Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxehmookau | Hacker News Reader

My knowledge of unions is based entirely on the UK. They allow groups of employees who are subject to poor conditions to group together and participate in collective bargaining. Most programmers in the UK are not a member of a union as pay is fairly high and conditions relatively good, but the majority of public-sector and a lot of private-sector workers are. Unionising would be an excellent first step for employees fighting back.

I see a lot of anti-union talk on HN, I don't think a lot of the criticism of unions I see here is fair.

View on HN

> I see a lot of anti-union talk on HN

That's because most people on HN are from the U.S. where a century of propaganda has convinced most people not only that poor people are lazy, but by extension that unions are evil, corrupt and lazy organizations infiltrated by organized crime. While this propaganda has a minority basis in reality in some cases, as all propaganda will have because propaganda can't be 100% fantasy and make-believe, it's an ignorant basis to take when discussing broad and general questions like unions as a concept.

If you ask someone from Spain or Germany about unions and attempt to explain why they're "evil" from the US perspective, I can guarantee you will be met with complete disbelief. Most people in Europe may not actively be a part of a union, but they normally recognize them as beneficial entities in the labor market, and as something that will help balance the scales against employers of normally vastly larger influence, both politically and economically.

There are/were some excesses, though. And if you ask an european about (union supported) rubber rooms, s/he would also express some disbelief.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/rubber-rooms-in-new-york-city... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rubber_Room

>If you ask someone from Spain or Germany about unions and attempt to explain why they're "evil" from the US perspective, I can guarantee you will be met with complete disbelief.

How can you possibly guarantee (no less!) what someone, regardless of where they come from, will say about any subject? You cannot complain about generalizations and broad statements, as in here:

>...a century of propaganda has convinced most people not only that poor people are lazy, but by extension that unions are evil, corrupt and lazy organizations infiltrated by organized crime.

And then try to fit reality into your own narrative at the same time without being a hypocrite.

I will tell you this, though: CCOO and UGT (the two major trade unions in Spain) are publicly funded, which I find absolutely wrong. Moreover, they tend to be incredibly incompetent and useless in most cases. Of course, I'm drawing from my own personal experience and others' accounts of their own.

You can always join CGT [1]. They take tech workers seriously and they have presence on most tech companies.

Leave the more general, "politics" side of unions (calling for general strikes, and so on) to CCOO and UGT, and make use of another union to protect you when your company tries to abuse you. Also, if you're not satisfied with what the unions do, you can always the works council. A workmate of mine is in our company's works council and she isn't even part of any union.

Also, in my experience CCOO and UGT are not nearly as bad as the media paints them (again, I'm talking about what's going on at companies I've worked at). This may sound like a cliché, but really, there is an awful lot of propaganda against them because there are plenty of rich people interested in having an exploitable work force. The only real complain I have against CCOO and UGT is that they sometimes don't fight as hard as they should. But in many other cases they do. I've seen cases where these unions have successfully sued companies upon wrongful termination of workers, for example.

[1] https://www.cgtinformatica.org/

+1, this is a political question and, as with every political question, there are of course plenty of different opinions in Europe about it.

Pointing out singular words when making an argument is just petulant, clearly I was speaking in general terms and referring to the general difference between the US and Europe. That anyone would claim that it's impossible to find someone with a pro-union opinion in the US is as nonsensical as saying you couldn't find one with an anti-union opinion in Europe. We're talking about hundreds of millions of people.

The main point of my comment, which I made very clear, was that specific examples of "bad unions" is not a helpful or constructive basis upon which to have an argument about the theoretical place of labour unions in a market, no more than you would base an argument about where to go for dinner in the nutritional value of a carrot.

Are you arguing that most people don't think that poor people are lazy? In the context of this conversation, the poster is right about what most people believe.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsweek.com/why-are-people...

>but by extension that unions are evil, corrupt and lazy organizations infiltrated by organized crime.

That's because, in the US, it's all true, historically. Auto unions were a big reason why Detroit's automakers were so uncompetitive against the Japanese automakers in the 80s; autoworkers got ridiculous pay for menial work, which is why Detroit moved a lot of their production to Mexico and Canada, and other automakers moved to Southern states where unions didn't exist.

The simple fact is that unions in the US in the latter half of the 20th century and beyond were nothing like unions in Germany, where by almost all accounts they seem to work out extremely well.

>Most people in Europe may not actively be a part of a union, but they normally recognize them as beneficial entities in the labor market

Yes, in Europe that's true. In America, it just hasn't been the case. It's just like public transit: in Germany, trains and subways are fantastic: they're inexpensive, clean, and efficient; whereas in America, they're an utter disaster: dirty, expensive, constant maintenance problems, and just a miserable experience. Try riding the subway in Munich, and then riding the subway in NYC or DC; there's just no comparison. The problem isn't that subways are bad, it's that subways in America are bad. Same goes for unions.

We've had singularly successful industries like Hollywood rely on unions as well - SAG, WGA, IATSE, etc. Their work bears a lot more similarity to software development than the auto industry does, so hopefully that is food for thought.

It's fair enough to say that American auto unions (and very importantly, auto company management and ownership) would do well to model themselves after Germany's system. It's not a universal truth that all our unions are ineffective.

Exactly. People on here treat companies with nuance and analyze their pros and cons but often with unions they get lumped into the all unions are bad bucket without considering what aspects of unionizing are good and bad with any real depth.

I could compare all companies to the worst examples too (e.g. all startups are Theranos) but that would never be taken seriously nor would it be fair yet somehow with unions that level of analysis is taken seriously.

>It's fair enough to say that American auto unions (and very importantly, auto company management and ownership) would do well to model themselves after Germany's system.

