The New Yorker has formed a union
newyorkerunion.com
newyorkerunion.com
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law
Here we tend to call it right-to-work-for-less. The gist of it is that employees aren't compelled to pay union dues if their workplace pays union-negotiated wages. If you think of union protections as something like a private form of OSHA, or say private car insurance, then opting out of paying for them while still receiving benefits is self-evidently not sustainable. Not enough people pay (essentially the same as having too many scabs) so unions can't maintain their bargaining power. The end result is that there are almost no unions in Idaho.
My experience with this was when I was moving furniture as a non-technical day job in the early 2000s. It was $10/hr for warehouse work and $12+/hr working for private truck drivers (you could negotiate your own rate). But if you went across the border to Oregon (a non-right-to-work state), it was at least $15/hr. I had several drivers from California pay me $20/hr for the same reason.
Our warehouse charged $34/hr. In a business where the work is done primarily by laborers, it's hard to understand how it's fair to pay them less than 1/3 of gross income. That's because it's not. Many businesses here charge $75-100/hr or more and pay their employees the going rate of $15/hr. The end result is that Idaho now has some of the highest wealth inequality in the nation:
http://www.idahostatesman.com/news/business/article209332734...
I mention all of this because I get the feeling that non-right-to-work states are enjoying the benefits of unionization without realizing it. It's one thing to argue the nuances of liberty and another to make 1.5 to 2 times as much money (or more) and provide for yourself and your family.
Unionization isn't about raising prices. It's about paying better wages so everyone is better off rather than one millionaire at the top. I think of it as "the person doing the lion's share of the work should receive the lion's share of the income". I feel it's important to really stress this on a site like Hacker News whose readership prides itself on being informed and rising above propaganda.
I've been thinking in the background of how one might setup a process for that kind of "coop lending/setup/tech" service. One thing I've read articles about is how unions actually control a lot of pension type funding, and that either legal restrictions, or even conventional financial management practices shut out that money from use as a community lending source.
Added: There are other sources of capital, but unions in theory and with some historical examples, have something of a common interest, and that kind of funding/lending has happened in the past.
Unions are permitted to refuse representation to non-members, as long as they don't include them in the bargaining unit. If they do, then they are required to represent them.
So far, unions have ignored this and pretended that they are forced to represent non-members, because it makes it easier for them to "demonstrate" that they have to have exclusive representation over all members of the bargaining unit. In other words, they intentionally sabotage unions in right-to-work states, because they don't want to admit that they have the legal ability to engage in members-only contracts in right-to-work states, because then they'd have to admit that they have the ability to engage in members-only-contracts in all states.
The easy alternative is for unions in right-to-work states to require membership (and fees and dues) for inclusion in the bargaining unit. They would then have no obligation to represent people who don't join the union or don't pay fees and dues.
My overall views of unions throughout my life have not been positive, however my opinion of them is slowly improving somewhat.
This is actually why we need traditional compulsory unions if a unionization vote succeeds, it's the only way to maintain the bargaining power of the workers. If you don't like that working for a certain employer requires paying union dues you take the same action as if you don't like the health plan or pay offered by a certain employer, you look somewhere else.
> This is actually why we need traditional compulsory unions if a unionization vote succeeds
Never. If I don't want to join a union, who are you to force me to join and steal money out of my paycheck to boot?
Tragedy of the commons. Whether or not the dues are “reasonable”, they’re not nothing. And as long as union and nonunion employees are paid the same, as an individual employee, leaving the union lets you save that money without giving anything else up in return. But then if everyone does that, the union loses its bargaining power.
This is a common talking point based on a factually incorrect premise.
There's no reason union and non-union employees would necessarily be paid the same, because there's no reason the unions have to include non-members in the bargaining unit.
They are perfectly free to establish contracts that only cover employees who join the union.
Because they can keep their dues? Why is anyone going to pay several hundred dollars for a group which they perceive is doing nothing for them? (this is in the situation where an employer is trying to bust the union by paying both groups the same)
>Never. If I don't want to join a union, who are you to force me to join and steal money out of my paycheck to boot?
If you read the rest you can see that you're not forced to join the union in the same way you're not forced to accept subpar pay. Just go work somewhere else.
One argument is that you didn't choose to join the IRS, yet they are allowed to steal money from your check.
Hmmm ... I don't quite remember it that way. The US constitution specifically gave the right to levy taxes to the federal and state governments. I don't seem to remember them giving that right to unions.
In Michigan, the unions went for a kill shot in 2012, that backfired wildly. They tried getting a Michigan constitutional amendment in place that would have mandated their rights over workplaces in perpetuity. They lost that, in a very lobsided vote. The backlash, or karma as it were, was a bitch. People, collectively, realized that giving them as much unfettered power as they wished was only going to hurt us even more, so maybe it is time to rein them in. So we did that.
And now, curiously, we are seeing a nice little growth going on here, as companies consider us in their lower cost location decisions. Change that, change our cost structure, and we will lose companies again.
How is it that people don't get this?
If an employer wants to treat employees well enough that they feel no need to unionize, isn't that also a victory for workers?
This is literally how unions work in most of the developed world outside the US.
> The gist of it is that employees aren't compelled to pay union dues...
This is always the argument unions make to get mandatory contributions from employees. The risks of doing so are the following:
1) that all employees regardless of their individual contribution get the same salaries, meaning that over-achieving workers will work less, and under-achieving workers will not work more. (a.k.a. elimination of incentives)
2) That employees that do not like how the union is managed cannot work in that place, either because the union would not allow them, or because they have to pay for an organization that they do not belong to voluntarily
3) That the union, having sole negotiation power for all workers, takes kickbacks from the company for lower compensation for all workers.
4) That even if the union is incorruptible, its optional but its subscribed by most employees, that it actually manages not to decrease productivity, then, there is another company that does not have the same problem, will attract more capital since it gets bigger returns, and the company fails anyway.
Unions are not economically efficient organizations. They are politically efficient, so they serve a great political purpose, but their work in the economic sphere is only destructive.
2) Same is true for non-union workplaces - you don't like how a place is run I guess you're going to be unhappy there. With a union (that you can take part in, vote for your leaders, vote on your contract, etc.) maybe you can change that.
3) Sure, if your union/leadership is corrupt. Vote the bastards out then. With no union...the company just keeps that money that would have been used to bribe a union official. Not clear to me that's better for the worker.
4) Maybe. Maybe the union attracts better employees, improves retention, etc. and leads to a better and more profitable workplace. Maybe the whole industry gets unionized so it's an even playing field and the owners of all companies lose (and workers gain).
I certainly think it's possible unions reduce the total amount of wealth generated from a system. But so what? I think society would be better of if, for example, Walmart made $90b instead of $100b and the workers gained $9b. (Numbers completely made up, of course).
I've also never heard of a union that supported performance pay, because by the law of average most of their members will be under average, and they wouldn't want to irritate them.
What unions almost always do is require management to follow the procedures in place in the negotiated contract. A well negotiated contract lays out what underperforming is, what qualifies as appropriate notice, etc.
People find it hard to say "your performance is not great in these ways, you need to improve in these ways" and then follow up over weeks or months. That's often what union negotiated contracts require. Employers, obviously, would prefer to be able to say on a Friday "hey you're fired go home" and pay no severance.
These two, in different years, had one thing in common. Both were functionally illiterate.
Neither one could read at the level one would need to in order to take the non-calculus version of physics. Math was simply beyond them.
I asked my advising professor what I should do about this, as it was obvious that the right thing to do was to report this, get the person some help, and get them out of the classroom.
I was told to drop it. That the teachers union was simply too powerful, and would protect their own. That if I made noise, it would hurt the university, this program, etc. That I should find a way to pass them.
Yeah. That.
Much like a defense attorney a union must defend everyone--even the crappy ones.
Because most of the time, the employee really isn't that crappy and simply annoyed management by doing something silly like--oh, demanding the safety equipment necessary to do a task and told management to pound sand when they didn't provide it. Yeah, seen that one in person.
It is up to management to make the case that the shitty employee actually is so. And, if they can't, well the employee really isn't that bad then.
For example, everybody bitches about the crappy teachers, but I have seen numerous cases where the school superintendent never even tries to make the case because that would affect his ability to get his next job. Why does nobody ever complain about the superintendent not doing HIS job and putting together the case to fire the teacher?
> I've also never heard of a union that supported performance pay
Not true. However, the union almost always demands that the performance criteria be objective or that the union gets to determine who falls into which categories. Funnily, management never seems to want to agree to "performance pay" that they can't hand out arbitrarily.
