Few people know how unions work any more. They vary as much as companies do. Some are top down, some are bottom up. Some run their own insurance and pension plans. Some are craft oriented, like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and some cover everyone in a plant, like the United Auto Workers.
For the "tech" industry, the Hollywood unions are worth looking at as a model. Most are under the umbrella of IATSE, The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. The Animation Guild represents most of the animators at the major studios. IATSE has grown over the last decade, which is unusual for unions today. They've picked up many people in Hollywood effects houses. They have not, however, been able to organize the game industry, despite trying.
IATSE figured out the "gig economy" long ago. Their contracts cover things like "minimum call time" (if you're called into work for an emergency, that's not only paid time, there's a minimum number of hours, usually 4), and overtime (not just paid, but time and a half and double time during crunches). This is why, as I've pointed out before, film scheduling is an organized discipline but software development scheduling is a joke.
There are advantages to working at a company with a partly unionized workforce even if you're not in a unionized job. There's less being jerked around. Management is aware that their authority is not unlimited. Hours also tend to be more reasonable.
Teen Vogue (which has better content than the name would suggest) has a good article.[2]
[1] http://rooseveltinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/Mil...
[2] https://www.teenvogue.com/story/what-a-labor-union-is-and-ho...
My main concern for the tech industry is that a union is fundamentally exclusionary. It's survival depends on preventing competition- any other activity it undertakes is only to serve that goal, or to justify it.
Unions prevent competition by demanding exclusivity in a company's labor supply, they prevent competition from new entrants by being outright hostile to young tradespeople (in most trade unions, it's basically impossible to join without sponsorship form an existing member), and they prevent competition among members by fixing wages, suppressing the earning potential of the most valuable employees.
Once a union has succeeded in restraining trade, it can extract monopoly rents from the flow of labor. At best, this looks like an ever-growing university-style administration that exists to justify its own existence. Unions can never exist to create net value, only to capture it, and that by necessity means that value is destroyed by their existence. They're antithetical to the principles of fairness, openness and inclusiveness that we claim to value.
Moreover, why would we even want a union, on an individual level? We (American citizens with a BSCS or similar) each already hold a golden ticket directly to the gentry class. We are, by pure luck of nationality, already privileged beneficiaries of the American coastal tech boom cities, of American currency and political dominance of the past seven decades, and of our restrictive immigration policies that artificially inflate wages for computer professionals across the country above their global equilibrium price. A CS graduate today can reasonably expect to be a millionaire by midlife, if they choose to save accordingly.
And if you don't like having to work late sometimes, you have the option to take a job that doesn't require it. If you don't want to live the Senior SRE lifestyle, you don't have to.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...
Companies view everything as a cost whether it is infrastructure, health care or rights. They lobby broadly to minimize those costs and to keep their own position. And that is unlikely to change. If there is any argument against unions it is that it is already too late. Unions ultimately work by having a war chest for strikes. The company, or the employer organization, then have their own war chest. Tech companies have so much cash, and the cost of living is so high, that a strike wouldn't even be thinkable for many many years. Making an effective union impossible.
What I do see is that a $350-400M settlement was seen by insiders as being short an order of magnitude, meaning that the 65,000 tech workers affected by this wage-fixing crime left a lot on the table. Class actions lawsuits, it seems, aren’t the correct tool for this kind of negotiation and unions are a viable alternative.
I don’t disagree that companies will fight unionization in the industry but that describes the history of unions and ironically workers are better protected these days by the NLRA and the low likelihood that business will hire armed goons to attack striking workers violently than in the days where large strides were made by the labor movement in the US.
But, like all big and complex organizations they become corrupted and rather than having the interest of workers and society as foremost goals, self perpetuation and preservation become the goals.
Except for Bernie no other candidate explicitly and implicitly supports unions. All the others support policies which would undermine unions, except for where it’s politically expedient.
But this is natural. Even in the proletarian era of Mao, unions/workers suffered descent too. Often a most favored group would be pitted against another when necessary, for example the Hong Wei Bings [紅衛兵]
The same can be said of corporations too.
What does "up to a point" mean? Like these videos, this makes it sound as if the progress of workers' rights is over, and we've got all we'll ever need.
