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I think it's important for people to realize that even if your employer treats you well, a union is also still important so that workers can have a seat in the
I think it's important for people to realize that even if your employer treats you well, a union is also still important so that workers can have a seat in the table where decisions are made. Blanket trust in your employer is a bizarre offshoot of corporate kool-aid.
It's all very well to claim that unions are unnecessary for hyper-mobile, extremely well compensated and in high-demand, tech workers (however, that is at present; the future might be different), but the same is not so true for workers who rely on a single physical institution or location for their and their families livelihood. The threat of leaving, or simply moving offshore, enables employers of those workers to squeeze employees into longer hours or into poor working conditions because there is no collective means of pushing back against the employer, and because the employer doesn't have to care about them: they aren't at the decision making table at all.
It's not that Amazon creates nice working conditions now; it's that Amazon can change it arbitrarily without having to care about any of the employees.
> It's not that Amazon creates nice working conditions now; it's that Amazon can change it arbitrarily without having to care about any of the employees.
That said, it's also about the fact that Amazon currently has bad working conditions, across the board and even for tech workers!
I see how poorly public sector works with public sector unions (especially police, but also city government generally) and I wonder if private unions won’t be just as bad for organizations. Private companies do a lot of the work to enable modern living (e.g. producing food, handling logistics, manufacturing, etc). I get that corporate=bad, but do we want them to become more poorly run and inefficient than they are now?
Unions are sort of ok when there aren’t that many of them, because market forces demand some level of competitiveness, but what happens when union shops are the only or the majority option?
Again, just consider how well public sector unions work for society (ime: disastrously) and how that will work applied to the organizations that do the much of the work enabling modern society.
I guess another angle is: look at how dysfunctional politics have become, at how ~50% of Americans would gladly re-elect DJT post-January 6, and ask, do you want those people to hold the industrial economy hostage? Do we really think the average worker is able to produce better outcomes than management?
Maybe I’ve just been traumatized by the public sector unions. I don’t understand why people can’t make the connection between public sector unions, and the inevitable outcomes of private sector unions get too much traction.
Slavery is the most efficient organizational structure.
But the needs of the people producing the goods and services should take precedent over the desire for corporations to sell khaki pants at the lowest price.
That a union can lead to negative outcomes is not an argument in favor of no-unions, I think, it's an argument that that union should be improved.
The basic gist of unions (or "collectives" or co-ops), that they offer employees and workers leverage and collective bargaining power to counteract arbitrary changes, still stands as necessary.
I also have experience with public sector unions, and though management might dislike them, I know very very few employees who would choose to be non-unionized instead. It's literally giving yourself up to the whims of your employer for no gain.
> I get that corporate=bad, but do we want them to become more poorly run and inefficient than they are now?
Do we want them to succeed at the cost of basic human dignity, or by dragging people into shitty working conditions? "inefficient" for whom? That human dignity should come at the expense of corporate profits is, I think, always a grotesque position to hold. We can mitigate that out by understanding how profit can co-exist with safe and good working conditions for everyone.
Back before Covid, if I stopped during my work day and looked at my fellow colleagues, I’d pretty quickly come to the conclusion I don’t want 20-40% of them having a say in how the company is run. I can barely get them to reply to an email or think strategically beyond “let’s do what we did last time”.
If I asked them how we should be compensated as a group it would quickly be apparent they vote for the lowest common denominator.
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> The threat of leaving, or simply moving offshore, enables employers of those workers to squeeze employees into longer hours or into poor working conditions because there is no collective means of pushing back against the employer
Wouldn't the formation of a local union make an employer more likely to leave a location? Seems like it would increase the size of the cost differential between staying and leaving.
I mean, we don't have to guess, a third of US workers were union members in the 50s and 60s. You can look at the real history of private sector unions and see how they impacted society. I think it's clearly been positive, but it's tough to summarize in a comment. One easy example is the Fair Labor Standards Act, which would not have passed when it did without decades of union activism including massive strikes.
Basically, I don't think the outcomes you're imagining are inevitable because we tried private sector unions for a very long time and those outcomes didn't happen.
I understand why you're traumatized by police unions, but I can just as easily say I don't understand why people can't make the connection between the decline of union membership and the increase of income inequality and all its disastrous effects.
Yeah, many of them were incredibly racist organizations focused on keeping black people from doing jobs. Easy when they cartelize labour and use violence when required.
E.g. https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/charlie-walker-movie-san-francisco-oil-spill-16377938.php https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/charlie-walker-mov...
Yeah they were fantastic for the majority because they allowed the majority to retain a tight grip on work.
If your preference matrix prefers that racist workers get better gigs while other workers don’t get work at all, fine. That isn’t my preference matrix.