You will find interesting that there is a link between high unionization and unemployment.
> Sure, if your union/leadership is corrupt. Vote the bastards out then. With no union...the company just keeps that money that would have been used to bribe a union official. Not clear to me that's better for the worker.
If you dont vote for the union, you dont get hired or get fired. You as a worker now are subject to the whims of a new master, one that is worse that the previous one.
Also justifying the bribes is pure robbery. You should be ashamed of thinking that.
Yes, and there's a link between high unionization and higher wages/better benefits/better working conditions. Of course there are trade-offs. Look at the history of labour movements in the west. Why do you think we have weekends, overtime pay, etc
>>If you dont vote for the union, you dont get hired or get fired. You as a worker now are subject to the whims of a new master, one that is worse that the previous one.
That's completely untrue - if you vote against unionization you don't get fired. The union (almost always) doesn't choose who gets hired or gets fired; they often offer protection against undue termination. You may (depending on jurisdiction) be required to join/pay dues. Also, unions have elections - you have a regular chance to choose who negotiates on your behalf. How exactly is the "new master" worse then the previous one?
>>Also justifying the bribes is pure robbery. You should be ashamed of thinking that.
Not at all what I said. I said owners keeping 100 rather than keeping 95 and bribing with 5 is no better for the worker; both situations are shitty. But when the union leadership is being bribed they can be voted out by the union members.
>Yes, and there's a link between high unionization and higher wages/better benefits/better working conditions. Of course there are trade-offs. Look at the history of labour movements in the west. Why do you think we have weekends, overtime pay, etc
No, the point the parent was making is that there is a well understood and accepted link between increased unionization and increased unemployment.
>>>If you dont vote for the union, you dont get hired or get fired. You as a worker now are subject to the whims of a new master, one that is worse that the previous one.
> That's completely untrue - if you vote against unionization you don't get fired. The union (almost always) doesn't choose who gets hired or gets fired; they often offer protection against undue termination. You may (depending on jurisdiction) be required to join/pay dues. Also, unions have elections - you have a regular chance to choose who negotiates on your behalf. How exactly is the "new master" worse then the previous one?
It's quite true. Here in Michigan, until we regained our sanity recently and went right to work, there were closed union shops. You could get hired if and only if you were a member of the union. Which you couldn't get into without being hired. The entry fee into the union ranged depending upon the union, but it was most definitely a pay for play scam. So if you were poor, and couldn't afford the entry fee ... how would you get in? How is this not a monopoly?
On those union elections ... Do you believe for a moment that the elections were either free, or fair? Do you not believe that there were corrupting outside influences?
This new master became rent seeking, drove costs up, quality down, caused higher unemployment by driving costs up, and eventually drove much of the work to lower wage locales.
Yes, this is the reality of what unions have wrought.
As for this
> But when the union leadership is being bribed they can be voted out by the union members.
um ... no. The people in power in their rent seeking ways have a habit of building up a support system of similarly minded folks. Trickle down. Bribes paid supported large union machines that existed for the sole purpose of keeping their officials in power. These elections are rarely ever free, and are most certainly never fair. There are entrenched interests that wish to not rock the boat, as that introduces uncertainty. Be this from management, external groups that want to dip into union coffers, etc.
> Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.
in this case I think the burden of improvement is on those trying to tear down the union and we can rework it a bit to say
> Unions are the worst form of worker protection, except for all the others.
I don't disagree that Unions can de-incentivize workers and become corrupt, but it's the best tool we have right now.
Without them business' and union get/have to freely and voluntarily come to an agreement about employment terms.
With them the union is handicapped in favor of the business.
The baseline default should instead be that nobody is forced to join your organization, and it.is on THEM to convince you to join.
Freedom of association is an important value, that is enshined in the Constitution.
1. People in a shop voluntarily associate with the union or not 2. If the shop hires non-union workers, the union workers stop working 3. Mgmt decides whether or not this is worth it to them to hire non-union workers
No one is coerced or forced into an involuntary association. A "union shop" is just a shorthand for the process above.
Incidentally, who is lobbies/bribes politicians for "right to work" etc.? Is it management or individual, non-organized workers? (If you think it's the latter I've got a bridge to sell you...). Why might management be interested in promoting the "right to work"? The interests don't seem to line up.
That is provably false in at least some states, because joining some professions in certain states required you to pay agency fees whether or not you chose to be a member of the union at all.
That's been the case since 1977, and was decided with __Abood v Detroit Board of Ed__[1], hich compelled teachers to pay union dues, no matter their stance on the union.
To whit:
> A Michigan statute authorizing union representation of local governmental employees permits an "agency shop" arrangement, whereby every employee represented by a union, even though not a union member, must pay to the union, as a condition of employment, a service charge equal in amount to union dues.
That issue is currently up for dispute in __Janus v American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, Council 31__[2]
[1] - https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/431/209/case.htm...
Once the union is created, nobody has any choice but to join it.
Thats the law. Once the union is voted in, they now represent all workers, and it is highly illegal to just decide to fire all the union people. There is nothing voluntary about that.
> 1) that all employees regardless of their individual contribution get the same salaries, meaning that over-achieving workers will work less, and under-achieving workers will not work more. (a.k.a. elimination of incentives)
Union representation doesn't inherently flatten compensation. Managers and companies can still promote, hire, and fire employees. Also differences in compensation in non-union workplaces is typically determined by the employees negotiating skills more than merit.
> 2) That employees that do not like how the union is managed cannot work in that place, either because the union would not allow them, or because they have to pay for an organization that they do not belong to voluntarily
Yea the point of unions is to have collective bargaining power, that power is sapped when workers don't participate in the collective part. Also a union is typically run by employees, and union leaders are elected. If things are bad you have the power to change things. You're much more empowered to change things in your union than you are to actually change things in the running of your corporation.
> 3) That the union, having sole negotiation power for all workers, takes kickbacks from the company for lower compensation for all workers.
Unions do have a tendency to corrupt with age, mostly because corporations who are saddled with a union typically find it easier to corrupt its leaders than to actually negotiate. I'd argue that even in a corrupt union you're better represented than without a union. You at least have the structure in place to do things like strike and organize. Often when union leaders are corrupt or just not effective workers will take action outside of the union. Most of the recent teacher strikes were "wildcat" actions taken without the union's consent.
> 4) That even if the union is incorruptible, its optional but its subscribed by most employees, that it actually manages not to decrease productivity, then, there is another company that does not have the same problem, will attract more capital since it gets bigger returns, and the company fails anyway.
This is the same argument people make against raising the minimum wage. "Conform to exploitation or be replaced". A lot of workers worry that fighting for better lives will lead to worse lives, like losing your job, or your company going under. This isn't really shown to happen in reality, but corporations keep pushing the point.
This entire comment reeks of corporate propaganda. Unions aren't a silver bullet against worker exploitation, but having union representation is a hell of a lot better than not.
If unions dont get a say on who gets fired or not, they have no power. The company could retaliate at any point on an employee making a demand, and the union can only stop it by threatening to strike. Thus, the union is an association of power to control who gets fired or hired.
The fact that the union and the company sit down together to make a guideline can only mean workers get shafted: neither the union leaders nor the company will lose in a voluntary arrangement.
> Yea the point of unions is to have collective bargaining power, that power is sapped when workers don't participate in the collective part. Also a union is typically run by employees, and union leaders are elected. If things are bad you have the power to change things. You're much more empowered to change things in your union than you are to actually change things in the running of your corporation.
Its a structure of power like any other, but you are missing out on many things: that workers that havent joined yet do not get a vote. So unions have this clever economic way to increase their wages: prohibiting others from doing their job. Thats why unions that are powerful advocate for higher minimum wages (that dont affect them directly) and tariffs.
In any case, saying a union only works if it is applied by forced unanimity should be a red flag for a certain kind of organization.
> This is the same argument people make against raising the minimum wage. "Conform to exploitation or be replaced". A lot of workers worry that fighting for better lives will lead to worse lives, like losing your job, or your company going under. This isn't really shown to happen in reality, but corporations keep pushing the point.
The unions make the same argument! Because they want all the workers in a field, for all companies, to unite! They do know that the power of a local union is very limited if another company is not bound by it.
> This entire comment reeks of corporate propaganda. Unions aren't a silver bullet against worker exploitation, but having union representation is a hell of a lot better than not.
More like reeks of someone from a country that has constitutional protections for unions and have worst productivity, highest prices, high unemployement, tariffs and low purchasing power.
