8 ms·

Break up bad companies; replace bad union bosses

72 points by hn_acker 11mo ago

krainboltgreene 11mo ago
> I raise this because a general strike is back on the table, likely for May Day 2028 (5/1/28): I say this as an out socialist, member of the DSA, and strong advocate for unions: No it's not. I love Shawn Fain to death, I am a huge fan of his work and strategies, but the idea that an American General Strike is two years away? Most americans won't join a union despite having extremely positive opinions of unions.
- JKCalhoun 11mo ago
  Why is that?
  - toothandnail 11mo ago
    [dead]
  - outside1234 11mo ago
    There has been decades of propaganda about how unions destroy jobs in the United States and most software engineers have grown up in those decades. I'm not trying to argue that Unions are exact right answer (perhaps something like worker's councils would be better) but the underlying issue is that collective action in the United States has been effectively demonized for a very long time (going back to blaming unions for our uncompetitive cars vs. Japan).
    - Aurornis 11mo ago
      A neutral observation: The pro-union camp really needs some better messaging if they want any hope of overcoming these objections. Nearly every pro-union discussion I see online or even politician speaking to a crowd feels like they're in full-on preaching to the choir mode, where they don't even consider how to address anyone skeptical of unionization. It's always presented as the obvious choice. Any skepticism or critical questions are dismissed as the result of consuming propaganda (like the comment above). If the hardcore pro-union people want to get anywhere, they need to stop treating anyone with critical questions or skepticism as being misinformed or the victim of propaganda. Speakers like Pete Buttigieg are a good model for addressing mixed audiences without alienating the other side right off the bat. Not everyone is going to agree with him, but he does a much better job of speaking to a mixed audience as a group of people with differing opinions than most.
      - Arainach 11mo ago
        It's almost like all of the forms of communication and media people pay attention to is owned by billionaires with a vested interest in promoting anti-union views.
    - dylan604 11mo ago
      You also have decades of corruption within the unions. That'll take effort as well to overcome.
      - outside1234 11mo ago
        There has also been decades of corruption in management (see donations to ballrooms) and yet nobody is saying it will take decades to overcome management.
        dylan604 11mo ago
        It will though. Tim Apple has been in charge how long? Bezos? Musk?
        Arainach 11mo ago
        The problems with management aren't the result of any one person - it is the ownership class, their lack of any feeling of societal obligation, the lack of consequences for their actions, and their ownership of media and messaging.
    - gopher_space 11mo ago
      As a group we're probably the most profoundly ignorant people on the planet when it comes to labor relations. We can't even reason about this because we (again, as a group) have practically no experience and even less interest in the subject. The union issue vs. Japan is a perfect example because you only need to sit in the cars both countries were making at the time to understand why we were uncompetitive.
  - dylan604 11mo ago
    A lot of states are right to work states, so joining a union is just giving your money to someone else with no protections if they can just fire you regardless of union status. At least that's something I've been told before
    - krainboltgreene 11mo ago
      Unions would actually prevent this problem, because in response to a wrongful firing they can apply collective pressure. That's not why Americans don't want to join a union.
      - dylan604 11mo ago
        While it's not the reason, it is a reason in a list. It doesn't make it any less true.
    - tadfisher 11mo ago
      Whoever told you that is misinformed, because the power of unions does not stem from forcing all employees to join the union. Even in right-to-work states, unions have the power to negotiate contracts which include protections, and workers who join unions are protected from retaliation under federal law. There is an extreme counterbalance in the form of employers misleading employees that unions do not benefit them, as you helpfully demonstrated with this comment.
      - dylan604 11mo ago
        There are definitely examples of shops where you cannot be an employee without being in the union. I worked for a company that was going through a union vote which ended in the vote failing. Part of the conversation was if the vote succeeded would becoming a union member be required to maintain employment. The answer was a solid yes. Luckily, I didn't have to find a new job because of it since the vote failed
        tadfisher 11mo ago
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
philipallstar 11mo ago
