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Not starting out adversarial with management is a big part of it. Unions in the US feel like they need to have strict rules because otherwise management will ta

Not starting out adversarial with management is a big part of it. Unions in the US feel like they need to have strict rules because otherwise management will take advantage. Management in the US is often very strongly anti-union. This is a situation where social conventions and government regulation could yield better outcomes than an adversarial system. But Americans love adversarial systems.

Kinrany 5y ago
Why is being adversarial a problem?
- spoonjim 5y ago
  Adversarial expectations shift games to zero sum that don't have to be.
- kelnos 5y ago
  Because going into a negotiation with a belief that both parties are expected to be reasonable and negotiate in good faith tends to give you better outcomes.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    Whenever I buy nearly anything negotiated (car, house, boat, large software license, other business deal), I simultaneously expect both parties to be reasonable and negotiate in good faith, yet all of those single-trial negotiations are entirely adversarial. It seems perfectly reasonable and fairly efficient to me.
    - dhosek 5y ago
      I've not done a lot of negotiated purchases other than cars, and car salesmen are notorious for negotiating out of bad faith.
    - kennywinker 5y ago
      Think prisoners dilemma. A car /house/boat purchase is basically a one-off interaction - you’re not likely to be dealing with the same salesperson in 5-15 years when you buy your next car - so the strategy both parties should use is different from the strategy when it’s going to be frequent repeated interactions as in a workplace.
      - AussieWog93 5y ago
        In the case of the car, it's definitely not a one-off purchase. People will go back to the dealer to get the vehicle serviced, and from what I understand this can (mainly for new cars) have a greater total lifetime value than the cost of the vehicle itself. Even if this weren't the case, if you're ripped off by a used car salesman you will tell every single person you know that they're a snake. Even if you don't do that, there are arbitration courts you can take them to to both waste their time and force a refund (VCAT where I am, I'm sure there's something similar overseas). I really don't think it's in a used car salesman's best interests to lie and swindle.
        kennywinker 5y ago
        You're mixing situations. I was imagining a NEW car sale, not used cars. In that case the product itself isn't in control of the salesperson, so there's no room for swindles there - but you have an adversarial relationship in terms of price, features / upsells, etc. That said, you're hardly going to blame the dealership if you get talked or dark-patterned into an upgrade you don't need or even regret. "Caveat emptor" and all that. We're so used to adversarial situations like that we blame ourselves more often than not. A collaborative approach is a lot more like when you ask you're knowledgeable friend "what kind of bike should I buy?" and they ask you about your needs, goals, and budget then guide you towards specific options. They're helping you make a purchase, without pressuring you into something that's not useful to you.
        AussieWog93 5y ago
        >adversarial relationship in terms of price, features / upsells, etc. I get what you mean now. As someone who "does sales" a fair amount in my work (owner of a second-hand video games business) the adversarial stuff is actually really frustrating. I always try to give the customers the same advice I'd give a friend or family, even "downselling" them from a $100 purchase to a $25 repair if that would be more suitable, yet still so many people are adversarial and distrustful. From my experience, this distrust hurts (non-expert) consumers even more than it hurts the businesses. Ideally, you'd have an honest salesman pointing out the pros and cons of all the different products so that the consumer can make an informed choice. Maybe that product that costs $50 will last for 20 years of continuous use, whereas the $30 version will break after 18 months. Instead, because salesmen can't be trusted, they rely on their own instincts and buy products whose prices are completely uncorrelated with quality.
    - foepys 5y ago
      The difference is that you buy or don't buy the car if negotiations fail. At work you have or done have a job or even revenue if the only thing employer and employees are doing is trying to throw wrenches into the machinery to get the upper hand.
    - majormajor 5y ago
      I assume car sellers - especially for used cars - are negotiating in bad faith. It definitely seems to make the process less efficient. Standard advice is to get a car inspected by your own mechanic before purchasing. Dealers disclosing the results of an inspection and being trustworthy would be a more efficient process - it would avoid redundant inspections by multiple prospective buyers, and it would avoid people wasting their time on cars in condition that they didn't want to deal with, and it would avoid people who don't know how to play the game getting ripped off.
    - louisswiss 5y ago
      If you're buying a large software license today — and I bet this holds true for at least some houses, cars, other "high-pressure sales situations" too — the vendor definitely won't think of the negotiation as adversarial. In an unending game of the prisoner's dilemma, either you all win or you all lose.
      - sokoloff 5y ago
        How is a house purchase not adversarial? For every extra $1K the buyer does or doesn’t pay, $950-ish goes to or comes out of the seller’s pocket.
        xyzelement 5y ago
        I wouldn't use the term adversarial for this. Ideally in a house transaction, the main thing is that both parties want the deal to happen - the seller wants the money and the buyer wants the house. They very much have the same goal of getting the deal executed. Now obviously all other things being equal, I'd rather pay less money (or charge more money) But in most cases, neither the seller nor the buyer operating in good faith will really try to squeeze the other because losing a multi-hundred-thousand (or even million+) deal by being too anal about $1000 is in neither one's interest. If a seller got very "adversarial" most buyers would say "fuck you, I'll keep looking."
- dvtrn 5y ago
  If you're a worker sympathetic to the organizing effort, it's probably not. Depends on your presumed union leaders. If you're in management, being 'the adversary' probably means being on the back foot in terms of negotiating and probably compliance with local labor laws. An unenviable place to be (said with a wee bit of sarcasm).