We do. Social mores have been doing this, for good and ill, for basically forever.
Part of the pernicious effects of neoliberal Thatcherism has been the slow removal of the idea that companies have any social role or responsibility aside from maximizing shareholder value.
The ethic has crept in everywhere and it has had seriously destructive effects for important public institutions whose primary social value is non-economic (such as journalism, the arts, or academia).
However this is quite clearly false:
> Unions are not economically efficient organizations. They are politically efficient, so they serve a great political purpose, but their work in the economic sphere is only destructive.
Unions can be quite economically productive and at their best can provide productivity bonuses to companies that work with them.
The problem is balancing the power between the union and the company to get cooperation and increases in productivity. When Unions get too powerful, they start looking out for their own interests rather than those of their members, to the detriment of the workers and the company. When companies become to powerful, they can suppress union membership and the collective negotiating power of their workers, to the detriment of the workers and the market.
But that is not the union people imagine or want when bernie Sanders calls for them. They imagine the power of changing wages at will.
Why does everybody always assume that they will always be the overachievers? This seems to be a particular fault in the HN readership.
The problem is that you WILL have some off times. You will get sick and you will age. You will be "merely average" at some point.
Should the company be able to fire you after 20 years because someone new might be more productive?
This was far more critical in places like the steel mills where the work itself guaranteed that you would get sick. "Nobody ever retires from the car shop" was one of the mantras at Bethlehem Steel--you wound up dead of something caused by working around toxic crap all your life.
As soon as productivity departs wages, you will see it go to any direction, and most likely, down. And if productivity goes down, you better be damn sure wages are going down as well.
> Should the company be able to fire you after 20 years because someone new might be more productive?
That will be desired if by union negotiation you are forced to pay both equally. But if you allow for different wages that can be re-negotiated at any point.
1) Unions set wage minimums and working conditions. You're free to negotiate for more. Underachieving workers receive more, and overachieving workers also receive more because the floor for their negotiations are raised.
2) Employees who do not like the operations of their union have a democratic stake in changing it, or can run for leadership positions themselves. Without a union, their only option for a grievance is to work elsewhere, which is not always feasible (location, family, accrued benefits).
3) Workers have skin in the game and union dues to pay. It's not unheard of for workers to threaten union leadership with non-payment to force a radical leadership change, and there's always the more measured approach of union elections.
4) This is a critical mass problem. There was no decrease in productivity when unionized workplaces were the standard. Without unions you have skyrocketing productivity but wage stagnation. Eventually the wage stagnation turns into a drag on productivity, but in the meantime the company gets rich. It depends on what you prioritize.
EDIT: patmcc has a much better response than my own.
Each union has its own organizational structures, rules, and contracts that can sometimes including a ban on union members negotiating for higher pay for themselves. None of the unions that I am familiar with have such a restriction except for one union for civil servants.
The problem is, the best response I can come up with is "tough luck, find another job". Which could be the same response one could give to someone unhappy with their (non-unionized) working conditions.
Come on, you can't answer that question without first knowing why they don't want to work in a union. If that's the best response you can come up, you're being disingenuous.
Maybe the person doesn't want to pay dues. Maybe they don't want to work in an environment where they perceive that individual talent/effort is not rewarded. Maybe they're afraid it'll be a bureaucratic nightmare of un-fireable employees? These are the best reasons I can come up with, not knowing much about unionized environments. And it seems the answer to all of them is the same -- tough luck, find somewhere else to work.
If you're calling me disingenuous, fine -- I assume that means you have better questions or better answers, and I'd appreciate hearing them.
And, to play devil's advocate, you can't say for sure that her NON-union jobs' pay and benefits weren't indirectly affected by having to compete with unionized jobs (although they're the minority in her industry)
I suggest you learn about a topic before jumping to conclusions. I don't have much to add to the responses all over this thread, none of which are "tough luck, find another job", btw.
You could say the exact same thing about wages in rural areas vs urban areas.
Like, not a single mention of overhead?
It's hard to take this last comment seriously when all that's been provided is 15 year old anecdotal evidence about wage rates and an article about income equality which itself poses a different explanation for its cause.
https://www.eurofound.europa.eu/observatories/eurwork/articl...
I'll hold my opinion on California ;)
Idaho has shown healthy growth and Boise has been the fastest growing city in United States. In general economic outlook in Boise is much better than a holes that Oakland or Stockton have become.
It is not propaganda to state very basic economics here. You budget X for a years wages for your team of N people, on average paying them Y = (X/N)/12 per month. They form a union, and demand a wage increase of delta per person. So, now, you are paying Y*(1 + delta). X hasn't changed. Number of months in a year hasn't changed. What can possibly change to allow the company to do this?
N. The number of people employed.
So yeah, you can get fewer workers more money. What are you going to tell the folks who were let go, in order to make room in the budget to pay this?
This is where politics starts rearing its ugly head, and you see people referred to as "evil capitalists". You know, the ones who know they can't really raise X, without directly materially impacting the companies bottom line.
Their choices are hard. 1) let people go. 2) raise prices. 3) report lower profits (assuming profits), or increase debt to cover.
Which of these 3 options would you pick?
In recent years, thanks to globalization, a 4th option has opened. 4) move work to a lower cost locale.
It is not rocket science to understand that this has been what has been happening since the early 90s.
Now with the push to 15, as it is sometimes called ... the $15/hour minimum wage, a new option, thanks to tech, is opening up. 5) automate as much as possible, and reduce the workforce to keep costs low.
So, in all those nice locales where the wage is being pushed to 15$/hour, companies are exploring how quickly they can automate those jobs out of existence.
None of this is propaganda, all of it is reality.
Unions work best for workers in places like the public sector where the employer is a government that literally cannot go out of business and where the state grants the union a monopoly so that other companies cannot enter the market and displace the union workers. Teachers, police, postal workers, firemen ... these are roles where no market competition is allowed and consumers are not given a chance to chose alternatives when service gets really bad. That's where a union is most beneficial to workers because they can extract a pound of flesh from the public and the public can't do anything about it.
But at a place like the New Yorker, where people can get news anywhere, and there are upstart competitors nipping at your heels, a union will just hasten the decline.
Now management will have to go through protracted union negotiations to make changes to the labor force at the company or to adjust roles and responsibilities.
I love the New Yorker. I hope enough rich urbanites are willing to pay a subscription to keep the magazine going even if times move on.
I'm not sure that's true in Germany. (It does seem to be the general trend, I'll agree.)
The entertainment industry and professional athletes are all unionized. I can't think of more competitive and dynamic industries than those outside of tech.
Indie film is largely non-union.
You can't with a straight face say US professional sports are dynamic. The NFL is one of the worst government-supported cartels in America. The players, I would argue, are screwed over by the NFL, despite having a union.
You seem to be shifting a lot of goal posts to suit your narrative.
Are you saying that growth is the only legitimate business goal?
It's a great idea to older workers. Every union I've been part of sacrificed the benefits of younger or future workers for the benefit of the older ones.
> I love the New Yorker. I hope enough rich urbanites are willing to pay a subscription to keep the magazine going even if times move on.
Why would we pay a subscription for a magazine full of ads?
I'd rather support independent journalists, writers, etc than those working for establishment media. The only reason writers/journalists needed media companies was because they needed a delivery platform. Now they have the internet, maybe they should strike out on their own.
If we took a snapshot of capitalism in the 19th century, with children working in mines, ridiculously long hours, and so on, we could similarly say "capitalism is terrible because x, y, z", but that was just a particular implementation at that time.
I'm not advocating for or against unions, just trying to make sure we're arguing for or against them for valid reasons.
Don't get me wrong. When I slow down and can't work anymore, I want to live in Sweden too. But when I'm young and trying to make a change in the world I would never go there.
It's a good place to raise kids and have a lifestyle though.
I'm curious about the details. I believe that in New York if a union negotiates your contract you are legally obliged to be a member of that union and incur whatever costs are associated (dues). My mother is a labor relations specialist for NYSUT (New York State United Teachers) and she is very concerned about a coming SCOTUS ruling that would remove that legal obligation. How does The New Yorker's new union plan to deal with that if/when it comes?
There are differences in how this works between public and private employers — the changes your mom is concerned about are specific to public employers.
For folks like your mom, teachers, and other public employees, that case may fundamentally change the nature of the profession. The folks finding and pushing the case have a pretty transparent agenda to break public unions.
