Forced membership of a union!? Seriously!? How awful. I’d rather quit than have it forced on me. If I was at the New Yorker I’d almost certainly join, but only if I could do so willingly. Ugh.
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.
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.
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.
Literally the definition of a scab.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/scab definition 3b.
Of course there certainly are people in unions who do not support Labour, but the historical connection is there because the Labour parties were largely formed as an extension of the work started in and around the unions.
All arguments seem to circle back to a vague idea of 'but they represent you', for both unions and Labour. I'm sure that's what they think they're doing, but the Conservatives and the Greens also offer to 'represent' me. It's not convincing.
They do, or they just don't join a union at all.
Wasn't this conversation about why people might not be to keen to join unions?
If the unions don't care about membership numbers then there's no issue. If they want to increase their membership numbers then aligning themselves to, and worse than that actively funding, one party, that many people don't support, will be an issue that makes that harder.
It's not just the Greens - people who could be interested in joining a union but wouldn't want to fund Labour might include Socialists, Communists, Liberal Democrats, yes Conservatives as well (Conservative Workers & Trade Unionists for example), UKIP, and so on.
In the US union membership is a big issue. In the UK not so much. The unions do certainly care about membership, but they also care about actually having influence over the issues that matters to their members, as that's what they're for. At some point you need to choose if it's more important to represent everyone, or represent those who do join you well.
As it stands there's very little indication it'd be worth it for most UK unions to lose the influence they have in Labour. Consider that trade union support for Corbyn was greater than in Labours regular membership, for example - in other words, most of the unions have tended to lean to the left of Labour, not towards any of the other UK parties. Labour leaning UKIP members have largely returned to the fold, after the Brexit vote (and many places contributed to Labours result in the 2017 election). The far left have either embraced Labour again under Corbyn or at least accept it as an acceptable choice. Even TUSC and CPGB recommended people vote Labour most places.
This is a "problem" that mostly seem to be a problem to people who are usually not themselves unionised or interested in being unionised but who dislike the additional support it brings to Labour.
Put another way: If a substantial number of unionised people in the UK wanted unions affiliated with other parties, they can form them, or someone would form them and people would join. The Tories have tried at least twice (with CWTU that you mentioned being the latest incarnation) - it hasn't worked.
Instead what's happened after Corbyn is that unions that severed links with Labour during Blair has re-affiliated (most notably the Fire Brigades Union). RMT has not reaffiliated, but instead supports TUSC, to the left of Labour, but endorsed Corbyn in the Labour leadership elections. There are still other unaffiliated union options as well, as well as options to reserve yourself against affiliation in most unions affiliated to Labour (which means your money doesn't go to Labour and you don't get a vote in Labour leadership elections), so this is an artificial concern.
But if anything, UK unions have consistently been to the left of mainstream UK politics, even when some of their members end up voting for parties actively opposed to the same interests they've voted for when electing their union membership.
The proportion of members that reserve themselves against affiliation with Labour has typically also been low.
> Conservative Workers & Trade Unionists
... is a group set up by the Tory party as an attempt at trying to win over union support from Labour, that has totally failed at getting any traction, because it was started from the top with basically no bottom-up support. It was presented in 2015 as a major thing, and then quietly shoved under the carpet when they didn't manage to get anywhere.
One thing is conspicuously absent from their gallery page [1] for instance: More than a handful actual workers and regular members, as opposed to Tory party staffers, MPs, MSPs, MEPs and Lords. If they can't muster a room full of actual workers to front a "union", that say it all.
If they succeed at organising workers that feel unrepresented by Labour-affiliated unions in sufficient numbers to actually influence Tory policy, then great. But so far it has been a PR stunt from the Tory party.
To put it in other terms: The largest Tory led "union" was Conservative Trade Unionists (now "Conservatives at Work"), which at it's peak had at most a few tens of thousands of members, at a time when there were more than 10m unionised workers in the UK. It's been in steady decline since.
I'm thinking more about non-traditional potential unions. Like if people seriously tried to set up a computer scientist union and tried to unionise a large proportion of workers at white-collar places like Google in the UK, I would imagine that some of the push-back they would get would be, for example Liberal Democrat voters not wanting to pay for Labour election campaigns.
Maybe a computer scientist union could simply choose not to be associated with Labour, then.
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.
I have and my experience was that you will never get paid what you're worth --- unless you're ruthless and prioritize gaming review systems over working with your team.
So if you want to argue that people who work exclusively to maximize their short-term outcomes without developing skills or, for that matter, any actual software can make more money without unions, I would agree... in the short run.
Am I fairly characterizing corporate jobs? About as fairly as you're characterizing collective bargaining, is what I think.
