5 ms·

Unions are for the people, not the company

flohofwoe 3y ago
Those people often have a better idea how to run "their" company (and are more interested in keeping the company alive) than the latest celebrity CEO who's then replaced with the next one after six months.
eyelidlessness 3y ago
Unions are generally predicated on representing their members, but there are countless permutations of nuance where such representation would also benefit or protect the company, at least to some extent.
Scalene2 3y ago
What makes you say that?
hgsgm 3y ago
For the people who work at the company and want to continue. They don't get paid after the company dies.
zen928 3y ago
a company is made of: _____
- typon 3y ago
  The board of directors, rich shareholders and the C-Suite team. Incidentally they also employ powerless servants who are interchangeable and disposable.
  - vba616 3y ago
    Modern Western capitalism is pretty similar to the Soviet Union or China's. "State capitalism" and "monopoly capitalism" (the bad kind according to socialists) are about as different as Coke and Pepsi. Ultimately the "owners" in practice are people you never heard of that work for (government) pension funds and index funds. The billionaires, founders, and celebrities are mostly a sideshow. That's not a denial of wealth inequality, just as officially socialist countries have. But nearly all big companies have no owner in a top hat running the show, just faceless committees, responsible for buying everything - that company and all its competitors. Bureaucrats, apparatchiks, public or private, it's much the same. If the C-suite and directors of huge companies are generally parasites, it's because robber barons and corporate raiders are the exception today. People whose job is to invest trillions of dollars by simply buying everything for sale have the least control imaginable over company managers. The current situation reflects classic criticisms of socialism, but it won anyway. Nearly every source of information on public company stocks in the US has a figure for "institutional ownership". If a company is of any size, and is a real business, this is usually a high % - this is a reality check if what I'm writing sounds outlandish because nobody talks about anything but Twitter around here.
    - cyber_kinetist 3y ago
      From David Graeber's "Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class" (The full link is https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau4.3.007 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau4...., recommend reading the whole thing): "As radical theorists like Michael Albert were already pointing out in the 1970s, this is the key flaw of traditional socialism: actual members of the working classes have no immediate hatred for capitalists because they never meet them; in most circumstances, the immediate face of oppression comes in the form of managers, supervisors, bureaucrats, and educated professionals of one sort or another—that is, precisely the people to whom a state socialist regime would give more power, rather than less (Albert and Hahnel 1979; Albert 2003). The decisive victory of capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, ironically, has had precisely the same effect. It has led to both a continual inflation of what are often purely make-work managerial and administrative positions—“bullshit jobs”—and an endless bureaucratization of daily life, driven, in large part, by the Internet."
      - vba616 3y ago
        I disagree with every part of this quote and the whole "bullshit jobs" thesis. People think they know what a job is, without having done it. You cannot imagine even, say, stocking shelves at a retail store, without doing it. If, for the sake of argument, most jobs are bullshit, the only way that can be maintained is if people are ignorant of what other people do. But if you're so ignorant, you should consider that you can't imagine jobs you don't do, let alone do them. One job I had I suppose was bullshit, was sweeping a fairly spotless warehouse, because, I was told, a division boss was coming to inspect, and so they hired a temp to look busy. But a job is not bullshit, just because you have a flight of fancy that involves massive restructuring of an organization or society. "Writing this CRUD application should be unnecessary because everybody should've used the same database in the beginning". So...make a time machine, or get everyone using one of them to switch. Should be roughly comparable difficulty. And I'm pretty sure that "the key flaw of traditional socialism" is not that they recognized reality. I think it was Lenin who declared that there would have to be a temporary phase of socialism. It's a sick mind that thinks the "key flaw" of existent socialism was employing educated administrators and not, say, dekulakization.
beebmam 3y ago
This fundamentally misunderstands unions. Hospital unions often strike for the safety of patients, to stop unsafe policies by the hospital leadership.
- vba616 3y ago
  On the other hand, some unions (mine) sign contracts that say they will not strike and do whatever they can to prevent one. I haven't witnessed what happens if the members were determined to anyway, or read up on the circumstances of past wildcat strikes. Also, the last time I saw something about my local hospital nurses' union in the news, they were alleging that the recruiting and employment of foreign nurses violated human trafficking laws. Basically, they signed people up from another country with a huge penalty if they quit early as "compensation" for the cost of importation. To me, that strongly suggested the union was not playing a strong hand, when it comes to "unsafe policies".

