14 ms·

I don’t understand how so many HNers are anti-union and anti-collective bargaining. The fact that corporations and billionaires are so anti-union and engage in

I don’t understand how so many HNers are anti-union and anti-collective bargaining. The fact that corporations and billionaires are so anti-union and engage in regular conduct like this demonstrates that unions are pro-worker and ideal for the balance needed in the US and across the globe. Balance is key between workers and owners. Without it we are left with growing wealth inequality such as… - ridiculous housing prices - stagnant wages - poor public school education - no retirement benefits - expensive public universities

tivert 2y ago
> I don’t understand how so many HNers are anti-union and anti-collective bargaining. You underestimate the appeal of libertarian propaganda to software engineers. It's got the oversimple but neat models we can't resist, plus our relatively advantaged economic position allows allows us to easily confuse ourselves for capitalists.
ein0p 2y ago
Public school education is poor in part because it’s darn near impossible to fire bad teachers though. And I don’t see how unions would improve housing affordability. I’m not against unions per se, particularly for positions which are not as lavishly compensated as a typical white collar FAANG employee. I’m merely pointing out that you need to pick better examples. Otherwise you just undermine your own argument.
- walthamstow 2y ago
  Neither of you are giving examples, only conjecture. Bad teachers are a noteworthy cause of poor schools. House prices wouldn't be so high if we had unions. Ok, prove it. Or at least give me some reasoning to go off.
  - ein0p 2y ago
    What is the mechanism under which houses would be more affordable if employees had more money thanks to the unions? Real estate (and by extension rents) will take up any available slack on income.
    - pera 2y ago
      I think gp was referring to tenants/renters unions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenants_union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenants_union They are quite common in the UK.
    - komali2 2y ago
      > Real estate (and by extension rents) will take up any available slack on income. Only if allowed to do so - but yes, landlord are leeches who do nothing and in return soak up every penny of income they can from their tenants. However, isn't the typical market-capitalist argument to this, "if they could be making more money now, they would?" Don't "markets" set the price of real estate? Markets don't, but it's really funny to me when people argue against good things, such as increasing minimum wage, with absurdities, like somehow a minimum wage increase is simply a subsidy for landlords.
    - dragonwriter 2y ago
      > What is the mechanism under which houses would be more affordable if employees had more money thanks to the unions? Employees have more money thanks to unions -> those deriving income from capital have less money -> narrower distribution of wealth -> goods (including housing) which both classes pursue are more affordable to the working class. QED.
    - diffeomorphism 2y ago
      Housing prices rose much, much faster than inflation or rises in wages. So they are obviously not driven by income. Try again.
      - randomdata 2y ago
        If people normally paid cash for houses, that might be an interesting point. But most people rent money to buy a house (even while ironically trumpeting "renting is throwing money away"). Like the previous commenter pointed out, real estate-related rents will expand to take up any available slack in income. Now, save recently, the cost to rent money for real estate was in steady decline. That means even a constant income could afford to rent an increasing amount of money. As a result, the price of housing was able to rise disproportionally to income, but proportionally to rent.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    > Bad teachers are a noteworthy cause of poor schools You have that completely backward. Virtually all bad teachers start out hopeful and excited to teach kids, that's why they become teachers in the first place. They are then worn and beaten down by bad schools. Bad schools are mostly caused by bad students, who are disrespectful, disruptive, get into fights, etc. Bad students are mostly caused by bad parenting. If they aren't raised to respect adults, education, authority and their peers, then there is little that teachers can do about it. The reason "bad schools" have trouble keeping enough teachers despite high levels of state and federal funding is because the students burn through the teachers quickly. The teachers who hang on for a long time at those schools are often ones that develop coping strategies like not giving a shit, finding pleasure in yelling at kids, etc.
    - walthamstow 2y ago
      Read the thread in its entirety please, you are quoting me quoting someone else.
  - pbmonster 2y ago
    > House prices wouldn't be so high if we had unions. In Switzerland, all the large unions (railroad workers, public service workers, ect.) have so much money and so much access to cheap credit, they can (and frequently did in the past) start housing co-ops for their members. This results in large developments in the middle of the most expensive cities, where only union members have a chance to rent. And even those have year-long waiting list on every new development. Since the housing co-op is non-profit and pays rock bottom interest rates on its loans, rent is frequently around half the fair market rate.
    - lupusreal 2y ago
      Where did those unions get so much money from?
      - pbmonster 2y ago
        Dues, I imagine. If you don't strike very often, the war chest keeps filling... That war chest, in combination with it being unthinkable that a big union goes bankrupt, and the fact that they are building real estate, pretty much means they can borrow more money dirt cheap.
        lupusreal 2y ago
        I guess it just seems strange to me for a union to be so rich, yet their members can't afford to live in regular housing. I grew up in a factory town in America with a unionized workforce and despite the things people say about American unions, the workers there all did very well. At least until the plant was sold to private equity about 10 years ago... I hear bad things now... but for several generations the union succeeded in getting the workers paid enough to be regular members of the community, not some sort of second class living in company/union housing.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 2y ago
