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I had a boss who was an expensive consultant for unions. He explained the reason unions in the US were shrinking is that they are too powerful. They control hu

I had a boss who was an expensive consultant for unions. He explained the reason unions in the US were shrinking is that they are too powerful. They control huge pension and healthcare portfolios and can completely control the relationship with employers, especially in closed shop situations. Comparatively, European unions are much "weaker" - or maybe more accurately their purview is much smaller. They control smaller geographic regions, and in general, all of the heavy lifting for healthcare and pensions and worker rights is handled by the government. So the unions' focus is entirely on the collective bargaining piece. Also, unions tend to be more regulated - they can't carry so much bloat. All in all, everyone, companies included, have less reason to combat unions. I'd be interested to hear if anyone has experience with both and can gauge the accuracy.

soco 5y ago
Which leads to the weird situation when a US-based company will fight to the bone their European unions just out of principle, no matter the topic discussed or its legal base. And with the EWCs (European Worker Councils), even worse.
brimble 5y ago
> Comparatively, European unions are much "weaker" - or maybe more accurately their purview is much smaller. They control smaller geographic regions, and in general, all of the heavy lifting for healthcare and pensions and worker rights is handled by the government. So the unions' focus is entirely on the collective bargaining piece. Also, unions tend to be more regulated - they can't carry so much bloat. All in all, everyone, companies included, have less reason to combat unions. I'm not sure I'd call unions legally-mandated to hold 33-50% (depending on company size) of the company's board seats "weaker". That's the situation in Germany.
- tharne 5y ago
  > I'm not sure I'd call unions legally-mandated to hold 33-50% (depending on company size) of the company's board seats "weaker". That's the situation in Germany. I think that's a brilliant policy. It forces the unions to have some skin in the game. If you're on the board, you have a fiduciary responsibility to the company and it's shareholders. In the U.S., most union bosses are happy to bleed a company dry provided the bleed is slow enough for them to make it to retirement (or death in the case of folks with a nice pension). It's even worse with the public unions. Since governments can theoretically keep raising taxes, there's no real limiting factor to how much the unions can demand. The union system is the U.S. is completely broken. I think unions in the U.S. should be both more widespread but much less powerful.
  - cool_dude85 5y ago
    >It's even worse with the public unions. Since governments can theoretically keep raising taxes, there's no real limiting factor to how much the unions can demand. Do a search on governmentjobs.com for a job title you're familiar with and decide whether the unions have been successful at bleeding the government dry via high salaries. My anecdotal experience: you need to get to one level below Chief where I work to draw a salary close to a FAANG programmer, union pay tops out at 150k.
    - yibg 5y ago
      Why is the comparison against the highest paid jobs in the country? Shouldn't the comparison be against the median, or at least comparable jobs?
    - tharne 5y ago
      It's not the salaries that drive costs. It's mostly the long-term underfunded liabilities like pensions.
  - johnny22 5y ago
    I dunno, that german situation sounds like the power isn't less or more, but rather in a different place. It's a place that actually can affect the how the company runs in a direct fashion.
  - cycomanic 5y ago
    > I think that's a brilliant policy. It forces the unions to have some skin in the game. If you're on the board, you have a fiduciary responsibility to the company and it's shareholders. In the U.S., most union bosses are happy to bleed a company dry provided the bleed is slow enough for them to make it to retirement (or death in the case of folks with a nice pension). You mean how shareholders and boardmembers are happy to completely dismantle perfectly functioning companies for a short term stock gain? I would argue workers generally have much more skin in the game than shareholders. Hardly any large shareholder is going to loose their livelihood if a company goes down, workers do.
  - LesZedCB 5y ago
whimsicalism 5y ago
i feel like I'm missing the causal link in your comment between controlling healthcare portfolios -> shrinking.
- legitster 5y ago
  On a macro level, a US union is much more expensive per member than a EU union because members/companies have to front the cost of healthcare (as opposed to countries with universal healthcare). On a micro level, traditional US unions have huge pension funds that they have won from employers and promised to existing members, and so they can be very restrictive on membership qualifications.
  - rat87 5y ago
    I think a more accurate point would be that employers force new employees to get worse benifits to undermine the union
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    Hm, in my experience, even in a union context, healthcare was supplied by the employer, it was just negotiated in the contract. I'm not sure why that would make a US union much more expensive. Typically, you don't really get unions with dues unless they've managed to get a contract with a wage increase that covers the dues.
    - legitster 5y ago
      But if you are paying your union $25 a month to argue on your behalf, that money would go further if healthcare wasn't one of the things they had to negotiate.