> Unions are not perfect. Indeed, it is possible to belong to a union that is bad for workers: either because it is weak, or corrupt, or captured (or some combination of the three). It's also possible to belong to a union that's bad for customers as well, as they entrench the status quo or raise prices by blocking automation. Or to ones that donate against your politics[0], which seems particularly galling. [0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/teachers-unions-poured-over-40-million-into-left-wing-groups-watchdog-finds/ar-AA1LbHku https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/teachers-unions-pour...
- lawlessone 11mo ago
  >which seems particularly galling. Is it that galling they supported the party more likely to give teachers a favorable outcome? The idea unions shouldn't be political when some politicians want to destroy unions is silly. If the billionaires can donate to support politicians that serve their interests more than others why not workers?
  - philipallstar 11mo ago
    Of course workers can. But workers can be from different political stripes, and might not want people donating their money to the opposing cause. This shouldn't something you file under "it's only bad when they, the baddies, do it to us, the goodies"[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position
    - IAmBroom 11mo ago
      The purpose of the union is to attempt to consolidate worker power to improve their work conditions, not to appease every member's beliefs.
- OkayPhysicist 11mo ago
  Unions are political entities, because their existence in their current form (i.e., not throwing dynamite at the cops, blowing up bridges, kneecapping scabs, or dragging the foreman out of his home in the middle of the night and killing him in the street) is a legal construct, that the bosses would love to eliminate. If you're disjointed enough to belong to a union, benefit from a union, and yet hold political views that want to eliminate unions, then it really shouldn't come as some shock that your union is supporting politicians you don't.
daft_pink 11mo ago
In the United States, unions should be used to advocate for higher wages and that’s it. OSHA and the US’s high litigation costs make most work places fairly safe. The unions have been failing for advocating for unrealistic benefit packages where most workers would rather have the salary. The unions have also been destroying companies by imposing restrictions that limit operational flexibility like arguing against automation, specifying minimum operational hours for a factory etc. They should adjust unions so they are only arguing for increased total wages and not all these other things that are incredibly destructive.
- awkward 11mo ago
  Unions are useful because they are a counterparty to negotiations with management. They have leverage because they are able to represent labor as a single entity. If they are only able to represent labor on one axis, but not on issues that represent quality of workplace, they lose leverage in negotiation that allows them to win larger salaries.
  - pdonis 11mo ago
    > they are able to represent labor as a single entity They'd be even more able to do that if they were actual corporations, owned by all the workers, selling organized labor as a service. Then they would only have to negotiate the prices of the services they sold, instead of having to negotiate all kinds of other things. The workers themselves, as owners of the corporation, would be determining things like benefit packages, retirement, how to bring new workers in, etc., etc.
    - oersted 11mo ago
      It's a good idea. Co-ops do tend to face quite a few fundamental challenges in practice that make them less competitive, but they have their place and they should be a more common occurrence. One would need to be careful to stop such a company from fully monopolising the profession though. Otherwise we go back to medieval guilds, which were good at guaranteeing product quality standards, but heavily suppressed innovation and were quite extortionate towards new workers. I suppose unions are also like this to a degree, but making them actual profit seeking companies may be dangerous.
jdross 11mo ago
I would love to address unions in public and semi-public (e.g. teachers' unions, dockworkers, police and fire unions). They are able to hold the public hostage by preventing automation at ports, stopping teaching (often doubling as daycare for children), or withholding public safety. The counterbalance to a union and to management needs to be customers, but customers aren't able to vote no here. That's fundamentally undemocratic. And you end up with terrible outcomes like collapsing literacy rates through the prevention of teaching phonics, which leads to parents opting out of public education entirely. There needs to be a feedback mechanism in unions for them to work.
- rcbdev 11mo ago
  What are you talking about? >99% of all Austrian employment contracts are based on and negotiated by the unions here. Is our school system failing? No. Is our public infrastructure somehow inferior? No. The U.S. is much less unionized and much worse off for it.
  - jdross 11mo ago
