11 ms·

I wonder why US companies keep pulling stunts like this despite the data showing little negative impact of unionization to overall productivity nor company surv

I wonder why US companies keep pulling stunts like this despite the data showing little negative impact of unionization to overall productivity nor company survival. It looks to be a purely dogmatic ego trip where somehow blind loyalty is demanded even when it's not actually necessary.

nicce 2y ago
If it saves even a little money, it will happen.
- Stranger43 2y ago
  Yep but that's again a dogmatic view as there is hints that anti-unionization measures are the kind of cost cutting that kills companies rather then the kind that makes them huge successes.
  - sverhagen 2y ago
    In companies with a healthy culture, maybe. But if staff unionizes, how's Amazon going to make them pee in a bottle to squeeze out a few more deliveries, without running into trouble with the union. I'm sure other companies have their own terrible anecdotes.
- Rodeoclash 2y ago
  Companies do all sorts of itrrational things that cost money
- ceejayoz 2y ago
  Only if it saves money now.
komali2 2y ago
I personally believe companies are given way too much credit in being considered rational pure-profit motive actors. They're far worse than that (a rational pure-profit motive actor is also bad because it would inevitably select for slavery): they're typically run by extremely conservative, often ivy-league people (if not in alma mater, then in worship of ivy league culture). These people are trained from the get go to associate unions with everything antithetical to their cult heroes of people like Ford or Edison. Once in an argument with a similarly minded founder, he dropped the line on me, "unions are anti-capitalist," which to me really reveals the mindset that to at least him, negotiating from positions of equal power is not capitalism.
- thuridas 2y ago
  You mean that forcing developers to work 60 hours weeks do not work? Surprise!!
- DanielHB 2y ago
  What you are describing is the ascendency of a new third class of people in capitalist systems: the managerial class. Where once you had labourer and capitalist you now increasingly have people with real power derived from their positions within large private organisations and not derived from their direct ownership of capital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93managerial_class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manageria... It is a bit of an overused catch-all term though, but explains what you are describing.
mytailorisrich 2y ago
If it made no difference why would employees bother? It does make a negative difference for employers with potentially higher costs and lower flexibility over time.
- sebtron 2y ago
  It makes a positive difference for the employees. You seem to imply that this is correlated to a negative difference for the employer, which is completely wrong.
  - mytailorisrich 2y ago
    Obviously in general it makes a positive difference for employees, that was a rhetorical question... I have listed two main negative differences it makes for employers. I am hard-pressed to find any positive differences for them... on the issues this touches it's pretty much a zero-sum game so if employees gain it means employers 'lose'. If something is positive for both sides then I think the market will eventually adopt it on its own.
    - sebtron 2y ago
      The purpose of unions is to make sure the employees work is sustainable, easier, pleasant if possible. On a more practical level this means enforcing work regulations, if an employer is at risk of breaking regulations (intentionally or not), unions will help them keep the line. A happier employee is more productive and less likely to leave the company on the forst occasion or do anything hostile (stealing, selling company secrets). This is not exactly news, it has been known for at least 150 years.
      - mytailorisrich 2y ago
        The purpose of unions is to extract as much as possible from the employer on the behalf of its members, or at least to extract more than the employer would otherwise have given. You do not contradict anything I have written nor provide any examples of how unions might be a positive for employers... Again, if an happier, more productive employee benefits the company then the market will sort it out by itself (For instances tech companies have not needed unions to offer high pay and plenty of perks). That said, it's not an universal truth that a happier employee is a net gain.
zimpenfish 2y ago
At a meta level, if your government isn't particularly pro-union (and one side is rabidly anti-union with the potential for them to be in charge for the next four years), and you are to some extent hostage to governmental fortune (cf the current lawsuits against Apple, the reliance on outsourcing to China, etc.) there's probably a certain amount of political sense in being seen to be anti-union Just In Case.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Thorrez 2y ago
  The big automakers have big unions. That doesn't stop Trump from supporting them. https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-ford-rawsonville-components-plant/ https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/re...
whoitwas 2y ago
If you aren't joking, it's because executives fight against employees to enrich themselves. They only consider the next quarter, not systemic change.
hackernewds 2y ago
Is that actually true, you do see unionized pilots and police unions functioning pretty unproductively and in bad faith
- DrewRWx 2y ago
  Police aren't labor and therefore are not a labor union.
  - alkonaut 2y ago
    In what sense aren't police labor? "Labor" literally just means "work"? It's not like the unions of managers, pilots, lawyers, NHL players or software developers aren't "labor unions"? Policemen are employed so their organization as employees is a labor union (or just "union" for short)?
    - SamWhited 2y ago
      "Labor" isn't being used in the dictionary definition of "doing work", here, it's being used in the sense of "the labor movement".
      - alkonaut 2y ago
        The movement that gave rise to the term is hardly relevant for who uses it today. Labor union means "employee organization". Do the police call their union "union" but not "labor union"? That's just a language thing then (The two terms aren't separated in my language - I always assumed that in English "union" was short for "labor union")
        SamWhited 2y ago
        I'm struggling with what you meant by "it's just a language thing", that is of course true and what I was pointing out. For the purpose of good communication, everything is a language thing and language things are important. When we say "the police union isn't a labor union", we're people rejecting them from the classification even though they use the word because we don't think they fit in with our values. That's because we have labor (movement) values. You could also talk about any group of employees getting together and acting towards a common goal and call that a union, or a labor union, that wouldn't mean that everyone else automatically means the same thing. In this case, the poster didn't mean that.