It is a nuanced issue that tends to draw lots of fire. There are certainly lots of problems with public sector costs (mostly driven by stratospheric healthcare cost increases) that unions have been able to protect members from. If you work as a rank and file, non-political public employee, not unionizing is an incredibly stupid thing to do, but people will do anyway to make their extra 2% a week.
That's not just pedantry because many people still believe that new employees can be forced to join a union in a unionized workplace. Having to pay agency fees is a contentious issue but equivocating that with union membership as a non-negotiable term of employment isn't remotely the same thing, and simply furthers a particular (unfortunately very successful) political narrative.
Right-to-work is a classic political idiom that long predates pro-choice and pro-life. Using Google Ngram you can see it's use increase immediately after the 1947 outlawing of union shops. The whole point of "right-to-work" is to muddy the waters and confuse people. After outlawing union shops in 1947--which were just as controversial as they are today--Republicans needed a way to sustain widespread skepticism of union power. It's no coincidence that the vast majority of people assume right-to-work states are the only ones that ban union shops. If people realized union shops were already illegal nationwide it would seriously blunt public sympathy for Republican arguments. People can easily sympathize with arguments that one shouldn't be forced to join a union in order to be gainfully employed; but agency fees are much more technical and not something most people would have strong opinions about, especially because they generally only amount to a few dollars per month--mostly to cover the cost of the dispute resolution process, as mandated by the union contract, when an employee is penalized or terminated.
I don't have strong opinions about agency fees. But I do have strong opinions about transparent and honest public discourse.
There is very little difference between being forced to join a union and being forced in an agency model.
They are basically the same thing, and are different in name only.
You still have to pay the same fees. You are still subject to the same rules. You are still subject to their collective bargaining agreement and are disallowed from negotiating on your own.
There are close to zero defacto differences between the two, even if you give it a different name.
Those agency fees, paid in lieu of membership dues (i.e. mutually exclusive), are indeed much higher than I expected. I've had professional experience with police unions, and the fee structure for campus police is indeed much more like what I was familiar with, where the agency fee is substantially less than the membership due.
The only question is, does the employee collective you belong to have any collective bargaining ability or not?
For example, the dev group could be treated differently than ops than sales than content than mechanical. And you can have different groups even within devs for example. So being able to choose as an employee before joining or through career is important to me.
I have never looked at a union’s value proposition for me and chose to join. Either through not joining a firm, or through not joining an optional union. But I’m a programmer-type and likely others will feel differently based on their conditions and principles.
But what if I don't like the union's goals or the way it tries to achieve those goals? Not joining them isn't 'scabbing' it's standing up for my own principles.
People talk about unions as if they're some kind of benign force for unquestioned good. In your mind they're simply 'fighting for better standards' without any qualification of what they think those better standards are, how they're fighting to get them, what their end-state is, what other political campaigns unrelated to the job they support, and so on.
The the UK most unions aggressively support one of our main political parties. If you don't want to support that political party then don't join any union because your money will be going to them!
It's not 'scabbing' to stand up to not join a union.
I think I wouldn’t feel too bad if I was in a position and co-workers joined a union, but I didn’t. But I would feel kind of scabish if I joined a majority union org and didn’t join the union.
Kind of like if you live in a house and your neighbors form an HOA and you choose not to join. I wouldn’t feel bad at all, as I bought the house with the expectation of no HOA.
1) Does your union represent you as talent or just by your seniority?
2) How much more (or less if you're talented) do you make now because you're unionized?
3) How much are you forced to PAY to the union for the privilege of having your job?
The right way to think of a union is as a force with similar (but radically reduced) power over your work conditions, but one with different incentives and for which you have some (depending on how healthy the union is) representation.
Unions can obviously be a bad thing! But the idea that they're intrinsically coercive is a little overwrought. All of employment is coercive; the median union simply peels off some of the coercive forces that apply to your job and hands them to the employees as a collective to manage.
I have and my experience was that you will never get paid what you’re worth - if you’re talented.
So if you want to argue that people with less talent can make more money with unions, I would agree... in the short run.
Eventually talent will seek other means and leave the unionized industries. The brain drain will have two negative results, reduced overall productivity and a union demanding more and more for its members who produce less and less.
Ultimately, the company produces worse product and recieves less revenue. Less money to pay the hungry union members who demand even more.
Finally the company says fuck this and moves its production to another country where people will work harder for less.
The whole thing will be blamed on corporate greed and will be used as a rallying call to socialism. ‘Cause that’ll fix it.
However workers who represent the union are often unpaid. Or paid very little for their efforts.
Could a kickstarter or contingency support more cases?
In the US, unlike in most other countries, unions usually receive exclusive rights to representation. Decertifying a union is technically possible under the law, but almost impossible in practice, so there's no competition between unions for membership the way that you see in most other countries.
That gives the union very little incentive to keep its fees in check, because there's no risk of members defecting (they're legally required to pay) and essentially no risk of its members choosing to be represented by a different union.
Without these buffers, going on strike is basically impossible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
In the US, unions have two options:
1) Define a large bargaining unit which includes both members and non-members, collect fees from everyone in the bargaining unit (whether or not they are a member), and provide representation to everyone (and also have control over everyone in the bargaining unit).
2) Define a bargaining unit to include only members of the union, collect fees and dues from members of the union, and provide representation to members (and have control only over members).
In both cases, the union has full, exclusive control and representation of the bargaining unit - it does not compete with other unions for representation of members, and it is free to define the bargaining unit pretty much as it wishes.
In the US, unions have typically preferred to do #1, because it allows them to collect money from a larger pool of people, and it gives them a greater degree of control. In most other countries, unions either aren't allowed to collect fees from non-members or have to compete with other unions for representation of members, so they can't rely on exclusive representation laws to give them the right to represent (or control) people who decline to join.
a major difference between unions in the US and for instance, western europe, is that the political foundations of unions is far better represented politically in western europe.
in western europe, social democracy and socialism are political powers who can influence the goverment, and unions usually use that to their leverage. There is very little competition between unions, because they are all part of the same political ideology.
Forcing people to join a union is not all that much better than preventing one in the first place IMHO.
By the logic above, working for a corporation where the head starts paying themselves 300k (or 3M!) and maintains a large/expensive organizational structure and offices is not all that much better than preventing incorporation in the first place.
That means you, the citizen, will have less power to fire them and you'll also have to pay them more out of your pocket through taxes (think how the police keeps settling for millions of dollars at a time for wrongful murder of suspects, just as an example).
You are working at a place where you are as forced to take orders from bosses employed by the Newhouse heirs. People work all day to get their wages and refurbish ongoing capital expenses, then at night they work for free to kick up expropriated surplus time profits to SI Newhouse IV.
Conde Nast, without consulting you, as they do for most decisions, has theoretically come to the agreement with a union that they represent you as a bargaining unit. This , of all the things you are forced to do seems to be the only one you have a problem with, the one giving you more autonomy and money.
It's a bizarrely convoluted logic where you have almost no say in Conde Nast's decision about your own management, revenue disbursement etc., but in solely this decision that they made, you are being "forced".
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/money/2018/06/06/me...
Nine out of ten of the people actually working there appear to be fans of unionizing.
Unfortunately, most US labour laws are set up in such a way that most gains made by a union are extended to non-union-members. The only viable response to that is a membership requirement.
There is no requirement to represent non-members. There is a requirement to represent all members of the bargaining unit. The union is free to define a narrower bargaining unit that only includes non-members.
In the US, unions choose not to do this because they can always define a larger bargaining unit and collect fees from non-members, and there's almost no downside for them to do so. In other countries, unions aren't allowed to redefine bargaining units unilaterally, or aren't allowed to collect fees from non-members, or aren't allowed exclusive representation over non-members.
Do you know of any unions that have atypical bargaining units, like covering everyone in a particular line of business or people in 2 very different jobs?
This is 100% backwards.
In most states, unions are able to extract fees from employees, even if those employees are not members, as long as the employees are included in the union-defined bargaining unit. In exchange for this, the union is required to provide representation and benefits for all people in the bargaining unit from whom they collect fees, whether or not those employees are members.
The easy alternative to forced membership is for unions to define the bargaining unit to be the union members, which is analogous to what happens in almost every other country. However, unions in the US have taken an all-or-nothing approach for the last half century, in which they gamble that, if they can't use expanded definitions of the bargaining unit, they won't have a union at all. That worked for a few decades, but it's come back to bite them in the last 30 years or so.
