only reason for this is seeing the results of the Brexit referendum in 2016. What happened there is people who set themselves up as figures of authority and told the people Brexit was in their interest. They made the fishing industry into the poster child of their campaigns and convinced them they would benefit. The fishing communities in particular where overwhelmingly in support. Perhaps some did try do their own research, but a large part of social media and the mass-media where all pushing the agenda and using scare tactics and any concerns were batted away as "project fear". When you have figures of authority pushing an agenda it's understandable that people will believe them - Why would they lie? But as Jan 2021 rolled around, the fishing industry in the UK is all but decimated (YoY Salmon exports were down 98% in January). So from that perspective, I wouldn't call the voters dumb because it's easy to get caught out by the disinformation that's out there, but for the most part I would say many were naively trusting ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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christophilus 6y ago

For me, it is all anecdotes from my dad (some of which I observed first hand). He worked for unions for half of his career and then intentionally uprooted us to move to a right to work state purely to escape the unions. He moved up the ranks and ended his career as the general manager of a manufacturing facility. The next county over was heavily unionized. The contrast in the two counties was notable. The industry in the unionized county was run-down, falling apart, constantly in and out of bankruptcy. The industry in the non-unionized county was literally some of the best in the world in what it does. The plants were clean and well run. Early on in the management-part of his career, my dad hired some formerly unionized workers who had moved up from the unionized county in order to find work (jobs were disappearing in that county due to the bankruptcies). They were fired in a few months because they wouldn't show up on time, were constantly dropping the ball, etc. In his opinion, their work ethic had been ruined. I'm actually not anti-union, but I'm mostly anti US union. I think if we adopted a non-antagonistic model similar to Germany, it'd be alright.

DonnyV 6y ago
What were the 2 counties and in what state. I'm sure this is all true but I like verify.
- christophilus 6y ago
  They were Horry and Georgetown, SC.
CameronNemo 6y ago
How much of that difference was due to capital preferring to invest in the right to work environment while deliberately neglecting the unionized jurisdiction? It is hard to use purely observational evidence to determine causation. You need sophisticated statistical techniques, and many observations, to conduct meaningful observational studies.

slibhb 6y ago

Unions are employee cartels. They are a tool for correcting an imbalance between employers and employees. Sometimes unions are good, because the employees have no leverage. Other times unions are bad, because employees have plenty of leverage. Workers are not saints. When given leverage, they use it to advance their own interests, which are not always reasonable. People disagree over whether Amazon is a situation where unions would be a benefit or a detriment. Make an argument instead of diminishing people who disagree with as you misinformed.

hnburnsy 6y ago

Saw this at r/Costco from an employee who worked at a unionized store, straight from the source... "Next, the union dues. I know this isn't a problem at every location but mine is part of the local teamsters union, and having to pay $450 in initiation fees and $40 on the regular adds up, especially for someone who is in real need of the income. I wouldn't be complaining if I saw the tangible benefits the union provides, but after speaking to several coworkers, many of whom have worked at my location for 20+ years, I am of the impression that the union does not actually do anything to improve working conditions at Costco. If anything, it seems to me that the union locations simply serve to protect the wages of those who are not unionized by playing into Costco's desire to prevent the unionization of said locations. Yes, the union makes it harder to arbitrarily fire people, "guarantees" you won't get scheduled for 7 days straight (have seen otherwise at my location), etc. In my view, this only contributes to my previously mentioned point that many long-time employees feel protected from termination regardless of how they perform or act, and as such they bring subpar attitudes, service, and effort into their work."

tablespoon 6y ago

> My question is this: Where did you get information about unions? Because people keep mentioning their "bad reputation" and then start listing off a bunch of "facts" that read like they're bullets straight out of one of those anti-union videos during onboard at several major employers (Walmart, Target, Amazon, etc). Realistically? Probably libertarian advocacy literature coupled with a few confirmatory anecdotes that may or may not be from first hand experience. When I was anti-union, that's where it came from. You also have to keep in mind the HN is run by a VC firm, and a lot of its culture was set by aspiring capitalists hoping to win the startup lottery. That's going to lead to certain predicable biases (e.g. taking the perspective of a business owner even if you're unlikely to ever successfully be one).

unionanswer 6y ago

Worked in a union for a few years.

strictnein 6y ago

My "original source" is my wife who grew up poor and started working at 14 to pay for things like clothes for school. Every dollar her union took was money she couldn't use to pay for necessities and they never once did a single thing for her or any of her coworkers, no matter how egregious the discrimination or behavior of the store's management. Their union rep would 100% ignore every single complaint. But they always got a cut of her meager paycheck. Is that a good enough source for you, or does that not count? I'll never understand the people who think "You have a differing opinion. It must be because you don't know what you're talking about and have just consumed a bunch of propaganda".

