Tesla factory workers pushing for a union send demands to Tesla's Board
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
[edit: I love Musk and all his visionary work. Consider it this way, think of Musks usual week and how much he's up to, now imagine on a day he's announcing a new Space X breakthrough that you are working on site and there is an issue with the batch of door handles that have just arrived to you from the warehouse. What should you do? Are you just going to stop work on the assembly and drop Musk a line?)]
[edit 2: Seems Musk didn't actually say he wanted to be contacted directly by employees facing safety issues, see below]
"Musk then said he wants direct reports about every injury, without exception, going forward. He also plans to spend time on the assembly line."
Or it was a mistake. Journalists sometimes make them, too.
My experience with small time journalists, is that many are unethical and they are busy thinking of a narrative that they can sell to their editor and/or their audience. If their distortions were mistakes, they would be random, but lots of people reporting news in media generally err on the side of being more lurid, shocking, or controversial.
You can tell the ethical ones, because they manage to avoid this and be the "cooler heads that prevail."
"We have raised these issues repeatedly, but they remain unresolved,"
>but on this occasion it seems shoddy reporting should mean we can't make a strong comment on what he should be doing here.
Of course we can, there's a lot of articles other than this BI one. Musk should meet at least several of the things they're asking. Stopping anti-union behavior, laying out clear paths for promotion and improving the safety of his factories all seem like perfectly reasonable requests.
The HN crowd probably thinks the current meritocracy is good enough, so unions seem like an unneeded expense.
You tend to appreciate it more if it might have direct benefits to you.
I suspect if you asked people who were laid off, or older developers experiencing age discrimination, you would see a different distribution of opinions.
There's also some history in the US of unions lining their own pockets, shady deals, coercing membership, organized crime connections, etc. None of it very recent though.
Public unions (police, fire, gov't workers, some teaching unions) are usually not politicized this way.
Unions are one tiny attempt by the common-man to even that out a fraction, and is therefore evil by definition, because it goes against the above point.
Anyone against unions is either a) an obscenely rich owner who doesn't want to share, or b) has been tricked into thinking making rich people richer will help them in some extremely obscure way.
I agree, that's why I asked for other people's augments against them.
And of course you are correct, unions are not perfect and sometimes are downright stupid (your two examples). Just because something is not perfect is not a reason to not have it.
It's just a good reason to improve it.
On the whole, unions (including their sometimes stupid rules) are better that not unions, and I have never seen a compelling argument otherwise (other than the two reasons I mentioned in my original post, which are not valid)
I think unions are positive or negative on a case-by-case basis. Given the value of human life, safety-critical industries almost always benefit from union presence but Hollywood for example seems to take on unions as a burgeoning cost of doing business without them providing much in the way of real value. I don't think they're universally good or bad.
I'm broadly supportive of private sector unions, and I think it would be great if the relationship between unions and employers in the US would more closely match what I've observed in Europe and Japan. With that being said, I think it's perfectly reasonable to be supportive of unions in general, while being critical of certain aspects of them.
My own criticism of unions comes both from my personal experience working in a union shop, as well as second hand info I get from several close friends currently working in union shops at the Port of LA/LB and various municipal and private employers in the LA/OC area. My personal criticisms stem from what I viewed as an almost total inability to hold more senior employees accountable for performance, an extremely rigid organizational structure that made it very difficult/impossible for a low level employee like myself to try and get into new positions based on work and effort rather than strict seniority, and a very lax attitude towards harassment and discrimination towards those who were not white or Hispanic, and especially towards those who weren't heterosexual. Sprinkle in a heavy dose of nepotism at the top and things got bad enough that I actually quit and went back to working a crappy retail job.
Now I realize that these things could just as well, and in fact do, occur in non-union shops, which is why I still support unions in general, but again, I don't think they are above critique.
My view of public employee unions, particularly for public safety employees like police and fire, is more philosophically opposed.
Edited for punctuation.
I am in total agreement with you - Unions are good, but nothing is above constructive criticism.
After all, the goal is constant improvement.
I would also caution against assuming that because unions, and their members, might share similar views with traditionally left wing political parties in regards to employment policies, that these views extend to being left wing or "progressive" on non-work related issues. I would probably describe myself as being well to the left of mainstream US politics when it comes to most social issues, and probably fairly to the left on economic issues, and I did not get the sense that most union coworkers shared these sentiments in the least.