      - whimsicalism 5y ago
        TBH, the additional overhead from also negotiating healthcare seems like a pretty marginal reason to explain the state of unions in the US today.
whatever1 5y ago
European Govs have more regulation in place to allow for unions. That is why there are more widespread than in the US. Many of the union-busting activities American companies casually do would be flat out illegal in th EU.
- Conan_Kudo 5y ago
  They are illegal in the United States too, just culturally the laws are not enforced like they are in the European Union.
cool_dude85 5y ago
>He explained the reason unions in the US were shrinking is that they are too powerful. They control huge pension and healthcare portfolios and can completely control the relationship with employers, especially in closed shop situations. This is interesting. I'm a government employee with a union, a pension, health insurance, the whole deal. The union does not control the pension or healthcare in any way whatsoever. The governmental entity that I'm employed by, my employer, controls both, subject to collective bargaining to some extent. That is, my contract says I can join the pension, that I pay X% into the pension, that I can also join a 401k-style program if I wish, I'd pay Y% in that case. But it doesn't say anything about the operation of the pension or offer any real control. Same with my healthcare - it needs to meet certain criteria (e.g., premiums will be so many dollars for single coverage, employer must pay X% of actuarial value, etc.) So, who are these unions who actually have union-run pensions and healthcare plans?
- legitster 5y ago
  I believe Teamsters is the biggest. But there are enough that taxpayers ended up bailing out a ton this year: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/business/dealbook/bailout-pensions-stimulus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/business/dealbook/bailout... But even if your union doesn't directly control your healthcare plan, I would still assume it was part of the collective bargaining?
  - cool_dude85 5y ago
    Multi-employer pension plans are usually governed by a board of trustees. Depends on the plan but typically labor and management share power equally (broadly speaking). And yeah, pensions, healthcare are all part of collective bargaining. Do you control the healthcare plan where you work? I assume it's part of negotiating the terms of your employment, so you could always ask for a really good one.
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  This is also my experience with unions. I don't know if it is different for things like electricians/etc. where you might not have a single shop you work for but you get jobs through the union.
rat87 5y ago
Seems like someone really bad at his job. Unions in the US are much much weaker making it easier for companies to undermine them. Also there is more of an anti union attitude among US empoyers and sometimes illegal union busting techniques/consultants are much more developed. And to top it off the laws and politics are much worse for unions, some conservative Governors have said that they would rather not have good autoworker jobs if they are unionized
lamontcg 5y ago
Its very on brand that the first response to this on HN is more or less: "Okay, hear me out, but what if Unions in America are really _too strong_?". Very counterintuitive thinking.
- legitster 5y ago
  I mean, if you prefer to err on the side of groupthink I'm sure there are plenty of decent online spaces to do so.
  - johnny22 5y ago
    the point is that HN has groupthink though.
- davidw 5y ago
  The comment seemed like an honest question in that they're asking if it's accurate.
- educaysean 5y ago
  Counterintuitive to what? Do you have stories or facts you want to share that argue unions in US are actually comparatively weaker than their European counterparts? The only thing you illustrated was that you were personally astonished by OP's comment, but I don't think that carries as much weight as you think it does.
  - munk-a 5y ago
    One of my favorite unionization stories comes from Denmark when unions in various industry sectors joined together to force McDonalds to adhere to union rules.[1] The US has so few weak and disparate unions that that story could never play out there - even up here in Canada we're pretty anti-union in general. 1. https://mattbruenig.com/2021/09/20/when-mcdonalds-came-to-denmark/ https://mattbruenig.com/2021/09/20/when-mcdonalds-came-to-de...
    - educaysean 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
djrobstep 5y ago
The parent comment really isn't at all descriptive of actual reality, somebody could really come away with the wrong impression reading it. It's misleading to consider unions in other countries like the Nordics as anything other than much stronger and more powerful. They have almost universal membership, engage in sectoral bargaining, set minimum wages, run important parts the welfare state, and sit on company boards. It's often noted that the Nordics don't have legal minimum wages - this is because industrial bargaining agreements that set minimum wages make this unnecessary because they cover ~all workers. In countries where union membership is declining (US and other anglo countries particularly), membership rates are low and optional, there's little sectoral bargaining, most industrial action is essentially outlawed. Sympathy and wildcat strikes are entirely illegal, and in Australia you cannot strike without prior permission from a government body.
cyberpunk 5y ago
The RMT/Unite Union in the UK regularly cripples London by staging tube strikes when they all have well paying secure jobs so not entire sure I buy it.
