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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 sa

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 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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.
    - pdonis 10mo ago
      > One would need to be careful to stop such a company from fully monopolising the profession though. Antitrust law should take care of that. Indeed, making the unions into actual worker-owned corporations would help in that respect, as there is no counterpart to antitrust law for unions that I'm aware of.
      - oersted 10mo ago
        Agreed, but antitrust law has had a deep enforcement problem for a long time. It's too open-ended and up to interpretation, perhaps fundamentally so as a concept. It's not easy to clearly delineate a market and prove the dominance of a company, one can endlessly argue the definition of the market, especially a company with such resources. As a result, it is only really enforced when the political winds are aligned, and selectively towards those it is aligned against.
        pdonis 10mo ago
        > antitrust law has had a deep enforcement problem for a long time That's true--in fact early "big name" enforcements hurt consumers, by breaking up Standard Oil and Alcoa Aluminum, whose "antitrust violation" was selling products more cheaply and in greater quantities than their competitors. As a result of the breakups, prices went up and supplies went down. > It's not easy to clearly delineate a market and prove the dominance of a company That's true as well, particularly for labor, because the market for "labor" is more fungible than most; people can retrain and learn new skills, so, for example, it's not clear that "all auto workers in the US" is a "market" that shouldn't be dominated by one company, since workers have the option of switching industries. Whereas, you can't retrain a product to do something different--your car can't be taught to do your laundry, for example. What the above tells me is that it's not very clear when one company dominating a market (or market segment, or whatever) is actually a problem that needs to be addressed. So I don't see this as a reason why "unions becoming actual corporations" shouldn't be tried.
        Arainach 10mo ago
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
oersted 10mo ago
> high litigation costs make most work places fairly safe I don't understand this. High litigation costs give an unfair advantage to those with capital to spare. It makes it harder for harmed workers to sue and have the stamina to succeed. An important role of unions is actually to pool worker capital to level that playing field. Do you mean that the amounts that companies need to pay when they loose are high enough to disincentivize taking those risks? I'm not sure that's true, it may be to a degree.
dylan604 10mo ago
Why only focused on wages? What about treatment of employees in general from maximum hours, minimum down time, workplace safety, and many other things that unions are meant to address?
- daft_pink 10mo ago
  Because wage growth is too low in the United States, but these other factors introduce weird effects that hurt the competitiveness of our companies and our industry. I don’t think that work in the US in general is unsafe and things like OSHA and insurance really manage safety well. It doesn’t seem like unionized industries are any more less safe than non unionized industries. I think most workers actually want wage growth. Things like hollywood writers banning ai or auto workers preventing plant closures just don’t make sense.
danaris 10mo ago
If you would rather have an extra, say, $3k/yr* in salary, rather than having that exact same amount of money go toward an employer-provided health plan that would, if you tried to obtain it on your own, cost $10k/yr, then I think you might have a problem with math. Note that I don't just mean the math of $10k > $3k, because I know some people think that they can save money by just not having health coverage. This is also being bad at math: specifically, statistics. You won't win, especially since you need regular checkups to make sure you aren't starting to develop something that's cheap to nip in the bud, but massively expensive to treat later. * No actual numbers were harmed in the making of this post. If you think these specific numbers are unrealistic, feel free to substitute other actual values, but the rough ratios should still be in the right ballpark.

awkward 10mo 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 10mo 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 10mo 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.
  - pdonis 10mo ago
    > One would need to be careful to stop such a company from fully monopolising the profession though. Antitrust law should take care of that. Indeed, making the unions into actual worker-owned corporations would help in that respect, as there is no counterpart to antitrust law for unions that I'm aware of.
    - oersted 10mo ago
      Agreed, but antitrust law has had a deep enforcement problem for a long time. It's too open-ended and up to interpretation, perhaps fundamentally so as a concept. It's not easy to clearly delineate a market and prove the dominance of a company, one can endlessly argue the definition of the market, especially a company with such resources. As a result, it is only really enforced when the political winds are aligned, and selectively towards those it is aligned against.
      - pdonis 10mo ago
        > antitrust law has had a deep enforcement problem for a long time That's true--in fact early "big name" enforcements hurt consumers, by breaking up Standard Oil and Alcoa Aluminum, whose "antitrust violation" was selling products more cheaply and in greater quantities than their competitors. As a result of the breakups, prices went up and supplies went down. > It's not easy to clearly delineate a market and prove the dominance of a company That's true as well, particularly for labor, because the market for "labor" is more fungible than most; people can retrain and learn new skills, so, for example, it's not clear that "all auto workers in the US" is a "market" that shouldn't be dominated by one company, since workers have the option of switching industries. Whereas, you can't retrain a product to do something different--your car can't be taught to do your laundry, for example. What the above tells me is that it's not very clear when one company dominating a market (or market segment, or whatever) is actually a problem that needs to be addressed. So I don't see this as a reason why "unions becoming actual corporations" shouldn't be tried.
        Arainach 10mo ago

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

oersted 10mo ago

> high litigation costs make most work places fairly safe I don't understand this. High litigation costs give an unfair advantage to those with capital to spare. It makes it harder for harmed workers to sue and have the stamina to succeed. An important role of unions is actually to pool worker capital to level that playing field. Do you mean that the amounts that companies need to pay when they loose are high enough to disincentivize taking those risks? I'm not sure that's true, it may be to a degree.

dylan604 10mo ago

Why only focused on wages? What about treatment of employees in general from maximum hours, minimum down time, workplace safety, and many other things that unions are meant to address?

daft_pink 10mo ago
Because wage growth is too low in the United States, but these other factors introduce weird effects that hurt the competitiveness of our companies and our industry. I don’t think that work in the US in general is unsafe and things like OSHA and insurance really manage safety well. It doesn’t seem like unionized industries are any more less safe than non unionized industries. I think most workers actually want wage growth. Things like hollywood writers banning ai or auto workers preventing plant closures just don’t make sense.

danaris 10mo ago

If you would rather have an extra, say, $3k/yr* in salary, rather than having that exact same amount of money go toward an employer-provided health plan that would, if you tried to obtain it on your own, cost $10k/yr, then I think you might have a problem with math. Note that I don't just mean the math of $10k > $3k, because I know some people think that they can save money by just not having health coverage. This is also being bad at math: specifically, statistics. You won't win, especially since you need regular checkups to make sure you aren't starting to develop something that's cheap to nip in the bud, but massively expensive to treat later. * No actual numbers were harmed in the making of this post. If you think these specific numbers are unrealistic, feel free to substitute other actual values, but the rough ratios should still be in the right ballpark.