- raverbashing 2y ago
  It would be better if they could fire the bad students as well
  - ein0p 2y ago
    Until recently they could. There were programs for gifted kids. But then DEI ruined that as well.
- komali2 2y ago
  > impossible to fire bad teachers though. It's impossible to fire bad teachers (it really isn't, btw, at least not in Texas) because there are no teachers because teachers wages are pathologically low because every education department in the country is underfunded.
  - lostlogin 2y ago
    That’s causing the same problem then. If there are no teachers to hire, you’re less likely to fire
  - nox101 2y ago
    IIUC the USA spend near the top per student of all countries. Why is it other countries get better results with less money? https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-expenditures-by-country https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
    - geraldwhen 2y ago
      White and Asian students, if stratified separately, rank in the top 10 academically world wide. Everyone else brings down the average, and it has nothing to do with teachers or how good they are. Teachers in my county are assigned to schools randomly, and yet some schools score 9/10 and others score literally 1/10 and 2/10 on great schools for academic performance. Funding between schools is the same. Teachers assigned are from the same pool. It’s not the money. It’s not the teachers. Anyone who talks about “education in the USA” without addressing the giant disparity in academic performance that begins in kindergarten for black and Hispanic students is ignoring the single largest factor on student outcomes.
      - MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
        Why do black and hispanic students score worse?
        geraldwhen 2y ago
- dragonwriter 2y ago
  > Public school education is poor in part because it’s darn near impossible to fire bad teachers though. The funny thing is that public employment (in the US) is where unions have the least impact on firing difficulty, because employees have a property interest in their employment which means government — even as their employer — cannot deprive them of it without due process under the 5th (for the federal) or 14th (for states and subdivisions) amendments even if they are not unionized. Also, the line you push about teachers is pushed by privatizers (and sometimes administrators as an excuse for their own failures), often supported by one or two anecdotes, so often as to have become an article of faith ib sone circles, but there is no systematic evidence for it.
- refurb 2y ago
  I’m not anti-union, but I’m not pro-union either. I was in a union, Teamsters in fact. It protected crappy workers, prevented any change to work processes that might save time and put a low ceiling on high performing workers. Not all unions are like that, but they certainly aren’t panaceas to all workers ills (in fact, sometimes they are the cause of new ones).
- germinalphrase 2y ago
  FWIW, my decade as a high school English teacher indicates otherwise. People weren’t let go in the middle of a semester, but they would absolutely be let go without fuss during the summer break. I never experienced anything like the about “rubber rooms” in NYC (they may exist in NYC, IDK - but the suggestion that they are “business as usual” in school districts across the country is a fantastical lie). If admin wanted a teacher gone, they simply put them on the education version of a PIP, collected evidence of poor performance, and let that person go at a non-disruptive time.
cjk2 2y ago
I'm anti-union AND pro labour regulation. Your government should be targeting wealth inequality with legislation and public services on all of these issues. The union tends to become another opaque organisation with a power hierarchy of its own and layers of internal politics and power struggles. The unions rarely if ever push for legislation change either because it would risk their existence. The corporations should live in fear of the government, not an independent union. Also my father was a union member for many years but was ousted after suggesting that full time management were wasting members' money on expenses. This turned into a 2 year long shit show where he was pretty much forced out of the job he had for being a non union scab. As much as being told he was a lesser human.
- therouwboat 2y ago
  "The corporations should live in fear of the government, not an independent union." I think that membership funded union would be much likely to protect worker rights than tax funded government.
  - cjk2 2y ago
    But the union has little to no legislative power, only relying on lobbying and private legal cases, at which point you end up competing with non-union entities who have a lot more money.
    - h4ckerle 2y ago
      A general strike has a lot of power. Which is why they are banned in many countries.
    - Stranger43 2y ago
      It's not not always been the case that the unions were the weaker non-state actor, in fact they used to rival political parties and business cartels in their ablity to lobby/negotiate. And in some countries that power havent completely faded away.
- pmontra 2y ago
flandish 2y ago
It’s because HN folks seem to consider themselves above working-class or soon to be above. They’re just temporarily stuck before they find their big ceo level breaks. They often demonstrate ideals that go counter to their own interests while simping for daddy ceo’s boot and money.
- arnavpraneet 2y ago
  > They often demonstrate ideals that go counter to their own interests This for real. The cognitive dissonance is giving me more cognitive dissonance. I highly doubt that even though this may be a VC owned and operated site, somehow everyone on the site is a vc or something similar?
  - flandish 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - matchbok 2y ago
      Oh and one virtue singaling guy named flandish who needs to pass Econ 101 before commenting again.
      - flandish 2y ago
        [flagged]
        matchbok 2y ago