The union can basically claim whatever unit they want, within reason (and then some). It's completely legal to define membership as a requirement for inclusion in the bargaining unit. Beyond that, the boundaries are usually drawn by things like job title, role/responsibility, geographical location, etc.).
Unions can also retroactively redefine bargaining units after elections and use that as an argument to invalidate elections that they lose. In theory the NLRB is responsible for judging this, but they tend to favor the unions heavily, which is one of the reasons that decertifying a union is nearly impossible in practice - even if the employees win the election to decertify their union, the union could claim that the bargaining unit is different, and that they didn't get a majority of the new unit.
Can you elaborate on this comment?
https://www.flra.gov/exclusive_representation
The tl;dr of it is that if 50% + 1 of a workforce unionizes, the union bargains collectively for everyone. Even for free-loaders who don't pay union dues.
This is like being able to opt out of paying taxes, while still receiving all government benefits. If that were legal, then our public services would collapse by next week.
There are no freeloaders. The union defines the bargaining unit, and they can choose to define it to include only members. They typically don't choose to do this, because they prefer to make the bargaining unit as large as possible, and they are legally allowed to collect fees from non-members in the bargaining unit.
This is a quirk of US labor law; most other countries don't permit unions to do this.
I can see how union gains might be naturally extended to non-union (safety improvements in a factory, say), but I can also see that the union could negotiate for higher wages to cover the cost of running the union, which avoid free-riding concerns.
The issue I would expect is that mandatory membership (or at least mandatory partial-dues for partial benefits, as is common in some municipalities) is required because the union simply wouldn't work if half the labor force opted out and the employer could simply hire all non-union workers; and the Law decided that unions deserve a right to exist, similarly to how the Law decides that a State or City government is mandatory for all residents.
Can't you see how weird this is? 'The law needs to make people be members of a union, because if they didn't the union wouldn't exist and people wouldn't be able to be a member of it.' That's so circular!
Just let people be in a union if they want to be, and not if they don't want to be, and let the union live or die based on people voting with their feet like that.
If your union isn't effective because people aren't joining then you need to change what it is your union offers them.
You'll have to explain why this gets rid of free-riding concerns?
Because the company wants to weaken the unions as much as possible.
To bust unions. Especially when you combine it with right-to-work legislature.
The end result is that theoretically, unions have a right to exist, as long as they don't actually do anything meaningful.
Or put another way, your mother is concerned that she will no longer receive money forcibly taken from others through the exercise of state power.
Imagine everyone gets a 15% raise if a union is negotiating for them because of the increased bargaining power but union dues are 3%. Now it's in the groups best interest to have a union because they all make 12% more money after the union dues. However it's in each individual's best interest to collect the increased raise from the union's negotiation but not pay union dues. Effectively free riding off the union.
If the employers know who's in a union and whose not in a union it's easy for them to push out union members and replace them with non union members.
But we should call out rent-seeking for what it is. In so doing, sometimes democracies change their laws.
Also, in so far as public employee unions are little more than PACs dumping dues largely into elections, mandatory contributions due raise a free speech issue. By becoming a public school teacher, I am in fact a sponsor of a candidate I may loathe.
Rent-seeking would be if the union were attempting to extract these dues without returning a meaningful service to the worker--but membership needs to be obligated, systemically, for the negotiating power to be retained. This is how you get two truly corporate individuals determining compensation through negotiation. See other replies elsewhere for more details on why this works.
So for example, should unions be recognized that are just two people in a team of 50? Currently federal law says no, no matter what state you're in. You can't be in a union unless a majority of the voting bargaining unit says yes. Same for no. If a majority says no, no union for anybody.
Certain protected concerted activities are already allowed with even 2 out of 50 employees. E.g. a a man could legally go to his employer saying "please fix [my female colleague]'s salary to be more in line with what you're paying me, since she's performing comparably. I feel strongly about this and might not stay here if this gap persists."
The employer may value his services more than hers due to sexism or personal relationships, so this could help - and is NLRA-protected even without a union, assuming neither is a supervisor and both are in the US private sector.
I disagree and think in both cases it should be democratic, but your views are certainly valid.
It's more generally the problem that there can only be one single federal policy, and one single territorial policy per territory; and that therefore, any disagreements of policy can only be resolved by imposition of tyranny over one group by the other.
Setting aside the inherent evil of tyranny, it is also readily observable that anyone with sufficient time and resources can gain a tyrannical majority (either in elections or in the legislative bodies themselves) and that this prize is so valuable that there is no system by which corruption can be prevented.
Ergo, the state is inefficient at best, and evil at worst.
The Janus ruling will only impact fee payers in "right to work" states. These union members are more politically diverse, and a large percentage do not want any portion of their dues going to liberal or Democratic candidates (even though they will continue to receive equal representation and benefits from the Union).
This is wrong.
The Janus ruling hasn't happened yet, so we don't actually know how broadly or narrowly they will rule. But the case is about public unions (which NewsGuild is not). It's unlikely that Janus will affect anything about NewsGuild's operations directly.
> (even though they will continue to receive equal representation and benefits from the Union).
Not necessarily. The unions can redefine the bargaining unit to be members-only, in which case they will pay neither dues nor fees, and won't be entitled to benefits or representation.
And "yes", the ruling will only impact right to work states... not this NewsGuild.
Do any unions currently do this in RTW states?
This is how unions operate in most other countries around the world. The US is an exception.
There are a few unions that do members-only bargaining. But in the US, unions that are part of larger federations (like the AFL-CIO, UAW, Teamsters, etc.) are either strongly discouraged or prohibited (by the larger federation) from engaging in members-only bargaining, because it makes it harder for them to deny that they are legally permitted to do so.
When a union fails to represent its members, they should form another union. If they do so, they will be forced to renegotiate their contracts - which allows the employer to influence a "best contract" thereby choosing a winning union; thus a union can't fall too far out with the employer for fear of being supplanted by a new union. Even though the employee remains the voting piece, they lose an awful lot of power.
It gets wonky for national organizations with all of the different rules, especially as former backwater places like the South have become more prominent economically.
So when it comes time to negotiate your annual raise, it's not you alone dueling with your boss (and the whole corporate hierarchy backing him up). Instead it's you and all your colleagues getting together, sending in some representatives, and saying, "Profits are way up this year, so we all deserve decent raises. Let's talk numbers."
(This is less interesting to tech workers, in that we already have a ton of salary negotiating power due to supply/demand differences. But personally I'd still like to see more collective action to deal with other issues. A good example is the way employees recently forced Google to get out of military contracting. Or imagine how different Uber might have treated employees if they'd had a union that helped keep awful managers in check.)
On occasion I've tried to pick up side jobs for 10-20 hours per week for a second company, and I've always been refused, not because I wasn't technically qualified but because they just weren't interested in considering non-standard work arrangements. If there were TRULY such a huge gulf in supply/demand, I would've been able to get a side job at 60-70% of my normal hourly-equivalent rate, for 10-20 hours per week, is my thinking.
I've also observed a lot of stubbornness in salary bands and so on.
By the way, I speak as a person who has previously made in excess of $200,000 per year in non-stock compensation.
Also, I'm not entirely sure your case is proof that there isn't a big supply/demand difference. I would be very unlikely to hire a developer 10 hours per week because software is collaborative intellectual work, and I'd have a hard time using somebody who wasn't around for much of the thinking and constantly needed to be brought up to date. Their efficiency (in terms of hours of actual coding versus hours of communication and keeping up with codebase changes) would be low, but their cost in terms of time spent by other workers would be at least the same.
Occasionally I'll see small units of work that could safely be done by part-time contractors working on something solo. I definitely looked for this at my last startup, as my cofounder was correctly eager to accelerate things. But it was pretty rare that I found things where the cost/benefit ratio was at all decent.
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/m/monopsony.asp https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopsony
Like a monopolistic market, a monopsonistic market is inefficient compared to a competitive one. Employers gain "utility" at the expense of workers, but less than the workers lose compared to a competitive market.
Unions can remedy this by becoming a monopolistic (or near monopolistic) supplier of labour, by negotiating a higher wage (price floor), bringing the wage closer to it would be in a competitive market.
Long story short: if you're pro competitive markets, you need to recognize the benefits of unions. They're not an ideal solution, but the alternative is not a competitive market outcome.
Edit: this seems like a pretty good explanation: http://www.economicsonline.co.uk/Business_economics/Monopson...
Societies should prioritize according to their values. I don't think that maximizing GDP is a universal value.
Also, it's not really about positive market outcome in general (optimized market), but about positive outcomes for the employees.