2) Next time you're in New Orleans read the passenger "rights" placard in a taxi. It's absurd and laughable. Protectionist rules there protect drivers behaving badly. You will be scammed every time you go there, if they don't try to get you on the way in they'll try on the way out. You get bonus points if they try both times. People who might oppose unions? People who've been burned by unions protecting bad behavior.
3) Police unions protect Police officers behaving badly. This prevents conversations about proper and improper behavior, which fosters bad behavior, which damages public trust and safety. Who supports public safety and trustworthy armed public servants? Hopefully everyone.
I'm all for workers rights but sometimes worker protections protect bad behavior which can lead to negative emotions about the process.
- Factory layoffs HAD to be done by seniority rather than merit. We knowingly laid off top performers, just because they were newer to the company (due to union contract rules).
- Vendors at a tech conference got in trouble for moving their display tables a few feet because that was supposed to be done by union workers.
- Promotions and raises strongly tied to seniority, less flexibility.
IME seniority and political patronage is basically how a lot (if not most) companies promote too - under the guise of being purely concerned about objective performance of course.
For example, if you want layoffs performed by merit, you'd need a union board to verify those metrics and agree to them, with the addition of a bonus for those who performed well enough to stay or some stock in the company.
Vendors moving stuff is a bit harder because if they break some shit, the union will be forced to cover them by law despite the fact their people had nothing to do with it. They'd probably relax it if their company paid for insurance that covered anyone and everyone doing work on the premises.
Promotions and raises can again have more company input but the union would want more money for people who are promoted. They choose not to pay it and deal with the system as is.
Most of the unions I've seen aren't voluntary. When I was in grad school, I was forced to pay dues into the union. I don't like that. I think there should be as many unions as employees like. I don't understand how the union can be understood to be negotiating on my behalf if I can't choose not to have them negotiate on my behalf.
Once the union has negotiated a budget for itself, it has an independent mandatee to sustain itself, which is sort of detached from any selective pressures. If I'm a bad employee, I get fired. If the company is bad, it goes bankrupt. If a union behaves badly, the consequences are indirect. A bad union only gets its comeuppance if the company goes under.
Because the selective pressure on it is indirect, evolution can't happen within regimes, it can only happen when union workers transfer (or don't) organizational knowledge into a new host company. Basically, like a virus. It's just weird to have an entity that doesn't face any consequences.
To the extent that employees have collective bargaining power, they can just use it. Get a group together, write a letter to Elon, and threaten to quit. See what he says. If you have any leverage, you can use it. If you don't have any leverage why would the union fare any better?
He'll identify the key players and throw them a bone and tell the rest to go ahead and quit, maybe even sue them as an example. The whole point of a union is that it can't be defeated by divide-and-conquer: it provides a reasonable counter-balance to the amount of power wielded by the employer. Instead of the threat of a few people quitting, their biggest leverage is "there'll be work stoppage"
I don't know enough to speak to the 'being forced to pay dues' point but having as many unions as employees want defeats the purpose of a union. You need everyone to come together as one to have any power. Have multiple unions and the company can play them off against eachother.
>> To the extent that employees have collective bargaining power, they can just use it. Get a group together, write a letter to Elon, and threaten to quit. See what he says. If you have any leverage, you can use it. If you don't have any leverage why would the union fare any better?
If people that work on the production line doing unskilled tasks got together and complained about safety and refused to work until it was fixed the company could easily fire them and hire another bunch of people tomorrow. If the union comes to the company with the issue on their behalf the company has to listen because the union members will include skilled workers too and they company can't afford to lose them.
Unions can get fired by their employees, in fact it's something that has happened. Their pressure is very direct, they have far more invested in the company working than management more often than not. If a CEO loses their company but has drawn a few mil from it in savings, they have a relatively easier path to rebuilding themselves than employees who have far less wealth.
>To the extent that employees have collective bargaining power, they can just use it. Get a group together, write a letter to Elon, and threaten to quit.