What about, say, "a living wage", which the government's minimum wage law is unable to provide? This isn't done. It will probably never be done.
Governments need to pursue policies to ensure there are a surplus of jobs paying living wages for the number of workers that need to live off work. This is not the same as pursuing policies to ensure every job pays a minimum wage.
Now, I’m somewhere in the middle. I think shipping jobs overseas has had a catastrophic impact on wages and jobs (unions can’t protect against this in any meaningful way). Also unions will milk a company dry regardless of consequences. But they occasionally protect against some abuse. On the other hand they stifle innovation in very counterproductive ways.
On the flip side this is also what has contributed so much to global progress in terms of increased wages globally, increased standard of living, life expectancy, literacy levels, and every other measurable positive progress indicator. I'm conflicted as well.
That point being when capitalists convinced the government to limit the power of unions and stifle their use of union pension funds to finance things that would be beneficial union.
Taft Hartley Act of 1947
I agree with this from both perspectives. Companies and business-owners should also be allowed to espouse anti-union arguments without automatically being tagged as "evil" or subjected to extra scrutiny.
That said, you're certainly not going to find a nuanced debate in a ... training video. The purpose of this video is literally for the company to train their employees, not to serve as a forum for debating the pros and cons of unions.
As long as the union gets to speak to the employees on company time and gets to add pro-union arguments to the training videos, I see no problem with the boss doing so as well.
I honestly believe the Internet, specifically places like Twitter have destroyed civil discussion and consideration of alternate viewpoints.
Also, I don't think the video is absurd at all. What advantage would Amazon have by being pro-union or pretending to be pro-union? And what advantage would they have by not addressing it at all?
(Edit: This was meant to sound hopeful.)
- US is/was about 100 years behind european labor movement (germany, sweden, etc. started mid 19th century; US not until 1935 Wagner Act)
- ghent system - in scandanavian countries, unions provide most unemployment benefits, not .gov. you can imagine this leads to large union membership
- americans lost manufacturing/blue collar ("union" jobs) en masse as white collar jobs rose, whereas trade skills are still a thing in countries like Germany with their sort of parallel university system for trades
- there is probably a relationship between strong social welfare and union membership, though directionality isn't clear - perhaps large % of union membership enables more tolerance towards social welfare, or perhaps social welfare allows people to not worry about retaliation from attempting unionization, or ..
Union wages are consistently higher than non-union wages, so we have evidence that unions are an improvement compared to direct relationships with employers.
Source: literally every long-term economic comparison of wages done for the last 50 years.
Activists always want to take credit, but it's the engineers and scientists who actually did the thing that changed the pattern that had lasted for 10,000 years. Unions are just one particular way of structuring one side of a human conflict that is as old as civilization and as inherent as gravity.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...
For thousands of years those bad conditions reigned. For thousands of years, 'organized labor' changed nothing. Then technology changed, and suddenly 'organized labor' became able to offer all these wonderful things. Does it sounds like 'organized labor' can take credit for all that? That they just happened to succeed in the decades after industrial technology took off?
The timeline clearly indicates technology, which increased productivity across the board, as the root cause.
If unions raised wages enough to offshore jobs those jobs would no longer exist, that union would not exist, and those wages would not contribute to the total average wage breakdowns that show an 18% increase in wages for union members.
Yet, today, union members make 18% more than non union members. The only thing the data actually suggests is that if you want an 18% raise you should join or start a union.
This statement is so vague that it is not worth debating. What does "better" mean?
It's not that this state or that state is corrupt. It's that democracy is vulnerable to corruption, so we should have systems in place to guard against that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
As for particular criticisms of any particular org (unions, corporations, government, whomever), the evergreen all purpose prescription is to increase transparency, responsibility, and accountability. What's going on, how are decisions made, who gets the blame.
Everything else is just rhetoric (partisan squabbling).
This is largely a legacy of the police Red squads funded by the capitalists all over the USA starting in the 1930's. To get the radicals and other effective organizers and voices of the working classes out of the unions, local politicians and the police looked the other way as organized crime gained influence over many unions, thus simultaneously corrupting local governments, law enforcement, and organized labor.
I would be VERY interested in a reading list of any kind, as I have lived near Chicago, which has an interesting history with both police officers and unions.