bell-cot 2y ago
Read up on primate behavior. Top executives are alpha males, and didn't get there without lots of compulsive control-seeking, dominance-asserting, etc. behavior patterns.
- inamorty 2y ago
  Did Europeans descend from elves instead of primates?
  - hermannj314 2y ago
    I thought the general opinion was that the percentage or working age men your society lost in WW2 determined what lesson you learned from it. America didn't lose enough men to qualify for the "collectivism" unlock.
    - marnett 2y ago
      I’ve never heard this before but I’m very interested in the concept. Who wrote about this?
- highcountess 2y ago
  Executives are still just a function of their masters above them, i.e., chief executives, investors, pension funds, governments, lobbyists/donors, bond holders/bankers (in that order). Executives are just functionaries, the literal managerial class or minor nobility as we know it by from the past. Those behaviors you describe have clearly shifted somewhat in the last years for very specific reasons that the system has determined that, e.g., “DEI” is more profitable and also cedes more power and control to the top, so they’ve been working hard to put in place the more profitable and beneficial structure, and the minor nobility we call executives, have been quick to implement the King’s wishes, as they’ve come down from the Dukes and the Earls, among slick presentations and videos with upbeat audio from professional propagandists called PR firms.
- Reptur 2y ago
  Except the concept of “alpha male” was debunked.
highcountess 2y ago
[flagged]
datavirtue 2y ago
Next to losing control, executives care little about overall productivity. CEOs are constantly micromanaging HR to pull levers and manipulate employees. It's so second-nature they don't even consider any other possibilities. They don't want to lose that control.
sct202 2y ago
A lot of large companies like to have standardized policies across the company so they can shuffle people where ever they need and everything is the same. Unions are usually location by location and often only cover a specific classification of the employees in a location (manufacturing, warehouse, maintenance, sanitation, and/or truck drivers), and each union will bargain on its own so you can have a single location running with multiple unique union contracts for each classification of employee. This is a PITA to manage for big slow corporations who would need teams of lawyers and HR people working thru and negotiating each contract individually and getting approvals from above.
- trollbridge 2y ago
  One would think that technology could offer fancy scheduling, HR, etc. solutions for this.
tyingq 2y ago
I think mostly because they think it's potentially detrimental. And the financial consequences of doing illegal things to fight unions are substantially lower than their perception of what unions might cost them. Like from this article..."The board cannot impose fines or direct punishments against Apple for its violations".
spamizbad 2y ago
Nobody wants to admit it, but businesses are deeply ideological. Not in the typical sense, but they have lots of strongly held irrational beliefs that are contradictory. They are not rational actors.
- brookst 2y ago
  Who doesn’t want to admit that? Businesses are groups of people. Is there anyone in the world who says large groups are perfectly rational? A well-managed business tries to focus on profitability as opposed to, say, picking up horseback riding as a hobby. But the way profits are pursued is absolutely irrational and chaotic. Does anyone believe otherwise?
  - droopyEyelids 2y ago
    You could charitably assume that media companies don’t want to admit or publicize this ideological bias. Media companies have an oversized impact on what the people of the country think and discuss
- mort96 2y ago
  I think this is pretty correct; the owning class is ideologically opposed to worker control.
- droopyEyelids 2y ago
  I’m not even sure that it is irrational exactly. The owners of a company want to believe and behave as if they own the company. Its their toy to do with as they please. Unionization changes the fundamental facts of ownership. The owner no longer do as they please, they must consult the representatives of their labor force. That is a fundamental shift in how the business operates and the rights that the owners enjoy
  - spamizbad 2y ago
    The owners of Apple are its millions of shareholders. The people who made the decision to break the law are merely its operators.
atmosx 2y ago
I recall a graph that Yale prof Ian Shapiro showed in his lecture series "Power and Politics in Today’s World" (available on YouTube) that shows a strong correlation between participation fall in worker unions and wage stagnation as opposed to corporation profits in the US. The break point is the fall of the Berlin wall. IIRC he goes on to explain how's that not an accident. I don't remember which lecture was it though :-/ Here's the YT Link for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNeyViG2ar68jkgEi4y6doNZy https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNeyViG2ar68j...
- cscurmudgeon 2y ago
  https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations More seriously: Any analysis which ignores globalization and skirting of environmental and labor laws by importing from China is an incomplete/dishonest analysis. Wage stagnation also correlates to importing from China. https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/the-impact-of-u-s-imports-manufacturing-employment/ https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/the-impact-of-u... You probably won't see this analysis from Yale. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/09/congress-targets-harvard-yale-and-top-universities-with-china-linked-endowments-00038625 https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/09/congress-targets-ha...
beanjuiceII 2y ago
I've been involved with an IT union for 15 years of my career, i don't know how the data shows there's little negative impact... it's a catastrophic mess from what I've seen
- shakes_mcjunkie 2y ago
  What issues are you seeing?
thisislife2 2y ago
It has more to do with US politics - both the major US political parties lean to the right- and allowing unions encourages socialist ideas that obviously clash with the ideas of the political right. Unions can (and do) become powerful political blocs which means that political parties then have to try to entrench themselves in it to retain some level of influence. But that also means they also have to actually listen to their concerns and politically deliver on some of them, to retain their influence. This can lead to a dilution of the ideology of the politically right, which some politicians and businessmen do consider as a political threat.