That's a pretty strong argument against unions in the US, then, since (unlike in other countries) there's no competition between unions at an employer, there's almost no ability to deauthorize a union in practice (ie, choose a different union), and very high barriers to entry (very difficult to authorize a different union for representation in place of an existing one).
I do think that unions could also have too much leverage, but I think that finding a happy medium is a worthy legislative goal.
This is not correct. The company competes with all other companies for the same job. Not only that, but companies go bankrupt more often than people do. Businesses are the frail side of the equation, if you make any.
> o when it comes time to negotiate your annual raise, it's not you alone dueling with your boss (and the whole corporate hierarchy backing him up). Instead it's you and all your colleagues getting together, sending in some representatives, and saying, "Profits are way up this year, so we all deserve decent raises. Let's talk numbers."
Now let me answer with actual economic theory: microeconomics. The fundamental way to make something get a higher price is to increase its utility or to decrease its supply. Unions can increase salaries if they increase productivity (which they dont, in fact they do the exact opposite in the majority of cases, worker health being the best exception to this rule) and decrease supply (not allowing to hire other workers).
Regarding your other point, unions can also increase salaries by getting workers a larger piece of the pie. Not sure why you left out this obvious aspect of any negotiation?
The fact that you havent seen people stressed out for their business running into the ground is entirely due to not talking to people that have businesses that can be run into the ground.
> Regarding your other point, unions can also increase salaries by getting workers a larger piece of the pie. Not sure why you left out this obvious aspect of any negotiation?
Because that is a labor theory of value proposition. The pie does not work that way: the moment a businesses loses its competitive returns due to higher demands, it will stop investing capital unto itself and remain stagnant, while the capital goes to areas where it does not have such restrictions.
Companies compete with each other fiercely, and a company that has workers that cant unionize will very much welcome such problems on their competitors!
When it is tough, companies collude so that they can keep salaries down (see Google & co).
Negotiating as part of a group is not about supply and demand, it's about reaching a fair agreement between a specific company and a specific group of workers. Nobody cares about supply and demand on the market, most people would rather have a stable place to work and get decent raises if the company is doing well, instead of all the profits going to the management and shareholders.
I agree that there is a different flexibility of labor and capital, but unions do not make labor and capital more flexible or inflexible. If anything, it makes labor inflexible and affects capital in the short term.
> Negotiating as part of a group is not about supply and demand, it's about reaching a fair agreement between a specific company and a specific group of workers. Nobody cares about supply and demand on the market, most people would rather have a stable place to work and get decent raises if the company is doing well, instead of all the profits going to the management and shareholders.
That sounds all good and well, but the union's interests are not its worker's interest. Its another organization that can feed of workers. Unless they make the pie bigger, they eat a generous slice, and if the company goes bust they will not eat at all. Unions have strong incentives to work in tandem with the company than with the worker.
There are also huge conglomerates which gobble up smaller brands, e.g. Kraft Heinz, Time Warner, Alphabet, 3M, etc. They couldn't give a fuck about fragility.
Established businesses are in no way fragile. It's so ridiculous having to read this type of defensive argument.
Employees are a bunch of peons for the big corps, but they shouldn't try to organise because it will be somehow worse for them, right. Any type of group dynamic will not perfectly represent the interests of the group, and yet there are very successful unions out there even in the US, where capital had an long and bloody history trying to suppress them.
Your "pity the poor companies bit" is just bizarre to me. It's true that companies compete for workers, which is why employees have any negotiating power at all. But it doesn't change the fact that employers still have more negotiating power because of relative size. The same is true when companies negotiate with one another: Walmart, for example, is famous for jerking suppliers around because of the relative need.
If this were true, real salaries would have increased as the GDP increased. Instead they've been stagnant for over 30 years. You're argument is incredible and would need some sort of evidence to back it up against what is being observed in real life
There is concentration on both sides of that equation. Small businesses do not have the profits and margins big companies have.
I will concede that if every business was a small business, then unions likely would be unnecessary as the negotiating power is more equal
The way we see it, unions are best used when there is a power discrepancy between employer and employee. In the end, your value as an employee is how much it costs to replace you. Simple as that.
So if you are educated in a specialized field, you have bargaining power (and you don't need a union). If you are working in a more generalist area, you have none whatsoever - it is an illusion (exception being if the demographics means 100% employment).
What the union does is of course to band generalists together so they have strike power. That sucks for the company. But what the Danish unions tend to do is demand eduction, lifting the generalist work into a more specialized position. You can always get good at a job.
This means that the company may have to pay a more expensive salary, but get a much improved worker and/or product. Paying 50% extra for twice the productivity is a good investments, even if you have to pay for some of the education of the former generalist.
So rather than just demand more pay, the unions demand more education and higher standards. They also demand better pay, of course - but in the end they are interested in many members working rather than few members getting ridiculous payments.
Mature unions are good for the economy. Corrupt or immature unions can be a terrible ball-and-chain for a society.
Btw, this doesnt address how unions can benefit things like commodities. From your post, it wouldnt. It can only benefit if you are leading the industry.
Change.
Things do not stay the same, and while Europe has survived this far, I have watched my company remove Europe from the supply chain and development of products.
Everything is made in China or south America.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_relations_in_China#All-C...
The biggest "upside" is that there is usually more stability in terms of work rules, benefits and compensation, and when there are changes, you know about them. There are defined work rules, disciplinary procedures, etc. Your health insurance doesn't randomly change every year, etc.
The union itself is at least a nominally democratic institution. The downsides are that shitty employees can work the system. And just like how you have bad IT, HR or other teams, some unions suck. Dealing with a shitty union is difficult.
In general, if there are a bunch of people around you doing the same things, the company is making money, and you'd like long tenure, a union probably is a net benefit. If you work for a mega-org or .gov, it's essential. If you're in a high-growth business, or a profession where you expect to bounce from employer to employer, it's not a good value.
Everyone on HN is a 10x employee making a $500k/year, so it's not a good value in that situation either. ;)
This isn't a hypothetical worst-case scenario. I mean, it is a worst-case, but it did actually happen to Hostess.
The union and Hostess had already agreed to a round of salary cuts and decreased benefits. When the management still "couldn't" make it work that they went nuclear.
Arguably, this is a reason unions shouldn't get too big. It creates scenarios where some workers get their interests sacrificed, precisely the thing unions exist to forestall.
Oracle is an awful software company. Does that mean that we should use paper ledgers for corporate accounting?
Which is to say I believe there is a point to be made in there about what can and has happened. And what there is to be cautious of.
Government jobs?
People dont get fired from those anyway.
You have a monopoly service and monopoly workforce. This is recipe for disaster.
At least a monopoly workforce in the private sector can bleed a company dry and force it out of business.
The government? Well they raise taxes + increase debt... Or the service just sucks.
No. That is wrong. All of government is overhead, it's like an operating system that way. Public employees should not be collectively bargain to extract more money from taxpayers. If compensation is so bad in the gov't then the employees can organize to get someone else voted in to turn things around. Furthermore, because so much of what happens in government is subject to public scrutiny (as it should be, it's our money) there's much less space for the government to poorly compensate its employees or treat them like crap.
Edit: did people forget what a great contribution to society police unions have made?
Usually, the best pros of the best unions are: Strong representatives negotiating for better PTO, healthcare, work practices, wages/salaries, etc. Some recourse besides quitting or suing if your manager is treating you badly.
The cons can be: Fixed salary ranges and benefits - want more money as a star employee? Want to try to negotiate a different benefits package? Too bad, you get what the union negotiated. Pay and promotions may be based on time in role rather than productivity or skills. It's usually difficult to fire poor workers.
Essentially, unions foster an environment of distrust between management and workers, so they generally try to remove any way for management to affect your work. Management evaluation of who is a good and bad worker is not to be trusted, since they are presumed to want to use that power to stop the union. Management is less encouraged to care about giving the workers a fair shake - that's the union's job now, management isn't expected to push for anything but more money for themselves.
My situation is such that the union together with the employer negotiate a base agreement. It might detail things like making sure you received compensation for overtime, what the requirements for termination are, rights in regards to parental leave, minimum annual wage adjustments, etc. My country has very little legislation in regards to workers rights, because we've traditionally had very strong unions instead, so workers rights could be mandated through agreements rather than law. To give you an ideal, the standard collective bargaining agreement within my industry is a few hundred pages. If you are not part of such an agreement, it is instead on you to make sure that your employment contract covers all those aspects.
