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That's the theory. The practice is that unions worry more about campus carry than about treatment of adjuncts (yeah, I'm an academic scientist and can speak only from observations) and that they serve more as a shield from accountability than anything else.

After the local public-sector union made brief noises about unionizing postdocs - my then-supervisor, himself protected from accountability by the double shield of tenure and union, tried to discourage us from supporting the effort - and retreated quickly I changed my position. The local union boss graduated one (1) PhD student during his 30 years on the faculty. Other faculty members were on the record of saying they are ashamed to be represented by such a lazybag.

American unions somehow painted themselves into a corner.

While I don't discount your example. In the wider context there is a vast pressure to paint unions as a bad thing because they cost people with power money.

Work unlike normal products has a fuzzy relationship to market forces because people are not quite fungible. If you pay relative to the lowest common denominator, then the surplus from over performers ends up with the company. Ratchet up the pay and that surplus ends up with under performers.

American unions somehow painted themselves into a corner.

They became too focused on an adversarial relationship with the company. Germany has the right of things. Unions there have guaranteed board seats [0]. This gives the employees more of a say in the direction of the company.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany

I'm trying to think of a good word to use instead of 'union', any thoughts? I think the word's been poisoned as much as socialism, so perhaps using a different term can help (in the US?).

"Employee Association" usually gets thrown around a lot.

Thanks for the suggestion, but Employee Association sounds to transparent a 'euphemism'. How do others feel about that?

Guild. Like the Screen Writer's Guild, Actor's Guild, etc.

My Dad was involved in unions from 70s-90s. He describes things differently. In the 1970s the relationship with most companies was collaborative. When they sat down at the negotiating table each side wanted the best deal possible, but the union wanted the company to do well and the corporate management saw the unions as partners.

Beginning in the 1980s the whole relationship changed. Companies started hiring professional tiger teams to roll in and negotiate with the most aggressive tactics possible. They began to regard the union to an impediment to profits and make every effort to undermine and break it. Corporations began to even engage in tactics like strategic bankruptcies to invalidate their union contracts and cancel their pensions.

American Labor has always wanted a relationship like the one in Germany. It's aways been the other side who's resisted that. Current "Maximum Shareholder Value" theory insists that labor should have no say in how the company is run, because the only stakeholder that matters is the investor.

The shareholder value theory is a problem, integrity isn't a consideration any more.

I think unions are a great way of balancing the power of the employer and employee, but there are some major drawbacks.

I'm not sure how it is in Europe, but in the public higher education space here in the U.S. the unions are way to powerful.

An example of this imbalance:

All faculty and staff members for the California State University system are part of the same union. That means that the union has the collective bargaining power of all 50,000 employees. The union is very good at their job of protecting employees, and will always resist any disciplinary action by the administration, even if the employee is clearly in the wrong. This leads to a situation where administration will simply ignore extremely low-performing individuals because they would have to fight the union to do so.

Also, all CSU employees must pay the union dues, even if you are not part of the union, which is insane.

When unions are this big and this focused, their collective bargaining power, IMO, exceeds what is necessary to protect workers.

With the union you mentioned your a part of things seem to be better structured. Though it is large at around 140,000 members, they seem to be spread across many companies and I imagine that not every company is made up of 100% union employees. Also the fact that your union encompasses a wide variety of professions is definitely a big positive. That seems more like a fairer balance of power to me.

> Also, all CSU employees must pay the union dues, even if you are not part of the union, which is insane.

This is to avoid the free rider problem. Removing this requirement basically kills a union. Right-to-work laws, for example, are 100% about neutering unions, and they do so by precisely this mechanism. Voluntary associations have serious problems that severely limit their effectiveness. Same reason e.g. taxes can't be voluntary.

That was not so much a commentary about right-to-work as it was about the absurdity of the situation.

California is decidedly against right-to-work laws, so why in this case you are allowed to opt out of the benefits of the union while still having to pay for it is what I take issue with.

If you are allowed to choose not to join the union then you shouldn't have to pay union dues.

The problem is that most of the union benefits are really hard to opt out of. I benefit from an improved payment schedule, better overtime rules, a safer work environment, nicer insurance, etc. whether I'm a member of the union or not.

Don't think of it as club membership, think of it as a negotiator's fee that's baked into your employment contract.

It's not practical to opt out of various benefits that come from the union's activities. For instance, your employer's not going to be able to cut your pay/benefits much below that of union workers, or try to give you an abusive schedule/workload, since if they try you'll (I assume) just join the union at the first opportunity.

Further, the union may negotiate things like compensation and benefits packages for all workers because not doing so would terminally weaken them by letting management entice workers to leave the union, until it eventually dies—and then management can enjoy the deeply unequal bargaining position of giant-organization versus uncoordinated individuals, until workers organize again—but this time management can kill it more easily and inexpensively before it even gets started, through he same process, but with the bonus that this time they can also be much more coercive and punitive in their approach toward certain especially troublesome individuals since they have less-effective oversight.