- iso1631 5y ago
  > staging tube strikes > all have well paying secure jobs I wonder if that's linked.... And $70k a year in London is not "well paid", it's 9% of the price of an average property in London.
- pmyteh 5y ago
  RMT and ASLEF; Unite don't tend to organise train crew. London transport is an interesting case. I wonder the extent to which they have well-paid secure jobs because they can and do disrupt London. Bus drivers have a much worse deal, for example, being easily replaceable. I think from time to time about a statement made by Bob Crow, who was the former hardline chief of the RMT. He said that his members were now amongst the only working class Londoners who could afford to live decently in the city they served. Which (despite my dislike of his tactics) does seem like a reasonable point. FWIW my union (UCU; academic) has traditionally been a lot quieter and more consensual, and we've been repeatedly shafted in recent years as a result. That kind of collaborative management/union relationship only works if both sides are committed to making a decent workplace operate, and our management no longer are.
- Starlevel001 5y ago
  I wonder how they got those well paying and secure jobs
marricks 5y ago
Cases like this you really need to be extremely specific about what powerful means. I think a lot of left leaning folks could agree with such statements but made too broadly it can be taken a number of different ways. I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone pro union who'd say unions have too much influence or sway in the lives of US citizens. Most workers don't have union representation and unions don't have much say in worker pay in a great majority of sectors. Especially where it could help like warehouse work which has seen wages plummet with the advent of Amazon. Now, compare that to two unions which are extremely powerful and not always good for the public or their members! 1) Teachers unions. Extremely powerful (at least Oregon where I know about them), but they don't necessarily help teachers! Pay is low because they haven't flexed their power and are fully at the whim of taxes. Since their funding is low the most teacher's union can guarantee their workers is that they will have a consistent job. Which sucks! Also, when COVID occurred there was little room for teachers to get a say as to how classes would be virtual, when kids would be back in schools, or when and how the mask mandate would be lifted. Supposedly a union would help! 2) Police unions: super strong, extremely political, extremely effective. Also nigh impossible to fire a cop unless they offend their union or a fellow cop. Rarely do police budgets ever get cut or does cop pay go down. Do most folks want this? Do most people in New York want their police force to have a budget larger than military of a mid sized country? Probably not? But hey, they're too powerful to do anything about.
- gruez 5y ago
  >Do most people in New York want their police force to have a budget larger than military of a mid sized country? Probably not? Pareto distribution strikes again! Apparently new york city has a GDP that ranks 15 in the world, above mexico[1][2] and ranks 59 in the world in terms of population[3], so the fact that new york exceeds "a mid sized country" (median?) in some statistic isn't surprising. If you want to make the argument that the US is over-policed, use some statistic like officers per 100,000 people or something. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_New_York_City [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...
SubiculumCode 5y ago
I agree that unions should have both more power but be less consolidated.
coredog64 5y ago
American unions are essentially required by law to take an adversarial relationship with employers as an accidental consequence of historical racism. The short version is that there was a union that was declining to support dues paying members because they were black. It resulted in a case that went all the way to the USSC. In contrast, European unions are allowed to be more realistic and accept that some members are knuckleheads and that it’s a positive for both the union and the employer if they are fired with minimum fuss.
britch 5y ago
My understanding is that unions in the US are much weaker. It's hard to talk about all of Europe because...there's a lot of countries I'm with different histories, laws, and culture around this. In the US a union is tied to a workplace. A single company, often a single location. This is by design of the NLRA. Corporations fight to limit the size of the bargaining unit, to make the unions less powerful. This Amazon warehouse is unionized, but the other warehouses are not unionized and warehouses over a FooBar Corp. are not unionized. Each of these unions has to work out their own contract and bargain independently even if they all work for the same company. This gives the workers less leverage and makes it easier for US Corps to pit workers against each other. In Germany and elsewhere in Europe, unions are also organized by sector. You could have a national Warehouse workers union, which sets working conditions for all warehouse workers. This gives them significantly more leverage and makes it difficult to do the kind of "we shut down this store and open another" tactic that you see in the US. I'm sure there's a variety of other differences, but I don't think it's fair to characterize EU unions are weaker.
heavyset_go 5y ago
> They control huge pension and healthcare portfolios and can completely control the relationship with employers Employers already do all of this, except you have no say in it. In contrast, you're granted democratic decision making with a union, so you do get a say in those arenas.