        Dude you are not convincing anyone with your childish comments. People like you don't last long here, so adios. (reported)
        flandish 2y ago
        [flagged]
cbsmith 2y ago
> The fact that corporations and billionaires are so anti-union and engage in regular conduct like this demonstrates that unions are pro-worker and ideal for the balance needed in the US and across the globe. I think there are a lot of things that demonstrate that unions are pro-worker and ideal for the balance needed in the US and across the globe, but that isn't one of them. Corporations & billionaires are so anti-union because they perceive unions as reducing their profits, which is not necessarily the same thing as them being pro-worker or ideal. You'll find that, outside of the defense industry, corporations & billionaires generally don't like wars, for exactly the same reason; that doesn't really suggest anything good about wars.
wickedsickeune 2y ago
> The fact that corporations and billionaires are so anti-union and engage in regular conduct like this demonstrates that unions are pro-worker and ideal for the balance needed in the US and across the globe. No, that's incorrect. The corporations could also be anti-nuclear war, this would not make it good for workers. A better example is to look at countries with functional unions and functional capitalism, like the Netherlands, Denmark and others. The quality of life won by union conflicts with capital owners is a measurable fact. Unions can be implemented and be useless for the workers (an example for the most part is Greece), or maybe too demanding like France. It's up to the participants of the union to shape it as a net contributor to society. The point is that each individual member has a significant say in how a union operates, meanwhile in corporations, even middle management can be completely powerless.
jajko 2y ago
You are trying to blame literally every public policy failure in US on unions, that's simply incorrect and they stem from many other sources. I know its convenient in some populist fashion, but unless you understand the root cause of each of those, any sort of fix has no chance of arriving. Unions make corporations extremely sluggish when they need to react quickly to sudden market shocks or changes of direction of companies, be it positive or negative (yes, includes firing people for which there is suddenly no work anymore). There are corporations that have them heavily and they are not the top of the cream when it comes to progress, agility nor salary pay. The money is the key issue here - people want extra safety/bargaining net as long as their ultra massive FAANG-like salaries are not touched. How many would agree with say 20% cut while working exactly the same, but being unionized? That's maybe how much that additional burden is to the owners/managers. I suspect not that many but maybe I an wrong.
- badgersnake 2y ago
  It’s far easier to tell people that if we just fix this one thing then everything will be fine than try to deal with the complexity of the world and actually make things better. In the UK it’s been the EU, which we left so they moved on to immigrants. That was too hard to fix so they’ve recently decided to pick on the sick.
badgersnake 2y ago
It’s a forum run by a VC firm.
ExoticPearTree 2y ago
> I don’t understand how so many HNers are anti-union and anti-collective bargaining. I had the displeasure of working with union labor in the US, they would come in at 7 (who does that) and leave at 4 on the dot. Then worked with non-union labor: cheaper, worked as much as possible per day, got the job done faster. Money-wise it was less than union labor. Now tell me how is good for me, as a company that needs stuff done, to use union workers?
- komali2 2y ago
  > how is good for me, as a company that needs stuff done, to use union workers? For the company, it's very good, because unionization, or better yet, being a co-op, means your company will be more likely to be profitable in the long term. But you are correct that in these situations, your employees are more difficult to exploit for longer hours, harsher conditions, and worse pay. So yes, if you're trying to be a major shareholder-owner, unions may hurt your individual bottom line, even if they benefit the corporation as a whole.
  - ExoticPearTree 2y ago
    I think you should read my initial comment again. And then the next one, answering to an angry person just like you: It is about working as much as it is needed to get work done, not about not paying. And there is nothing wrong in getting the best possible price on a contract.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- ok_dad 2y ago
  > Now tell me how is good for me, as a company that needs stuff done, to use union workers? Because in a race to the bottom, even the winner ends up in shit. The reason America is turning to crap now is because everyone is just out for themselves, and that's mostly folks like you who just want to get stuff done cheaply. Unions may not be the answer for your company, but please at least treat your workers like they matter, and pay them better than you think you should, because they are your company, they are America, and the rampant evisceration of the middle/working/blue collar class by the greedy corpos will destroy us all before anything else. I truly don't understand how businesspeople cannot understand that humans are your most important resource. You run roughshod over them for a bit more profit. It's perplexing!
mytailorisrich 2y ago
I suspect most people here are highly educated in sought-after, high-paying jobs. There is a valid point that the net benefits of unions in such cases are low. Workers unions were created by and for factory workers, miners, etc. People who had zero leverage individually. In addition, we might be a more individualistic and competive crowd who think they are better than average and thus better off bargaining for themselves.
- komali2 2y ago
  > People who had zero leverage individually. This is interesting to say considering the record amounts of layoffs we've had across the tech sector of these "high leverage individuals" in the thousands the last few quarters.
  - mytailorisrich 2y ago
    Layoffs are not a good example when discussing highly paid jobs with plenty of perks. In a historical perspective I really mean being squeezed to the limit with no possibility of complaining or of "just moving somewhere else".