    Specifically in the US context, this is failing. And 70% of our teachers are unionized, with unionized districts seeming to underperform equivalent non-unionized districts (despite researchers repeatedly trying to find the opposite, the stats just are what they are) You need to be able to explain this better than “look at Austria”. Nearly everything about Austria is different than the US.
    - sillyfluke 11mo ago
      >Specifically in the US context, this is failing. You have existing counterexamples in other countries who don't employ your suggested tweeks. It's a sign you should go back to the drawing board (and history books). Ask the customers: Ok great. I can already see how well that would've worked in the past. Tobacco smokers are pissed off at the rioting slaves for slowing down shipments. Boo-hoo. There's stats being thrown about that this Black Friday the number of people buying shit decreased even though the amount of shit bought was higher. Even if you ignore that point but can concede the growing wealth inequality is a thing (consumer class is shrinking but getting richer), you should be able to understand why giving more weight to the wealthier class should be thought about twice.
ronsor 11mo ago
Customers have the power to destroy both bad companies and bad unions.
- teeray 11mo ago
  Yes, they can take their dollars away from one bad company and bring them to the other bad company instead. That will show them.
  - oersted 11mo ago
    Or they can create a new good company and take all the customers, that's the fairytale at least. It does actually happen quite often, but then the good company predictably goes bad once its dominant, which may or may not be premeditated. Indeed, often the only way the good company can afford to be good is the prospect of eventually being able to be bad, worse even, to pay back that speculative investment. And on-and-on we go.
    - teeray 11mo ago
      > but then the good company predictably goes bad Don't forget the other fun variant: Bad company sees the rise of Good company, offers the founders F-U money, then puts all of Good Co.'s products into maintenance-mode post-acquisition to prevent them from competing with Bad Co.
    - danaris 11mo ago
      > It does actually happen quite often Maybe it used to. Nowadays, it's very, very hard for anyone not already born to generational wealth to have enough financial security to start their own competitor to any of the bad companies that are actually causing the problems. And those bad companies—by far the worst ones, the ones that most need some competition to make them honest again—are also the ones best able to destroy any competitor, because so much of what makes them bad is their titanic size.
- worik 11mo ago
  That is a sweet thought, it would be nice if it were true, it is false. "Customers" are barely holding on in a very precarious position
tolerance 11mo ago
Does this guy lift?
BrenBarn 11mo ago
The article calls out "bad" union bosses as being those who push things like two-tiered contracts, prioritizing more senior members and creating inequality within the union. But in my perception (and I don't think I'm alone in this), an equally troubling problem is that even "good" union bosses prioritize members of their own union and create inequality among the broader class of workers and citizens. Egregious examples include union advocacy for various kinds of licensure or "fossilizing" regulations (i.e., "we must keep doing things in this way we've been doing them to preserve the jobs of the people who do them that way"). These just raise barriers for other workers, increase competition for coveted union jobs, and increase the separation between "good" (aka union) jobs and the rest. The old-school unions a la the Wobblies were more focused on improving the lot of all workers, everywhere. Many of the labor reforms that were passed in the early 20th century (like minimum wage) followed this model: everyone gets the minimum wage, everyone gets worker safety guarantees, everyone gets the benefits of the labor policies. But nowadays I don't see so much of that from unions or labor activism in general. To a large extent I see the reverse: advocating for special minimum-wage carveouts (e.g., for hotel workers or fast-food workers); advocacy for special work-condition requirements; and yes, things like two-tier systems where benefits or pensions are differentially allocated based on characteristics internal to the union/job. I hate fat cat capitalism and large corporations more than almost anyone I know, but many unions (especially public employee unions) have lost a lot of my trust because of these things. The sad reality seems to be that many unions, just like the corporate bosses, are just in it for themselves. Being in it for everyone in the union is better than being in it for just the union bosses, but it's still not good enough as long as they're not in it for everyone who isn't super wealthy. If unions want to attract people they need to forcefully advocate not just for better stuff right now for these few people (union members), but for a wholesale societal overhaul to upend the entire economic system that makes such small-scale negotiation necessary.