soco 5y ago

Which leads to the weird situation when a US-based company will fight to the bone their European unions just out of principle, no matter the topic discussed or its legal base. And with the EWCs (European Worker Councils), even worse.

brimble 5y ago

> Comparatively, European unions are much "weaker" - or maybe more accurately their purview is much smaller. They control smaller geographic regions, and in general, all of the heavy lifting for healthcare and pensions and worker rights is handled by the government. So the unions' focus is entirely on the collective bargaining piece. Also, unions tend to be more regulated - they can't carry so much bloat. All in all, everyone, companies included, have less reason to combat unions. I'm not sure I'd call unions legally-mandated to hold 33-50% (depending on company size) of the company's board seats "weaker". That's the situation in Germany.

tharne 5y ago
> I'm not sure I'd call unions legally-mandated to hold 33-50% (depending on company size) of the company's board seats "weaker". That's the situation in Germany. I think that's a brilliant policy. It forces the unions to have some skin in the game. If you're on the board, you have a fiduciary responsibility to the company and it's shareholders. In the U.S., most union bosses are happy to bleed a company dry provided the bleed is slow enough for them to make it to retirement (or death in the case of folks with a nice pension). It's even worse with the public unions. Since governments can theoretically keep raising taxes, there's no real limiting factor to how much the unions can demand. The union system is the U.S. is completely broken. I think unions in the U.S. should be both more widespread but much less powerful.
- cool_dude85 5y ago
  >It's even worse with the public unions. Since governments can theoretically keep raising taxes, there's no real limiting factor to how much the unions can demand. Do a search on governmentjobs.com for a job title you're familiar with and decide whether the unions have been successful at bleeding the government dry via high salaries. My anecdotal experience: you need to get to one level below Chief where I work to draw a salary close to a FAANG programmer, union pay tops out at 150k.
  - yibg 5y ago
    Why is the comparison against the highest paid jobs in the country? Shouldn't the comparison be against the median, or at least comparable jobs?
  - tharne 5y ago
    It's not the salaries that drive costs. It's mostly the long-term underfunded liabilities like pensions.
- johnny22 5y ago
  I dunno, that german situation sounds like the power isn't less or more, but rather in a different place. It's a place that actually can affect the how the company runs in a direct fashion.
- cycomanic 5y ago
  > I think that's a brilliant policy. It forces the unions to have some skin in the game. If you're on the board, you have a fiduciary responsibility to the company and it's shareholders. In the U.S., most union bosses are happy to bleed a company dry provided the bleed is slow enough for them to make it to retirement (or death in the case of folks with a nice pension). You mean how shareholders and boardmembers are happy to completely dismantle perfectly functioning companies for a short term stock gain? I would argue workers generally have much more skin in the game than shareholders. Hardly any large shareholder is going to loose their livelihood if a company goes down, workers do.
- LesZedCB 5y ago

whimsicalism 5y ago

i feel like I'm missing the causal link in your comment between controlling healthcare portfolios -> shrinking.

legitster 5y ago
On a macro level, a US union is much more expensive per member than a EU union because members/companies have to front the cost of healthcare (as opposed to countries with universal healthcare). On a micro level, traditional US unions have huge pension funds that they have won from employers and promised to existing members, and so they can be very restrictive on membership qualifications.
- rat87 5y ago
  I think a more accurate point would be that employers force new employees to get worse benifits to undermine the union
- whimsicalism 5y ago
  Hm, in my experience, even in a union context, healthcare was supplied by the employer, it was just negotiated in the contract. I'm not sure why that would make a US union much more expensive. Typically, you don't really get unions with dues unless they've managed to get a contract with a wage increase that covers the dues.
  - legitster 5y ago
    But if you are paying your union $25 a month to argue on your behalf, that money would go further if healthcare wasn't one of the things they had to negotiate.
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      TBH, the additional overhead from also negotiating healthcare seems like a pretty marginal reason to explain the state of unions in the US today.

whatever1 5y ago

European Govs have more regulation in place to allow for unions. That is why there are more widespread than in the US. Many of the union-busting activities American companies casually do would be flat out illegal in th EU.

