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Honest question - don't you believe that Tesla Factories don't unionize because Tesla puts a significant amount of effort, manager training, and probably millio

Honest question - don't you believe that Tesla Factories don't unionize because Tesla puts a significant amount of effort, manager training, and probably millions of dollars of investment into preventing them from unionizing? And, if Tesla stopped that effort - wouldn't they naturally unionize fairly quickly?

bpodgursky 5y ago
Something like 13% of private-sector US workers are unionized... choosing to unionize is not some kind of default position. It's pretty rare. And not every employer is pushing hard to prevent it from happening. Most employees just aren't that unhappy and would prefer to work under their own contract w/o answer into another intermediary that gets a cut of their money.
- GavinMcG 5y ago
  Most employees aren't even aware of what a union is or does. When something isn't part of your experience, you don't even have a preference one way or another. Your comment is evidence: it sets up a false dichotomy. The whole point at a workplace that chooses to unionize is that they want to work under a different, better contract, and they're willing to invest in the organizing that it takes to get there.
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    Right... and the Tesla employees didn't. You seem really convinced that if Tesla forced and up/down vote on a union their employees would vote yes, and I just don't think that matches the reality of labor in the US. At the root of this thread is that someone implicitly suggested forcing workers to unionize (or be fired) as a solution to Tesla not being unionized, and I stand that that's a gross distortion of what it means to grant rights to labor.
    - GavinMcG 5y ago
      Not at all convinced. It takes a lot of work to organize a workplace, and a lot of people are skeptical of unions—for some good reasons, and some bad ones. I don't see anyone interpreting things as "forcing workers to unionize" except you. The argument you're making seems to be a strawman.
      - bpodgursky 5y ago
        > If this makes it cheap enough, Tesla will likely use union labor How else could this be accomplished?
        GavinMcG 5y ago
        They can invite workers to unionize and facilitate that with education, obviously. They could even share some of that $15,000 tax credit directly with workers! Or maybe I'm wrong, and Tesla is just going to have to reap what it sowed in violating long-established worker rights. That's another way a tax incentive could work: by translating into market rewards. That doesn't make it exclusive.
        bpodgursky 5y ago
        You can cut this however you want with pretty semantics, but your argument is predicated on not giving the workers the right to choose whether to unionize. If they choose no, Tesla has no option but to replace them. You want to "educate" workers in order to help them make the right choice... you are not coming at this from a position where you actually respect the rights of workers to make a choice.
        GavinMcG 5y ago
        Of course they have an option! They can follow the law, not fire their workers for making their own choices about (non)representation, and just not get the tax credit. Saying that Tesla would be forced to do anything here is absurd. I'm not the one making an "argument predicated on not giving the workers the right to choose."
  - ecpottinger 5y ago
    Sorry, I use to work for GM under a union. When I left and started working in non-union businesses I never once said "I wish we had a union here.". Unions have done a lot of good in the past, but for the last couple of decades they seem to be more organizations more interested in paying big paychecks to their own representatives.
    - runako 5y ago
      This is interesting. Do you do the same kind of job that you did when you were a union employee? My understanding of unions is employers hate them in part because they make labor more expensive, which would seem to be exactly why one would want to be represented by a union. Is that not correct?
      - rsj_hn 5y ago
        It depends on how much of that extra expense you can capture as your own pay and how much is dead weight costs (e.g. union overhead or additional costs imposed on employers), as well as how likely it is to mean you can't get a job in the first place. So it depends very much on things like overall economic growth, how the union cooperates with management, etc. In Europe, unions collaborate with management whereas US unions have historically been more adversarial. In the US, for example, managers can't be union members whereas in some places in Europe union reps have board seats and are partners with management in trying to get the company to grow.
        runako 5y ago
        Quick stats check via Google shows that in the US, union workers earn ~11% more than non-union workers. Which would seem enough to warrant a modest membership fee. Also aligns with the management rhetoric that union labor & benefits are expensive and reason enough to move entire factories to the South to escape collective bargaining. (It does not make sense that they would do this to save the cost of union management's paychecks, the numbers are not big enough.) What I was trying to understand from the OP was what's missing from the picture and whether perhaps her role was somehow an outlier.

bpodgursky 5y ago

Something like 13% of private-sector US workers are unionized... choosing to unionize is not some kind of default position. It's pretty rare. And not every employer is pushing hard to prevent it from happening. Most employees just aren't that unhappy and would prefer to work under their own contract w/o answer into another intermediary that gets a cut of their money.