thequux 2y ago
I think unions are great! I'm even a member of one, and have been known to encourage everybody else around me to unionize. Notably, though, I love in Belgium. The American implementation of unions, on the other hand, is not great. While in the US, I've run into rules like not being allowed to plug something in because only union electricians are allowed to do that, and that's just one example among many. Police unions and teacher's unions are mostly known for making bad employees unfirable outside of egregious circumstances, and teacher's unions in particular don't seem to have improved pay or working conditions much. I have no idea where the difference comes from, but for people who have only seen and interacted with the American system, I don't blame them for not liking unions
- actionfromafar 2y ago
  The differences were made law with the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. I.e. sympathy strikes are illegal in the US, so the only real power left to unions is jealously guarding the petty pearls available to them.
- easyThrowaway 2y ago
  Yep, they feel like different institutions sharing some similar objectives and the same name. In the US they had a very institutional, "role-based" org feel rather than being a work welfare and wellbeing observer I've experienced in most of Europe. I can only assume this is due to the more adversarial relationship between workers and employers?
- justin66 2y ago
  > teacher's unions in particular don't seem to have improved pay or working conditions much. The difference in pay between unionized and nonunionized teachers is big enough that I wonder where you got such an idea.
- vharuck 2y ago
  >While in the US, I've run into rules like not being allowed to plug something in because only union electricians are allowed to do that, and that's just one example among many. I obviously don't know anything about the particular union you're talking about. But rules like this are often written to close a loophole. For example, the union negotiates higher wages for their electricians. After the deal is signed, the company hires more office secretaries, reassigns to them most tasks that used to be done by electricians, and fires a bunch of electricians because there's "not enough work."
dragonwriter 2y ago
> I don’t understand how so many HNers are anti-union and anti-collective bargaining. HN is full of the aspirational haut bourgeois, of course they want the proletariat maximally exploitable.
- arnavpraneet 2y ago
  oh yes this basically. Very annoying, especially people finding the flaws with collective bargaining. The individualistic rhetoric is mind-numbing.
strken 2y ago
Are so many of them anti-union? I don't see much evidence that they're any more against unions than the general population. It's surprising to me that nobody has pointed out this article has far fewer anti-union than pro-union comments.
resource_waste 2y ago
Its Apple. They can't have cognitive dissonance about the company they fanboy over. They come up with rationale because its part of their identity. Consider how Tesla looks like Elon Musk and has a bad reputation. We need to defend Apple or Apple will start to look cheap like Elon Musk. (That or its astroturfing, which we aren't allowed to talk about here, but isnt exactly unheard of in unionbusting, time to get deleted for talking about astrotrufing and history)
AmericanChopper 2y ago
Because unions are a leveling mechanism, so if you consider yourself an above average, or even average performer there’s a good chance a union is going to leave you worse off. Why would you want to submit your labor to a collective agreement if you think you can do better or at least equal to the rest of the collective? The only thing a union is guaranteed to be is pro-union, not pro-employee and certainly not pro-you-in-particular. The only time a union definitely makes sense to an existing workforce is if they can suppress labor supply by implementing onerous barriers to entry into the profession, like lawyers, doctors and pilots have. They can be a force of good for enforcing labor laws. But law enforcement is certainly not a job that should be left to private organisations, that really should be the role of the government. But even then, if you’re earning an SV salary, you absolutely don’t need a union’s help to settle your civil disputes.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
whywhywhywhy 2y ago
> I don’t understand how so many HNers are anti-union and anti-collective bargaining. If you're talented and skilled then collective bargaining hurts your position because now every low rung and non-productive is along for the ride with your bargaining. > Balance is key between workers and owners. Without it we are left with growing wealth inequality such as… Inequality is inevitable and its only going to get a lot lot worse, in 20 years time you'll dream for house prices as they are today. The only way out is in your own hands and collective bargaining will just mean existing in a slightly better low with the people a fraction of your skills and drive, any small union win will be inflated to nothing in single digit years but if you bargain on your own there is no real limit if you can back up what you're asking for.
Aunche 2y ago
The purpose of a union is to serve those inside the union. They don't care if the consumer has to pay for higher cost, the unionized company stagnates, or if all new jobs in that company get shipped overseas. Naturally, this means that people who aren't members of a union already have a negative opinion of unions. > - ridiculous housing prices > - stagnant wages > - poor public school education > - no retirement benefits > - expensive public universities Outside of "no retirement benefits," none of these have anything to do with unions, and HN-goers probably would prefer self-funded retire anyways so they can FIRE. Notably, ridiculous housing prices are mostly the result of grassroots NIMBYs, and capital tends to be on the side of build whatever you want. However, when they're operating in a NIMBY environment, they adapt and buy up the existing supply.
arnavpraneet 2y ago
From what I gather of HN, although its possible I may be wrong, HN's demographics make union member's rare on the site. Tech companies have clearly been winning for a while against unions and the rhetoric reflects that.