[EDIT] bah, I effed up my reasoning on that second part by starting with one thing then going another direction and not fixing the first bit. There are two separate problems: 1) if non-union folks don't have to pay dues, the employer can kill the union by enticing people away from it, and 2) if they can hire non-union at below-union compensation (say, if you have to pick up-front whether you're union and can't sign on later) then they can simply only hire people who don't join the union (and preferentially retain non-union folks) until it dies.

> California is decidedly against right-to-work laws, so why in this case you are allowed to opt out of the benefits of the union while still having to pay for it is what I take issue with.

You misunderstand the situation. California public employees covered by a union can opt out of union membership and full membership dues and pay reduced “fair share” fees, get all the benefits negotiated by the union (including union representation in disciplinary proceedings); they only benefits they lose are voting rights and non-representational benefits (e.g., if the union has separate arrangements to make products or services available to members separate from benefits negotiated with the employer.)

I'm not sure I understand. Why couldn't the company only provide union-negotiated benefits to the members of the union, and treat all non-union employees the way they normally would? What constrains the company to give union treatment to non-union members?

See my reply below. TL;DR a situation where people can receive different compensation if they're non-union, and can get out of paying union dues if they're non-union, makes it trivial for management to strangle the union. They can entice people to leave the union until it dies.

[EDIT] more generally there's a bunch of game-theoretic stuff that keeps unions from being effective if all participation in them is totally voluntary. Union-busting laws usually aim to disrupt the preconditions necessary for the survival of unions, often by simply forcing them all to be voluntary, probably choosing that tactic because there's a personal liberty argument to be made in its favor. Why these people are so insistent that one particular requirement for working for a given employer (join the relevant union) should be outlawed while all manner of other requirements the employer themselves may have are just fine is left as an exercise for the reader.

> Right-to-work laws, for example, are 100% about neutering unions,

No, they're not. The idea that you should have to join an outside organization to work for a government agency is ridiculous. Doubly so when those same groups spend extremely heavily on politics.

You just provided a (good or not is another question) justification for neutering unions, not an argument supporting the position that right-to-left laws aren't about neutering unions.

I did not, but I understand why some would want to read it as such, because it's an indefensible position to claim that one should be forced to join a politically active organization (or any outside organization for that matter) to become a public employee.

My point is that you should be able to work for a government agency without joining a union. That is a reason for right-to-work laws that has nothing to do with neutering unions. If unions can't survive without people being legally obligated to join them that is on them and they should adapt to meet that reality.

> I did not, but I understand why some would want to read it as such, because it's an indefensible position to claim that one should be forced to join a politically active organization (or any outside organization for that matter) to become a public employee.

You dodged the point above, but the governmental agencies themselves are politically active. So are very nearly all employers.

[EDIT] my point being, why is aiding one politically-active organization (your employer) as a requirement for employment entirely fine, but being required to aid two is some abridgment of liberty? It's not like it's sprung on you after the fact. It's exactly as much a choice as aiding your employer's political agenda (i.e. you can not work there).

Why's it more ridiculous than other restrictions and requirements for employment? Or, on the political spending issue, than what companies and trade organizations spend on the same (though usually to different ends)? Hell, even governments and governmental agencies participate in lobbying (of larger/parent governments or agencies), if we're restricting it to that in order to have a potential conflict-of-interest on the political lobbying front for the union. Should their employees be able to opt out of that and receive higher pay in return?

To head off "if you don't like the political spending of your employer then you can just quit"—right, and you can quit working at a place with a union membership requirement if you don't like the union's political spending. "But that's impractical because almost all the unions spend in ways I don't like". Oh, I know. Guess how lots of people feel about the political spending of almost all employers/companies? Good for the goose, good for the gander.

Again, why is required paid membership to a non-governmental group an acceptable requirement for employment by the government? It's a very, very simple question. I don't care what trade groups or companies do.

Why's it unacceptable?

> All faculty and staff members for the California State University system are part of the same union.

No, they aren't. As you, yourself, note later (see final quote below).

They all just get the benefit of representation by the same union, even though they can opt-out of actual membership.

> This leads to a situation where administration will simply ignore extremely low-performing individuals because they would have to fight the union to do so.

No, what leads to that is lack of accountability of the administration for aggregate performance. If leadership was accountable, they'd be motivated to act where necessary even if the union would be opposed. (Given the lack of accountability for performance, without union resistance, disciplinary power would be used arbitrarily, and not effectively target low performers either.)

> Also, all CSU employees must pay the union dues, even if you are not part of the union, which is insane.

No, they don't. Non-members (membership is opt-out for classifications covered by the union) have to pay what are called "fair share" fees which are related to the functions that the union must provide them as non-member represented employees; only union members pay actual union dues.

> tl;dr Unions work for me.

Fixed.