- jdavis703 5y ago
  I’ve heard union leaders say getting workers to “hate the boss” is an important part of organizing. Entering in to negotiations where the goal is to punish the boss as opposed to getting the best deal for the workers is toxic.
  - fennecfoxen 5y ago
    Union leaders tend to be rewarded for doing the best thing for the union, which is not always the best thing for the workers. The principal-agent problem is hard to beat.
    - zdragnar 5y ago
      The quickest way to beat it is to not allow closed shops. Give employees the freedom to join a union of their choosing, independent of their current employer, and you'll fix a lot of (doubtfully all) of America's problems with unions.
      - lovich 5y ago
        Are we going to ban exclusivity agreements for all organizations or just for labor unions? The business doesn’t have to agree to a closed shop
        zdragnar 5y ago
        To clarify a technicality, closed shops are illegal (hiring o ly those already in the union), and union shops (where you must join upon hiring) are legal. It isn't businesses that want it, but unions demand it as a power move- power against the workers. By being forced into a particular union, workers lose their recourse against unions that behave badly. For one thing, it undermines their ability to screw over new hires at the benefit of those with seniority, and allows them more wiggle room in wasting the money they collect in dues on things like retreats to remote islands. There are a few instances of places throwing off bad unions, but it is a long process, unions will fight back in courts, and you have to be prepared for retribution from your coworkers who disagree. Having union membership in any way tied to your employer is nothing but a way to abuse you, the worker.
- newsclues 5y ago
  It gets in the way of cooperation.
- topkai22 5y ago
  You can end up with insane rules that ultimately benefit no one. An old boss of mine told me about a time he was working for a big auto manufacturer. They were rolling an update to a major system. It looked like everything went well, so people started to go home. Pretty soon though, the team started to see issues with the update, up to and including a major LoB system going down. They immediately rolled back the update but found they had a problem- they needed some servers restarted to pick up the update, and the sole person who by union rules could restart the server had left for the day and wasn't picking up the phone. Now there were people who technically had permissions to restart the server, but they couldn't cross the union rules. They spent over an hour (with the major LoB, business critical system down) trying to get in touch with the people who were allowed to restart the server until they finally convinced the physically datacenter ops people (who were still on duty) go physically unplug and replug the servers in question. He couldn't disclose the total cost of the outage, but I was lead to believe it was in the millions of dollars. A functioning owner/management/worker relationship might fight over how the earnings of a company might be split, and even how or what to invest in, but they should all be working to making a company successful as a whole. An adversarial relationship prevents the sort of cooperation and good-faith assumptions that allow the different parties to collaborate and work to everyone's benefit. That being said, that non-adversarial relationship is a two way street, and ownership+management need to be participating in good-faith as well.
  - dls2016 5y ago
    Sounds like management dropped the ball of having the appropriate number of trained people in that position.
    - jhelphenstine 5y ago
      Alternately: sounds like the point about adversarial relations stands; a more collaborative culture prioritizing the success of the business (the collective interest) might have yielded a less expensive reboot.
      - lovich 5y ago
- lugged 5y ago
  Because it creates a false dichotomy in people's minds. It pushes everyone into a zero sum mode. They have to win at the opponent's expense. Instead, both parties should be looking for win win solutions to all the problems they face.
- s1artibartfast 5y ago
  In adversarial systems, the successes of the other party can be seen as a relative loss, even if everyone benefits. At a friends workplace, the union recently fought management and prevented a prevent work from home policy from being implemented. This was something that both the workers wanted and management wanted, but the union saw it as leverage to push for other demands.
aaomidi 5y ago
Wow this is a fantastic point. Unions in the US are always on the defensive.
mike_d 5y ago
People get really confused when I say I am pro-union, but anti-american-union. Workers deserve representation and protections. But American unions are still closely tied to organized crime and are effectively a form of rent-seeking (you must pay us a percentage of your earnings or you can't work here). As recently as 2017 the FBI arrested members of the Lucchese crime family and members of the LIUNA Local 66 for applying a "mob tax" to new construction projects. SDNY settled RICO charges against the Teamsters in 2015.
- nicoffeine 5y ago
  You know who else is tied to organized crime? Major financial institutions.[1] Corruption happens everywhere, including every major corporation and every government. Singling out unions for the same problems is a smearing tactic, not a moral stance. [1] https://apnews.com/article/paul-manafort-money-laundering-archive-7a2579c1eac8a1300de258f25504e8e9 https://apnews.com/article/paul-manafort-money-laundering-ar...
  - Synaesthesia 5y ago
    Corporate crime/ Blue collar crime gets ignored a lot
- ashtonkem 5y ago
  American unions are far from perfect, but I feel like you’re drastically understating the good they did for American workers during their heyday.
  - garciasn 5y ago
    I think everyone understands the historical good unions did for the average worker. But, particularly for workers who most often frequent sites like HN, unions have not had much of a positive impact, contemporarily.
    - lsiebert 5y ago
      Yeah but only one tech company has a union, right? And the workers there seem to think it's valuable. Here's the oral history I've been listening to. https://engelberg-center-live.simplecast.com/episodes https://engelberg-center-live.simplecast.com/episodes
AndrewKemendo 5y ago
But Americans love adversarial systems This is an underrated point actually. I've thought about this for a while and there's a case to be made both for and against some of the adversarial and arguably antisocial aspects of American ethos.