GavinMcG 5y ago
Most employees aren't even aware of what a union is or does. When something isn't part of your experience, you don't even have a preference one way or another. Your comment is evidence: it sets up a false dichotomy. The whole point at a workplace that chooses to unionize is that they want to work under a different, better contract, and they're willing to invest in the organizing that it takes to get there.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  Right... and the Tesla employees didn't. You seem really convinced that if Tesla forced and up/down vote on a union their employees would vote yes, and I just don't think that matches the reality of labor in the US. At the root of this thread is that someone implicitly suggested forcing workers to unionize (or be fired) as a solution to Tesla not being unionized, and I stand that that's a gross distortion of what it means to grant rights to labor.
  - GavinMcG 5y ago
    Not at all convinced. It takes a lot of work to organize a workplace, and a lot of people are skeptical of unions—for some good reasons, and some bad ones. I don't see anyone interpreting things as "forcing workers to unionize" except you. The argument you're making seems to be a strawman.
    - bpodgursky 5y ago
      > If this makes it cheap enough, Tesla will likely use union labor How else could this be accomplished?
      - GavinMcG 5y ago
        They can invite workers to unionize and facilitate that with education, obviously. They could even share some of that $15,000 tax credit directly with workers! Or maybe I'm wrong, and Tesla is just going to have to reap what it sowed in violating long-established worker rights. That's another way a tax incentive could work: by translating into market rewards. That doesn't make it exclusive.
        bpodgursky 5y ago
        You can cut this however you want with pretty semantics, but your argument is predicated on not giving the workers the right to choose whether to unionize. If they choose no, Tesla has no option but to replace them. You want to "educate" workers in order to help them make the right choice... you are not coming at this from a position where you actually respect the rights of workers to make a choice.
        GavinMcG 5y ago
        Of course they have an option! They can follow the law, not fire their workers for making their own choices about (non)representation, and just not get the tax credit. Saying that Tesla would be forced to do anything here is absurd. I'm not the one making an "argument predicated on not giving the workers the right to choose."
- ecpottinger 5y ago
  Sorry, I use to work for GM under a union. When I left and started working in non-union businesses I never once said "I wish we had a union here.". Unions have done a lot of good in the past, but for the last couple of decades they seem to be more organizations more interested in paying big paychecks to their own representatives.
  - runako 5y ago
    This is interesting. Do you do the same kind of job that you did when you were a union employee? My understanding of unions is employers hate them in part because they make labor more expensive, which would seem to be exactly why one would want to be represented by a union. Is that not correct?
    - rsj_hn 5y ago
      It depends on how much of that extra expense you can capture as your own pay and how much is dead weight costs (e.g. union overhead or additional costs imposed on employers), as well as how likely it is to mean you can't get a job in the first place. So it depends very much on things like overall economic growth, how the union cooperates with management, etc. In Europe, unions collaborate with management whereas US unions have historically been more adversarial. In the US, for example, managers can't be union members whereas in some places in Europe union reps have board seats and are partners with management in trying to get the company to grow.
      - runako 5y ago
        Quick stats check via Google shows that in the US, union workers earn ~11% more than non-union workers. Which would seem enough to warrant a modest membership fee. Also aligns with the management rhetoric that union labor & benefits are expensive and reason enough to move entire factories to the South to escape collective bargaining. (It does not make sense that they would do this to save the cost of union management's paychecks, the numbers are not big enough.) What I was trying to understand from the OP was what's missing from the picture and whether perhaps her role was somehow an outlier.