tivert 2y ago

> I don’t understand how so many HNers are anti-union and anti-collective bargaining. You underestimate the appeal of libertarian propaganda to software engineers. It's got the oversimple but neat models we can't resist, plus our relatively advantaged economic position allows allows us to easily confuse ourselves for capitalists.

ein0p 2y ago

Public school education is poor in part because it’s darn near impossible to fire bad teachers though. And I don’t see how unions would improve housing affordability. I’m not against unions per se, particularly for positions which are not as lavishly compensated as a typical white collar FAANG employee. I’m merely pointing out that you need to pick better examples. Otherwise you just undermine your own argument.

walthamstow 2y ago
Neither of you are giving examples, only conjecture. Bad teachers are a noteworthy cause of poor schools. House prices wouldn't be so high if we had unions. Ok, prove it. Or at least give me some reasoning to go off.
- ein0p 2y ago
  What is the mechanism under which houses would be more affordable if employees had more money thanks to the unions? Real estate (and by extension rents) will take up any available slack on income.
  - pera 2y ago
    I think gp was referring to tenants/renters unions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenants_union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenants_union They are quite common in the UK.
  - komali2 2y ago
    > Real estate (and by extension rents) will take up any available slack on income. Only if allowed to do so - but yes, landlord are leeches who do nothing and in return soak up every penny of income they can from their tenants. However, isn't the typical market-capitalist argument to this, "if they could be making more money now, they would?" Don't "markets" set the price of real estate? Markets don't, but it's really funny to me when people argue against good things, such as increasing minimum wage, with absurdities, like somehow a minimum wage increase is simply a subsidy for landlords.
  - dragonwriter 2y ago
    > What is the mechanism under which houses would be more affordable if employees had more money thanks to the unions? Employees have more money thanks to unions -> those deriving income from capital have less money -> narrower distribution of wealth -> goods (including housing) which both classes pursue are more affordable to the working class. QED.
  - diffeomorphism 2y ago
    Housing prices rose much, much faster than inflation or rises in wages. So they are obviously not driven by income. Try again.
    - randomdata 2y ago
      If people normally paid cash for houses, that might be an interesting point. But most people rent money to buy a house (even while ironically trumpeting "renting is throwing money away"). Like the previous commenter pointed out, real estate-related rents will expand to take up any available slack in income. Now, save recently, the cost to rent money for real estate was in steady decline. That means even a constant income could afford to rent an increasing amount of money. As a result, the price of housing was able to rise disproportionally to income, but proportionally to rent.
- lupusreal 2y ago
  > Bad teachers are a noteworthy cause of poor schools You have that completely backward. Virtually all bad teachers start out hopeful and excited to teach kids, that's why they become teachers in the first place. They are then worn and beaten down by bad schools. Bad schools are mostly caused by bad students, who are disrespectful, disruptive, get into fights, etc. Bad students are mostly caused by bad parenting. If they aren't raised to respect adults, education, authority and their peers, then there is little that teachers can do about it. The reason "bad schools" have trouble keeping enough teachers despite high levels of state and federal funding is because the students burn through the teachers quickly. The teachers who hang on for a long time at those schools are often ones that develop coping strategies like not giving a shit, finding pleasure in yelling at kids, etc.
  - walthamstow 2y ago
    Read the thread in its entirety please, you are quoting me quoting someone else.
- pbmonster 2y ago
  > House prices wouldn't be so high if we had unions. In Switzerland, all the large unions (railroad workers, public service workers, ect.) have so much money and so much access to cheap credit, they can (and frequently did in the past) start housing co-ops for their members. This results in large developments in the middle of the most expensive cities, where only union members have a chance to rent. And even those have year-long waiting list on every new development. Since the housing co-op is non-profit and pays rock bottom interest rates on its loans, rent is frequently around half the fair market rate.
  - lupusreal 2y ago
    Where did those unions get so much money from?
    - pbmonster 2y ago
      Dues, I imagine. If you don't strike very often, the war chest keeps filling... That war chest, in combination with it being unthinkable that a big union goes bankrupt, and the fact that they are building real estate, pretty much means they can borrow more money dirt cheap.
      - lupusreal 2y ago
        I guess it just seems strange to me for a union to be so rich, yet their members can't afford to live in regular housing. I grew up in a factory town in America with a unionized workforce and despite the things people say about American unions, the workers there all did very well. At least until the plant was sold to private equity about 10 years ago... I hear bad things now... but for several generations the union succeeded in getting the workers paid enough to be regular members of the community, not some sort of second class living in company/union housing.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 2y ago
raverbashing 2y ago
It would be better if they could fire the bad students as well
- ein0p 2y ago
  Until recently they could. There were programs for gifted kids. But then DEI ruined that as well.
komali2 2y ago
> impossible to fire bad teachers though. It's impossible to fire bad teachers (it really isn't, btw, at least not in Texas) because there are no teachers because teachers wages are pathologically low because every education department in the country is underfunded.
- lostlogin 2y ago
  That’s causing the same problem then. If there are no teachers to hire, you’re less likely to fire
- nox101 2y ago
  IIUC the USA spend near the top per student of all countries. Why is it other countries get better results with less money? https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-expenditures-by-country https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
  - geraldwhen 2y ago
    White and Asian students, if stratified separately, rank in the top 10 academically world wide. Everyone else brings down the average, and it has nothing to do with teachers or how good they are. Teachers in my county are assigned to schools randomly, and yet some schools score 9/10 and others score literally 1/10 and 2/10 on great schools for academic performance. Funding between schools is the same. Teachers assigned are from the same pool. It’s not the money. It’s not the teachers. Anyone who talks about “education in the USA” without addressing the giant disparity in academic performance that begins in kindergarten for black and Hispanic students is ignoring the single largest factor on student outcomes.
    - MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
      Why do black and hispanic students score worse?
      - geraldwhen 2y ago
dragonwriter 2y ago
> Public school education is poor in part because it’s darn near impossible to fire bad teachers though. The funny thing is that public employment (in the US) is where unions have the least impact on firing difficulty, because employees have a property interest in their employment which means government — even as their employer — cannot deprive them of it without due process under the 5th (for the federal) or 14th (for states and subdivisions) amendments even if they are not unionized. Also, the line you push about teachers is pushed by privatizers (and sometimes administrators as an excuse for their own failures), often supported by one or two anecdotes, so often as to have become an article of faith ib sone circles, but there is no systematic evidence for it.
refurb 2y ago
I’m not anti-union, but I’m not pro-union either. I was in a union, Teamsters in fact. It protected crappy workers, prevented any change to work processes that might save time and put a low ceiling on high performing workers. Not all unions are like that, but they certainly aren’t panaceas to all workers ills (in fact, sometimes they are the cause of new ones).
germinalphrase 2y ago
FWIW, my decade as a high school English teacher indicates otherwise. People weren’t let go in the middle of a semester, but they would absolutely be let go without fuss during the summer break. I never experienced anything like the about “rubber rooms” in NYC (they may exist in NYC, IDK - but the suggestion that they are “business as usual” in school districts across the country is a fantastical lie). If admin wanted a teacher gone, they simply put them on the education version of a PIP, collected evidence of poor performance, and let that person go at a non-disruptive time.