You've literally just described a union. The reason they're compulsory in union companies is they threaten ruining production if non-union members get used, as a way of giving themselves more bargaining power. The reason you're required to pay dues is the union is required BY LAW to pay for your legal defense and benefits whether you want to be a member or not, so it seems kind of mean to not pay for that.
Second hand things I've heard: (I know the people who saw these firsthand)
1) Detroit had rooms were extra workers would just watch TV all day. It they didn't show they could be fired but as long as they did they were kept on the books. The jobs were in the contract and the union wouldn't let them go away.
2) The lines had been designed to be run by 4 people each but they kept 5 for years just keep the union happy. A good company would buy these workers out or just let attrition take its course but they had to restaff at this level for years. This was finally solved by a strike where the replacement non-union, lightly trained office workers set 6 straight shifts of new plant output records.
3) A general sand bagging to keep worker count up. i.e. if you get done early, sleep/hide in your work truck, but you can only park it at these type of locations so it looks ok. Your scheduled route WILL take 8 hours, even if it only takes 5 after your first month. This is very common, even more so in cost plus government contracts where even the company likes it. Every extra $ is that much more profit.
I wish unions had better reputation but at least in the US it one of (mostly) lazy workers making sure they get their cut while doing as little as possible. I know this isn't 100% true but there is a kernel of truth.
Strong fucking everything
Let's not forget that unions are not opt-in or opt-out. If you work in a union shop you are in that union and their dues are automatically taken directly out of your pay. You don't like what your union is doing? Tough luck. Suddenly you need to negotiate with the people who should be on your side and are taking money away from you to fund themselves. Union workers are often doubly screwed by their employers and their unions.
No one is ever legally obligated to join a union in the U.S. You may be required to pay dues, since the union affords you protections even if you're not a member, but you'll never be required to join it.
It's also not true that "don't like what your union is doing, tough luck". Unions are democratic organizations. Don't like what it's doing? Take your case to your fellow union members, persuade them, and steer the ship to what you do want the union to do.
You seem to have a view of unions that is tinged with much of the anti-union lies that have been propagated for decades in this country. (I won't dignify those lies by calling them propaganda.)
I doubt a handful of forum posts would convince you to reexamine the things you say that aren't true, but I hope you'll consider the fact that you've been mislead for a long time by very wealthy, powerful, media-savvy people.
(Unions are none of these, by the way--not particularly wealthy, nor powerful, and not media-savvy in the slightest.)
Unions are also not very democratic. They are democratic in principle but once again fall to the tyranny of the majority. If you are a minority in a union you are completely screwed unless you can trump their demands by using a protected class.
Unions have already served their purpose, well their original purpose was racism pure and simple, but their purpose of protecting workers is no longer necessary. Now they exist to only protect themselves.
Exactly how much work-oriented racism was there in 14th century England, when trade unions were first outlawed? Or in industrial age Britain?
Stop spreading your crazy FUD.
So you can instead choose to pay money yet have no voice, or choose to not have a job at that company, or in some cases a job in an entire profession when the union has bought legislation to that effect. Great choice.
> Take your case to your fellow union members, persuade them, and steer the ship to what you do want the union to do.
Sure. And if you can't, then you should be able to stop giving them money if they're going to use it for purposes you oppose.
(For clarity: I have no problems with unions; in some cases they've achieved extraordinary things. I do have problems with mandatory union dues/membership, and mandatory unions for entire professions. Voluntary associations are a great thing; involuntary associations are not.)
No one is ever legally obligated to join a union in the U.S.
There is agency shop organizing in which workers have to pay full dues but do not have to join the union. It can be seen as a distinction without a difference to those who have to pay the dues.
Then there's full right-to-work situations, where unions cannot compel workers to join the union or pay dues as a prerequisite to work in that shop.
[0] http://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/how-union-card...
[Edit]: closed shop definitional error
since the union affords you protections
Here's one example I experienced directly. Normal California law at the time mandated minimum break periods and frequencies based on hours worked (e.g. 4+ hour shift = 1 rest break, 5.5+ hours mandated a meal break, 6?+ hours mandated a second rest break).
The union negotiated away all rest and meal breaks in our unit in return for either a shorter shift or slight shift premium depending on which shift one worked.
Of course, it probably does require the company to route some of the products of their labor back to the workers, which I guess is what American companies are loath to do?