There's a lot of bad unions out there as well. My wife dealt with one as a cashier at a grocery store in high school. They did less than nothing for her and her coworkers. Never visited the store, never responded to significant issues including discrimination and harassment, never met with management. But they did make sure they got their cut of her pay which, as a poor girl who had to buy her own clothes and pay for everything from the money she earned, she desperately needed.

And vote the union bosses out? How was she to do that exactly? Maybe it's different over there, but unions can cover tens if not hundreds of locations at different businesses in the US.

> And vote the union bosses out? How was she to do that exactly? Maybe it's different over there, but unions can cover tens if not hundreds of locations at different businesses in the US.

I resent "it's democratic, so vote instead of complaining" in 100% of its incarnations. Democratic systems are a bit more responsive than most others, but they're not actually subject to the desires of any one voter. It's entirely reasonable to look at a system and say "the fixes I think this needs are completely unattainable" or even "I think the voting process of this system is incapable of producing change". Calling unions - or anything - fixable simply because they count up votes feels like a way to silence uncomfortable criticism.

>Oh, bonus points, the settlement they got me when my position was made redundant

I'm curious why you felt you deserved a settlement just because your employer didn't need you anymore. Did your employer violate relevant laws in your country regarding termination of employment or perhaps violate a contractual obligation on their part that you negotiated when you were hired?

Well, it's obvious that he deserved the settlement, otherwise, why the employer pay it?

I find that idea, that we hear so frequently, that employees should not extract all the possible value of their employers very uncapitalistic.

Because it was cheaper to do so than have to pay lawyers to deal with him.

Yes, my point was that when corporations extract all the possible value of a deal inside the legality, rarely you hear the question of why "they felt that they deserved" it.

We are constantly questioning whether lawsuits are fair/justified around here. The first that comes to mind are patent trolls. Settlement implies at least the threat of a lawsuit, so it's reasonable to question what a potential lawsuit was about, isn't it?

Sure, only that the question was not "what was the dispute about", but:

"why you felt you deserved a settlement just because your employer didn't need you anymore. "

I read in those words an implied moral position that I wanted to criticize. My excuses if read it wrong.

I see what you mean. The reason I responded that way was because of the way OP worded their own message:

>Oh, bonus points, the settlement they got me when my position was made redundant has paid for the union dues for many years to come.

It sounds like he was happy he was able to milk some company out of money just because he got fired. That pinged my frivolous lawsuit radar pretty hard. I would've worded that, "When my employer failed to comply with federal regulations about how to lay me off, my union provided me with a lawyer to help recoup what I was owed." or something to that effect...

It's a fair question - and you've got the right answer. In the UK, when you want to make a large number of people then you have to follow a set procedure. My employer did not do that. Then they tried to prevent me taking up a new job via a dubious non-compete.

If I didn't have a union provided legal firm working on my behalf, I wouldn't have understood my rights.

For anyone reading this who happens to live in the US... if something like this happens to you, you can contact the labor board for either your state or the national level one. They handle issues like this all the time and you almost certainly won't have to go through the trouble of seeking out a lawyer.

I disagree, just ask the manufacturing industry how well unions work. They worked well at getting employers to relocate their production facilities.

Automation killed more jobs than either unions or free trade by orders of magnitude.

In an ideal world, union leadership should work with management team to make the company succeed and share the fruits of that success with the rank and file employees. A corollary of this is that if the company fails to succeed, there will be no goodies to share.

In practice, American unions failed to see that. Even if we ignore the cases where leadership just enriched themselves, unions concerned themselves mostly with extracting as much value as the employer would bear, and to a lesser degree to shield employees from the consequences of their mistakes.

On the other hand, fluid capitals means jobs would have gotten outsourced regardless of union's stance. In Mexico, which is far from having the cheapest labor in the world, minimum wage is less than $5USD per day. There are loads of social problems derived from that, but the fact that this is feasible at all relies on a much lower cost of living compared with USA. Try to implement that on the other side of the border and you'd be facing bread riots in no time.

This is wrong. Back in the day, unions did see that, and were happy to work with the companies. However, the companies were the ones that broke that social contract first, trying to frame negotiations as adversarial.

And, so what if the employees are trying to extract as much value as they can out of their employer? Isn't that what capitalism is all about? Isn't that what the employer is doing to the employees, and anyone else they deal with? Why do we see it as acceptable for the company to do so, but not the workers?

They worked very well for decades, fighting hard for a lot of things that we take for granted now, and then corporations found a legal loophole to get around them. Probably some laurels-resting too. Same basic thing with automation.

So toss out the idea of giving workers more leverage entirely, or try to adapt with the times? The relocation example shows that the business isn't on your side.

How many jobs has not having a union prevented from being outsourced? Even when not fully outsourced, how many of us work at companies that have foreign offices in certain regions that pay a fraction of the US going rate? Or that invest much heavier in lobbying for increased immigration than in worker training/re-training programs?

And I disagree with you. Just ask the Director's Guild, the Screen Actor's Guild, the Writer's Guild, or any of the pro athlete unions.