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Comment by tomohawk | Hacker News Reader

Start a "consulting" business that provides really good pay and benefits to all of the workers. Be very selective about who you let in.

You're now in the business of providing workers for companies that produce stuff. If they want access to your workers, they sign a contract with your company. If some workers don't like working for some particular company, transfer them to places where they like to work.

You've now created a private union that operates on a consensual basis rather than a coercive / adversarial basis.

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Some of my peers have thrown around the idea of team hires. Interviewing as a team and working as a team. The team is hired and quits together and is generally a collective that works within itself.

Love it. I'd be interested in hiring such a team.

I really like this idea.

Isn't that now essentially a company that work gets subcontracted out to? or am i missing the joke?

Just to point out the obvious, that doesn't serve the main purpose of the union at all: collective negotiation with the employer.

You haven't described a private union. You've described a co-op - a solution to an entirely different problem - how to deploy capital and labor in an egalitarian way.

Unions exist to counter an existing adversarial and coercive economic relationship with counter-coercion.

It's kind of like saying that instead of using tanks to fight a war you should use really persuasive arguments because then you don't have to use "coercion".

Sure that was the whole point, to broaden the discussion beyond tending the symptoms and trying to get at the causes.

An interesting idea could be to use a union or similar vehicle to start a co-op. Or start to strive for more democratic practices in companies. I actually like the comparisons to consulting companies in the sibling comments which seem to be an attempt at doing something like the outlined, however, with more of a traditional paint on top and probably more vulnerable to coercion in the long run.

Co-ops don't address the causes of coercive economic relations though. If they did they'd be much more common - Walmart and John Lewis both exist but they simply can't compete effectively in the same market. The only way to counter a Walmart is with a union - and a really aggressive one, too.

If you look at the video I posted at least one professor seems to think otherwise and I kind of find his arguments at least worthy to consider. Corporations will by nature have place an emphasis on pleasing owners, which in the case of coops are the workers. So, it doesn’t dispense with competition in general but aligns interests better with workers which should have a profound effect on “coercive economic relations”.

If you just mean that coops just cannot really compete, I would say that’s a myth. Look at Mondragon for example [1] or some large German coops. They also run successful competitors to walmart at leasr in europe. I think that one reason that they are just not as common is a general need to raise capital quickly, general availability of capital and a lack of education. But you are right that none of that is likely to counter an existing monopoly with access to huge capital baring some kind of legislative changes. There is certainly a place for unions.

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mondragon_Corporation

You just described a body shop.

Heck this is what is done in India and other countries as well, to get around worker protection rules.

Keep several rota of workers, employ them at firm X. When the 9.999 years of work are up, “switch” the workers to a new firm.

Thus dodging the legal test which states that any worker who has worked at a role for more than 10 years at a single company, is a de facto employee and should be given pension and other recognitions.

Your design degenerates to this situation. The same way Uber degenerated from ride sharing and using surplus resources to people barely squeezing by.

But I mean, how different is that really from any normal corporation that offers its services to other corporations? The issue is still how the workers protect themselves from you (the employer).

This is actually called a PEO (professional employment organization) and is often used for small companies looking to hire workers in foreign countries. The PEO becomes the employer of record and the employee is assigned 100% of the time to the foreign company. It’s pretty neat.

And suddenly you've created Accenture

They literally provide ‘stuff’. Not sure whether it’s actual solutions.

You are basically describing ThoughtWorks.

Except afaict the big agile consultancies underpay relative to tech industry big names.

Source: fmr pivotal labs

Sure - there are overheads in running a company where people like to work, and there's only so much that can come from the top line in a consulting business.

Parent to my comment was responding to somebody suggesting that consultancies provide "really good pay and benefits" and I was suggesting that this isn't true, currently, in the tech industry.

Yeah, I missed that the parent was suggesting good pay and benefits. My point is that the consultancies generally pick one or the other, because otherwise they'd be priced out of the market - even for really good staff that are hard to find elsewhere.

Wasn't this the way the Guilds were operating in the Medieval era?

My friend from Europe explained that this is how companies get around labor laws (for example, laws that restrict the number of hours a given employee can work). Companies essentially hire contractors who are paid higher wages which results in fewer actual positions hired by the company. Now there are fewer positions hired directly by the employer so in-effect, the labor laws haven't impacted much. At least that's how he explained it to me.

I don't understand. What you're describing is individual contracting, no?

The comment above described contracting a company with employees. These employees would than drop be bound by the labor laws.

To my understanding it happens with both individual as well as company based contracting. Unsure which is more prevalant though.

The problem of course is if you give your employees really good pay and benefits you price yourself out of winning any jobs.

This model already exists and does really well in practice. Both clients and employees love it.

That's all fine and good, but now you have to find contracts and compete/bid competitively on RFP's for work.

Why would you pay workers above what they are willing to work for you?

To be able to hire them for a particular unit of work and then let them go once the project is over, without having to worry about labor laws. This kind of flexibility and optionality can be very valuable.

And expensive.

Firm theory has studied this subject in the field of economics. There's a reason there are employees in the world, and not everyone is a contractor.

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