anm89 6y ago

Are you questioning the source of a specific piece of data you interpret to be anti-union or you questioning what is the source of peoples opinion on why they are anti union. If you are questioning the source of a specific piece of data than be clear about what that data is. If you are asking people to cite a source for a general opinion they personally hold, they don't owe you that.

adamrezich 6y ago

I posted the story here before but my only experience with unions was when my friend and then-roommate was waiting for his teaching license to transfer over from SD to WA, so he had to have multiple part-time jobs to survive in the interim. one of the places he got a job at was one of the Redmond QFCs. he worked there as a cheese monger and was paid minimum wage for doing so. (it's statistically likely that a nonzero number of readers of this comment bought cheese from him sometime in 2015–2016 lol). we both had worked at various Walmarts in the past so we were familiar with their explicitly anti-union rhetoric, but it had never affected us, so we didn't think much of it. my friend was shocked to discover that union membership was mandatory in order to work at QFC (this has been since made illegal in WA apparently), which included a union initiation fee of like a hundred dollars iirc, in addition to the monthly union due. my friend was not looking for some kind of long-term employment with Kroger (QFC), he just wanted a short-term part-time job that would help him get cash quick, to stay afloat. yet, the union literally did nothing for him but take money from his minimum wage income while he was employed there. like I said, mandatory union membership is apparently illegal in WA now, which is great. and there are probably situations where unions are helpful and productive. but I have seen a lot of people have this opinion that unions are unassailably forces of good in all situations, and that just seems silly to me.

AdamJacobMuller 6y ago

> So anti-union people exactly where does your information come from? From speaking with family members who work or worked for Unions. From a management perspective it is untenable to not be able to hire who you want (because you must offer the job to any "qualified" union employee before you can hire externally), not be able to fire who you want (because you must meet arbitrary requirements set by the union). From an employee perspective I've seen situations where they want specific or custom arrangements with their boss and their boss would like to give them but they violate union rules so they are either forced to work around it (and face repercussions if they are found out) or refuse to accommodate situations that both the manager and the employee agree upon. I will also say that I find the anti-anti-union rhetoric very distasteful. I fundamentally agree that employees have the right to discuss their desire to join or form a union but I think that companies have the fundamental right to advocate their position as well. Virtually all of this get's called out as "anti-union" propaganda and I find that very distasteful and disingenuous. Most of the "propaganda" videos I've seen I found to be actually quite reasonable arguments, while most of the anti-anti commentary I find to be disingenuous appeals to emotion. There are also many industries where unions are massively corrupt. I know nothing about the union here so I won't speak about it, but I do have personal experience with this. Finally, I will also say that my opinion of unions skews heavily against larger and more diverse ones. Had this been Amazon Warehouse workers choosing to form their own union vs join an existing union, I feel that would have been more successful by virtue of being smaller in scope and more targeted.

01100011 6y ago

Personal experience with unions. The unions at Boeing protect workers who do drugs and sleep on the job. The teamsters union in Boston prevented my small company from unloading a small amount of equipment from our truck ourselves(enforced with veiled threats). The longshoreman's union hands out jobs to well connected members and runs a racket. I'm not saying all unions are bad. I think many industries might benefit from well run, transparent, regulated unions. But I have seen many examples where they are bad.

winkeltripel 6y ago
Compare the scale of the harm that you see to the direct benefits: these huge unions getting each and every member a solid benefits package, and better pay rates, overtime or limited hours. Even non-union jobs pay better in areas with high union membership. Its one of the only tools with broad benefits to working-poor and lower-class at the cost of the non-working rich. I think it's an unfair argument to say that unions need further regulation. Regulating them is how we've lost millions of union jobs to contractors, and where we keep seeing large strikes broken up by governments. Regulations often benefit large players over small ones. We'd rather see a plethora of smaller, niche unions, than just one massive union. Competition breeds capability.

missedthecue 6y ago

I don't like them on the basis of principle. It is my belief that monopoly cartels are a net cost for society whether they deal in oil like OPEC or in labor like the UAW.

