11 ms·

Except that in the long run it's the employees that get punished in overly unionised industry.

• 6f8986c3 5y ago
  Exactly.
• pharmakom 5y ago
  Why? I would argue rhat the consumer might get harmed (higher prices) or the business (higher wage costs) but the employee? How?
  • kortilla 5y ago
    Because US-style unions are bad for top performers. Incompetent employees don’t get fired and seniority takes priority over skills. Overall, this encourages everyone to act in the bare minimum fashion and the business will suffer when pitted against a motivated workforce at a competitor. Unless the business has a very big moat, it will collapse under the union bloat.
    • JumpCrisscross 5y ago
      > US-style unions are bad for top performers Not necessarily. It just institutionalises office politics. If you’re in a customer-facing role, the skills that make you successful at lobbying customers and lobbying your union might be identical.
    • jjeaff 5y ago
      Is the screen actor's guild a US style union? Because it seems to be working just fine for their top performers.
      • flir 5y ago
        Every counterexample will be a special case for some reason. Police unions?
        • legutierr 5y ago
          Police officers seem on an individual level to be quite happy with their unions.
          • throwaway894345 5y ago
            Society on the other hand, less so.
        • JohnWhigham 5y ago
          Seeing as police won't hire you if your IQ is too high, top performers aren't really a concern for them.
      • syshum 5y ago
        No, it is not. SAG is in no way the norm when it comes to US Labor employment unions.
        • ethanbond 5y ago
          Why so? Is it structurally different?
      • throwaway894345 5y ago
        Film stars are their own brand. People will go see the new Owen Wilson movie but they won’t buy software just because it’s built by Frank the SWE. This isn’t a good comparison IMO.
        • someguydave 5y ago
          I would buy software built by Frank the SWE if he was good. Why can’t I find authorship information for software?
          • ghaff 5y ago
            Significant software is rarely an individual effort. Same with movies of course but a film star can have an outsized impact. A lot of software does often have a credits splash screen somewhere, if it's open source you can probably see contributions on GitHub, etc. Game designers are fairly well known even if all the coders aren't.
          • alisonkisk 5y ago
            why do you think you can't? people can talk about what they work on. You can buy John Carmack products.
        • emptyparadise 5y ago
          I'd buy software written by Fabrice Bellard.
      • username90 5y ago
        Top performers doesn't like SAG, they'd prefer not to be in it but SAG forces them to pay their union fees and not take non-union contracts anyway since most big budget movies are union shops. And you can't compare professions where you get paid for fame with professions where you get paid for performance. It is really hard to prevent famous people from making loads of cash, but it is very easy to prevent high performers from getting a higher salary than their peers as both companies and unions would prefer that.
        • criddell 5y ago
          Unions for professional athletes seem to have figured out how to get paid for performance.
    • quicklime 5y ago
      Unions will never take root in the tech industry because the workers see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed top performers :) Even Amazon FC workers, and SV employees who had their wages suppressed by illegal collusion, it seems.
      • pjmlp 5y ago
        In Europe they do.
        • throwaway894345 5y ago
          In Europe tech workers also make ~40% less than American tech workers after taxes, retirement/pension, and healthcare. I’m sure that’s not entirely attributable to unions, (and I would genuinely be interested in understanding the full cause of the disparity) but I imagine it plays a role.
          • pjmlp 5y ago
            I am quite happy with my 40h week, extra pay for overtime and weekends work, 30 day vacation, health care and retirement, no need for extra 40%.
            • username90 5y ago
              You don't need to be in a union to get that though, you don't even need to be in a profession that has a union in any company to get that.
              • pjmlp 5y ago
                If you are lucky, here mostly everyone gets it.
                • throwaway894345 5y ago
                  Again, the benefit is standard among tech workers here as well. We can still appreciate Europe without the pretense that it is better than America for every category of citizen. No need for the defensiveness.
    • adrianN 5y ago
      I don't know how it is in the US, but here in Germany unions are democratic entities. They are pretty much exactly what (the actively voting subset of) their members want them to be.
    • Frondo 5y ago
      The NFL Players League and the Screen Actors Guild do not operate this way. Their top performers negotiate significantly higher salaries for themselves (check out what Tom Cruise is getting for a film) while retaining the protections of the guild. Why wouldn't organized labor in software build their unions the same way?
  • ralusek 5y ago
    Have you ever worked for a union? It's just another entity that you have to negotiate with, except not only are they a self interested entity like your employer, but they also average out your interests within the context of their other members. It's good if you were on the bottom half of the distribution and you don't value independence/personal leverage. If you are a talented individual who is able to make your worth known to a self interested employer, such that you can typically negotiate higher pay, or choose to work on specific things, at specific hours, etc, unions can be extremely constraining. They often have arbitrary systems in place of meritocracies, where a position you might be better suited for, which your employer would prefer to have you do, will instead go to someone with seniority, or someone who has played the union political game better than you. In other words, it's just another interested party that gets inserted as a middle man between you and your employer. If you weren't lacking in leverage, which most engineers are not, you're unlikely to find the upside.