nicce 2y ago

If it saves even a little money, it will happen.

Stranger43 2y ago
Yep but that's again a dogmatic view as there is hints that anti-unionization measures are the kind of cost cutting that kills companies rather then the kind that makes them huge successes.
- sverhagen 2y ago
  In companies with a healthy culture, maybe. But if staff unionizes, how's Amazon going to make them pee in a bottle to squeeze out a few more deliveries, without running into trouble with the union. I'm sure other companies have their own terrible anecdotes.
Rodeoclash 2y ago
Companies do all sorts of itrrational things that cost money
ceejayoz 2y ago
Only if it saves money now.

komali2 2y ago

I personally believe companies are given way too much credit in being considered rational pure-profit motive actors. They're far worse than that (a rational pure-profit motive actor is also bad because it would inevitably select for slavery): they're typically run by extremely conservative, often ivy-league people (if not in alma mater, then in worship of ivy league culture). These people are trained from the get go to associate unions with everything antithetical to their cult heroes of people like Ford or Edison. Once in an argument with a similarly minded founder, he dropped the line on me, "unions are anti-capitalist," which to me really reveals the mindset that to at least him, negotiating from positions of equal power is not capitalism.

thuridas 2y ago
You mean that forcing developers to work 60 hours weeks do not work? Surprise!!
DanielHB 2y ago
What you are describing is the ascendency of a new third class of people in capitalist systems: the managerial class. Where once you had labourer and capitalist you now increasingly have people with real power derived from their positions within large private organisations and not derived from their direct ownership of capital https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93managerial_class https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manageria... It is a bit of an overused catch-all term though, but explains what you are describing.

mytailorisrich 2y ago

If it made no difference why would employees bother? It does make a negative difference for employers with potentially higher costs and lower flexibility over time.

