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

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.