    • realityking 5y ago
      > If you are a talented individual who is able to make your worth known to a self interested employer, such that you can typically negotiate higher pay, or choose to work on specific things, at specific hours, etc, unions can be extremely constraining. I’ve never worked in an Amazon Warehouse but I don’t think there’s any room to negotiate any of that - no matter how good you are, you’re still a replaceable cog to Amazon.
      • syshum 5y ago
        Everyone is replaceable, this is fact and people need to recognize this fact However even roles where the skill set is filled by more people a good worker, that shows up on time, has few absences, performs the job with limited errors, and has higher productivity then other members will be valued more by the company, and (in a non-union setting) often be giving more wage increased, promotions etc In a union setting however none of that matters, everyone is on the exact same contract, and the pay is often determined by tenure not performance.
      • bluGill 5y ago
        Which is why Amazon Warehouse workers are a good target for unions, while tech workers are not. If amazon figures out a way to measure productivity of warehouse workers and reward the better ones, then suddenly they are not a good target of unions. Unions work when people are all equal in output. Assembly lines are only as fast the line, it doesn't matter how much faster you can put that bolt in the hole than the next guy: it just means you have more time to wait for the next widget to come before you can put the bolt in the hole, so you can't be worth more than the guy who barely gets done in time (and the guy who is a little slower needs to be fired)
  • BeFlatXIII 5y ago
    The stereotypical anti-union case are rules that are about making work for other employees rather than providing higher wages and shorter hours. Think “you’re not allowed to plug that in: that’s a job for the lighting Union”
  • throwaway0a5e 5y ago
    Decreased managerial discretion and increased rigidity in assignment and pay. Obviously this is a doubled edged sword. As long as you hit whatever metrics the agreement says you're gonna be tracked by you'll say employed and get your scheduled raises. People can be real jerks to everyone around them and cause all sorts of problems while still doing whatever their on-paper job duties are. The guy who wants to work his butt off make everyone happy and pivot that built up goodwill into a quick promotion or internal transfer to a different role is usually SOL in those kinds of workplaces.
• eigenket 5y ago
  This has not been my experience.
• pjmlp 5y ago
  As European, where unions usually affect everyone in the industry across the whole building, I enjoy my punishment.
  • username90 5y ago
    European unions are very different from American unions though due to legal differences. In USA they tend to have much more power over workers and many workers don't like that.
    • gumby 5y ago
      > many workers don't like that. "many workers"? Citation needed.
      • alexilliamson 5y ago
        Many people are saying this
      • username90 5y ago
        If they liked having unions with lots of power over workers they would join unions. "Company propaganda" is just a cop out, companies in Europe does the same, the main difference is that unions in Europe has a lot of power over companies and very little power over workers while in USA it is the opposite. An example of protections workers in USA lacks is "right to work", everyone has that in Europe but in USA it is said to be right wing anti union propaganda. The only one who is hurt by banning "right to work" is the worker, unions wants it though since it gives them more power over workers. Btw, saying that unions are on the workers side just because workers elect and pay them is like saying that politicians are on the peoples side since the people elect and pay the politicians taxes. It doesn't work that way, you need to protect people from politicians and also protect workers against unions.
        • bostonsre 5y ago
          Why do you dismiss company propaganda as a cop out so easily? Are you saying that in the Amazon warehouse example their propaganda had no effect? I'd argue that even Amazon disagrees with that statement even if they wouldn't admit it publicly. If there were no effect, they wouldn't have needed to worry about putting a bunch of time and effort into stopping the union.
• bostonsre 5y ago
  Can you elaborate some? It seems to me like unions are incredibly good. It allows workers to have a stable career with pay advancement over the long run and reasonable working conditions. The alternative is Amazon warehouses where workers are pushed extremely hard and have absolutely zero job security. We are in a world with plentiful resources, there is no reason to treat the workers on the bottom like dirt and make them scrape to get by.
  • RHSeeger 5y ago
    Without trying to go into too many details, because it would be a long discussion, unions have both positives and negatives. There are people on both sides that ignore/discount the other side, so it can be difficult to even have a reasonable discussion on it. Some points from both sides Positives - Without unions, we wouldn't have the 40 hour work week or many of the safety regulations we take for granted. - Without unions, people can wind up working long hours in inhumane environments because it's the only opportunity they have (do it or starve). That's true even today. Negatives - Union members consider anyone who disagrees with the union an enemy, dishing out verbal and physical abuse on those people. - Unions sometimes prevent poor workers from being fired, resulting in certain worse conditions for everyone involved. I'm not looking to debate any of the above, just throwing out some examples from each side. The topic of unions is far from clear cut as good or bad.
    • bostonsre 5y ago
      From the standpoint of union members, isn't more good than bad though? In this amazon warehouse example, in the long run, people that work in these amazon warehouses will have the opportunity to have a stable career where they chase the american dream and raise a family with relative security. The alternative without unions in this day and age with plentiful resources is just not humane to those workers.
      • RHSeeger 5y ago
        > From the standpoint of union members, isn't more good than bad though? That is a matter of debate. Some say yes, some say no. The same holds true for their effect on society as a whole; some people think unions are a net positive (beyond just for the workers), some do not.