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Comment by brianwawok | Hacker News Reader

This is the argument I can't solve.

With union = No merit based pay. Protection for the incompetent. Worst and best teacher make identical pay, and both are near impossible to fire.

Without union = race to the bottom. Where a union car assembly plant may pay workers $25 an hour, a non-union plant pays workers $10 an hour. We can't as a nation survive with so many jobs paying $10 an hour or less.

So what is the actual right path? How do you get fair pay for all workers, but not promote and protect the lazy and the incompetent?

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My mother was a teacher, and was unionized, and got paid a good middle class income.

But from my perspective one thing her union did really well was professional development. As well as advocating for the students in terms of capping class sizes, pushing the school on various initiatives, etc.. My mother was able to complete her masters while she worked, and professional development was something the union had negotiated with management and took very seriously.

It's trendy to pick on teachers unions. And definitely it seems like where I am now, in Ontario, the teacher's unions do some dubious things. But I mostly only saw good things from my mother's union growing up.

More employee-friendly employment laws would go a long way in preventing unions from feeling the need to fight for ridiculous contract terms that ensure employees are basically unable to be let go.

At-will employment is a joke. 2 weeks unpaid maternity leave is a joke. Reasonable public policy would prevent unions from completing with each other on these fronts to the demise of their own organizations.

> At-will employment is a joke.

I will be the first to admit that I am generally pro-business. Earlier comments make it clear I am generally anti-union, or at best ambivalent. That being said, I can generally understand the argument of the other side, even if I disagree with it.

But I don't understand at all the sentiment that at-will employment is negative. I believe if you're bad at your job, your boss should be able to fire you. That day. The obvious straw man here is "well at-will means you can be fired for anything, so if you wear yellow shoes and your boss doesn't like yellow he can fire you," which just never happens. So that nonsense aside, I honestly do not know what the opposition to at-will employment is.

You could also be fired because your boss wants to hire his nephew.

You could also be fired because you would be better at your boss' job than he is and he wants to get rid of you before his boss notices.

You could also be fired because you refuse to do something dangerous and insist that it should be done in a less-dangerous but more expensive way.

Nope. Wrongful termination is against the law.

At-will employment isn't a blank check for discriminatory practices.

> which just never happens. So that nonsense aside, I honestly do not know what the opposition to at-will employment is.

You don't understand it because you have declared that the argument of the other side to "never happen" and declared it "nonsense" to begin with.

But if you think it never happens, you are being naive and wrong. I have over the years had first hand knowledge of plenty of people being fired for reasons which have nothing to do with work performance at multiple companies. I've managed to stop some other attempts in the companies I've worked at, others were entirely out of my control to do anything about.

> I believe if you're bad at your job, your boss should be able to fire you. That day.

Even if we were to stipulate that no boss ever abuses this to fire you for unrelated reasons, this is also a strange attitude to me.

If you're bad at your job, your boss did a bad job interviewing you for the role and/or did a bad job providing adequate training. Also, if an employee is that bad at hiring the right people, I have little reason to trust that they are not also bad at ensuring they only fire people that are objectively bad at their job.

A process that does not give the employee some degree of recourse to argue their case and/or try to redeem themselves seems to me to be inherently one sided, unfair and abusive.

That does not mean I believe that an employee should be allowed to coast forever, but there is a massive gap from firing instantly to letting some coast forever. Such as e.g. the typical UK process, which usually involves raising a concern and formally drawing up a plan for improving performance together with the employee, followed by warnings if targets are not met, and finally termination. Yes, some people takes the piss and uses this to collect a paycheck a bit longer, others take it seriously and improves and become valuable employees; others will decide to leave on their own accord once they realise they will fail to meet requirements.

I think its something to do with, abuse by employers of vulnerable workers who can't stand up for themselves. Never mind yellow shoes; how about being critical of an abusive new rule by a sadistic manager? Unions were invented because of things like that and a hundred more; and yes I imagine somebody got fired for wearing the wrong color of shoes somewhere, sometime. And before unions, could do nothing about it.

> The obvious straw man here is "well at-will means you can be fired for anything, so if you wear yellow shoes and your boss doesn't like yellow he can fire you," which just never happens.

I feel like you set up a straw man that supports your point rather than the opposing point. How about this: A company's owners resent paying for health insurance but know that they have to do it to attract employees. To lower health insurance costs, they invent infractions to fire women and anyone age 50 or older.

Or a startup example: A company offers low pay and generous stock options that vest after 5 years of employment. Then they fire 90% of the employees in their fourth year.