Or, viewed through another lens: the auto workers' union is the organization that prevented auto workers from being squeezed tighter and tighter without end.
If they, the workers, hadn't banded together, the owners and shareholders could keep cutting their wages, could keep failing to uphold their obligations to the workers' pensions and health care, could keep screwing the workers out of wages and a good life.
It's hard for me to be sympathetic to the owners and shareholders. They're not the ones showing up to a factory floor day after day, bolting cars together, destroying their bodies for dollars an hour.
It's also especially hard for me to say, "you have a constitutional right to assemble, but not if you want to use that right to assemble to demand better pay for yourselves and your fellow workers".
In fact, given the history of how the owning class has treated the laboring class in this country, it's hard for me to say the laboring class should have fewer tools to better their lives.
$31 per hour for a non-skilled assembly line worker.
That's $31 per hour + very good benefits.
http://www.npr.org/news/specials/gmvstoyota/
Perhaps we should demand government mandate a $100 per hour salary? I don't know, what's "fair" in your mind? Why not $200 per hour?
The truth is that many of these auto workers make more money than many of the shareholders. It isn't like "the shareholders" are ensconced in castles counting doubloons. These shareholders are teachers, fire fighters, normal people who invest in retirement funds or other retail investments. Sure there are a few rich people investing, but acting like shareholders are some kind of privileged class is disingenuous.
Why should the factory worker have more rights than the old lady living off her General Motors dividends?
If they can work collectively and demand it, who are we to stop them?
Isn't that a market at work? They don't own the building, but they do provide the labor. Let them negotiate, collectively, and get whatever they can.
Why is the little old lady who does literally nothing for that dividend prized over the people who go to work day after day?
"Fair" is the value that workers' labor generates. It's probably a lot more than $31 in the case of autos.
To ensure that those protections are enforced. To ensure those protections aren't rolled back. To advocate for their membership in a changing economy where their work won't remain static for 40 years.
Maybe it's because I'm not American but is it really so hard to see why having someone to advocate for the people in the economy is a good thing? After all, companies are just 'capital unions' that advocate for their members.
It's up to the members of a union to take sufficient interest in it that there are appropriate and effective governance structures in place - in the same way that it's up to the shareholders of a business to do the same.
Organizations of any kind have someone they're supposed to serve - from your neighborhood bowls club to a fortune 500 company.
Organizational (corporate) governance is how you make sure the organization is operating for the benefit of its intended recipients.
Some organizations do governance well. Some do it badly. When the owners (shareholders, members etc) take their eye off the ball over time that organization will skew towards badly.
I don't think this is a controversial statement at all, even when applied to workers' unions.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidmarquet/2017/06/04/elon-mu...
Maybe if Musk spent time on his endeavor instead of throwing his time willy nilly in each direction he could have prevented a union. Cest la vive
Americans don't have basic labor rights like mandated vacation, paternity/maternity leave, sick leave, etc. I don't see the American political system as fixing this anytime soon.
To be clear, I'm not opposed to vacations -- that's a benefit that companies could offer in their bid to compete in the market for labor. It absolutely ought not be any of government's business. This is one of the reasons it's so incredibly unattractive to start a business in France and some other EU countries. The amount of government largesse at the entrepreneur's expense makes it insane to want to hire anyone let alone try and grow a business there. At the end of the day, "paid" vacation is paid for by the employee and the customers in the form of lower salaries and higher prices. Look at pre-tax salaries in Paris versus Silicon Valley. SV pays 3-4 times more AND offers health care and "benefits." In France, it's very risky to hire anyone, so salaries reflect the amount of risk assumed when hiring that employee -- meaning they're paid much less because there's a chance you'll be stuck with that employee indefinitely. Taxes are higher, living costs are higher, yet salaries are lower -- by 300%. All that "paid" vacation and "paid" benefits aren't cheap. If you look at net salaries, the difference is even more dramatic. The disposable income of a European worker is dramatically less than that of an American worker -- at least in software and tech.