Conan_Kudo 5y ago
They are illegal in the United States too, just culturally the laws are not enforced like they are in the European Union.

cool_dude85 5y ago

>He explained the reason unions in the US were shrinking is that they are too powerful. They control huge pension and healthcare portfolios and can completely control the relationship with employers, especially in closed shop situations. This is interesting. I'm a government employee with a union, a pension, health insurance, the whole deal. The union does not control the pension or healthcare in any way whatsoever. The governmental entity that I'm employed by, my employer, controls both, subject to collective bargaining to some extent. That is, my contract says I can join the pension, that I pay X% into the pension, that I can also join a 401k-style program if I wish, I'd pay Y% in that case. But it doesn't say anything about the operation of the pension or offer any real control. Same with my healthcare - it needs to meet certain criteria (e.g., premiums will be so many dollars for single coverage, employer must pay X% of actuarial value, etc.) So, who are these unions who actually have union-run pensions and healthcare plans?

legitster 5y ago
I believe Teamsters is the biggest. But there are enough that taxpayers ended up bailing out a ton this year: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/business/dealbook/bailout-pensions-stimulus.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/07/business/dealbook/bailout... But even if your union doesn't directly control your healthcare plan, I would still assume it was part of the collective bargaining?
- cool_dude85 5y ago
  Multi-employer pension plans are usually governed by a board of trustees. Depends on the plan but typically labor and management share power equally (broadly speaking). And yeah, pensions, healthcare are all part of collective bargaining. Do you control the healthcare plan where you work? I assume it's part of negotiating the terms of your employment, so you could always ask for a really good one.
whimsicalism 5y ago
This is also my experience with unions. I don't know if it is different for things like electricians/etc. where you might not have a single shop you work for but you get jobs through the union.

rat87 5y ago

Seems like someone really bad at his job. Unions in the US are much much weaker making it easier for companies to undermine them. Also there is more of an anti union attitude among US empoyers and sometimes illegal union busting techniques/consultants are much more developed. And to top it off the laws and politics are much worse for unions, some conservative Governors have said that they would rather not have good autoworker jobs if they are unionized

lamontcg 5y ago

Its very on brand that the first response to this on HN is more or less: "Okay, hear me out, but what if Unions in America are really _too strong_?". Very counterintuitive thinking.

legitster 5y ago
I mean, if you prefer to err on the side of groupthink I'm sure there are plenty of decent online spaces to do so.
- johnny22 5y ago
  the point is that HN has groupthink though.
davidw 5y ago
The comment seemed like an honest question in that they're asking if it's accurate.
educaysean 5y ago
Counterintuitive to what? Do you have stories or facts you want to share that argue unions in US are actually comparatively weaker than their European counterparts? The only thing you illustrated was that you were personally astonished by OP's comment, but I don't think that carries as much weight as you think it does.
- munk-a 5y ago
  One of my favorite unionization stories comes from Denmark when unions in various industry sectors joined together to force McDonalds to adhere to union rules.[1] The US has so few weak and disparate unions that that story could never play out there - even up here in Canada we're pretty anti-union in general. 1. https://mattbruenig.com/2021/09/20/when-mcdonalds-came-to-denmark/ https://mattbruenig.com/2021/09/20/when-mcdonalds-came-to-de...
  - educaysean 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

djrobstep 5y ago

The parent comment really isn't at all descriptive of actual reality, somebody could really come away with the wrong impression reading it. It's misleading to consider unions in other countries like the Nordics as anything other than much stronger and more powerful. They have almost universal membership, engage in sectoral bargaining, set minimum wages, run important parts the welfare state, and sit on company boards. It's often noted that the Nordics don't have legal minimum wages - this is because industrial bargaining agreements that set minimum wages make this unnecessary because they cover ~all workers. In countries where union membership is declining (US and other anglo countries particularly), membership rates are low and optional, there's little sectoral bargaining, most industrial action is essentially outlawed. Sympathy and wildcat strikes are entirely illegal, and in Australia you cannot strike without prior permission from a government body.

cyberpunk 5y ago

The RMT/Unite Union in the UK regularly cripples London by staging tube strikes when they all have well paying secure jobs so not entire sure I buy it.