Kinrany 5y ago

Why is being adversarial a problem?

spoonjim 5y ago
Adversarial expectations shift games to zero sum that don't have to be.
kelnos 5y ago
Because going into a negotiation with a belief that both parties are expected to be reasonable and negotiate in good faith tends to give you better outcomes.
- sokoloff 5y ago
  Whenever I buy nearly anything negotiated (car, house, boat, large software license, other business deal), I simultaneously expect both parties to be reasonable and negotiate in good faith, yet all of those single-trial negotiations are entirely adversarial. It seems perfectly reasonable and fairly efficient to me.
  - dhosek 5y ago
    I've not done a lot of negotiated purchases other than cars, and car salesmen are notorious for negotiating out of bad faith.
  - kennywinker 5y ago
    Think prisoners dilemma. A car /house/boat purchase is basically a one-off interaction - you’re not likely to be dealing with the same salesperson in 5-15 years when you buy your next car - so the strategy both parties should use is different from the strategy when it’s going to be frequent repeated interactions as in a workplace.
    - AussieWog93 5y ago
      In the case of the car, it's definitely not a one-off purchase. People will go back to the dealer to get the vehicle serviced, and from what I understand this can (mainly for new cars) have a greater total lifetime value than the cost of the vehicle itself. Even if this weren't the case, if you're ripped off by a used car salesman you will tell every single person you know that they're a snake. Even if you don't do that, there are arbitration courts you can take them to to both waste their time and force a refund (VCAT where I am, I'm sure there's something similar overseas). I really don't think it's in a used car salesman's best interests to lie and swindle.
      - kennywinker 5y ago
        You're mixing situations. I was imagining a NEW car sale, not used cars. In that case the product itself isn't in control of the salesperson, so there's no room for swindles there - but you have an adversarial relationship in terms of price, features / upsells, etc. That said, you're hardly going to blame the dealership if you get talked or dark-patterned into an upgrade you don't need or even regret. "Caveat emptor" and all that. We're so used to adversarial situations like that we blame ourselves more often than not. A collaborative approach is a lot more like when you ask you're knowledgeable friend "what kind of bike should I buy?" and they ask you about your needs, goals, and budget then guide you towards specific options. They're helping you make a purchase, without pressuring you into something that's not useful to you.
        AussieWog93 5y ago
        >adversarial relationship in terms of price, features / upsells, etc. I get what you mean now. As someone who "does sales" a fair amount in my work (owner of a second-hand video games business) the adversarial stuff is actually really frustrating. I always try to give the customers the same advice I'd give a friend or family, even "downselling" them from a $100 purchase to a $25 repair if that would be more suitable, yet still so many people are adversarial and distrustful. From my experience, this distrust hurts (non-expert) consumers even more than it hurts the businesses. Ideally, you'd have an honest salesman pointing out the pros and cons of all the different products so that the consumer can make an informed choice. Maybe that product that costs $50 will last for 20 years of continuous use, whereas the $30 version will break after 18 months. Instead, because salesmen can't be trusted, they rely on their own instincts and buy products whose prices are completely uncorrelated with quality.
  - foepys 5y ago
    The difference is that you buy or don't buy the car if negotiations fail. At work you have or done have a job or even revenue if the only thing employer and employees are doing is trying to throw wrenches into the machinery to get the upper hand.
  - majormajor 5y ago
    I assume car sellers - especially for used cars - are negotiating in bad faith. It definitely seems to make the process less efficient. Standard advice is to get a car inspected by your own mechanic before purchasing. Dealers disclosing the results of an inspection and being trustworthy would be a more efficient process - it would avoid redundant inspections by multiple prospective buyers, and it would avoid people wasting their time on cars in condition that they didn't want to deal with, and it would avoid people who don't know how to play the game getting ripped off.
  - louisswiss 5y ago
    If you're buying a large software license today — and I bet this holds true for at least some houses, cars, other "high-pressure sales situations" too — the vendor definitely won't think of the negotiation as adversarial. In an unending game of the prisoner's dilemma, either you all win or you all lose.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      How is a house purchase not adversarial? For every extra $1K the buyer does or doesn’t pay, $950-ish goes to or comes out of the seller’s pocket.
      - xyzelement 5y ago
