6 ms·

If not all the employees are represented by the union, the employers will refuse to negotiate with the union, give more favorable terms to the employees who do

If not all the employees are represented by the union, the employers will refuse to negotiate with the union, give more favorable terms to the employees who do not join the union, and refuse to hire employees who choose to choin the union. This saps or breaks the union's negotiating strength, leaving the employer free once again to dictate terms to employees unilaterally.

anigbrowl 5y ago
Well so it is said, but I'm not sure this is backed up by reality. I'm proposing a change in the law here, and that could include requiring that if workers choose to delegate negotiation to a union representative companies are required to honor that request. The existing approach is clearly not working that well (as evidenced by plummeting union membership over the years, and the use of tactics by employers to influence union elections) so perhaps it's time to try a different approach.
- bawolff 5y ago
  > I'm proposing a change in the law here, and that could include requiring that if workers choose to delegate negotiation to a union representative companies are required to honor that request. What does that mean? Are you proposing that employers cannot say no to any proposal put forth by the union representative? If yes, that seems rediculously over powered on the union side. If no, i don't see how it helps the situation.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    Well if the union is self-organized, that's a pretty reasonable request. Who better than the workers themselves to decide how to operate?! The boss needs us, but we don't need a boss. History has shown it time and time again.
    - anigbrowl 5y ago
      This isn't what I'm saying though. I'm saying employers should have to negotiate with workers' representatives in good faith. I think this union trope of 'the boss needs us, we don't need a boss' is silly and childish. Not that people need to be bossed around, but that people obviously need employers in the sense that they provide capital and organization to some extent (I'll revisit this below). Otherwise you could just get a bunch of workers together in an empty lot and bang, functioning business. A business starts because someone has an idea and invests or obtains (by loan or outside investor) some capital. If the capital is provided by an investor, they're taking some risk that the business might fail and lose money. In many contexts this can lead to fair outcomes, eg I enjoy and am good at making lemonade, you have $100 doing nothing so we team up and I spend the $100 on a table, sign, glassware, and some ingredients to run a lemonade stand. We take in a few hundred $ and split the money evenly, everyone wins. Now I can either buy out the table, sign, glassware (ie return your original investment and own the lemonade stand outright), or you might decide to put in more money and make a bigger stand, or open a second one a few blocks away. I always have the buyout option because now that I have some money, I could just go and buy new materials if you didn't want to do that. You'd then be left with the original lemonade stand, but you are no good at or don't like making and selling lemonade so it's probably a better deal to sell them to me. If we open a new lemonade stand elsewhere, we're gonna need someone to run it. At this point I need to hire workers. They're going to be doing the same work of selling the lemonade as I am, but maybe the production of the lemonade will be centralized in a kitchen. Even if not, I still have to train them in everything about running the lemonade stand, and now that I'm an employer, I have some administration work to do for each employee. So, how much should I pay the lemonade stand worker, given the work that I do on top of theirs? What I'm getting at here is that investors bosses don't just bully and exploit employees, although many definitely do. Investors provide capital, and this is valuable, ie deserving of some reward in return for their risk. I think investment turns into 'capitalism' when the investors get swelled heads and start to argue that their contribution is the only one that matters and therefore they should get all the profits of investing in a business. Bosses can often be the people who come up with an idea and do the work of getting it off the ground (perhaps failing repeatedly), plus they provide organization and take care of administration. Again, if they decide that this is the only part of the business that matters it's easy for them to become greedy and that's bad. Workers provide labor to perform a job that's already defined but which is too much for one person to start, and many workers then have ideas for how to improve or expand the business. If workers get too carried away with their own greatness, they begin thinking they brought the business into existence, which they usually didn't. What I'm getting at here is that you can have healthy relationships where different parties in a business recognize each others' valuable contributions, and then share out profits accordingly. The most ideal form of this is a co-op or worker-owned business, where every new worker has the opportunity to buy into the coop and can then take on some of the administration and management overhead as they see fit, ie every worker is also a shareholder and/or a manager. I'm big on coops, and to my mind the larger a business is the more likely it can be run on a cooperative basis. But It hink this requires a different model of business as a system with inputs and growth patterns that goes through a few different phase transitions, as opposed to the simplistic model of workers v bosses. It's not that bosses don't exist and create adversarial situations with the workforce, that absolutely happens. I'm arguing it's just one possible direction business can go in, and if we want businesses to go in different and more equitable/sustainable directions, we need to look past the dysfunctional model as if it were the only game in town.
  - anigbrowl 5y ago
    No of course not. I'm saying employers have to negotiate with the union delegate chosen by the workers. If you hire me and we later have an employment dispute, I generally have the right to be represented by an attorney. I'm just saying that people should be able to delegate their bargaining rights and not be fired for doing so.
    - bawolff 5y ago
      And if the employer and the employee's representative can't come to an agreement? Employee wants a million dollars, employer wants to pay minimum wage - what happens next? In a normal situation if both sides can't come to an agreement both sides part ways. What does a negotiation where one side can't be fired (and hence the other side cannot walk away) look like?
      - anigbrowl 5y ago
        What does a negotiation where one side can't be fired (and hence the other side cannot walk away) look like? It looks irrelevant, because what I proposed was that people couldn't be fired just for joining a union/delegating their bargaining rights, which is something people were saying would pre-empt even the possibility of negotiation or collective bargaining. Most negotiations are going to employ more reasonable positions on both sides (eg likely within one or two standard deviations from median wages) because good faith negotiations involve a degree of mutuality. If one side is being unreasonable then external mediation or a grievance process might arise. I am not claiming that my proposal is the perfect solution for all situations and has no failure points. I don't really appreciate your use of maximal edge cases to break it like it was a theorem assertion. That just seems like you're more interested in negating the idea than exploring it.