cjk2 2y ago

I'm anti-union AND pro labour regulation. Your government should be targeting wealth inequality with legislation and public services on all of these issues. The union tends to become another opaque organisation with a power hierarchy of its own and layers of internal politics and power struggles. The unions rarely if ever push for legislation change either because it would risk their existence. The corporations should live in fear of the government, not an independent union. Also my father was a union member for many years but was ousted after suggesting that full time management were wasting members' money on expenses. This turned into a 2 year long shit show where he was pretty much forced out of the job he had for being a non union scab. As much as being told he was a lesser human.

therouwboat 2y ago
"The corporations should live in fear of the government, not an independent union." I think that membership funded union would be much likely to protect worker rights than tax funded government.
- cjk2 2y ago
  But the union has little to no legislative power, only relying on lobbying and private legal cases, at which point you end up competing with non-union entities who have a lot more money.
  - h4ckerle 2y ago
    A general strike has a lot of power. Which is why they are banned in many countries.
  - Stranger43 2y ago
    It's not not always been the case that the unions were the weaker non-state actor, in fact they used to rival political parties and business cartels in their ablity to lobby/negotiate. And in some countries that power havent completely faded away.
pmontra 2y ago

flandish 2y ago

It’s because HN folks seem to consider themselves above working-class or soon to be above. They’re just temporarily stuck before they find their big ceo level breaks. They often demonstrate ideals that go counter to their own interests while simping for daddy ceo’s boot and money.

arnavpraneet 2y ago
> They often demonstrate ideals that go counter to their own interests This for real. The cognitive dissonance is giving me more cognitive dissonance. I highly doubt that even though this may be a VC owned and operated site, somehow everyone on the site is a vc or something similar?
- flandish 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - matchbok 2y ago
    Oh and one virtue singaling guy named flandish who needs to pass Econ 101 before commenting again.
    - flandish 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - matchbok 2y ago
        Dude you are not convincing anyone with your childish comments. People like you don't last long here, so adios. (reported)
        flandish 2y ago
        [flagged]

cbsmith 2y ago

> The fact that corporations and billionaires are so anti-union and engage in regular conduct like this demonstrates that unions are pro-worker and ideal for the balance needed in the US and across the globe. I think there are a lot of things that demonstrate that unions are pro-worker and ideal for the balance needed in the US and across the globe, but that isn't one of them. Corporations & billionaires are so anti-union because they perceive unions as reducing their profits, which is not necessarily the same thing as them being pro-worker or ideal. You'll find that, outside of the defense industry, corporations & billionaires generally don't like wars, for exactly the same reason; that doesn't really suggest anything good about wars.