        I wouldn't use the term adversarial for this. Ideally in a house transaction, the main thing is that both parties want the deal to happen - the seller wants the money and the buyer wants the house. They very much have the same goal of getting the deal executed. Now obviously all other things being equal, I'd rather pay less money (or charge more money) But in most cases, neither the seller nor the buyer operating in good faith will really try to squeeze the other because losing a multi-hundred-thousand (or even million+) deal by being too anal about $1000 is in neither one's interest. If a seller got very "adversarial" most buyers would say "fuck you, I'll keep looking."
dvtrn 5y ago
If you're a worker sympathetic to the organizing effort, it's probably not. Depends on your presumed union leaders. If you're in management, being 'the adversary' probably means being on the back foot in terms of negotiating and probably compliance with local labor laws. An unenviable place to be (said with a wee bit of sarcasm).
jdavis703 5y ago
I’ve heard union leaders say getting workers to “hate the boss” is an important part of organizing. Entering in to negotiations where the goal is to punish the boss as opposed to getting the best deal for the workers is toxic.
- fennecfoxen 5y ago
  Union leaders tend to be rewarded for doing the best thing for the union, which is not always the best thing for the workers. The principal-agent problem is hard to beat.
  - zdragnar 5y ago
    The quickest way to beat it is to not allow closed shops. Give employees the freedom to join a union of their choosing, independent of their current employer, and you'll fix a lot of (doubtfully all) of America's problems with unions.
    - lovich 5y ago
      Are we going to ban exclusivity agreements for all organizations or just for labor unions? The business doesn’t have to agree to a closed shop
      - zdragnar 5y ago
        To clarify a technicality, closed shops are illegal (hiring o ly those already in the union), and union shops (where you must join upon hiring) are legal. It isn't businesses that want it, but unions demand it as a power move- power against the workers. By being forced into a particular union, workers lose their recourse against unions that behave badly. For one thing, it undermines their ability to screw over new hires at the benefit of those with seniority, and allows them more wiggle room in wasting the money they collect in dues on things like retreats to remote islands. There are a few instances of places throwing off bad unions, but it is a long process, unions will fight back in courts, and you have to be prepared for retribution from your coworkers who disagree. Having union membership in any way tied to your employer is nothing but a way to abuse you, the worker.
newsclues 5y ago
It gets in the way of cooperation.
topkai22 5y ago
You can end up with insane rules that ultimately benefit no one. An old boss of mine told me about a time he was working for a big auto manufacturer. They were rolling an update to a major system. It looked like everything went well, so people started to go home. Pretty soon though, the team started to see issues with the update, up to and including a major LoB system going down. They immediately rolled back the update but found they had a problem- they needed some servers restarted to pick up the update, and the sole person who by union rules could restart the server had left for the day and wasn't picking up the phone. Now there were people who technically had permissions to restart the server, but they couldn't cross the union rules. They spent over an hour (with the major LoB, business critical system down) trying to get in touch with the people who were allowed to restart the server until they finally convinced the physically datacenter ops people (who were still on duty) go physically unplug and replug the servers in question. He couldn't disclose the total cost of the outage, but I was lead to believe it was in the millions of dollars. A functioning owner/management/worker relationship might fight over how the earnings of a company might be split, and even how or what to invest in, but they should all be working to making a company successful as a whole. An adversarial relationship prevents the sort of cooperation and good-faith assumptions that allow the different parties to collaborate and work to everyone's benefit. That being said, that non-adversarial relationship is a two way street, and ownership+management need to be participating in good-faith as well.
- dls2016 5y ago
  Sounds like management dropped the ball of having the appropriate number of trained people in that position.
  - jhelphenstine 5y ago
    Alternately: sounds like the point about adversarial relations stands; a more collaborative culture prioritizing the success of the business (the collective interest) might have yielded a less expensive reboot.
    - lovich 5y ago
lugged 5y ago
Because it creates a false dichotomy in people's minds. It pushes everyone into a zero sum mode. They have to win at the opponent's expense. Instead, both parties should be looking for win win solutions to all the problems they face.
s1artibartfast 5y ago
In adversarial systems, the successes of the other party can be seen as a relative loss, even if everyone benefits. At a friends workplace, the union recently fought management and prevented a prevent work from home policy from being implemented. This was something that both the workers wanted and management wanted, but the union saw it as leverage to push for other demands.

