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My first job was at a tech company with a union. Boeing. It was ridiculously bad. I've never worked with less talented people. One of my coworkers did nothing,

• JohnFen 3y ago
  I've worked at a few non-union shops that were the same way. I don't think the existence of a union is a large factor in that regard. I think the size of the company is.
• BazookaMusic 3y ago
  Maybe the issue was with company being a dinosaur instead of it having a union?
• Atrine 3y ago
  Was it the union that was the problem or was it that you were working for a Dinosaur that hadn't been required to operate in today's high-tech world? Experience has shown that AT&T and Disney are the same sort of thing when working in tech, yet they don't have unions. But what they do all have in common - they are old companies that formed well before the internet.
  • hondo77 3y ago
    Disney is a very big company. Maybe there are parts of it that our dinosaur-like but there are other parts that are doing the sharpening of the cutting edge. They'll fall behind every so often but then they catch back up and have been known to pass ahead.
• mistrial9 3y ago
  you are associating a top-ten US Defense contractor with "being in a tech union"
• monero-xmr 3y ago
  People love simple answers to complex problems. Unions are such an example. The core idea behind a union makes sense - it's legalised extortion. Unions have codified in the law the ability for everyone in the union to hold the owner of property at ransom until they meet the union's demands. The only counterweight is the threat of bankruptcy, which ruins everything for everyone, but because the ideology of labor is very anti-business, they don't really care about that anyway. Very few intelligent, educated people are part of unions, so they have no idea how they actually work. As I am against extortion, I am against unions.
  • ink_13 3y ago
    Based on this comment I am not convinced you know how unions work, either.
  • JohnFen 3y ago
    > The core idea behind a union makes sense - it's legalised extortion. How is it extortion, legal or otherwise?
    • catlover76 3y ago
      I think the notion of "we are all going to quit and/or refuse to work if employer doesn't do (or does do) x" is arguably pretty extortiony. One could also argue it's just makes the market hyper-efficient by signalling the reaction of the supply of labor to a change in the asking price very quickly and directly. I genuinely don't know why employers do not hire non-union employees in such circumstances; I think most of us assume they "can't", but would like to hear from someone who actually knows.
      • JohnFen 3y ago
        It's no more extortiony than how employers treat their employees. Collective bargaining is pretty much the only tool workers have to even begin to correct the power differential between employer and employee. Ideally, it allows employees and employers to negotiate on more equal terms than is otherwise possible.
• wahnfrieden 3y ago
  You were at Boeing
• WalterBright 3y ago
  When I was at Boeing, there was a story that a worker slugged his supervisor. The worker was fired, the union got him reinstated. Boeing is a big company with a lot of inefficiency, but there clearly was inefficiency due to union rules. For one thing, layoffs went by seniority, not merit.
• arecurrence 3y ago
  Been in a similar environment as an intern. Can concur was worst professional experience of my life. Very glad I experienced this early on to avoid whenever possible for the rest of my days. Staff couldn't even be disciplined without going through the union rep and everything was based on seniority... with no other reason. That business no longer exists... its competitors that were non-unionized are still thriving.