72 points by hn_acker 11mo ago

> I raise this because a general strike is back on the table, likely for May Day 2028 (5/1/28): I say this as an out socialist, member of the DSA, and strong advocate for unions: No it's not. I love Shawn Fain to death, I am a huge fan of his work and strategies, but the idea that an American General Strike is two years away? Most americans won't join a union despite having extremely positive opinions of unions.

JKCalhoun 11mo ago
Why is that?
- toothandnail 11mo ago
  [dead]
- outside1234 11mo ago
  There has been decades of propaganda about how unions destroy jobs in the United States and most software engineers have grown up in those decades. I'm not trying to argue that Unions are exact right answer (perhaps something like worker's councils would be better) but the underlying issue is that collective action in the United States has been effectively demonized for a very long time (going back to blaming unions for our uncompetitive cars vs. Japan).
  - Aurornis 11mo ago
    A neutral observation: The pro-union camp really needs some better messaging if they want any hope of overcoming these objections. Nearly every pro-union discussion I see online or even politician speaking to a crowd feels like they're in full-on preaching to the choir mode, where they don't even consider how to address anyone skeptical of unionization. It's always presented as the obvious choice. Any skepticism or critical questions are dismissed as the result of consuming propaganda (like the comment above). If the hardcore pro-union people want to get anywhere, they need to stop treating anyone with critical questions or skepticism as being misinformed or the victim of propaganda. Speakers like Pete Buttigieg are a good model for addressing mixed audiences without alienating the other side right off the bat. Not everyone is going to agree with him, but he does a much better job of speaking to a mixed audience as a group of people with differing opinions than most.
    - Arainach 11mo ago
      It's almost like all of the forms of communication and media people pay attention to is owned by billionaires with a vested interest in promoting anti-union views.
  - dylan604 11mo ago
    You also have decades of corruption within the unions. That'll take effort as well to overcome.
    - outside1234 11mo ago
      There has also been decades of corruption in management (see donations to ballrooms) and yet nobody is saying it will take decades to overcome management.
      - dylan604 11mo ago
        It will though. Tim Apple has been in charge how long? Bezos? Musk?
        Arainach 11mo ago
        The problems with management aren't the result of any one person - it is the ownership class, their lack of any feeling of societal obligation, the lack of consequences for their actions, and their ownership of media and messaging.
  - gopher_space 11mo ago
    As a group we're probably the most profoundly ignorant people on the planet when it comes to labor relations. We can't even reason about this because we (again, as a group) have practically no experience and even less interest in the subject. The union issue vs. Japan is a perfect example because you only need to sit in the cars both countries were making at the time to understand why we were uncompetitive.
- dylan604 11mo ago
  A lot of states are right to work states, so joining a union is just giving your money to someone else with no protections if they can just fire you regardless of union status. At least that's something I've been told before
  - krainboltgreene 11mo ago
    Unions would actually prevent this problem, because in response to a wrongful firing they can apply collective pressure. That's not why Americans don't want to join a union.
    - dylan604 11mo ago
      While it's not the reason, it is a reason in a list. It doesn't make it any less true.
  - tadfisher 11mo ago
    Whoever told you that is misinformed, because the power of unions does not stem from forcing all employees to join the union. Even in right-to-work states, unions have the power to negotiate contracts which include protections, and workers who join unions are protected from retaliation under federal law. There is an extreme counterbalance in the form of employers misleading employees that unions do not benefit them, as you helpfully demonstrated with this comment.
    - dylan604 11mo ago
      There are definitely examples of shops where you cannot be an employee without being in the union. I worked for a company that was going through a union vote which ended in the vote failing. Part of the conversation was if the vote succeeded would becoming a union member be required to maintain employment. The answer was a solid yes. Luckily, I didn't have to find a new job because of it since the vote failed
      - tadfisher 11mo ago