        bawolff 5y ago
        > I am not claiming that my proposal is the perfect solution for all situations and has no failure points. I don't really appreciate your use of maximal edge cases to break it like it was a theorem assertion. That just seems like you're more interested in negating the idea than exploring it. I'm not saying it fails in edge cases, i'm saying it fails in every case. There's two possibilities: A) the employer acts in good faith. In which case, why would you need this? Firing someone for unionizing is the ultimate example of acting in bad faith, so if they are acting in good faith, no problem to solve. B) the employer acts in bad faith. We're assuming the employer wants to fire the employee - why would they be reasonable? The rational thing to do would be to be unreasonable until the employee walks away. I'm not saying that a solution has to fix everything, but it should fix something in some reasonable scenario where parties are behaving towards their interests. Otherwise we might as well simplify it to: instead of unions, employers should just stop exploiting their employees.
- krageon 5y ago
  You say you are not sure it is backed up by reality, but you're not giving any new evidence to support your claim. Meanwhile the history of the US is absolutely chock-full of examples of this type of employee abuse, especially during the original dawn of unions (where "war" would honestly be a better word than abuse).
  - anigbrowl 5y ago
    I am not the one making a claim, and others have pointed out that the arrangement I propose actually obtains in many other countries. I'm proposing a change to the law and you're arguing it won't work even though I'm including legal language to forbid the specific abuse you describe.
- washadjeffmad 5y ago
  Yes, the barrier to unionizing is too high. Laws are in the works to lower the threshold prior to vote because the current situation practically requires people to organize before they officially organize, which is dangerous at places like Amazon where involuntary layoffs and turnover are inscrutable (eg- at will / right to work states) and high. Weakening collective bargaining isn't a solution to low unionization.
throwawaysea 5y ago
Maybe that is a fair outcome. In sectors that are more labor constrained the unions would still have power to negotiate and it wouldn’t be unilateral. And the formation of multiple unions and competition between multiple unions and individuals may be healthy.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > And the formation of multiple unions and competition between multiple unions and individuals may be healthy. It depends. When a union renounces its revolutionary ideals and becomes a pawn of the bosses, then it's really counter-productive. For example in France, the CFDT and CGT used to be pretty radical, but nowadays despite some local section still practicing sabotage, nation-wide these two unions are pretty reactionary and will want to peacefully talk to the boss about getting slightly better improvements, instead of organizing workers with the explicit goal of the social revolution and self-organization of all aspects of life. How could an anarchist union (see Émile Pouget for example, about the history of the CGT TV won't tell you about) become a counter-revolutionary force whose security service is well-known (and documented) to attack undocumented folks and other protesters in demonstrations, siding with the cops against the people?! Back to the point, yes i believe diversity is useful for unions, though not competition. If only, because when your union turns bad you're free to make your own.
s1artibartfast 5y ago
This is essentially the model in many parts of the world. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.
- makeitdouble 5y ago
  In my understanding, countries with stronger labor laws mandate an employee representation of some sort past a minimum size (I think it's 50 employees in France for instance) These are not unions per se, but partly cover the same role (discuss and negotiate on behalf of individual employees) and there is no opting out of that representation.
  - krageon 5y ago
    Those are definitely not unions. They're employees, the groups are small and they're usually managed using a combination of bribes and threats (yes, even though that is illegal). A union does not have these problems because they are so large they cannot effectively be managed in such a detailed way. That leads to a positive incentive to simply negotiate.
southerntofu 5y ago
I'm pretty sure this is what bosses and major corporate unions will tell you, but i don't think it's so simple... at least as long as you have provisions that make it illegal for a boss to fire someone on the basis of their union activities as we do here in France (although they still do, and it takes years to get compensation through special tribunals). First, because the boss has no idea whether you're gonna join an union before you're actually employed, unless you tell them to their face. Second, because having a single major union goes against workers best interests by adding gatekeepers (the union leaders) who have interests in keeping the status quo and putting away proposals deemed too radical. Second, because it's a useful construct to demonize unions. As you can see here on HN, lots of people in the US (i don't think this is true elsewhere) have examples of stupid union-mandated rules that apply to everybody. As long as the boss makes the rules, we're all happy to be against the boss for their soulless management. But when stupid rules are proposed and enforced by the single union, it's very convenient to keep everyone divided and not looking at who's profiting from the situation. All in all, the single union appears to be a manipulation by the bosses themselves, or by the more authoritarian stalinist components of the workforce, and i don't see any benefits to it. Maybe i'm being a bit conspirational about it, but it sounds really at odds with the history of unionism all across the planet, for example the IWW in the USA which was the biggest union for i reckon a few decades, promoting sabotage and expropriation of the bosses alongside workers self-organization. Voting for some stuff can be useful, though. In France it's common for people as individuals to go on a strike, but when it's part of a more global social movement, "joining the general strike" is usually put to a vote, as a measurement of the workers agreeing that everything needs to change and production should be entirely halted, and the workplace blocked. But voting or having a majority should never prevent people to struggle for emancipation.
vidarh 5y ago
Most places have laws requiring recognition of unions past certain sizes or following votes, even if they don't require membership of the union. The main distinction is not whether membership of a union is required - closed shops is illegal both in the US (since the Taft-Hartley Act 1947) and in all countries bound by the European Court of Human Rights (which is basically every country eligible for Council of Europe membership apart from Belarus, Kazakhstan and the Vatican) - but whether or not non-members are required to pay dues towards a recognised union.

