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> Our business model is built on speed, innovation, and customer obsession. Things not generally associated with unions. Unions are there to stop employers usi

> Our business model is built on speed, innovation, and customer obsession. Things not generally associated with unions. Unions are there to stop employers using their might to exploit their workers - sorry - associates. Unions and management have a valid stake in the company. No company, no workers, no profit.

kmlx 3y ago
> Unions are there to stop employers using their might to exploit their workers in theory yes. in practice it gets murky.
- GolfPopper 3y ago
  Employers, particularly large employers, exploit there workers unless those workers unionize. That's not murky at all, it's quite well documented.
- Ensorceled 3y ago
  Do you have examples of murky? I can think of police and prison unions but those are a symptom of an entirely different set of problems and aren't really about "unions". Any others?
  - bitshiftfaced 3y ago
    Teacher's unions becoming so strong that schools cannot fire bad teachers, and in the end it's the students who pay for it.
    - UtopiaPunk 3y ago
      Sometimes unions make bad calls in individual situations, sure. But for all of the myriad of big issues that exist in public school systems, I don't see unions as being the fundamental source for system-wide issues. Here are some issues I identify: - Money. Schools just often lack the financial resources they need to provide a robust and well-rounded education. - Bureaucracy. Public schools are heavily regulated in complicated ways, from the local school board, to state education board, to federal laws. When changes need to happen, it can be hard to figure out how to change something, or to find people with enough energy and stubborness to push through the bureaucracy. I guess union contracts would be included in the web of bureaucracy, but it is my experience that teacher unions are just as often the vehicle with enough energy and experience to push for beneficial changes. - Culture war nonsense. The education of our children is an emotional and sensitive issue for people, understandbly so. Unfortunately, public schools are becoming a battle ground for people to "fight" in whatever culture war issue is being roused up at the time (discussions on gender, critical race theory, book bans, prayer in schools, sexual education, military recruiters on campus, cops/school resource officers, take your pick). These issues have to be acknowledged and addresses, and it uses up real resources to do so. In the nastiest situations, individual school staff can be targeted and harassed, and in those cases it is very good to have a union to support staff. There are specific local issues I'd like to provide as anecdotes, but it's local and newsworthy enough that my IRL identity would start to bleed into this online identity, which I try to keep pseudo-anonmyous. So I'll try to stick to generalities. While I won't argue that unions get things right 100% of the time, and I would absolutely say that my child's education benefits from teachers having strong unions.
      - friend_and_foe 3y ago
        No no, it's not about and calls, unions always do what's in the interest of their members. If that means it's bad for non members, tough. Non members can form their own interest groups.
        UtopiaPunk 3y ago
        I guess I just think teachers are, on the whole, a pretty great group of people. I feel that way about most working-class people, tbh. I think we'd be a stronger society if more working people were represented by strong unions.
        friend_and_foe 3y ago
        Well, I feel the opposite about teachers at least, I think they're mostly an awful group of people. Maybe my view is colored by my experience, or maybe by the state of education in the US. I do like most working class people, and I tend to agree with them more often than not politically.
        bitshiftfaced 3y ago
        I think many teachers are pretty great. Yet some teachers are failing our children, and we need to be able to fire them. For me, the issue is totally about public sector unions. Public schools have a government granted monopoly on education. Who is on the other side of the bargaining table with the union representatives? It's parents, or the representatives that they voted for. Yet unions themselves are political, and they lobby those representatives. Teachers, and their friends and family are voting too. The bargaining power of parents becomes diluted. This is how teacher's unions become so strong that schools can no longer give children the quality of education they otherwise would get. Check out "Waiting for Superman" for a concrete example of how this is playing out in LA and NYC.
halflings 3y ago
Debatable. Unions can also be seen as there to benefit current union workers only. Milton Friedman is as libertarian as it gets, but he makes a good case about how unions only serve current employees, and have no incentive to see the business grow and serve & hire more people if it does not lead to higher wages for employees.
- hcarvalhoalves 3y ago
  > no incentive to see the business grow and serve & hire more people if it does not lead to higher wages for employees The alternative being lower wages for the same work? This argument doesn’t make sense to me, unless he implicitly agrees companies only grow by exploiting workers.
  - hnbad 3y ago
    It makes sense if you don't assume any of this has anything to do with the workers benefiting long-term because Friedman doesn't care about that: being able to suppress wages gives a business more room to grow by redirecting surplus to the owners, who can choose to reinvest the money by hiring more workers or buying machines that increase the productivity per worker. Unions on the other hand would use their leverage to redirect some of that surplus back to workers by increasing wages, reducing the overall profit. Unions can also use their leverage to mandate a better and safer working environment and reduce workloads, which reduces the short-term productivity whereas a business owner could otherwise weigh the benefits of these measures reducing churn (i.e. people being too exhausted/injured/maimed/burnt out to continue doing their job and having to be replaced) against the overall increase in productivity. "Growth" means increasing profits. Profit means surplus from income that is not paid out to workers (wages, bonuses, etc) or spent on sustaining the business itself (operating costs, rentals, service contracts, etc). Payroll can easily be one of the biggest cost factors and productivity one of the biggest factors to income, so being able to squeeze both of these liberally makes it much easier to grow a company. This is completely tangential to the interests of the workers.
- hnbad 3y ago
  I don't know how Milton Friedman being extremely libertarian is a reason his criticism of unions should be taken more seriously. Libertarians (in the modern political sense, i.e. right libertarians) are generally anti-union because they want free enterprise and unions interfere with the freedom of business/capital owners. But you're right to an extent: unions are a stop gap. The better option would be collectivization, turning the business into a cooperative so all workers have a stake in the success of the company and unlike shareholders have a strong interest in its sustainability, which may in some cases involve lowering wages (to weather a loss of income during a market downturn or to allow more room for investments, not to increase profits in quarterly reports).
runeks 3y ago
Unions are there to take care of the interests of their members. This is undeniably good for their members, but I'd like to remind you that it's not always good for outsiders. For example, the union of California's prison guards (California Correctional Peace Officers Association) have helped lobby for the "three strikes" rule to get more people in prison: https://academic.oup.com/book/11009/chapter-abstract/159336778?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false https://academic.oup.com/book/11009/chapter-abstract/1593367...
- hnbad 3y ago
  Arguably prisons should not be privatized in the first place. There are problems associated with prison and police unions in general but this specific problem is largely a result of prison guards having a direct incentive to want more people in prison.
  - gadders 3y ago
    They'd still want that in public-sector prisons. They still need prisoners to stay employed.
  - bitshiftfaced 3y ago
    From the union's perspective, isn't it good to have more prisoners whether or not the prison is privatized?
  - unmole 3y ago
    > Arguably prisons should not be privatized in the first place. Private prisons house ~8% of all prisoners in the US.
  - philwelch 3y ago
    People who work for the government still, for some idiotic reason, are allowed to form unions.
- gadders 3y ago
  There is also a case to be made regarding the behaviour of teaching unions prioritising their members over the children they teach.

