Americans Don’t Miss Manufacturing – They Miss Unions | Hacker News Reader

Americans Don’t Miss Manufacturing – They Miss Unions

fivethirtyeight.com

9 pointsmarricks6 comments

Bad conclusion (and title). It says right in the article what American workers actually miss - "a source of stable, well-paying jobs, especially for people without a college degree". At the same time, Americans overwhelmingly want cheap goods, which usually means goods not produced with American manufacturing labor. The failure of the economy isn't that unions are disappearing, it's that legitimately good jobs simply aren't taking the place of lost jobs for a large portion of American workers.

This is what I don't get, people who say lower priced goods are more important than paying workers more.

We have a bunch of new jobs coming in warehouse work, retail, information & technology and what group ensures they get good pay and benefits? To a certain extent we can rely on competition, but with companies growing after larger and more powerful, and willing to collude[0], those jobs will likely get worse with time or start out crappy.

This is pretty evident with the economic problems starting in the 70's then the rise of neoliberalism in the 80's and stripping unions of powers.[1] What's even more perplexing now is in the last decade we have a growing economy but it's limited to the upper class. I think there is definitely space for us to have unions and fight for more of that growth to benefit the working class.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/01/25/upshot/shrinki...

I always see comments like this, that states some data about unions and decreasing wages and rights, etc.

While I agree, I almost never see anyone going one step further and saying what can be done about it. "Call your representatives!" says many, but this is a mainly passive action that depends too much on faith in the incorruptibility of our representatives. We can continue to do this, but we need a more powerful and active direction.

With the tech bubble collapsing and people losing their jobs (especially with what's currently happening in Silicon Valley), I think maybe it is time for a dedicated union for both engineers (us) and other employees. That is, some kind of active effort designed to spearhead these principles. How can this happen? HN readers are smart; we can organize ourselves, can't we?

Since half the states have a "right to work" law that says no employee has to support a union financially[1] it's much harder to start a union, especially for a multistate endeavor. With social media one would think it'd be easier to form up, but that same media can be used to slander unions and quash them before they even form. There's a lot of well financed and experienced Anti Union advisers that can inform as to how best stop a union from forming and somehow an anti union mindset has seeped into popular opinion like seen above.

Honestly seems like it'd take another great recession with the focus put on employee rights for major changes to happen. Luckily with Obama leaving he is finally lending some helping hand to Unions by making companies disclose when the get advice from anti-union advisers [2]

[1] http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/02/23/right-to-work-laws_...

[2] http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-03-24/business-back...

What's to stop Trump or Hilary from revoking these "union-friendly" when they come into office? They'll have 4 or 8 years to dismantle it again. I guess at that point maybe people will be really angry, but right now we have thousands of engineers and other startup employees that just got screwed over big time. What can be done to help them at this moment?

If targeting "right to work" is the first step, then perhaps we can organize something around abolishing that. If abolishing is too difficult, then perhaps modifying it so that "right to work" only applies to companies that have less than $1 million but have safeguards in place to ensure fair layoff packages, but companies with more than $1 million must allow unions. That way, small companies don't have to worry about unions and when they're big enough, they'll have the money and the lawyers to deal with it.

Waiting is a loser's game. With another recession, the government will do just enough to keep people content, but not go that extra length to solidify those protections. With changing seats of power over time (re-elections), there's no guarantee that the next set of people in power won't dismantle protections... causing the cycle to repeat... causing us to wait for another recession... and so forth.

>U.S. manufacturing jobs, I argued a few weeks ago, are never coming back.

Horse and buggy jobs aren't coming back either. That's not a bad thing. U.S. manufacturing is outputting almost 50% more than it did 20 years ago(1). US manufacturing is more productive and provides a higher standard of living generally. Having said all of that, there are still manufacturing jobs, despite all of the rhetoric to the contrary.

1. http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/08/upshot/the-economy-is-rigg...

As for the title, I don't miss unions.

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