anigbrowl 5y ago

Well so it is said, but I'm not sure this is backed up by reality. I'm proposing a change in the law here, and that could include requiring that if workers choose to delegate negotiation to a union representative companies are required to honor that request. The existing approach is clearly not working that well (as evidenced by plummeting union membership over the years, and the use of tactics by employers to influence union elections) so perhaps it's time to try a different approach.

bawolff 5y ago
> I'm proposing a change in the law here, and that could include requiring that if workers choose to delegate negotiation to a union representative companies are required to honor that request. What does that mean? Are you proposing that employers cannot say no to any proposal put forth by the union representative? If yes, that seems rediculously over powered on the union side. If no, i don't see how it helps the situation.
- southerntofu 5y ago
  Well if the union is self-organized, that's a pretty reasonable request. Who better than the workers themselves to decide how to operate?! The boss needs us, but we don't need a boss. History has shown it time and time again.
  - anigbrowl 5y ago
    This isn't what I'm saying though. I'm saying employers should have to negotiate with workers' representatives in good faith. I think this union trope of 'the boss needs us, we don't need a boss' is silly and childish. Not that people need to be bossed around, but that people obviously need employers in the sense that they provide capital and organization to some extent (I'll revisit this below). Otherwise you could just get a bunch of workers together in an empty lot and bang, functioning business. A business starts because someone has an idea and invests or obtains (by loan or outside investor) some capital. If the capital is provided by an investor, they're taking some risk that the business might fail and lose money. In many contexts this can lead to fair outcomes, eg I enjoy and am good at making lemonade, you have $100 doing nothing so we team up and I spend the $100 on a table, sign, glassware, and some ingredients to run a lemonade stand. We take in a few hundred $ and split the money evenly, everyone wins. Now I can either buy out the table, sign, glassware (ie return your original investment and own the lemonade stand outright), or you might decide to put in more money and make a bigger stand, or open a second one a few blocks away. I always have the buyout option because now that I have some money, I could just go and buy new materials if you didn't want to do that. You'd then be left with the original lemonade stand, but you are no good at or don't like making and selling lemonade so it's probably a better deal to sell them to me. If we open a new lemonade stand elsewhere, we're gonna need someone to run it. At this point I need to hire workers. They're going to be doing the same work of selling the lemonade as I am, but maybe the production of the lemonade will be centralized in a kitchen. Even if not, I still have to train them in everything about running the lemonade stand, and now that I'm an employer, I have some administration work to do for each employee. So, how much should I pay the lemonade stand worker, given the work that I do on top of theirs? What I'm getting at here is that investors bosses don't just bully and exploit employees, although many definitely do. Investors provide capital, and this is valuable, ie deserving of some reward in return for their risk. I think investment turns into 'capitalism' when the investors get swelled heads and start to argue that their contribution is the only one that matters and therefore they should get all the profits of investing in a business. Bosses can often be the people who come up with an idea and do the work of getting it off the ground (perhaps failing repeatedly), plus they provide organization and take care of administration. Again, if they decide that this is the only part of the business that matters it's easy for them to become greedy and that's bad. Workers provide labor to perform a job that's already defined but which is too much for one person to start, and many workers then have ideas for how to improve or expand the business. If workers get too carried away with their own greatness, they begin thinking they brought the business into existence, which they usually didn't. What I'm getting at here is that you can have healthy relationships where different parties in a business recognize each others' valuable contributions, and then share out profits accordingly. The most ideal form of this is a co-op or worker-owned business, where every new worker has the opportunity to buy into the coop and can