That's why I said it's tough to summarize. Obviously there were many negatives including racism, organized crime, corruption, etc. I do not believe that racism or corruption is an inevitable outcome of unions, just like I don't think the positive outcomes are inevitable.
Unions' interests are not aligned with those of the company. If the company needs to shed a bunch of people or switch business models or _hire different talent_ the union will resist, because their job is to maximize the number and pay of jobs for their members.
The prime example of this being a problem right now is longshoremen in LA and Long Beach resisting automation.
The other issue with co-op like structures is that they don't provide enough upside for company founders and early employees. Founders need the chance to make big money or they won't take big risks (see: Europe for an example of this). One of the reasons the NYC rideshare co-op is failing is because no software engineer wants to work at some rando startup for a fraction of what they could make at Uber & Lyft.
Unions work when the work is highly commoditized and technological improvement is stagnant. I can't say that's the case for a huge percentage of jobs today.
> Unions' interests are not aligned with those of the company.
They are not aligned with those of management. They are aligned with those of the company almost by definition if the union is big enough, because a company is its workforce. If the CEO says the company wants to do something and 80% of the employees disagree, then in fact the CEO wants to do something and the company does not.
It's obviously not hard to find examples of unions causing negative impacts on society, just like it's not hard to find the same for corporate executives. The idea is to find the right balance. Is the the threat of inefficiency worse than the threat of worker abuse and inequality? At some point yes it will be, but I don't think we're anywhere close to that point yet.
The company is not its workforce. Every individual in the company would like more money for less work, but that's not in the company's best interest. If the company goes under because it's paying too much for too little, the employees can get new jobs elsewhere, whereas any money reinvested into the company will provide virtually no direct benefit to any individual employee. A company's interests can be aligned with employees, indeed typically you want good employee retention and high morale which can only come from creating a company where people want to work, but companies do not exist to maximize employment and employee compensation.
This makes a false equivalency between no unions or decades old, powerful, public sector unions.
Between those two ranges, the following nuance is important:
- will a union of $15/hr Amazon employees, in aggregate, have the same power in the short term as a union of police or firefighters.
- mid-term, will those union bosses for Amazon become as powerful as the PD/FD/teachers union bosses?
- Are there lessons learned from when a private sector union like the Teamsters under Hoffa got out of control?
The answers to all of those, and likely more, are necessary to evaluate the outcomes of letting Amazon unionize. And from there, ya interesting discussions start - well, we do use Amazon for a lot. What if the local warehouse strikes? And so on.
Another way to evaluate it is the gut feeling about this: when an Amazon contractor sprints to your door, drops off a package at 8pm, apologizes for "being late," and sprints away to the next apartment.
You keep saying that "public sector unions" are bad for society without giving any specific reasons why we should think so. What is so disastrous or traumatic about public sector unions?
From my perspective, unions come with plenty of problems, largely the same problems as any large organization, but on the whole workers are better off when they have a union that represents them. Society as a whole benefits when people do not have to put off seeing a doctor because their employer decided to give them a garbage health plan. Society as a whole benefits when the wealth gap is kept under control. Unions, historically and currently, negotiate compensation and benefits in ways that individual workers cannot -- because an individual negotiating with a large organization is at a disadvantage (and corporations know this, which is why they try to prevent workers from forming unions). Society benefits when the people we rely on to sort and deliver packages are not being told to pee in a bottle just to save some time. Unions have been particularly important in dangerous occupations where cutting corners or working multiple roles can result in death or permanent injuries -- which is why unions formed in the first place and why unions remain strong in certain industries (railroads, etc.).
Market forces work poorly when one side of the market has greater negotiating power and a greater ability to externalize costs than the other. Corporations have been known to rely on the welfare system instead of paying workers the minimum wages needed to live in a given region or provide effective health and retirement plans. Corporations work hard to avoid compensating workers for injuries and have faced few penalties for discrimination, harassment, and other abuses.
Almost all the complaints about public-sector unions are based on myths or at best unusual and extreme examples. Things that work well often go unreported, and unions typically work well.
> Almost all the complaints about public-sector unions are based on myths or at best unusual and extreme examples.
Haven't you just done the same with complaints about corporations?
"Society benefits when the people we rely on to sort and deliver packages are not being told to pee in a bottle just to save some time."
Is this really the norm in corporate America, or "an unusual and extreme example"?
That is relevant to the actual article, which is about Amazon warehouse workers unionizing in response to various abuses, including being told to pee in a bottle.