The only people that demand "basic rights" such as 4 weeks paid vacation are people that have never run a business. The moment these campaigners for government mandated benefits actually try to start a business of their own is the moment they suddenly realize how destructive government-mandated benefits can be to a company and the economy. Employers should be able to offer whatever benefits they choose to offer. If an employee doesn't like the offered terms, they can walk away. If a company wants to compete for top talent, they'll end up offering good benefits as a response to the market as opposed to government mandate.
Look at the benefits offered by Facebook and Google. No government mandates there -- it's the market. They want to attract the best, so they have to offer the best.
I'm not saying that's what happened, but it's not impossible to come up with plausible situations that could lead to the situation described. I wouldn't be so sure to immediately discount the role of a union in how well a company fares a crisis, just as I wouldn't be so sure to discount the behavior of the executives. Each company probably had its own unique mix of problems.
For that idea to be rational, you probably are the owner of some big enterprise.
For example, consider doctors. They don't have a union but there should to help regulate working conditions. There are so many abusive workplace practices in medicine like number of hours that doctor is forced to work through residences and fellowship. There are many examples of doctors dying from a car crash after their shift. We limit the hours truckers, pilots, and air traffic controllers but we are ok with having our doctors being sleep deprived as they operate on us? Doesn't make sense. This article deep dives into it: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2016/12/no-doctor...
Another area - cab / ride sharing drivers. Do you really want Uber and Lyft to set rules on hours, breaks, etc. for their drivers given their track record on ethics and following regulations? As one example, Uber had a known bug for several months where they didn't pay the correct amount of commission to their drivers. We can't just rely on regulators (they are swamped and have their own conflict of interests) to regulate worker rights, Unions are appropriate in many conditions.
There are lots of abusive industries where unions are needed to prevent exploitation of workers. I also acknowledge that the flip side of the coin is that in many areas unions have hurt companies - it's definitely a balance.
A union doesn't work so well when there's sizable power differential between members, and that's the case with doctors. The political power of a senior consultant with tendrils into management is usually orders of magnitude more than that of a fresh graduate.
I wonder how this will play out in the future as class divides between high skilled versus low skilled workers become more and more ever present within the oncoming wave of mass automation.
The Bay Area is a pretty good current example of that future.
Of course, this will only give incentives to the company to further automate it's production facilities, at the expanse of the workers.
That would happen regardless.
I would bet they already have adopted most of the obvious union won rules such as tenure, scheduling, overtime, sick leave, time off, differential, bidding, etc...
Even Wal-Mart has adopted policies that are staples in some bargained areas. Just not "no termination clause" among others
My experience says union national leadership cares #1 about membership; #2-100 everything else
Think about Apple. This is one more thing to worry about on top of higher salaries than China.
Let's stop with this ridiculous demonization of unions. American corporations have chosen a confrontational model with unions and staff. It doesn't have to be this way. There are better models around if the owners of capital are willing to cooperate with workers.
I feel like if in today's America a CEO of a major investment bank was replaced with an AI that was given US law and history as a boundary set, and "maximize profit" as a goal... well I dunno, but I think it would be messy.
*There are a few things they are prohibited to do that are vaguely similar. They can't sell the company for $1 or destroy the value of the company intentionally to screw over shareholders.
http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-americ...
Really, public stock markets were a mistake, weren't they.
https://qz.com/452076/this-just-in-german-capitalism-has-won...
Secret German auto subsidies exposed
http://www.motoring.com.au/secret-german-auto-subsidies-expo...
It's clearly not about the unions.
Giving companies permission to abuse workers for fear that they'll go offshore seems like a good way to reduce global labor standards to the lowest common denominator.
> It also asks Tesla to refrain from using anti-union rhetoric or action. In April, the United Auto Workers and three Tesla employees filed separate charges with the National Labor Relations Board claiming the company had coerced employees trying to aid the unionization effort into silence.
Uh, what? Do they expect a checklist with items like "be there for 9 hours a day" and so on? Frankly, people who need such a list are not the ones who deserve a promotion - those who do deserve it just work away at the problems and add value to whatever they put their hands on.
I think you're missing the point entirely, because that statement is extremely vague. "Just keep working" is what you're saying, but it highly depends upon what kind of 'work' you're doing, and how you're doing it. Politics, and human nature gets in the way of that whole notion that those who deserve a promotion, get one. Guidelines probably won't help with that, but its always good to demand anyways.