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

philipallstar 11mo ago

> Unions are not perfect. Indeed, it is possible to belong to a union that is bad for workers: either because it is weak, or corrupt, or captured (or some combination of the three). It's also possible to belong to a union that's bad for customers as well, as they entrench the status quo or raise prices by blocking automation. Or to ones that donate against your politics[0], which seems particularly galling. [0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/teachers-unions-poured-over-40-million-into-left-wing-groups-watchdog-finds/ar-AA1LbHku https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/teachers-unions-pour...

lawlessone 11mo ago
>which seems particularly galling. Is it that galling they supported the party more likely to give teachers a favorable outcome? The idea unions shouldn't be political when some politicians want to destroy unions is silly. If the billionaires can donate to support politicians that serve their interests more than others why not workers?
- philipallstar 11mo ago
  Of course workers can. But workers can be from different political stripes, and might not want people donating their money to the opposing cause. This shouldn't something you file under "it's only bad when they, the baddies, do it to us, the goodies"[0]. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_position
  - IAmBroom 11mo ago
    The purpose of the union is to attempt to consolidate worker power to improve their work conditions, not to appease every member's beliefs.
OkayPhysicist 11mo ago
Unions are political entities, because their existence in their current form (i.e., not throwing dynamite at the cops, blowing up bridges, kneecapping scabs, or dragging the foreman out of his home in the middle of the night and killing him in the street) is a legal construct, that the bosses would love to eliminate. If you're disjointed enough to belong to a union, benefit from a union, and yet hold political views that want to eliminate unions, then it really shouldn't come as some shock that your union is supporting politicians you don't.

daft_pink 11mo ago

In the United States, unions should be used to advocate for higher wages and that’s it. OSHA and the US’s high litigation costs make most work places fairly safe. The unions have been failing for advocating for unrealistic benefit packages where most workers would rather have the salary. The unions have also been destroying companies by imposing restrictions that limit operational flexibility like arguing against automation, specifying minimum operational hours for a factory etc. They should adjust unions so they are only arguing for increased total wages and not all these other things that are incredibly destructive.

awkward 11mo ago
Unions are useful because they are a counterparty to negotiations with management. They have leverage because they are able to represent labor as a single entity. If they are only able to represent labor on one axis, but not on issues that represent quality of workplace, they lose leverage in negotiation that allows them to win larger salaries.
- pdonis 11mo ago
  > they are able to represent labor as a single entity They'd be even more able to do that if they were actual corporations, owned by all the workers, selling organized labor as a service. Then they would only have to negotiate the prices of the services they sold, instead of having to negotiate all kinds of other things. The workers themselves, as owners of the corporation, would be determining things like benefit packages, retirement, how to bring new workers in, etc., etc.
  - oersted 11mo ago
    It's a good idea. Co-ops do tend to face quite a few fundamental challenges in practice that make them less competitive, but they have their place and they should be a more common occurrence. One would need to be careful to stop such a company from fully monopolising the profession though. Otherwise we go back to medieval guilds, which were good at guaranteeing product quality standards, but heavily suppressed innovation and were quite extortionate towards new workers. I suppose unions are also like this to a degree, but making them actual profit seeking companies may be dangerous.

jdross 11mo ago

I would love to address unions in public and semi-public (e.g. teachers' unions, dockworkers, police and fire unions). They are able to hold the public hostage by preventing automation at ports, stopping teaching (often doubling as daycare for children), or withholding public safety. The counterbalance to a union and to management needs to be customers, but customers aren't able to vote no here. That's fundamentally undemocratic. And you end up with terrible outcomes like collapsing literacy rates through the prevention of teaching phonics, which leads to parents opting out of public education entirely. There needs to be a feedback mechanism in unions for them to work.