then take on some of the administration and management overhead as they see fit, ie every worker is also a shareholder and/or a manager. I'm big on coops, and to my mind the larger a business is the more likely it can be run on a cooperative basis. But It hink this requires a different model of business as a system with inputs and growth patterns that goes through a few different phase transitions, as opposed to the simplistic model of workers v bosses. It's not that bosses don't exist and create adversarial situations with the workforce, that absolutely happens. I'm arguing it's just one possible direction business can go in, and if we want businesses to go in different and more equitable/sustainable directions, we need to look past the dysfunctional model as if it were the only game in town.
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  No of course not. I'm saying employers have to negotiate with the union delegate chosen by the workers. If you hire me and we later have an employment dispute, I generally have the right to be represented by an attorney. I'm just saying that people should be able to delegate their bargaining rights and not be fired for doing so.
  - bawolff 5y ago
    And if the employer and the employee's representative can't come to an agreement? Employee wants a million dollars, employer wants to pay minimum wage - what happens next? In a normal situation if both sides can't come to an agreement both sides part ways. What does a negotiation where one side can't be fired (and hence the other side cannot walk away) look like?
    - anigbrowl 5y ago
      What does a negotiation where one side can't be fired (and hence the other side cannot walk away) look like? It looks irrelevant, because what I proposed was that people couldn't be fired just for joining a union/delegating their bargaining rights, which is something people were saying would pre-empt even the possibility of negotiation or collective bargaining. Most negotiations are going to employ more reasonable positions on both sides (eg likely within one or two standard deviations from median wages) because good faith negotiations involve a degree of mutuality. If one side is being unreasonable then external mediation or a grievance process might arise. I am not claiming that my proposal is the perfect solution for all situations and has no failure points. I don't really appreciate your use of maximal edge cases to break it like it was a theorem assertion. That just seems like you're more interested in negating the idea than exploring it.
      - bawolff 5y ago
        > I am not claiming that my proposal is the perfect solution for all situations and has no failure points. I don't really appreciate your use of maximal edge cases to break it like it was a theorem assertion. That just seems like you're more interested in negating the idea than exploring it. I'm not saying it fails in edge cases, i'm saying it fails in every case. There's two possibilities: A) the employer acts in good faith. In which case, why would you need this? Firing someone for unionizing is the ultimate example of acting in bad faith, so if they are acting in good faith, no problem to solve. B) the employer acts in bad faith. We're assuming the employer wants to fire the employee - why would they be reasonable? The rational thing to do would be to be unreasonable until the employee walks away. I'm not saying that a solution has to fix everything, but it should fix something in some reasonable scenario where parties are behaving towards their interests. Otherwise we might as well simplify it to: instead of unions, employers should just stop exploiting their employees.
krageon 5y ago
You say you are not sure it is backed up by reality, but you're not giving any new evidence to support your claim. Meanwhile the history of the US is absolutely chock-full of examples of this type of employee abuse, especially during the original dawn of unions (where "war" would honestly be a better word than abuse).
- anigbrowl 5y ago
  I am not the one making a claim, and others have pointed out that the arrangement I propose actually obtains in many other countries. I'm proposing a change to the law and you're arguing it won't work even though I'm including legal language to forbid the specific abuse you describe.
washadjeffmad 5y ago
Yes, the barrier to unionizing is too high. Laws are in the works to lower the threshold prior to vote because the current situation practically requires people to organize before they officially organize, which is dangerous at places like Amazon where involuntary layoffs and turnover are inscrutable (eg- at will / right to work states) and high. Weakening collective bargaining isn't a solution to low unionization.