aaomidi 5y ago

Wow this is a fantastic point. Unions in the US are always on the defensive.

mike_d 5y ago

People get really confused when I say I am pro-union, but anti-american-union. Workers deserve representation and protections. But American unions are still closely tied to organized crime and are effectively a form of rent-seeking (you must pay us a percentage of your earnings or you can't work here). As recently as 2017 the FBI arrested members of the Lucchese crime family and members of the LIUNA Local 66 for applying a "mob tax" to new construction projects. SDNY settled RICO charges against the Teamsters in 2015.

nicoffeine 5y ago
You know who else is tied to organized crime? Major financial institutions.[1] Corruption happens everywhere, including every major corporation and every government. Singling out unions for the same problems is a smearing tactic, not a moral stance. [1] https://apnews.com/article/paul-manafort-money-laundering-archive-7a2579c1eac8a1300de258f25504e8e9 https://apnews.com/article/paul-manafort-money-laundering-ar...
- Synaesthesia 5y ago
  Corporate crime/ Blue collar crime gets ignored a lot
ashtonkem 5y ago
American unions are far from perfect, but I feel like you’re drastically understating the good they did for American workers during their heyday.
- garciasn 5y ago
  I think everyone understands the historical good unions did for the average worker. But, particularly for workers who most often frequent sites like HN, unions have not had much of a positive impact, contemporarily.
  - lsiebert 5y ago
    Yeah but only one tech company has a union, right? And the workers there seem to think it's valuable. Here's the oral history I've been listening to. https://engelberg-center-live.simplecast.com/episodes https://engelberg-center-live.simplecast.com/episodes

AndrewKemendo 5y ago

But Americans love adversarial systems This is an underrated point actually. I've thought about this for a while and there's a case to be made both for and against some of the adversarial and arguably antisocial aspects of American ethos.