At will employment: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/13/us/iowa-court-reaffirms-de...

> With union = No merit based pay. Protection for the incompetent. Worst and best teacher make identical pay, and both are near impossible to fire.

I don't think any of that is true of all unions. NFL players and Hollywood actors are essentially 100% unionized. Both have highly merit-based pay and have very little protection from being fired.

Without caricaturing the position of bosses and unions, and constant good faith consultation and negotiation between them. And, honestly, a larger percentage of profits and productivity gains going to workers, instead of owners. If you haven't noticed, neither unions nor workers are winning; see Piketty.

You've set up a strawman. There is no requirement that for a union to behave the way you suggest anywhere that I'm aware of. A union will generally be expected to provide certain protections, but there's a vast gap from having nobody to help you to reasonable representation is provided to even your positions vs. your employer to making the worst employees near impossible to fire.

E.g. the UK has plenty of strong unions, yet firing UK employees if you have good reason is shockingly easy for the most part seen with Scandinavian eyes. Some unions here are harder to deal with than others, sure, but it's also clearly possible to have unions that provide effective protection without making it impossible to get rid of people who do a bad job.

Part of the problem is that "doing a bad job" is sometimes used to hide cases of getting rid of people management doesn't like. It takes very few abuses of trust like that before you have a hardline union on the other side of the table that will not give a shit what arguments you have because they don't know whether or not the employer is telling the truth.

Once a relationship like that has soured, fixing it will be incredibly hard.

Remember that lives literally used to get lost over workers rights in the US (and still are many places in the world) - many unions today have a long institutional memory of people who died trying to gain concessions for their members.

E.g. AFL, now a part of the AFL-CIO was the instigator behind May Day as the international day for workers demonstrations, in part to continue the demonstrations for the 8 hour working day, in part in tribute to those who lost their lives in the Chicago Haymarket Massacre.

US unions in particular used to be on the forefront of this, and bore some of the worst brunts of violence, and many of the older US unions early became very much hardline for good reason.

Compare to unions many places in Europe where electoral success for left wing parties meant many of their demands where implement by law, allowing many unions to take a much softer approach and taking a lot of contentious issues off the table for union<->employer interactions because the hard stuff was dealt with by government.

> You've set up a strawman. There is no requirement that for a union to behave the way you suggest anywhere that I'm aware of. A union will generally be expected to provide certain protections, but there's a vast gap from having nobody to help you to reasonable representation is provided to even your positions vs. your employer to making the worst employees near impossible to fire.

Why do most/all Unions in the US end up this way? I am not sure you can say something is a straw man when literally most unions in a country act the same way. A straw man would be if I simply chose 1 union at random, like the Chicago Teachers Union. But choose more, look at the UAW or your local town teachers union. Seems pretty common.

> Why do most/all Unions in the US end up this way?

I don't know. Do they? Why do most unions elsewhere not end up this way?

Clearly there is something extremely toxic about the US relationship with unions given the kind of opinions we get to hear about them. It would be very interesting to understand exactly how that has come about.

Part of it probably does have its root in the fact that the battle lines between unions and employers in the US were drawn very early, and that the US government never got the level of union-friendly representation that large parts of Europe did that forced employers to the negotiating table and that in many countries established relatively civilized relationships between unions and employers and/or shifted many of the conflicts away from the the unions.

At the same time a lot of protection that may be extremely important to many US unionized workers doesn't matter elsewhere. Being fired in Norway, for example, is difficult, but if/when it happens, the social welfare system also makes it financially far less of a burden - there's much less of a reason for a union to take hardline positions on this in those circumstances than in a situation where the welfare system is as basic as it is in the US.

Forget employers, most people's experience is with government employee unions. 35.2% of public sector workers in the US are in unions, only 6.7% of private sector workers. They are particularly powerful in local politics, and there is a history of negotiating benefits with the politicians they elect that become unaffordable in the future.

I'm optimistic about the rise of employee owned co-ops. Moots the (American style) management vs labor war. Can add better governance thru greater transparency and accountability.

>With union = No merit based pay.

Unions aren't inherently against merit based pay. They're against merit based pay where managers get to unilaterally decide what counts as merit.

When managers (especially non-specialist managers) are in charge, fealty normally trumps competence anyway.

>So what is the actual right path?

Either come up with an objective standard for merit that unions and management can agree on or go for the closest objective approximation - seniority and accept that some incompetent people are going to take a paycheck (the horror!).

> Either come up with an objective standard for merit that unions and management can agree on or go for the closest objective approximation - seniority and accept that some incompetent people are going to take a paycheck (the horror!).