Yes, most corporations are not asking people to pee in a bottle. On the other hand, as I said, individual workers have little negotiating power with a corporation, even a relatively small corporation, and the difference between union and non-union jobs is clear. It is not at all unusual or extreme for corporations to give non-union workers lower wages and lower-quality benefits because the corporation has outsized power to negotiate the terms of employment with individual workers. Non-union workers are more vulnerable to abuses and abuses are more common among non-union workers -- not extreme abuses, but mundane abuses that generally go unreported.
It feels like North America hates unions enough that we got the very worst of them. In Europe, there isn't the same societal conflict over unionization, but at the same time they aren't any more in love with the idea of industrial labour monopolies like the UAW than we are.
Where unionization works well, it's been because the government regulated to create competitive unions. In Germany, once a company unionizes, the union has special rights and privileges within the company, including access to the company's books and executive meetings. And things like union-busting are illegal. There's a lot of legislation in place to prevent the sort of abuses that North America has always seen with "company unions". But they can't join together with workers at other companies to form industrial labour monopolies either, so you still get market competition.
> Do we really think the average worker is able to produce better outcomes than management?
As a long time HN reader who works in a factory, I often hear the sentiment that management is clueless MBA's and workers are better off left on their own in WFH situations. Strange I see this is a highly upvoted comment. Maybe it has something to do with this:
> look at how dysfunctional politics have become, at how ~50% of Americans would gladly re-elect DJT post-January 6, and ask, do you want those people to hold the industrial economy hostage?
I'm just curious why you think "those people" don't deserve the right to fight for better wages, work life balance, better benefits just as the skilled tech class does. Does some of them voting for a politician you don't like have to do with this bias perhaps? Switching jobs to up your comp by 30% isn't an option for most of "those people". Unions are likely the only option they have to bring themselves leverage in negotiation.
In practice (I have experience with union labour), it depends. The older workers will usually step forward in negotiations and secure plum benefits for themselves, very often at the expense of younger workers.
Don't get me wrong - I think everyone does better with union negotiations (even managers to some extent - at least with a union contract, everyone's expectations are clear). But it definitely pays to be represented there at the negotiating table. It's a challenge to convince the younger workers to take an interest in this.
"The right question is - would my colleagues do a better job negotiating my compensation than I would?"
Probably. We often tell ourselves that we are better able to negotiate on our own behalf than anyone else, but the truth is that unionized workers usually receive better compensation than non-unionized workers.
To put this another way, if you said you were thinking about quitting, would your employer respond by offering a raise? If you were embroiled in some kind of scandal and had to either quit or be fired, would you receive a severance? If not, then you are not important enough to have any real leverage to negotiate your compensation. As an individual you are probably easy to replace, and certainly much easier to replace than the entire workforce -- which is why unions usually negotiate better compensation than individuals.
Except that we are not talking about a political club. We are not talking about an external group that imposes itself on the workers. Unions are formed by workers, the leaders are elected by the workers and drawn from the workforce, and unions serve the purpose of negotiating employment terms for the workers.
If you would rather have an argument about political clubs go find a forum where it is not wildly off-topic...
> This seems like a weird take, but maybe I don't understand. Are you saying that the other parties are equally at fault for failing to prevail in negotiation against the unions?
Well, first, we've not actually been discussing any specifics about arbitration. The most specific we've been is acknowledging that arbitration is a point of failure, and that police unions are involved in negotiating over the arbitration framework. Neither of those things points explicitly to police unions as a point of blame. For example, arbitration problems often stem from lack of evidence, lack of consistency in application, and lack of increased punishment for repeat problem officers; none of these problems are directly related to the contracts negotiated by police unions (obviously they are indirectly related). Blaming police unions, simply because they represent officers, which is their mandate, is an oversimplification.
Additionally, systems like arbitration, or the arbitration framework contract negotiation, is predicated on the idea that both interested parties represent their position adequately, in good faith, and without conflict of interests (among other things); this is not always the case, but is the side that is representing their position adequately and in good faith (i.e. police unions, making it harder to fire "good" officers) to blame? Another example, in other terms, many people are punished unnecessarily by judicial systems because of inadequate defense (i.e. ineffective assistance of counsel), but is the prosecutor always to blame?
It's not that other parties are necessarily at fault for failing in negotiation, but that assumes that those parties adequately represented their interests (in this case, one of those interests would be the public interest), which is certainly not a given.
> I am not claiming that unions are a net detriment to police union workers, simply that there are tradeoffs.
With this in mind, I guess I should've rephrased my initial question. I should've said "can you provide some insight into how police unions work poorly for police officers generally (i.e. their members)?" Obviously there are cases where police unions (and other unions) work poorly for individuals, but I meant where they work poorly for their members overall. This is why I think your reply fails to fit my intended framing and I was rejecting the premise from that perspective.