Shivetya 6y ago

I replied to another poster but let me double down the fun. Well first off, especially in low wage jobs, there is little they do for you and it can cost nearly two hours of your pay per month for the benefit. You get this wonderful set of rules which spells out what your employer can and cannot do but it also limits you as well. I got first hand experience in a union shop from late 1980s to early 1990s. My reward was seeing our rep once a quarter if we were lucky in her Mercedes which cost more than we made. However for every complaint about people being anti union and listing off "Bunch of facts" you never see those same people list their facts that support a pro union stance. Most of the time its little more than what people already have with some variation of something they won't even get when unionized. The simple fact is, in the US they are more political than worker oriented. They feed a ridiculous amount of dues and even state funds into political coffer so they come replete with lots of wonderful political supporters and press who love to lay the claim that workers will be better for representation. The benefactors are political appointees, elected officials, and union leadership. The workers are mostly pawns. What I read about European unions would be very nice to see in the states but what I experienced, family members have experienced, is not this fantasy that some people have of what its like here.

brandonmenc 6y ago

There are pros and cons to unionization, but imo not all workers should unionize. Most of my hardcore union friends think I'm "anti union", even though I think some workers should unionize for their own good (I'm looking at you, non-tenured college professors.) I come from a union town. My grandfather was a union organizer and disowned his sister for crossing a picket line. My mother worked in a union her whole life. My father was a union steward, then halfway through his career entered management and had grievances filed against him. I was - briefly - a dues-paying member of a union as a teenager (IBEW) for my summer job. I have many friends in trade unions (plumbing, electrician, etc.) and I have friends in SAG. The relatively high standard of living I enjoyed as a child was in large part the result of my parents being in unions. Sure, mom had to sometimes see less skilled co-workers get promoted before her due to seniority, but she wouldn't have had the good pay, benefits, or job security without the union. That's the trade-off, and for her it was worth it in the long run. However, the downside of a union encouraging low productivity can be very real. Case in point - where my father worked, the union was so entrenched that the high seniority factory workers were making as much as local software developers (nothing necessarily wrong with that), but their productivity was far below workers doing the same job in a non-unionized factory being paid far less in another state. When they were asked to increase productivity to meet that level, they balked. For years. Then went on strike. And as a result, at least partly, that business was sold off and a lot of them were laid off. It's always a set of trade-offs but I think plug-and-play workers should organize. They need to be able to collectively bargain. They just don't have the same individual leverage like say, software developers. The problem is that we're not in the heyday of unionization anymore. Few industries are unionized nationwide, so companies can just move to another state. Unions don't have the leverage they used to, so organizing can end up being a footgun. That might mean that business has too much of an advantage, not that unionization is bad, but it depends on your worldview. But without unions, it's just always going to be a race to the bottom for unskilled labor. How could it not be? Trade unions and guilds (like SAG) are a totally different animal. SAG is great because you work for an ephemeral production, not a company. Game development should definitely adopt this model, because games are really just movies now. You get your benefits through the union when you're not actively working, etc. Not a bad deal, and probably better for the production companies. Trade unions - they restrict the supply of labor, driving prices up, but they police themselves and maintain quality. I would be uncomfortable hiring a non-union plumber for anything non-trivial. Anyways, like I said, it's all a set of trade-offs, and those vary depending on the industry.

remir 6y ago

The HN crowd are generally in an advantageous position regarding the job market. Most people here can negotiate their salary and conditions, so having a union negotiate these for them would not make much sense. As for Amazon workers, since there was so much resistance coming from Amazon on this case, the workers probably feared that Amazon would have closed shop if they chose to unionize.

jimmar 6y ago

I'm in academia at a university. I'm part of a union and I hate it. Union meetings are mostly members nitpicking minor contract issues and complaining about being underpaid. The union's purported main goal is to protect free speech, but everybody knows it really only exists to (unsuccessfully) negotiate for better pay. I worked about a decade in industry and never felt like management was the enemy. We didn't expect management to coddle us, though. We knew we were there to do a job and if being there wasn't worth the benefit, we'd leave. Being in union, it feels like an artificial wall between management and union has been erected; that it's us versus them. Like the vice presidents are fat cats smoking cigars in their high rise offices while we, the proletariat, fight to get what's fair. Its as if union members think there's some reservoir of money we could get in salary if only we could break down the dam that management is using to hoard all the money. I'm in a right to work state and technically don't have to pay union dues. But, I pay my dues because if you don't, your name gets published publicly and there is a lot union members can legally do to make life difficult for you if you don't want to join the club.

mekoka 6y ago

Your comment (like a few others) reads as though you've discarded the possibility of some in the HN crowd having first-hand experience with unions. > HN is very consistently anti-union. I'd say HN is more consistently anti-bullshit. It's important to separate the legitimate problems from the solutions taken to address them, else you fall for the false dichotomy. Being skeptical of unions as a solution to address workplace conditions is not irrational.

rubyist5eva 6y ago

Personally, I have no need for one as I've been perfectly capable of advancing in my career without the baggage that comes along with collective bargaining. I'm compensated very competitively, get raises, negotiate PTO, sick days, etc. I also do not like my freedom of association to be infringed, by being required to join a union and dues extorted from me that I do not want to pay for.