kmlx 3y ago

> Unions are there to stop employers using their might to exploit their workers in theory yes. in practice it gets murky.

GolfPopper 3y ago
Employers, particularly large employers, exploit there workers unless those workers unionize. That's not murky at all, it's quite well documented.
Ensorceled 3y ago
Do you have examples of murky? I can think of police and prison unions but those are a symptom of an entirely different set of problems and aren't really about "unions". Any others?
- bitshiftfaced 3y ago
  Teacher's unions becoming so strong that schools cannot fire bad teachers, and in the end it's the students who pay for it.
  - UtopiaPunk 3y ago
    Sometimes unions make bad calls in individual situations, sure. But for all of the myriad of big issues that exist in public school systems, I don't see unions as being the fundamental source for system-wide issues. Here are some issues I identify: - Money. Schools just often lack the financial resources they need to provide a robust and well-rounded education. - Bureaucracy. Public schools are heavily regulated in complicated ways, from the local school board, to state education board, to federal laws. When changes need to happen, it can be hard to figure out how to change something, or to find people with enough energy and stubborness to push through the bureaucracy. I guess union contracts would be included in the web of bureaucracy, but it is my experience that teacher unions are just as often the vehicle with enough energy and experience to push for beneficial changes. - Culture war nonsense. The education of our children is an emotional and sensitive issue for people, understandbly so. Unfortunately, public schools are becoming a battle ground for people to "fight" in whatever culture war issue is being roused up at the time (discussions on gender, critical race theory, book bans, prayer in schools, sexual education, military recruiters on campus, cops/school resource officers, take your pick). These issues have to be acknowledged and addresses, and it uses up real resources to do so. In the nastiest situations, individual school staff can be targeted and harassed, and in those cases it is very good to have a union to support staff. There are specific local issues I'd like to provide as anecdotes, but it's local and newsworthy enough that my IRL identity would start to bleed into this online identity, which I try to keep pseudo-anonmyous. So I'll try to stick to generalities. While I won't argue that unions get things right 100% of the time, and I would absolutely say that my child's education benefits from teachers having strong unions.
    - friend_and_foe 3y ago
      No no, it's not about and calls, unions always do what's in the interest of their members. If that means it's bad for non members, tough. Non members can form their own interest groups.
      - UtopiaPunk 3y ago
        I guess I just think teachers are, on the whole, a pretty great group of people. I feel that way about most working-class people, tbh. I think we'd be a stronger society if more working people were represented by strong unions.
        friend_and_foe 3y ago
        Well, I feel the opposite about teachers at least, I think they're mostly an awful group of people. Maybe my view is colored by my experience, or maybe by the state of education in the US. I do like most working class people, and I tend to agree with them more often than not politically.
        bitshiftfaced 3y ago
        I think many teachers are pretty great. Yet some teachers are failing our children, and we need to be able to fire them. For me, the issue is totally about public sector unions. Public schools have a government granted monopoly on education. Who is on the other side of the bargaining table with the union representatives? It's parents, or the representatives that they voted for. Yet unions themselves are political, and they lobby those representatives. Teachers, and their friends and family are voting too. The bargaining power of parents becomes diluted. This is how teacher's unions become so strong that schools can no longer give children the quality of education they otherwise would get. Check out "Waiting for Superman" for a concrete example of how this is playing out in LA and NYC.

