7 ms·

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 cl

• 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
    • ashtonkem 5y ago
      Perhaps that’s less about unions becoming less good, and more about the collapse of unionization rates? Union membership is at an all time low, Occam’s razor says that the fact that most people aren’t in a union is the most likely explanation for why unions haven’t don’t people anything good recently.
      • garciasn 5y ago
        Possibly, but since we’re hypothesizing: it could potentially be that unions are better suited for aiding those working in some professions and not others. Perhaps highly educated knowledge workers can better manage salary/benefits and quality of work life better than a slate of hired guns? Maybe because the skill sets and work output is generally more unique, knowledge workers can more easily move jobs than those who work in traditional union shops?
        • ashtonkem 5y ago
          > it could potentially be that unions are better suited for aiding those working in some professions and not others. Possible, but unionization rates are also down in industries that used to be unionized, such as manufacturing. This strongly implies that the issue is less “unions are bad” and more “unions were good, so bosses fought to get rid of them”. Companies wouldn’t need to hire anti-union firms if unions weren’t at least attractive to laborers, right? After all, it’s not like life in those sectors has gotten so comfortable that laborers don’t think they need unions anymore. > Perhaps highly educated knowledge workers can better manage salary/benefits and quality of work life better than a slate of hired guns? Huh? I think you’re calling union reps “hired guns”, which is deeply ironic given the history of bosses hiring actual men with actual guns to actually shoot labor activists. > Maybe because the skill sets and work output is generally more unique, knowledge workers can more easily move jobs than those who work in traditional union shops? I mean, unequal professions do unionize all the time. Take a look at professional sports. Unions are extremely useful in negotiating between labor and capital about things other than just pay. Length of contracts, benefits, safety regulations, etc. Regardless, it’s pretty silly to argue that unions are useless because “they’ve had no impact” for this crowd when this crowd has never really had the opportunity to join a union. Hell, even quitting software and finding a union shop to join would actually be very hard in any field, given the low rates of unionization in this country.
  • rdtwo 5y ago
    The American union is pretty bad it seems to represent the lobby arm and is totally out of touch with employee needs. It’s not a local org of your peers it feels like just another rent seeking corporate entity.
    • ashtonkem 5y ago
      [Citation Needed]
      • rdtwo 5y ago
        Personal experience. All our local unions got sold out by union headquarters when it came time for contract negotiations. They did things like surprise votes over holiday weekend and negotiating contracts without involvement from local reps
        • ashtonkem 5y ago
          How many unions are we talking about here? One, a dozen, a hundred? Is it enough to draw a reasonable pattern from, or are we in “I had a bad experience with a union therefore all unions are bad” territory?
          • rdtwo 5y ago
            Teachers union got sabotaged, machinist union got sabotaged, engineers union same deal. Different kinds of tricks but it seems pretty consistent story. Big Union hq negotiates a contract that’s not great for local members but skirts by at 51% vote under suspicion conditions. I’m not anti union. I mean union do provide slightly better pay conditions for members but they seem to be super corrupt as well. They are like a mafia, they provide services for members and Mafia members do slightly better but it no co-op.
            • ashtonkem 5y ago
              So two private sector unions and a public union. Not exactly a strong base to build a trend from.
• trangus_1985 5y ago
  > the good they did for American workers during their heyday. It's not their heyday anymore, though. We need new structures and leadership for labor rights to prevent the (admittantly rare) abuses like this.