Those people often have a better idea how to run "their" company (and are more interested in keeping the company alive) than the latest celebrity CEO who's then replaced with the next one after six months.

eyelidlessness 3y ago

Unions are generally predicated on representing their members, but there are countless permutations of nuance where such representation would also benefit or protect the company, at least to some extent.

Scalene2 3y ago

What makes you say that?

hgsgm 3y ago

For the people who work at the company and want to continue. They don't get paid after the company dies.

zen928 3y ago

a company is made of: _____

typon 3y ago
The board of directors, rich shareholders and the C-Suite team. Incidentally they also employ powerless servants who are interchangeable and disposable.
- vba616 3y ago
  Modern Western capitalism is pretty similar to the Soviet Union or China's. "State capitalism" and "monopoly capitalism" (the bad kind according to socialists) are about as different as Coke and Pepsi. Ultimately the "owners" in practice are people you never heard of that work for (government) pension funds and index funds. The billionaires, founders, and celebrities are mostly a sideshow. That's not a denial of wealth inequality, just as officially socialist countries have. But nearly all big companies have no owner in a top hat running the show, just faceless committees, responsible for buying everything - that company and all its competitors. Bureaucrats, apparatchiks, public or private, it's much the same. If the C-suite and directors of huge companies are generally parasites, it's because robber barons and corporate raiders are the exception today. People whose job is to invest trillions of dollars by simply buying everything for sale have the least control imaginable over company managers. The current situation reflects classic criticisms of socialism, but it won anyway. Nearly every source of information on public company stocks in the US has a figure for "institutional ownership". If a company is of any size, and is a real business, this is usually a high % - this is a reality check if what I'm writing sounds outlandish because nobody talks about anything but Twitter around here.
  - cyber_kinetist 3y ago
    From David Graeber's "Anthropology and the rise of the professional-managerial class" (The full link is https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau4.3.007 https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/10.14318/hau4...., recommend reading the whole thing): "As radical theorists like Michael Albert were already pointing out in the 1970s, this is the key flaw of traditional socialism: actual members of the working classes have no immediate hatred for capitalists because they never meet them; in most circumstances, the immediate face of oppression comes in the form of managers, supervisors, bureaucrats, and educated professionals of one sort or another—that is, precisely the people to whom a state socialist regime would give more power, rather than less (Albert and Hahnel 1979; Albert 2003). The decisive victory of capitalism in the 1980s and 1990s, ironically, has had precisely the same effect. It has led to both a continual inflation of what are often purely make-work managerial and administrative positions—“bullshit jobs”—and an endless bureaucratization of daily life, driven, in large part, by the Internet."
    - vba616 3y ago
      I disagree with every part of this quote and the whole "bullshit jobs" thesis. People think they know what a job is, without having done it. You cannot imagine even, say, stocking shelves at a retail store, without doing it. If, for the sake of argument, most jobs are bullshit, the only way that can be maintained is if people are ignorant of what other people do. But if you're so ignorant, you should consider that you can't imagine jobs you don't do, let alone do them. One job I had I suppose was bullshit, was sweeping a fairly spotless warehouse, because, I was told, a division boss was coming to inspect, and so they hired a temp to look busy. But a job is not bullshit, just because you have a flight of fancy that involves massive restructuring of an organization or society. "Writing this CRUD application should be unnecessary because everybody should've used the same database in the beginning". So...make a time machine, or get everyone using one of them to switch. Should be roughly comparable difficulty. And I'm pretty sure that "the key flaw of traditional socialism" is not that they recognized reality. I think it was Lenin who declared that there would have to be a temporary phase of socialism. It's a sick mind that thinks the "key flaw" of existent socialism was employing educated administrators and not, say, dekulakization.

beebmam 3y ago

This fundamentally misunderstands unions. Hospital unions often strike for the safety of patients, to stop unsafe policies by the hospital leadership.

vba616 3y ago
On the other hand, some unions (mine) sign contracts that say they will not strike and do whatever they can to prevent one. I haven't witnessed what happens if the members were determined to anyway, or read up on the circumstances of past wildcat strikes. Also, the last time I saw something about my local hospital nurses' union in the news, they were alleging that the recruiting and employment of foreign nurses violated human trafficking laws. Basically, they signed people up from another country with a huge penalty if they quit early as "compensation" for the cost of importation. To me, that strongly suggested the union was not playing a strong hand, when it comes to "unsafe policies".