halflings 3y ago

Debatable. Unions can also be seen as there to benefit current union workers only. Milton Friedman is as libertarian as it gets, but he makes a good case about how unions only serve current employees, and have no incentive to see the business grow and serve & hire more people if it does not lead to higher wages for employees.

hcarvalhoalves 3y ago
> no incentive to see the business grow and serve & hire more people if it does not lead to higher wages for employees The alternative being lower wages for the same work? This argument doesn’t make sense to me, unless he implicitly agrees companies only grow by exploiting workers.
- hnbad 3y ago
  It makes sense if you don't assume any of this has anything to do with the workers benefiting long-term because Friedman doesn't care about that: being able to suppress wages gives a business more room to grow by redirecting surplus to the owners, who can choose to reinvest the money by hiring more workers or buying machines that increase the productivity per worker. Unions on the other hand would use their leverage to redirect some of that surplus back to workers by increasing wages, reducing the overall profit. Unions can also use their leverage to mandate a better and safer working environment and reduce workloads, which reduces the short-term productivity whereas a business owner could otherwise weigh the benefits of these measures reducing churn (i.e. people being too exhausted/injured/maimed/burnt out to continue doing their job and having to be replaced) against the overall increase in productivity. "Growth" means increasing profits. Profit means surplus from income that is not paid out to workers (wages, bonuses, etc) or spent on sustaining the business itself (operating costs, rentals, service contracts, etc). Payroll can easily be one of the biggest cost factors and productivity one of the biggest factors to income, so being able to squeeze both of these liberally makes it much easier to grow a company. This is completely tangential to the interests of the workers.
hnbad 3y ago
I don't know how Milton Friedman being extremely libertarian is a reason his criticism of unions should be taken more seriously. Libertarians (in the modern political sense, i.e. right libertarians) are generally anti-union because they want free enterprise and unions interfere with the freedom of business/capital owners. But you're right to an extent: unions are a stop gap. The better option would be collectivization, turning the business into a cooperative so all workers have a stake in the success of the company and unlike shareholders have a strong interest in its sustainability, which may in some cases involve lowering wages (to weather a loss of income during a market downturn or to allow more room for investments, not to increase profits in quarterly reports).

runeks 3y ago

Unions are there to take care of the interests of their members. This is undeniably good for their members, but I'd like to remind you that it's not always good for outsiders. For example, the union of California's prison guards (California Correctional Peace Officers Association) have helped lobby for the "three strikes" rule to get more people in prison: https://academic.oup.com/book/11009/chapter-abstract/159336778?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false https://academic.oup.com/book/11009/chapter-abstract/1593367...

hnbad 3y ago
Arguably prisons should not be privatized in the first place. There are problems associated with prison and police unions in general but this specific problem is largely a result of prison guards having a direct incentive to want more people in prison.
- gadders 3y ago
  They'd still want that in public-sector prisons. They still need prisoners to stay employed.
- bitshiftfaced 3y ago
  From the union's perspective, isn't it good to have more prisoners whether or not the prison is privatized?
- unmole 3y ago
  > Arguably prisons should not be privatized in the first place. Private prisons house ~8% of all prisoners in the US.
- philwelch 3y ago
  People who work for the government still, for some idiotic reason, are allowed to form unions.
gadders 3y ago
There is also a case to be made regarding the behaviour of teaching unions prioritising their members over the children they teach.