The benefit for the employer is that they have to deal with less legislation, don't have to negotiate a complex contract with every employee (i.e. we already agree on the vast majority of issues, and can focus on the few things where I want individual adjustment), and finally, as long as the employer follows the agreement, the workers through their union agree not to go on strike.
Now, to your question, just because you have an agreement through your union does not mean that you cannot exceed that agreement. You can certainly negotiate a higher salary, for example. It only ensures the minimum level.
Some unions have rules where you can get more pay based on performance, holding certain certifications, or experience. Other unions have rules where pay is related to tenure, and employees compensation is directly proportional to their tenure.
The concept of white-collar unions is really interesting. I know a lot of white-collar workers think unions would mean that their crappy coworkers would abuse the system to make the same money while doing just enough work to avoid being fired.
I can understand the argument behind that, but I think unionization could help certain white-collar workers force their employers to support changes that improve quality of life and reduce burnout and stress.
For example, a sysadmin union might be able to dictate only a certain number of on-call nights a month, or prevent companies from calling sysadmins while they are on vacation. A developer union could mandate a certain number of hours a developer could work before getting comp time or paid overtime. A union could give developers who are worried about what they are being asked to do might be illegal or immoral the ability to say no without being punished (think the VW scandal).
A lot of white collar fields already have a body performing the role of a defacto union because they have licensing bodies. I can see why techy types don't have a licensing body, since techy types are a bit more rebellious than engineers as a whole, and we haven't had any 'major' disasters to force regulation of the profession. That being said developers are constantly working in environments that hurt their productivity and the quality of their work and at some point we need a way to enforce better working standards on organizations.
I've never had to contact my union (though I've benefited from it indirectly), but my sense is that they're useful as advocates for their members interests, especially in larger organizations. Often, this can even be for simple "common sense" proposals that are not controversial, but are difficult for individual employees to make happen. Navigating the bureaucracy of large organizations is not easy, and unions help with this (by creating an additional bureaucracy admittedly, so they're not a perfect solution).
The best way to think about a union is using the collective power of workers to set a floor on wages and labor conditions, not a ceiling. And best of all, they're democratically controlled, so they're members can create whatever structures and rules they think best serve their interests.
Cons: Union dues to pay for the above, possibility for corruption
It's basically like joining an additional, tiny government.
Did we prove 99.99999=1? Not sure if that was a youtube myth or a reality.
Whatever the case, union corruption is worse than the petty fee they charge.
The questions you are asking likely have different answers for every union out there. The pros are collective bargaining. The cons are variable.
There's plenty of unionised workplaces (especially when it comes to professionals) that have large variation in pay, and there's other examples where pay is based on some formula with no variation (this is vastly more common when it comes to labourers and tradesmen).
However, I did have to sit though the day long session where the union told everyone how they were there for the members and what that meant in terms of their interaction with the employer. Most of it was around insuring that I knew what things the union had negotiated and that I should not feel bad about demanding the employer honor their commitment when that happened. For example there were two 20 minute breaks (10AM and 2PM), there was 50 minutes for lunch including time to get to and from the lunch area, and if I was asked to work more than 40 hours a week it had to be paid at 1.5x my hourly rate, weekends at 2x my hourly rate, and holidays 3x my hourly rate. There were medical benefits that I pretty much ignored, and a formal grievance process if I felt I was being asked to do something outside my job scope.
The big message was that if my manager didn't live up to their obligations, the big union would make sure that the manager was made to understand what they could and could not do.
Every other job I've held I was not in a union. The difference in experience was pretty stark. Managers at non-union companies had no problem with intimidating employees to work additional hours to meet an unreasonable deadline that they had set, I've known managers who played head games on their direct reports to instill confusion and obedience, and have known managers who have gotten away with grossly unfair pay discrepancies between people they liked and people they disliked with little to no regard to their performance at the company.
Is it all managers? No of course not. And I have been extremely fortunate that if things were ridiculous and I couldn't influence change within the company I could leave and work somewhere else. That is much easier in the technical/engineering world than it is in a more trades oriented type of job.
On your question of wages, of the unions I've been in direct contact with, and the ones we've read about their negotiations in the news (Transit, Teachers, SEIU, etc) the wages are negotiated. You get what you get. Although at least some people augment their salary with overtime (for example a member of law enforcement providing security for an event).
Unions can also create definitions of when someone can be fired, which would be different for tech workers in California. Most employment in tech is "At Will" which means you can quit for any reason at any time and they can fire you at any time for nearly any reason. Unions often replace 'At Will' with contractual terms which define what it takes to fire someone and what their recourse is.
One of the most amazing things about unions I found in my career is that talking about organizing one at a tech company will get you fired faster than having relations with the CEO's spouse. It is a really touchy subject.
But why would you say that? It feels very defeatist to me to do something like that
This is something that reddit users should also probably keep in mind as they use the site, as Condé Nast owns reddit as well.
When Condé Nast originally bought reddit, there was an outcry about how Condé Nast was going to ruin reddit. People thought Condé Nast was just going to pump their magazine content (GQ, Vogue, New Yorker, Wired, many more...) on reddit.
In order to prove this wasn't going to happen, Conde Nast reincorporated Reddit as its own company and moved it under its parent holding company (Advance Publications).
Advance Publications is to Conde Nast what Alphabet is to Google.
Also one thing to note is that Reddit has employees within Conde Nast's head quarters. Its not like they are trying to hide their ownership. They just changed the structure of the ownership to prove Reddit still controls Reddit.
However, Checking the new yorkers revenue shows around 200 million/yr, I definitely did not expect that and likely means it can easily support a union. (unless the new yorker is loaded with debt, which it might be)
Seems like this is a basic law of economics or something. Monetary rewards for success, monetary losses for failures. Unions have a tendency to be out of sync with this, which means their objectives aren't aligned with managements. Which ... never ... ends well.
How does union work in Germany or other European countries. How are they still able to keep up their economic competitiveness. Is it because of small population or that they've built a moat around their patents etc... Or they've access to cheap workers from poor neighboring nations or if their unions are all fake scheming together with the owners to raise the productivity for workers and give them false sense of security? I've never seen non German union leader for a German company even tho I've seen lots of non German folks working for them. I never understood why
* The corporate culture is very different to the US, and there's much less of the antagonism you often see between employers and employees in the US. This manifests itself in various ways, most obviously with employee representatives on the board. There's lot more recognition that both losing staff (especially en mass) is hurtful to the company even in "replaceable" rolls (because there's always job specific knowledge) and that driving the company into the ground isn't good for the employees (because then they don't have a job).
* If it's obviously cheaper to move manufacturing overseas (or decrease labour through automation, etc.), the unions are less likely to fight it than they are in the US, but rather negotiate with the company some agreement either moving employees to elsewhere in the organisation or giving them training so they have the skills to be able to find another, safer job.
* An extreme example is a union negotiating a pay decrease for its membership in exchange for increased investment in the company to ensure job security (i.e., valuing the long-term outcome of consistent income above short-term income).
So, in short, a lot of it simply comes down to a willingness to compromise.
I think it's hilarious when people's only exposure to unions is textbooks or being put in charge of managing union employees and they scream bloody murder.
Unions are fantastic and being eroded solely through lobbying efforts of billionaire Koch suckers.
In grad school, early 90s, we were getting this brand new ethernet installed. Originally they were going to run thin-net, and decided instead to run UTP to the offices.
As one of the major users of modems to dial into the university ISP, in order to run our code on supers, I was quite eager to get my connection. They prepped the wiring, and then scheduled us for a month or two out.
The reason for this was that they needed one specific union person to cut the hole in the wall for this, and they were busy.
Ok, this is just silly.
So I asked, "hey, can I help out here? I know how to do this, and can do it in my advisors and my office."
We were told that if I did
a) they would charge us $3k USD (quite a lot to a poor grad student) PER HOLE, to fill it in.
b) they would then charge us another $3k USD to cut a new hole.
Because, union.
I've got other stories when I was at SGI, and we were setting up systems at Ford ... we couldn't simply carry our computers ourselves ... oh no ... that was verboten. We would get written up, and disallowed back on campus.
No, unions are not fantastic. They mostly evolve from being useful constructs to being rent seeking monopolies on labor, opposed to any measure that reduces their ability to seek/collect rent.
In grade school, we had a teachers strike[1]. I remember being on a bus, being attacked. By teachers. Who yelled and screamed at us. They threw rocks at the windows. Cracked a few. Police were called, but none of them suffered consequences for their actions. Even though quite a number of us saw them do this, while the only crime we had committed were being small kids on a school bus.