rcbdev 11mo ago
What are you talking about? >99% of all Austrian employment contracts are based on and negotiated by the unions here. Is our school system failing? No. Is our public infrastructure somehow inferior? No. The U.S. is much less unionized and much worse off for it.
- jdross 11mo ago
  Specifically in the US context, this is failing. And 70% of our teachers are unionized, with unionized districts seeming to underperform equivalent non-unionized districts (despite researchers repeatedly trying to find the opposite, the stats just are what they are) You need to be able to explain this better than “look at Austria”. Nearly everything about Austria is different than the US.
  - sillyfluke 11mo ago
    >Specifically in the US context, this is failing. You have existing counterexamples in other countries who don't employ your suggested tweeks. It's a sign you should go back to the drawing board (and history books). Ask the customers: Ok great. I can already see how well that would've worked in the past. Tobacco smokers are pissed off at the rioting slaves for slowing down shipments. Boo-hoo. There's stats being thrown about that this Black Friday the number of people buying shit decreased even though the amount of shit bought was higher. Even if you ignore that point but can concede the growing wealth inequality is a thing (consumer class is shrinking but getting richer), you should be able to understand why giving more weight to the wealthier class should be thought about twice.

ronsor 11mo ago

Customers have the power to destroy both bad companies and bad unions.

teeray 11mo ago
Yes, they can take their dollars away from one bad company and bring them to the other bad company instead. That will show them.
- oersted 11mo ago
  Or they can create a new good company and take all the customers, that's the fairytale at least. It does actually happen quite often, but then the good company predictably goes bad once its dominant, which may or may not be premeditated. Indeed, often the only way the good company can afford to be good is the prospect of eventually being able to be bad, worse even, to pay back that speculative investment. And on-and-on we go.
  - teeray 11mo ago
    > but then the good company predictably goes bad Don't forget the other fun variant: Bad company sees the rise of Good company, offers the founders F-U money, then puts all of Good Co.'s products into maintenance-mode post-acquisition to prevent them from competing with Bad Co.
  - danaris 11mo ago
    > It does actually happen quite often Maybe it used to. Nowadays, it's very, very hard for anyone not already born to generational wealth to have enough financial security to start their own competitor to any of the bad companies that are actually causing the problems. And those bad companies—by far the worst ones, the ones that most need some competition to make them honest again—are also the ones best able to destroy any competitor, because so much of what makes them bad is their titanic size.
worik 11mo ago
That is a sweet thought, it would be nice if it were true, it is false. "Customers" are barely holding on in a very precarious position

tolerance 11mo ago

Does this guy lift?

BrenBarn 11mo ago

The article calls out "bad" union bosses as being those who push things like two-tiered contracts, prioritizing more senior members and creating inequality within the union. But in my perception (and I don't think I'm alone in this), an equally troubling problem is that even "good" union bosses prioritize members of their own union and create inequality among the broader class of workers and citizens. Egregious examples include union advocacy for various kinds of licensure or "fossilizing" regulations (i.e., "we must keep doing things in this way we've been doing them to preserve the jobs of the people who do them that way"). These just raise barriers for other workers, increase competition for coveted union jobs, and increase the separation between "good" (aka union) jobs and the rest. The old-school unions a la the Wobblies were more focused on improving the lot of all workers, everywhere. Many of the labor reforms that were passed in the early 20th century (like minimum wage) followed this model: everyone gets the minimum wage, everyone gets worker safety guarantees, everyone gets the benefits of the labor policies. But nowadays I don't see so much of that from unions or labor activism in general. To a large extent I see the reverse: advocating for special minimum-wage carveouts (e.g., for hotel workers or fast-food workers); advocacy for special work-condition requirements; and yes, things like two-tier systems where benefits or pensions are differentially allocated based on characteristics internal to the union/job. I hate fat cat capitalism and large corporations more than almost anyone I know, but many unions (especially public employee unions) have lost a lot of my trust because of these things. The sad reality seems to be that many unions, just like the corporate bosses, are just in it for themselves. Being in it for everyone in the union is better than being in it for just the union bosses, but it's still not good enough as long as they're not in it for everyone who isn't super wealthy. If unions want to attract people they need to forcefully advocate not just for better stuff right now for these few people (union members), but for a wholesale societal overhaul to upend the entire economic system that makes such small-scale negotiation necessary.