sebtron 2y ago
It makes a positive difference for the employees. You seem to imply that this is correlated to a negative difference for the employer, which is completely wrong.
- mytailorisrich 2y ago
  Obviously in general it makes a positive difference for employees, that was a rhetorical question... I have listed two main negative differences it makes for employers. I am hard-pressed to find any positive differences for them... on the issues this touches it's pretty much a zero-sum game so if employees gain it means employers 'lose'. If something is positive for both sides then I think the market will eventually adopt it on its own.
  - sebtron 2y ago
    The purpose of unions is to make sure the employees work is sustainable, easier, pleasant if possible. On a more practical level this means enforcing work regulations, if an employer is at risk of breaking regulations (intentionally or not), unions will help them keep the line. A happier employee is more productive and less likely to leave the company on the forst occasion or do anything hostile (stealing, selling company secrets). This is not exactly news, it has been known for at least 150 years.
    - mytailorisrich 2y ago
      The purpose of unions is to extract as much as possible from the employer on the behalf of its members, or at least to extract more than the employer would otherwise have given. You do not contradict anything I have written nor provide any examples of how unions might be a positive for employers... Again, if an happier, more productive employee benefits the company then the market will sort it out by itself (For instances tech companies have not needed unions to offer high pay and plenty of perks). That said, it's not an universal truth that a happier employee is a net gain.

zimpenfish 2y ago

At a meta level, if your government isn't particularly pro-union (and one side is rabidly anti-union with the potential for them to be in charge for the next four years), and you are to some extent hostage to governmental fortune (cf the current lawsuits against Apple, the reliance on outsourcing to China, etc.) there's probably a certain amount of political sense in being seen to be anti-union Just In Case.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Thorrez 2y ago
The big automakers have big unions. That doesn't stop Trump from supporting them. https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-ford-rawsonville-components-plant/ https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/re...

whoitwas 2y ago

If you aren't joking, it's because executives fight against employees to enrich themselves. They only consider the next quarter, not systemic change.

hackernewds 2y ago

Is that actually true, you do see unionized pilots and police unions functioning pretty unproductively and in bad faith

DrewRWx 2y ago
Police aren't labor and therefore are not a labor union.
- alkonaut 2y ago
  In what sense aren't police labor? "Labor" literally just means "work"? It's not like the unions of managers, pilots, lawyers, NHL players or software developers aren't "labor unions"? Policemen are employed so their organization as employees is a labor union (or just "union" for short)?
  - SamWhited 2y ago
    "Labor" isn't being used in the dictionary definition of "doing work", here, it's being used in the sense of "the labor movement".
    - alkonaut 2y ago
      The movement that gave rise to the term is hardly relevant for who uses it today. Labor union means "employee organization". Do the police call their union "union" but not "labor union"? That's just a language thing then (The two terms aren't separated in my language - I always assumed that in English "union" was short for "labor union")
      - SamWhited 2y ago
        I'm struggling with what you meant by "it's just a language thing", that is of course true and what I was pointing out. For the purpose of good communication, everything is a language thing and language things are important. When we say "the police union isn't a labor union", we're people rejecting them from the classification even though they use the word because we don't think they fit in with our values. That's because we have labor (movement) values. You could also talk about any group of employees getting together and acting towards a common goal and call that a union, or a labor union, that wouldn't mean that everyone else automatically means the same thing. In this case, the poster didn't mean that.

bell-cot 2y ago

Read up on primate behavior. Top executives are alpha males, and didn't get there without lots of compulsive control-seeking, dominance-asserting, etc. behavior patterns.

inamorty 2y ago
Did Europeans descend from elves instead of primates?
- hermannj314 2y ago
  I thought the general opinion was that the percentage or working age men your society lost in WW2 determined what lesson you learned from it. America didn't lose enough men to qualify for the "collectivism" unlock.
  - marnett 2y ago
    I’ve never heard this before but I’m very interested in the concept. Who wrote about this?
highcountess 2y ago
Executives are still just a function of their masters above them, i.e., chief executives, investors, pension funds, governments, lobbyists/donors, bond holders/bankers (in that order). Executives are just functionaries, the literal managerial class or minor nobility as we know it by from the past. Those behaviors you describe have clearly shifted somewhat in the last years for very specific reasons that the system has determined that, e.g., “DEI” is more profitable and also cedes more power and control to the top, so they’ve been working hard to put in place the more profitable and beneficial structure, and the minor nobility we call executives, have been quick to implement the King’s wishes, as they’ve come down from the Dukes and the Earls, among slick presentations and videos with upbeat audio from professional propagandists called PR firms.
Reptur 2y ago
Except the concept of “alpha male” was debunked.

