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Comment by navigatesol | Hacker News Reader

>No union ever said "Wow, this new CEO and management are super fair and reasonable. We are no longer necessary, let's dissolve and let them take the reigns."

What an odd point of view. Homicides are down; should we loosen the laws? If management are "fair and reasonable", what do they care if there's a union on premises? Everyone just goes about their business.

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> What an odd point of view. Homicides are down; should we loosen the laws?

Sure, why not? Why does additional overhead added to systems always need to be permanent? It's like installing Norton Anti Virus and then never being able to uninstall it ever again. Sometimes I think it would be okay to say:

"Wow, aviation has been safe for 20 years since 9/11, maybe locked cockpits and increased public awareness are good enough, let's cut out the most onerous parts of the TSA and make our airports more lean and efficient"

Earlier you were saying that the optimal move would be for the union to dissolve, and now you're comparing that to loosening air regs after they turn out to have overcorrected. That's moving the goalposts.

You should compare "dissolving the union" to "abolishing all air regs" or "easing up on union activism" to "loosening the more onerous regs".

It's actually worse. In his examples, nobody profits from a disregard of the rules.

A more similar scenario would be "let's disband the IRS, as nobody does tax evasion anymore"

Traffic fatalities are down, I guess we can get rid of the seat belts and airbags now?

I prefer an analogy of "Nobody in NYC has been mugged in 3 months, let's fire all the policemen." because I think it's much more accurate from the angle that a union existing, but not doing anything other than sitting there, is still adding a pressure that management will keep in mind, a union being disbanded is saying "Welp, go ahead, do your worst." (and probably worse than a union never having existed, because a lack of a union can still retain the threat that a union may form, while a union dissolving is more demonstrative of collective bargaining just failing due to poor social cohesion which means the weaker actors can be picked on freely)

> If management are "fair and reasonable", what do they care if there's a union on premises? Everyone just goes about their business.

Do you realize that you have to pay monthly dues to a union? If I were paying union dues and the union didn't serve a purpose (due to fair and reasonable management practices), then I wouldn't want to pay those dues anymore. Everyone just going about their business still involves me paying union dues.

But the point of paying these dues to have a point. For example, strike-pay. If your employees are living pay-cheque to pay-cheque, then your risk of them all striking as a whole is minimal, whatever you do. If you know they could all subsist for say 6-months (housing and food covered by strike-pay), then you would be more cautious in your actions. My take is that there are stupid extremes on both sides of the unionization debate. But, as a concept, it provides a nice stabilizing counter-balance. If employees are happy, you don't notice the union. If they're unhappy, then you'll hear from the union. If the company is fundamentally unviable then really unionization is moot as you're all going down together.

Please differentiate between "dissolving" and "scaling back" if the union is mostly just idle I'd be disappointed if it didn't lower the membership dues. There could be discussions about building up a bank for rainy days, but if the union isn't doing anything but has a steep monthly payroll for administration that's a legitimate criticism... so cut down those dues until it's needed at full force again.

Try instead: When the last murder was a few years ago, it's possible we can have fewer cops.

That's the wrong analogy - it's not about loosening the laws. It's about reducing the overhead/framework for something that is no longer as necessary.

It should be "homicides are down, should we reduce the number of cops and investigators?"

And the answer is probably yes. But of course we know that in practicality no municipality would say they are letting a bunch of cops go because crime is down. Even though they arguably should. Or at the very least, don't replace them as they retire and let the number naturally decrease. Because the number of people who will go out murdering people solely because there are less cops is near zero. That's not really a driving factor.

To be fair, I have seen tons of headlines to the effect of "crime is the lowest it's ever been in decades, so why are we still hiring so many police officers"

There is absolutely pressure to loosen the (enforcement of) laws when crime is down

Homicides are down; should we loosen the laws?

If we can assume you're talking about USA, absolutely we should. We have more people in prison, in both absolute and percentage terms, than any society anywhere in the history of the human race. There is nothing about our situation that makes this a reasonable state of affairs. Reversion to the mean would contribute to justice.

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