My experiences are not aberrations ... I've heard quite similar stories from many others, be they schools, or where ever they've encountered unions.
I do have to point out that you are tipping your political beliefs with your last sentence. I've experienced first hand, the violence, and rent seeking behavior of these groups. The lakeland strike was written up in a book a few years ago. Longest and meanest strike in the country by teachers. It made for a fairly shitty 6th and beginning 7th grade for me.
It is certainly your right to believe whatever you wish. Me, and many others, whom have suffered from the downsides to unions ... their rent seeking, their monopolization drive on labor ... are opposed in principle, without any goading on behalf of Koch or others.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/1977/09/07/archives/430-teachers-str...
Quick Union story- Was an engineer at a factory. Foam pieces were blocking my path to the process room. Like, there was a tiny pathway, probably not shoulder length wide that I'd turn and squeeze in, and that was the path to my room.
The floor was a wreck, something bad happened with the temperatures + wax or something. The floor was a mess, foam everywhere. This was my job and I was failing tonight. Messing with temps and wax constantly, checking if chemicals were weird. Pretty much grasping at straws to fix this issue.
Well back to the blockage. I couldnt get to my room without either clearing the foam or walking around the factory.
So I took the piece of foam and tossed it into the garbage bin behind me.
Oh what a mistake. The next morning my boss was swamped with last night's mess and citation/form/write up that I was doing Union Jobs.
I was punished by having to take 2 days off unpaid. They paid a worker an entire day's salary, and I got some sort of negative mark on my record. My boss wasnt happy about this despite him being understanding of the silliness.
This was one of many many things that got to the point of hating unions. 95% of people just wanted to work. Then you had people that abused the system to the point that it didnt work.
My stories are similar.
Its not a right or left issue. Unions, with very few counterexamples ... to the point where I am unaware of any ... devolve into rent seeking constructs, which increase costs, decrease quality, etc.
I'd love to be wrong about this, but I've not yet seen counterexamples, where unions are held up as paragons of what we can be if we work together.
Many may have started to provide an offset to the asymmetric power of the management ... but pretty much all of them eventually are corrupted by the power that they yield. So much so that they can negatively impact people whom are not part of their union, wish no part of it, and yet have no choice but to join and pay dues.
This is a problem. A union should be a temporary construct, something that can be brought into existence quickly to offset/blunt bad management. Just as quickly, once it succeeds in its mission, it should deconstruct itself. To be formed only when needed. It should not persist. When it persists, it starts with nest feathering by officials at the top, rent-seeking behaviors, etc.
I'm honestly very surprised that there wasn't a union in a company with such a long history. The lack of unions in tech industry always seemed like an anomaly to me, but I attributed it to a fact that most tech companies are too young or too small.
It seems like one of their worries is about Condé Nast taking a more direct role over the publication.
> We are asking Condé Nast to recognize our union, and we look forward to beginning an amicable collective-bargaining process.
Condé Nast has been doing exactly this over the last 5 years as they got better organized. They'd be in worse shape had they not done this. The biggest impact has been in product, engineering, and design.
The New Yorker has always been well run for the most part so when Conde managed across the board cuts it was The New Yorker that was often exempted given they never threw money around like others.
Heh.
I'll bet the New Yorker would pay better + healthcare if they could. But they probably can't. They are probably facing 'going out of business' just like every other publication.
So I'm not sure if the union will matter, sadly.
You recently formed a union. Congratulations on that. We hope that you receive all that you desire. But because of the argument in your open letter announcing the union –– an argument that proposes that you should receive more money because you want to have more money –– we are concerned that your intelligence, considerable though it is, is in this case unable to grapple with the actual reality of the world. Your magazine comprises both fact (sort of) and fiction. When you’re asking for money, it’s typically best to focus on the fact world, not the fictional world."
Having an organized workforce should be the cost of doing business. If you can only survive as a corporation that does the bare minimum to take care of employees you have no right to be an employer in the free market. Most corporations _can_ function with organized labor, but would rather not because it cuts into profits.
> If you can only survive as a corporation that does the bare minimum to take care of employees you have no right to be an employer in the free market. Most corporations _can_ function with organized labor, but would rather not because it cuts into profits.
Think about this from a systems perspective. If you are a country that requires businesses to take a certain amount of overhead, then some percentage of businesses will just not be viable. Therefore your entire economy is x% smaller (at least). You can claim that this is offset by the economic well-being of the employees, but that's not at all obvious and would require a lot of justification. (If it were true, you'd expect countries like France to be more healthy economically than the USA, whereas in fact France is quite stagnant). If your economy is x% smaller, it means you are not competing effectively with other countries and have less leverage when dealing with them. And the shrunken economy has real consequences on the standard of living of people living in the country. etc, etc.
If you think of this only from a lens of "capitalists are evil people who deserve to be taxed to support the good workers" you are going to be missing most of the picture.
We hyperfocus on growth at the expense of other aspects of our economy. If you create consumer goods but systematically depress the wages of the consumers who buy the goods, eventually you've cannibalized your source of revenue. Similar to how cancer cells are hyperfocused on growth at the expense of working within the systems they're assigned.
I don't see how the economic wellbeing of workers is in need of justification.
In a free market, workers would be able to find other employment if their company treats them poorly. In reality, the demise of the free market here hasn't been hastened by "cancerous" management, determined to "screw the workers over" ... it has been hastened by rent seeking behaviors of the unions, driving costs up. Which has resulted in said management looking for ways to control/lower costs.
Such as moving labor intensive work to a) lower cost areas, and now b) automating to the point of which you no longer need many workers.
Those are all cost based decisions. No one, that I am aware of in management, is twisting their mustaches saying "if only I could find some way to screw my workers over even more". Everyone in management is being asked "how can I increase productivity as measured in producing more widgets per unit cost, or reducing the unit cost to produce each widget?".
Unions do not reduce cost per widget. They do not increase productivity in terms of more widgets per unit cost. They simply increase costs. Which drives the conversations on how to reduce costs. Move factory. Automate.
Take an industry with net margins of a few percent at best (most industries), and have one portion of their cost structure increase to remove a material fraction of that margin. The company owners (stock and bond holders) would be all over that board to find a way to reduce costs.
The darkly ironic aspect of this, is that 401k's and/or pension funds (defined benefit is going away in favor of defined contribution) that may be part of a comp program for union and non-union folk, are likely investing in these companies, making these demands upon them, to increase their profitability. That is, the union worker has competing antithetical goals at play that cannot be simultaneously satisfied.
Yeah, it would be nice to pay everyone a wonderful wage, have no poverty, no hunger, etc. The moment an industry player says "yes we are going to raise our prices to pay our people more money", is when their competition comes in and says "but we will charge less" and takes their business.
If you don't cannibalize your own revenue, your competitors surely will. Amazon is doing an incredible job of this, in they find niches which become profitable for some, which they then enter, leveraging their buying power. And they have largely cannibalized Walmart, who used to do the same to others (don't feel bad for them as they get a taste of their own medicine).
Denial of reality and the way economics actually works is a recipe for disastrous consequences. The free market is there, whether you want it to be or not. If you refuse to grow, your competitor will. At your expense.
If you increase your costs in one column without being able to decrease them somewhere else without harming productivity, you are increasing your risk. Not paying people better. But betting their jobs on something that isn't based upon sound economic theory.
Their benefits are directly derived from their employer not having the freedom-to-contract/full-control-over-their-private-property.
Ah yes, I forgot that employees were private property of employees. These damn uppity workers thinking they could band together to negotiate. Why wont they just negotiate one on one with me so I can pay them less?
I'm referring to their company, and their right to offer any terms of employment they want, which is restricted by federal law stating that you cannot have employment terms that discriminate against unionized workers, enable the company to refuse particular demands by unions (e.g. collective bargaining), or fire an employee for particular types of activity, like staging a strike.
Union-privileging labor laws usurps an employer's control over their own company. They replace contract law with central planning that regiments the acceptable range of employment relationships between consenting adults.
Why are the employers rights being trampled here if the union is a bunch of employees who agreed to negotiate together? The employer can refuse the unions deal, and then its on them to figure out how to run a company without employees.
The employers dont have a right to divide and conquer the employees so that they can get better terms.
>They replace contract law with central planning that regiments the acceptable range of employment relationships between consenting adults.
How is this even replacing contract with central planning? Are you trying to connect the bogeyman of communism with unions? Consenting adults are the ones who decided what the employment relationship was