wickedsickeune 2y ago

> The fact that corporations and billionaires are so anti-union and engage in regular conduct like this demonstrates that unions are pro-worker and ideal for the balance needed in the US and across the globe. No, that's incorrect. The corporations could also be anti-nuclear war, this would not make it good for workers. A better example is to look at countries with functional unions and functional capitalism, like the Netherlands, Denmark and others. The quality of life won by union conflicts with capital owners is a measurable fact. Unions can be implemented and be useless for the workers (an example for the most part is Greece), or maybe too demanding like France. It's up to the participants of the union to shape it as a net contributor to society. The point is that each individual member has a significant say in how a union operates, meanwhile in corporations, even middle management can be completely powerless.

jajko 2y ago

You are trying to blame literally every public policy failure in US on unions, that's simply incorrect and they stem from many other sources. I know its convenient in some populist fashion, but unless you understand the root cause of each of those, any sort of fix has no chance of arriving. Unions make corporations extremely sluggish when they need to react quickly to sudden market shocks or changes of direction of companies, be it positive or negative (yes, includes firing people for which there is suddenly no work anymore). There are corporations that have them heavily and they are not the top of the cream when it comes to progress, agility nor salary pay. The money is the key issue here - people want extra safety/bargaining net as long as their ultra massive FAANG-like salaries are not touched. How many would agree with say 20% cut while working exactly the same, but being unionized? That's maybe how much that additional burden is to the owners/managers. I suspect not that many but maybe I an wrong.

badgersnake 2y ago
It’s far easier to tell people that if we just fix this one thing then everything will be fine than try to deal with the complexity of the world and actually make things better. In the UK it’s been the EU, which we left so they moved on to immigrants. That was too hard to fix so they’ve recently decided to pick on the sick.

badgersnake 2y ago

It’s a forum run by a VC firm.

ExoticPearTree 2y ago

> I don’t understand how so many HNers are anti-union and anti-collective bargaining. I had the displeasure of working with union labor in the US, they would come in at 7 (who does that) and leave at 4 on the dot. Then worked with non-union labor: cheaper, worked as much as possible per day, got the job done faster. Money-wise it was less than union labor. Now tell me how is good for me, as a company that needs stuff done, to use union workers?

komali2 2y ago
> how is good for me, as a company that needs stuff done, to use union workers? For the company, it's very good, because unionization, or better yet, being a co-op, means your company will be more likely to be profitable in the long term. But you are correct that in these situations, your employees are more difficult to exploit for longer hours, harsher conditions, and worse pay. So yes, if you're trying to be a major shareholder-owner, unions may hurt your individual bottom line, even if they benefit the corporation as a whole.
- ExoticPearTree 2y ago
  I think you should read my initial comment again. And then the next one, answering to an angry person just like you: It is about working as much as it is needed to get work done, not about not paying. And there is nothing wrong in getting the best possible price on a contract.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ok_dad 2y ago
> Now tell me how is good for me, as a company that needs stuff done, to use union workers? Because in a race to the bottom, even the winner ends up in shit. The reason America is turning to crap now is because everyone is just out for themselves, and that's mostly folks like you who just want to get stuff done cheaply. Unions may not be the answer for your company, but please at least treat your workers like they matter, and pay them better than you think you should, because they are your company, they are America, and the rampant evisceration of the middle/working/blue collar class by the greedy corpos will destroy us all before anything else. I truly don't understand how businesspeople cannot understand that humans are your most important resource. You run roughshod over them for a bit more profit. It's perplexing!

mytailorisrich 2y ago

I suspect most people here are highly educated in sought-after, high-paying jobs. There is a valid point that the net benefits of unions in such cases are low. Workers unions were created by and for factory workers, miners, etc. People who had zero leverage individually. In addition, we might be a more individualistic and competive crowd who think they are better than average and thus better off bargaining for themselves.

komali2 2y ago
> People who had zero leverage individually. This is interesting to say considering the record amounts of layoffs we've had across the tech sector of these "high leverage individuals" in the thousands the last few quarters.
- mytailorisrich 2y ago
  Layoffs are not a good example when discussing highly paid jobs with plenty of perks. In a historical perspective I really mean being squeezed to the limit with no possibility of complaining or of "just moving somewhere else".