ChicagoBoy11 6y ago

I work at an institution that has a strong union presence (education). It is absolutely a cancer of the place. Granted, I think that probably in a lot of places that have unions they can easily become a scapegoat to all of the organization's problems, but some of the ones that I deal with on a daily basis are really hard to pin on anything else. In an idealized world, there would be infinite competition both on the demand and supply side of labor. The argument for unions, at least, is that in the real world the balance tips in favor of the demand side, and I'm sure in many organizations this makes a ton of sense. But at a place like a small learning organization where I work at, it just ensures that nothing ever happens. You have a fantastic faculty member that you want to compensate above and beyond market rate because they deserve it? Union will make that an issue. You want to fire a severe under-performer? Union will make that an issue. You are a non-union manager who has energy and wants to improve things? This sort of stuff will destroy your morale. Over time, the really good people who want to be recognized for their work individually leave, the people who care and want to actively promote change ALSO leave, and what you are left with is an assorted collection of folks going through the motions and heavily invested in not rocking the boat out in any direction. It sucks.

courtf 6y ago

HN is anti-union because HN is a weird little bubble of people who have bought the idea of meritocracy, mostly by being born wealthy and desperately needing to explain away the growing gap between them and the rest of the world. They have by and large managed to wriggle their way into careers that pay slightly above average (but still well below the actual earners), and need to believe this has some connection to actions or behaviors they personally undertook along the way. One only need to look back on the last hundred years of industrialization to see how briefly these kinds of professional, middle-class meritocracies can keep up the illusion. If it isn't slave labor abroad that undercuts them, it will be some innovation that makes them redundant. The music will stop, and it will become immediately clear that just because you've been the one building the chairs for the game doesn't entitle you to actually sit in one. This sort of thing is happening all the time, the law profession being one recent example. One day, your skills are valuable and command a good wage, the next, you're competing with thousands for a single position that comes with constant pressure to beat last quarter's results or be replaced by an intern. We could look at colleges and professorships as well for more middle-class devastation. Programmers, kind of like surgeons, sit in a unique position at the moment in that they are necessary for the imperial goals of the billionaire class and haven't yet been thoroughly replicated by cheap alternatives. That day is absolutely coming though, for both programmers and surgeons, and it isn't hard to find companies out there working full-time on those replacements. All the haranguing about performance and merit will stop, and we'll all be left with whatever table scraps we've managed to gather before the great hand of progress swept us into the trashbin. Of course, unions can't prevent this from happening, but they can help extract as much money from the sociopaths of industry as possible before our usefulness is over.

grzm 6y ago
> HN is anti-union because HN is a weird little bubble of people You are a member of HN. Please just elide such generalizations.
- courtf 6y ago
  I'll say whatever the hell I please, this is well within forum guidelines. Take your busybody nitpicking elsewhere.

kristopolous 6y ago

The worst thing that ever happened to unionizing was the AFL and the CIO. The value compromising was great for short term growth but here's where we are now. I've long thought the Samuel Gompers strategy was the right approach to coalition building. I've really started to question it probably just this week. The short term gains are substantial but it bites back hard I mean look at all these comments. Most people want the political power dynamics of syndicalism. But our compromised manifestations soured their dreams

Izikiel43 6y ago

I'm from a country where unions are basically destroying the economy and progress.

Ericson2314 6y ago

The fundamental reasons is the entrepreneurial brain rot that is startup culture that makes all these "temporally embarrassed billionaires" also "temporally embarrassed business owners". Yes, there are people here that have had bad experiences with American unions, many of which do suck for a variety of reasons, but their stories confirm a prevailing narrative not create it.

bluedays 6y ago

People think I am being conspiratorial when I say this, but I think the majority of antiunion rhetoric online is astroturing

damagednoob 6y ago

I formed my opinion of unions from watching the news. Union bosses drawing exorbitant salaries while trying to negotiate wage increases completely divorced from reality and current market conditions. People like to shit all over Margaret Thatcher and her policies but they forget that it was the actions of the unions (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_Discontent) under a Labour government that got her elected in the first place.

dang 6y ago

Please don't post spurious generalizations about the community. The community is (pretty straightforwardly) divided on divisive topics, but everyone with a strong opinion thinks that it's "very consistently" against them. This is cognitive bias, not reality. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20notice%20dislike&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html