iso1631 5y ago
> staging tube strikes > all have well paying secure jobs I wonder if that's linked.... And $70k a year in London is not "well paid", it's 9% of the price of an average property in London.
pmyteh 5y ago
RMT and ASLEF; Unite don't tend to organise train crew. London transport is an interesting case. I wonder the extent to which they have well-paid secure jobs because they can and do disrupt London. Bus drivers have a much worse deal, for example, being easily replaceable. I think from time to time about a statement made by Bob Crow, who was the former hardline chief of the RMT. He said that his members were now amongst the only working class Londoners who could afford to live decently in the city they served. Which (despite my dislike of his tactics) does seem like a reasonable point. FWIW my union (UCU; academic) has traditionally been a lot quieter and more consensual, and we've been repeatedly shafted in recent years as a result. That kind of collaborative management/union relationship only works if both sides are committed to making a decent workplace operate, and our management no longer are.
Starlevel001 5y ago
I wonder how they got those well paying and secure jobs

marricks 5y ago

Cases like this you really need to be extremely specific about what powerful means. I think a lot of left leaning folks could agree with such statements but made too broadly it can be taken a number of different ways. I think you'd be hard pressed to find anyone pro union who'd say unions have too much influence or sway in the lives of US citizens. Most workers don't have union representation and unions don't have much say in worker pay in a great majority of sectors. Especially where it could help like warehouse work which has seen wages plummet with the advent of Amazon. Now, compare that to two unions which are extremely powerful and not always good for the public or their members! 1) Teachers unions. Extremely powerful (at least Oregon where I know about them), but they don't necessarily help teachers! Pay is low because they haven't flexed their power and are fully at the whim of taxes. Since their funding is low the most teacher's union can guarantee their workers is that they will have a consistent job. Which sucks! Also, when COVID occurred there was little room for teachers to get a say as to how classes would be virtual, when kids would be back in schools, or when and how the mask mandate would be lifted. Supposedly a union would help! 2) Police unions: super strong, extremely political, extremely effective. Also nigh impossible to fire a cop unless they offend their union or a fellow cop. Rarely do police budgets ever get cut or does cop pay go down. Do most folks want this? Do most people in New York want their police force to have a budget larger than military of a mid sized country? Probably not? But hey, they're too powerful to do anything about.

gruez 5y ago
>Do most people in New York want their police force to have a budget larger than military of a mid sized country? Probably not? Pareto distribution strikes again! Apparently new york city has a GDP that ranks 15 in the world, above mexico[1][2] and ranks 59 in the world in terms of population[3], so the fact that new york exceeds "a mid sized country" (median?) in some statistic isn't surprising. If you want to make the argument that the US is over-policed, use some statistic like officers per 100,000 people or something. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_New_York_City https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_New_York_City [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependen...

SubiculumCode 5y ago

I agree that unions should have both more power but be less consolidated.

coredog64 5y ago

American unions are essentially required by law to take an adversarial relationship with employers as an accidental consequence of historical racism. The short version is that there was a union that was declining to support dues paying members because they were black. It resulted in a case that went all the way to the USSC. In contrast, European unions are allowed to be more realistic and accept that some members are knuckleheads and that it’s a positive for both the union and the employer if they are fired with minimum fuss.

britch 5y ago

My understanding is that unions in the US are much weaker. It's hard to talk about all of Europe because...there's a lot of countries I'm with different histories, laws, and culture around this. In the US a union is tied to a workplace. A single company, often a single location. This is by design of the NLRA. Corporations fight to limit the size of the bargaining unit, to make the unions less powerful. This Amazon warehouse is unionized, but the other warehouses are not unionized and warehouses over a FooBar Corp. are not unionized. Each of these unions has to work out their own contract and bargain independently even if they all work for the same company. This gives the workers less leverage and makes it easier for US Corps to pit workers against each other. In Germany and elsewhere in Europe, unions are also organized by sector. You could have a national Warehouse workers union, which sets working conditions for all warehouse workers. This gives them significantly more leverage and makes it difficult to do the kind of "we shut down this store and open another" tactic that you see in the US. I'm sure there's a variety of other differences, but I don't think it's fair to characterize EU unions are weaker.

heavyset_go 5y ago

> They control huge pension and healthcare portfolios and can completely control the relationship with employers Employers already do all of this, except you have no say in it. In contrast, you're granted democratic decision making with a union, so you do get a say in those arenas.