• lsiebert 5y ago
  I've been listening to the Oral History of the Kickstarter Union and I don't believe the charge of rent seeking or the implication of close ties to organized crime is accurate. Rent seeking usually refers to creating new income streams for yourself without providing any benefit by acting as a middle person, and unions do provide benefits to workers, in the form of collective negotiation for individual benefits, but also a seat at the table when it comes to how the business is run. I also get the sense that the organized crime connections of unions are overblown. Like that settlement was I believe a way to end the consent decree that's been in existence since 1989. And the arrest of the Lucchese crime family in 2017 didn't seem to include any members of liuna local 66. I believe the mob tax is actually a reference to crimes that happened back in the late 90s involving the Scalamandres brothers. If they were doing anything with the union it was exploiting it, and blaming the victim doesn't seem fair. Here are my references for the above https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/manhattan-us-attorney-announces-proposed-settlement-agreement-landmark-civil-rico https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/manhattan-us-attorney-a... https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/alleged-street-boss-and-underboss-la-cosa-nostra-family-charged-murder-and-racketering https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/alleged-street-boss-and... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/15/nyregion/brothers-plead-guilty-in-mob-payoffs-for-construction-businesses.html https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/15/nyregion/brothers-plead-g... https://engelberg-center-live.simplecast.com/episodes https://engelberg-center-live.simplecast.com/episodes
• tylerhou 5y ago
  Unions in the US (with some small exceptions) have to negotiate better working conditions which benefit all workers, regardless of whether they are a part of the union or not [1]. If there was no mandatory fee, then unions would likely suffer from the free rider problem and be suboptimally funded. Of course, this doesn't mean that all unions' fees are justifiable for the value they produce, nor does it mean that all unions which impose mandatory fees improve working conditions for all workers. But I think it's hyperbole to call mandatory fees "rent-seeking" when there might be a perfectly rational explanation in some instances. [1] https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/employees/right-to-fair-representation#:~:text=You%20have%20a%20right%20to,good%20faith%2C%20and%20without%20discrimination https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/em....
  • londgine 5y ago
    rather than a mandatory fee, it seems like a better solution would be to allow unions to not represent members who don't want to be represented
  • tikhonj 5y ago
    Mandatory fees are rent-seeking either way, it's just possible that imposing the rent is justified. Off-hand, I'm not convinced. I'm leaning more and more against systems designed to prevent free riders—our culture is so primed to value "fairness" that we're willing to impose significant net harm to achieve it. I usually think about this in terms of public policy (free public transport, subsidizing the unemployed/homeless/etc...) but I think it applies here too. I would not be surprised if a union that had to justify its dues to workers would be more effective for workers than one with mandatory dues because there would be more direct pressure for the union to be transparent and effective. I am not entirely confident in this though, in large part because I don't understand the politics around unions in practice! Mandatory dues do seem like a viable point of leverage against union-busting attempts from management, which could be a more important effect.
    • tylerhou 5y ago
      You are not using rent in the conventional, economic sense. Rent is specifically a payment made to an manufacturer of goods or services that is higher than what is necessary for that manufacturer to bring those goods into existence; (i.e. higher than the profit margin that would have incentivized that manufacturer to produce the good in the first place). For a trivial example, if a union makes no profit and its actions provide more utility to its employees than their mandatory payments, then it is not receiving any economic rent. > I'm leaning more and more against systems designed to prevent free riders—our culture is so primed to value "fairness" that we're willing to impose significant net harm to achieve it. I'm not sure if you fully understand what free rider problems are. The whole point of preventing free riders is that by imposing a tax or mandatory payment, you increase net utility. If imposing a tax truly imposed significant net harm, then the problem wouldn't be a free rider problem by definition! Free rider problems are really coordination problems. Essentially, there are situations where if everyone cooperated, then everyone would be happier. But there is no incentive for any one person to cooperate because they can choose to defect, yet still receive the benefits of cooperation. > free public transport, subsidizing the unemployed/homeless/etc... First of all, these are not solutions to free rider problems. Second of all, it is not clear that they impose significant net harm. For example, you might claim that welfare reduces the incentive to work and or educate themselves. This is the typical conservative market-fundamentalist argument. But practically speaking, humans need to take care of basic needs before they can start working or learn. The positive effect of nutrition, taking care of basic needs, etc. might overwhelm the negative effects from reduced incentive to work. So you need a lot of sophisticated analysis on real data before you can claim that these policies actually impose net harm.