highcountess 2y ago

[flagged]

datavirtue 2y ago

Next to losing control, executives care little about overall productivity. CEOs are constantly micromanaging HR to pull levers and manipulate employees. It's so second-nature they don't even consider any other possibilities. They don't want to lose that control.

sct202 2y ago

A lot of large companies like to have standardized policies across the company so they can shuffle people where ever they need and everything is the same. Unions are usually location by location and often only cover a specific classification of the employees in a location (manufacturing, warehouse, maintenance, sanitation, and/or truck drivers), and each union will bargain on its own so you can have a single location running with multiple unique union contracts for each classification of employee. This is a PITA to manage for big slow corporations who would need teams of lawyers and HR people working thru and negotiating each contract individually and getting approvals from above.

trollbridge 2y ago
One would think that technology could offer fancy scheduling, HR, etc. solutions for this.

tyingq 2y ago

I think mostly because they think it's potentially detrimental. And the financial consequences of doing illegal things to fight unions are substantially lower than their perception of what unions might cost them. Like from this article..."The board cannot impose fines or direct punishments against Apple for its violations".

spamizbad 2y ago

Nobody wants to admit it, but businesses are deeply ideological. Not in the typical sense, but they have lots of strongly held irrational beliefs that are contradictory. They are not rational actors.

brookst 2y ago
Who doesn’t want to admit that? Businesses are groups of people. Is there anyone in the world who says large groups are perfectly rational? A well-managed business tries to focus on profitability as opposed to, say, picking up horseback riding as a hobby. But the way profits are pursued is absolutely irrational and chaotic. Does anyone believe otherwise?
- droopyEyelids 2y ago
  You could charitably assume that media companies don’t want to admit or publicize this ideological bias. Media companies have an oversized impact on what the people of the country think and discuss
mort96 2y ago
I think this is pretty correct; the owning class is ideologically opposed to worker control.
droopyEyelids 2y ago
I’m not even sure that it is irrational exactly. The owners of a company want to believe and behave as if they own the company. Its their toy to do with as they please. Unionization changes the fundamental facts of ownership. The owner no longer do as they please, they must consult the representatives of their labor force. That is a fundamental shift in how the business operates and the rights that the owners enjoy
- spamizbad 2y ago
  The owners of Apple are its millions of shareholders. The people who made the decision to break the law are merely its operators.

atmosx 2y ago

I recall a graph that Yale prof Ian Shapiro showed in his lecture series "Power and Politics in Today’s World" (available on YouTube) that shows a strong correlation between participation fall in worker unions and wage stagnation as opposed to corporation profits in the US. The break point is the fall of the Berlin wall. IIRC he goes on to explain how's that not an accident. I don't remember which lecture was it though :-/ Here's the YT Link for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNeyViG2ar68jkgEi4y6doNZy https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNeyViG2ar68j...

cscurmudgeon 2y ago
https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations https://www.tylervigen.com/spurious-correlations More seriously: Any analysis which ignores globalization and skirting of environmental and labor laws by importing from China is an incomplete/dishonest analysis. Wage stagnation also correlates to importing from China. https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/the-impact-of-u-s-imports-manufacturing-employment/ https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/the-impact-of-u... You probably won't see this analysis from Yale. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/09/congress-targets-harvard-yale-and-top-universities-with-china-linked-endowments-00038625 https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/09/congress-targets-ha...

beanjuiceII 2y ago

I've been involved with an IT union for 15 years of my career, i don't know how the data shows there's little negative impact... it's a catastrophic mess from what I've seen

shakes_mcjunkie 2y ago
What issues are you seeing?

thisislife2 2y ago

It has more to do with US politics - both the major US political parties lean to the right- and allowing unions encourages socialist ideas that obviously clash with the ideas of the political right. Unions can (and do) become powerful political blocs which means that political parties then have to try to entrench themselves in it to retain some level of influence. But that also means they also have to actually listen to their concerns and politically deliver on some of them, to retain their influence. This can lead to a dilution of the ideology of the politically right, which some politicians and businessmen do consider as a political threat.