You could say that about many different things: if we just did it like the Germans, everything would be better, right? But how exactly do you actually do that? We're not Germany. You could go to Zimbabwe or El Salvador and tell them the same thing ("just be like the Germans or Japanese and you won't have all these social problems!"), but that isn't realistic; if it was that easy, every country would be copying the Germans and Japanese.

As for a universal truth, I haven't seen any evidence yet that unions in America actually work well. In Germany, yes, but this isn't Germany.

>which is why Detroit moved a lot of their production to Mexico and Canada

Well, I'm pretty sure those auto jobs in Canada were also high paying and unionized.

Source: I worked for one through University.

>Well, I'm pretty sure those auto jobs in Canada were also high paying and unionized.

That just supports my argument even more. It's not unions that are the problem, it's unions in America.

Don't know if it is still true but almost everyone at Boeing is part of the union, my college co-op student peers in the 1980's said they had to join the union even as electrical or aerospace engineers to work for a semester.

Auto Unions were blamed by corporate execs in the 1970s-2000s but the fact is the yen was undervalued at 250/dollar to 300/dollar in the 1980s up until 1999. Execs needed someone to blame or the board would fire their asses for not having the political connections to keep the car imports out..

The other big problem was that American cars at the time were poorly-designed, unreliable junk, and Japanese cars were great.

Just a minor note: Our terrible public transit is due to our society revolving around the motto "a chicken in every pot and a car in every garage." In my city, you can find overpasses that were purposely designed to not let buses fit through to further emphasize how "terrible" public transit is, and how we all need our own car. Those with money & power then moved into the Suburbs, and thereby even more legislation was made to ease suburbian transit.

I'm from Portugal (where we've had somewhat similar experiences to Spain with the mentality for unions).

When I was young I believed they were good as it was what I was taught and fell in the socialist-leaning mentality of much of the country.

Having started to learn about economics, entering the industry, and seeing the arguments many people make for unionization have definitely led to me to swing much harder to the "unions are evil" side of the argument.

That said I do believe they are a double edged sword of sorts. When the only employer for a certain profession is the government for example (i.e. not driven by profits and losses, or not a part of a competitive market) unions can actually help make things fair and get a point across that otherwise would not be visible. But in general they are much less efficient than profits and losses in a competitive market and in those situations will lead to a decline in growth that you would otherwise not get.

Unions are just reverse corporations. They cannot be any more good or evil than a corporation.

A reverse corporation of sorts, but with only a single source of revenue. A corporation is a collective that works together to produce something. A union, on the other hand, seeks to extract as much value as is possible/reasonable from the host organization, but not so much that they destroy it.

I'm not sure if I'm being poe's law'd or this is going to turn into a recursive thread but... this is also describing a corporation:

> seeks to extract as much value as is possible/reasonable from the host organization, but not so much that they destroy it

I guess my main points were that corporations differ in that their “host” is basically all of society and they must produce things of value or they die, but a union’s “host” is either a single corporation or industry and they do not directly produce things of value.

Unions consume goods and use services to make a loss?

The easiest way to debunk your claim that it is purely propaganda is to give easy counter-examples. In this case, may I present to you New York's finest: The MTA and LIRR. where rampant abuse of the system is everywhere and somehow, amazingly, have one of the highest disability claim rates out of any group of workers in the country.

Either working for the MTA or LIRR is one of the most dangerous jobs in the country, or this is quite literally "organized crime"

And who could forget this story? Is this "25 years of propaganda"? https://nypost.com/2013/12/20/ex-lirr-union-boss-in-gravy-tr... https://nypost.com/2014/08/06/nearly-all-lirr-workers-have-d...

Anyways, not saying there aren't good, hard working people in unions out there, and they don't provide some functional value, but like anything in life they have become corrupted.

Unions can certainly succeed if the the employee side also has a vested interest in the success of the company just as much as the company has, and that balance is maintained. Then, you truly have a collective.

An "employee owned organization" seems like a better alternative to unions, in my opinion.

Really I don't think you need unions at all, at least not now in the information age. If all employees across various industries simply shared salary figures (adjusted for cost of living, of course, to be fair), it would have the same effect as most of the benefits of union membership. That knowledge by itself would be incredibly empowering. The late Alan Kruger pointed this out when reflecting on the famous "Card and Krueger" experiment.

> An "employee owned organization" seems like a better alternative to unions, in my opinion.

This statement is completely and utterly nonsensical to anyone that has even a shallow understanding of the history of labour struggles and unionizing.

Oh I do understand the history. But with modern employment laws for overtime, safety, harassment, etc, workplace conditions are no longer an issue in the United States. In the meantime employee ownership aligns incentives l to operate efficiently and profitably.

Well, as someone from Russia and before that, Soviet Union, despite having the polar opposite message in propaganda, I've seen it again and again to be exactly true. I haven't seen a single competent, able-bodied and hard-working man staying poor in my life. What I've seen though was a lot of laziness, entitlement and horrible work ethics.

I was part of a union and was even on the union board that did the bargaining. Bargaining was incredibly stressful and a really terrible experience. Each time it made me want to quit my job. You learn just how little the company actually cares about you. Then you can't help but let the other members of the union know, and morale plummets overall. This happens every year...

I'm lucky at my current job that my employer does care for the employees. We are paid well, have amazing benefits, they are open about earnings and such. I much prefer this scenario rather than a union, but I can totally get why some companies need a union -- companies that treat their employees terribly. I just feel bad that it has to be a thing at all :(

Additionally, in many European countries, union agreements affect the whole company, regardless from whom is actually an union member.

Which means IT also benefits from the work hours agreements that affect everyone, just to give a basic example.

I’m all in favor of private sector unions, because a union that is too greedy will kill its host. For the same reason I am against public sector unions, their host is the government and “killing” that results in severe consequences for all of us. Look at the pension crisis in several states.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com