thequux 2y ago

I think unions are great! I'm even a member of one, and have been known to encourage everybody else around me to unionize. Notably, though, I love in Belgium. The American implementation of unions, on the other hand, is not great. While in the US, I've run into rules like not being allowed to plug something in because only union electricians are allowed to do that, and that's just one example among many. Police unions and teacher's unions are mostly known for making bad employees unfirable outside of egregious circumstances, and teacher's unions in particular don't seem to have improved pay or working conditions much. I have no idea where the difference comes from, but for people who have only seen and interacted with the American system, I don't blame them for not liking unions

actionfromafar 2y ago
The differences were made law with the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. I.e. sympathy strikes are illegal in the US, so the only real power left to unions is jealously guarding the petty pearls available to them.
easyThrowaway 2y ago
Yep, they feel like different institutions sharing some similar objectives and the same name. In the US they had a very institutional, "role-based" org feel rather than being a work welfare and wellbeing observer I've experienced in most of Europe. I can only assume this is due to the more adversarial relationship between workers and employers?
justin66 2y ago
> teacher's unions in particular don't seem to have improved pay or working conditions much. The difference in pay between unionized and nonunionized teachers is big enough that I wonder where you got such an idea.
vharuck 2y ago
>While in the US, I've run into rules like not being allowed to plug something in because only union electricians are allowed to do that, and that's just one example among many. I obviously don't know anything about the particular union you're talking about. But rules like this are often written to close a loophole. For example, the union negotiates higher wages for their electricians. After the deal is signed, the company hires more office secretaries, reassigns to them most tasks that used to be done by electricians, and fires a bunch of electricians because there's "not enough work."

dragonwriter 2y ago

> I don’t understand how so many HNers are anti-union and anti-collective bargaining. HN is full of the aspirational haut bourgeois, of course they want the proletariat maximally exploitable.

arnavpraneet 2y ago
oh yes this basically. Very annoying, especially people finding the flaws with collective bargaining. The individualistic rhetoric is mind-numbing.

strken 2y ago

Are so many of them anti-union? I don't see much evidence that they're any more against unions than the general population. It's surprising to me that nobody has pointed out this article has far fewer anti-union than pro-union comments.

resource_waste 2y ago

Its Apple. They can't have cognitive dissonance about the company they fanboy over. They come up with rationale because its part of their identity. Consider how Tesla looks like Elon Musk and has a bad reputation. We need to defend Apple or Apple will start to look cheap like Elon Musk. (That or its astroturfing, which we aren't allowed to talk about here, but isnt exactly unheard of in unionbusting, time to get deleted for talking about astrotrufing and history)

AmericanChopper 2y ago

Because unions are a leveling mechanism, so if you consider yourself an above average, or even average performer there’s a good chance a union is going to leave you worse off. Why would you want to submit your labor to a collective agreement if you think you can do better or at least equal to the rest of the collective? The only thing a union is guaranteed to be is pro-union, not pro-employee and certainly not pro-you-in-particular. The only time a union definitely makes sense to an existing workforce is if they can suppress labor supply by implementing onerous barriers to entry into the profession, like lawyers, doctors and pilots have. They can be a force of good for enforcing labor laws. But law enforcement is certainly not a job that should be left to private organisations, that really should be the role of the government. But even then, if you’re earning an SV salary, you absolutely don’t need a union’s help to settle your civil disputes.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

whywhywhywhy 2y ago

> I don’t understand how so many HNers are anti-union and anti-collective bargaining. If you're talented and skilled then collective bargaining hurts your position because now every low rung and non-productive is along for the ride with your bargaining. > Balance is key between workers and owners. Without it we are left with growing wealth inequality such as… Inequality is inevitable and its only going to get a lot lot worse, in 20 years time you'll dream for house prices as they are today. The only way out is in your own hands and collective bargaining will just mean existing in a slightly better low with the people a fraction of your skills and drive, any small union win will be inflated to nothing in single digit years but if you bargain on your own there is no real limit if you can back up what you're asking for.

Aunche 2y ago

The purpose of a union is to serve those inside the union. They don't care if the consumer has to pay for higher cost, the unionized company stagnates, or if all new jobs in that company get shipped overseas. Naturally, this means that people who aren't members of a union already have a negative opinion of unions. > - ridiculous housing prices > - stagnant wages > - poor public school education > - no retirement benefits > - expensive public universities Outside of "no retirement benefits," none of these have anything to do with unions, and HN-goers probably would prefer self-funded retire anyways so they can FIRE. Notably, ridiculous housing prices are mostly the result of grassroots NIMBYs, and capital tends to be on the side of build whatever you want. However, when they're operating in a NIMBY environment, they adapt and buy up the existing supply.

arnavpraneet 2y ago

From what I gather of HN, although its possible I may be wrong, HN's demographics make union member's rare on the site. Tech companies have clearly been winning for a while against unions and the rhetoric reflects that.