throwawaysea 5y ago

Maybe that is a fair outcome. In sectors that are more labor constrained the unions would still have power to negotiate and it wouldn’t be unilateral. And the formation of multiple unions and competition between multiple unions and individuals may be healthy.

southerntofu 5y ago
> And the formation of multiple unions and competition between multiple unions and individuals may be healthy. It depends. When a union renounces its revolutionary ideals and becomes a pawn of the bosses, then it's really counter-productive. For example in France, the CFDT and CGT used to be pretty radical, but nowadays despite some local section still practicing sabotage, nation-wide these two unions are pretty reactionary and will want to peacefully talk to the boss about getting slightly better improvements, instead of organizing workers with the explicit goal of the social revolution and self-organization of all aspects of life. How could an anarchist union (see Émile Pouget for example, about the history of the CGT TV won't tell you about) become a counter-revolutionary force whose security service is well-known (and documented) to attack undocumented folks and other protesters in demonstrations, siding with the cops against the people?! Back to the point, yes i believe diversity is useful for unions, though not competition. If only, because when your union turns bad you're free to make your own.

s1artibartfast 5y ago

This is essentially the model in many parts of the world. I wouldn't be so quick to dismiss it.

makeitdouble 5y ago
In my understanding, countries with stronger labor laws mandate an employee representation of some sort past a minimum size (I think it's 50 employees in France for instance) These are not unions per se, but partly cover the same role (discuss and negotiate on behalf of individual employees) and there is no opting out of that representation.
- krageon 5y ago
  Those are definitely not unions. They're employees, the groups are small and they're usually managed using a combination of bribes and threats (yes, even though that is illegal). A union does not have these problems because they are so large they cannot effectively be managed in such a detailed way. That leads to a positive incentive to simply negotiate.

southerntofu 5y ago

I'm pretty sure this is what bosses and major corporate unions will tell you, but i don't think it's so simple... at least as long as you have provisions that make it illegal for a boss to fire someone on the basis of their union activities as we do here in France (although they still do, and it takes years to get compensation through special tribunals). First, because the boss has no idea whether you're gonna join an union before you're actually employed, unless you tell them to their face. Second, because having a single major union goes against workers best interests by adding gatekeepers (the union leaders) who have interests in keeping the status quo and putting away proposals deemed too radical. Second, because it's a useful construct to demonize unions. As you can see here on HN, lots of people in the US (i don't think this is true elsewhere) have examples of stupid union-mandated rules that apply to everybody. As long as the boss makes the rules, we're all happy to be against the boss for their soulless management. But when stupid rules are proposed and enforced by the single union, it's very convenient to keep everyone divided and not looking at who's profiting from the situation. All in all, the single union appears to be a manipulation by the bosses themselves, or by the more authoritarian stalinist components of the workforce, and i don't see any benefits to it. Maybe i'm being a bit conspirational about it, but it sounds really at odds with the history of unionism all across the planet, for example the IWW in the USA which was the biggest union for i reckon a few decades, promoting sabotage and expropriation of the bosses alongside workers self-organization. Voting for some stuff can be useful, though. In France it's common for people as individuals to go on a strike, but when it's part of a more global social movement, "joining the general strike" is usually put to a vote, as a measurement of the workers agreeing that everything needs to change and production should be entirely halted, and the workplace blocked. But voting or having a majority should never prevent people to struggle for emancipation.

vidarh 5y ago

Most places have laws requiring recognition of unions past certain sizes or following votes, even if they don't require membership of the union. The main distinction is not whether membership of a union is required - closed shops is illegal both in the US (since the Taft-Hartley Act 1947) and in all countries bound by the European Court of Human Rights (which is basically every country eligible for Council of Europe membership apart from Belarus, Kazakhstan and the Vatican) - but whether or not non-members are required to pay dues towards a recognised union.