I’ve only ever had one union job (at a young age) and that told me everything I need to know about unions.
Ultimately if you’re not getting paid what you’re worth, that’s on you. Or you’re wrong about what you’re worth.
I guess our difference is that I’d rather myself to blame for poor negotiating than some union boss, making twice what I make, telling me what I’ll be getting with no ability to negotiate.
So mock my limited, yet actual, experience while you arm chair philosophize about how many people unions have helped in your imagination.
Without these buffers, going on strike is basically impossible.
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.
Yes.
There are a few exceptions, but by and large: once a union is granted authorization over a bargaining unit, the union exclusively represents all employees included in the bargaining unit (whether or not those employees voted for the union or are members of the union).
However workers who represent the union are often unpaid. Or paid very little for their efforts.
Could a kickstarter or contingency support more cases?
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.
The Worker Vs. Company conflicts that come up always favor a Company because they have more time, resources, and connections than an typical worker. The union's goal should always be to represent the needs of most workers most of the time, but there obviously will be situations where that puts an individual worker and their union at odds. This doesn't seem like a fatal flaw in the system any more than people will be elected to federal office who don't share your worldview.
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.
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.
That's the whole problem. Exclusive representation is fine. Right to work is fine. The two together destroy unions.
That's a weird conclusion, given that in, most other countries that are considered to have strong unions, unions actually don't have the authority to collect fees from all non-members in a bargaining unit.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Nope, they definitely can do members-only bargaining. It just doesn't happen often, because the large union syndicates dislike or prohibit it.
> 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?
Offhand, no, but I'm sure I could think of some. Again, in the US, the strategy taken by the major syndicates is to go for an all-or-nothing approach, in which it's preferable to have no union at all than to have a union that doesn't cover everyone (including non-members).
That's not the case outside the US, where unions don't have that legal right.
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.
It sounds like a bad idea for everyone except the union leaders, but I’ve seen other non-union based agreements like this where companies completely outsourced HR.
As a Union leader though, I now have a rather captive audience where I serve as the gatekeeper to any job someone might want at the company and gatekeeper to any employee the company might want. That seems like a recipe for abuse.
Low and behold, there are lots of examples of abuse by union leaders which a quick google search will show.
How is it a bad idea for the union members? Cause the alternative is no union at all.
And how, exactly, does the employer being able to choose if they want a union not lead to abuse?
"Low and behold, there are lots of examples of abuse by union leaders which a quick google search will show."
For every instance of union abuse, you can find tenfold the number of examples of company abuse.
>How is it a bad idea for the union members?
The paradox of this question is that you have to be a union member to get the job. If you have to be a member to work, then you must take what the union will give you and you must pay the union its dues. How is the union incentivized to keep dues down if you have to pay them? How is it incentivized to keep pay up, if you have to pay them?
>Cause the alternative is no union at all.
I’m not sure I follow. You’re saying that unions provide so little value to members that they wouldn’t voluntarily join the union given the option? I would have to agree with you.
>And how, exactly, does the employer being able to choose if they want a union not lead to abuse?
I’m just not sure what you mean here. Can people be abused if they don’t have unions? Can people be abused if they do have unions. Yes and yes.
Again, I get that voluntarily unions can have value, but being forced into a union has little value since there is NO motivation for a union to provide any value when your membership is mandatory.
Imagine if you had to pay Netflix a monthly due just because you had a TV. How hard do you think would Netflix work to get you the best programming it could deliver?
Answer: Not very hard. Sure maybe this alternative world Netflix started with good intentions...if every person who had a TV was forced to pay them money, Netflix could do great things...but then, after a while, the great things stop coming and people keep paying. There is no inducement for performance so performance will decline. These are immutable realities.
Either it is legal to negotiate union shop contracts, like you suggest, AND it is legal for companies to fire all union people, OR it is illegal to do both of those things.
You want to point out (what you perceive to be) the actual results of someone's position? Fine. Feel free to do so. But don't claim that they believe those results but are unwilling to say so. You don't have the knowledge to make that claim, so you are being dishonest when you do so.
Because I believe they are, if not just with us, then with themselves.
"You want to point out (what you perceive to be) the actual results of someone's position? Fine. Feel free to do so. But don't claim that they believe those results but are unwilling to say so. You don't have the knowledge to make that claim, so you are being dishonest when you do so."
And I disagree. Those outcomes are very, very obvious. If you do not realize those outcomes, then you are being dishonest.
So I’m not sure why you’re so sure you’re right when the real world contradicts your predictions.
It’s a voluntary system. Anything else is just tyranny.