But better people deserve more pay, not just older people. If that is the only argument, I would argue to just get rid of unions.

Do you have any evidence that "better people" (according to what measurement?) generally are the ones who get better pay?

The places I've worked it has generally seemed pretty arbitrary and largely down to who are best at negotiating. I've yet to work anywhere that have taken an anything remotely objective stance to measuring productivity and rewarding staff accordingly.

The closest I've gotten was working for Yahoo, which at least tried to gather feedback, but the system was still inherently flawed by being based on managers ranking staff members without any kind of formalized system to ensure the rankings were objective.

One year I was told that the group my team was in had too many "above expectations", and since two out of four on my team were ranked above expectations they had to arbitrarily drop one down to "meets expectations". (Not at any time while I was there did I see any kind of attempt at creating a uniform definition of what "meets expectations" or "exceeds expectations" meant; had a manager with high expectations? sucked to be you)

Since that directly affected the raises I was allowed to allocate, and since the ranges were in percent of salary, that decision cost that person several thousand pounds a year on an ongoing basis that I was unable to adjust for the following years, because some HR drone was making the reports from line managers fit his idealised curve without making any attempt at verifying whether or not the reports matched reality.

(as an aside: the origin of socialism, from Saint Simon, was the idea of a meritocracy)

For developers, better people tend to get better pay through job hopping. If an individual company only promotes brown nosers, there are other companies that are looking for talent.

Source: Looking back at my college class. 10 years later - most of the people of MEH skill are at one level of job, and most of the people of high skill are at another job level.

It's not a perfect correlation, and I am sure things like negotiation have a nontrivial impact.. but it is WAYYYYY better than looking at the staff of a local teacher union and pay rates.

The norm in most corporate and non-corporate environments that don't have unions is that the better person doesn't get better pay: the kiss ass does.

Getting rid of unions does nothing to further merit based pay.

With unions - It literally does not matter what you do, you can't get fired, you get paid a set rate.

Without unions - You negotiate a fair market value for your wage.

You see no reason how without union could lead to better pay? How much could DHH get a job consulting Ruby for, vs someone who can hardly code?

No, "the horror!" is that truly competent technical people no longer enter fields like teaching.

You would have to be insane to do an extra Master's in order to earn $40k as a 'junior' CS or Math teacher when you can earn $150k in industry in SF straight out of undergrad.

Some 50% of Ontario elementary teachers cannot do Grade 5 fractions. My CS teacher in high school was trained in history and geography and was literally concurrently learning the same course one lesson ahead of us.

It's a disaster and it will never be fixed as long as the unions insist on paying STEM teachers the same as English teachers.

There is no teacher union in Texas. Teachers in Texas are all paid the same based on years of service.

> Teachers in Texas are all paid the same based on years of service.

Do you have a source for this? The first thing I found on google was an article[0] which indicates teacher pay in Texas varies both with respect to location and subject taught (although admittedly not by much).

[0] http://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/headlines/20150627-...

Source: I'm a teacher in Texas.

Here is the payscale for my district: https://docs.google.com/a/roundrockisd.org/file/d/0B13hERGxq...

Each district determines its own payscale. That's no different than a union state. Teachers in Boston have a different payscale than teachers in Springfield, MA even though they are both part of the MTA.

CTE Teachers (Career and Technical Education) do get a $2000 stipend but they also have an extra week of work plus extracurricular duties during the school year, so it's not just "extra money".

There is no negotiating over salary or benefits.

"Employees are paid in accordance with administrative guidelines and an established pay structure. The District’s compensation plan is reviewed by Human Resource Services each year to include comparisons with other districts, an analysis of market data, as well as cost of living information. The compensation plan is adjusted as data dictates and the budget allows. The Board of Trustees approves the compensation plan on an annual basis."[1]

This is the Dallas pay schedule: http://www.nctq.org/docs/DISD_2015-2016_Salary_Handbook_FINA... (page 9)

They do pay more in Dallas but there still is no negotiation over your salary.

It looks like Dallas is replacing the "years of service" schedule with a pay-for-performance schedule (page 8) where your salary is adjusted up or down according to "performance, student achievement and student perception surveys."[2] That went into effect last year, I believe. I wouldn't be surprised to see that spread.

[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B13hERGxqDqDR19OcW1WRHpEd0U... (page 15) [2] http://tei.dallasisd.org/current-teachers-2/

A teacher with 30 years of EXP and a PHD makes worse than the worst programmer I know with no degree :( :( :(

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