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I think German industry is a good example, it is strongly unionised and the unions have representatives in the board that supervises the running of companies. Apparently the result has been better cooperation between employers and workers: where the employers invest in and are mindful of employees and the employees in turn see the "big picture" and are committed to making sure their employer is competitive. My German colleagues are happy to point out that the more unionised Germany has retained it's manufacturing industry while the UK's has withered.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination#Germany

The union I'm part of in the UK regularly arranges on-site events for all employees and pushes for improvements on environmental issues as well as working conditions.

Yes German unions work really well. I think part of it is that after WW2 the whole system was designed to be a market economy with social elements (“soziale Marktwirtschaft “).

And because the Nazis explicitly went after trade unions. Postwar, people understood that preserving democracy in the workplace was an equally important bulwark against the return of fascism. Nazism wouldn’t have been nearly as powerful and horrendous without its business allies (in both Germany and the US), which is why it was important to check their authoritarianism.

Weird to get downvoted for a historical truth. Trade unions had their assets seized and their leaders thrown in concentration camps. But here’s the reference anyway...

“The Trade Union Movement and the Redistribution of Power in Postwar Germany”

Clark Kerr The Quarterly Journal of Economics Vol. 68, No. 4 (Nov., 1954), pp. 535-564

https://www.jstor.org/stable/1881876?seq=1#page_scan_tab_con...

That type of inefficiency isn’t exclusive to unions, you realize that right?

You realize that maybe there were other factors involved that caused the bridge to take that long?

You realize that construction is often a very sequential process that can block other steps from being completed until the first is done?

Every part of your comment is completely anecdotal and could be due to myriad other factors.

> associate unions with extreme wasting of resources

sounds like 30+ years of anti-union propaganda working its charm.

> Sounds like 30+ years of anti-union propaganda working its charm.

I dunno. I see it all over the place.

Look at the US government. Most of the govt. run customer facing services are abysmal when it comes to efficiency (DMV, etc.). From my quick Googling the DMV is unionized. It doesn't end at the DMV either.

I know some types of construction jobs are usually sequential but I don't understand how in any circumstance it can take 2 years to fix 30 feet of road while it disrupted traffic the whole time. This isn't an isolated case either, I see similar things all the time.

That's state governments, but I haven't heard much better about non-unionized federal offices.

Yeah because Comcast, EA, Verizon, and there are numerous private today constructions crews that aren't unionized and they are all known for great service. Unions have zero impact on quality or speed of work. All unions do is create a group of individuals to balance the power that corporations have. If unions had any real power in the United States, then wages wouldn't have failed to rise with the rate of efficiency for the last 50 years. Since Reagan went union busting wages have barely increased for the average worker against inflation. You know who has been getting more money? The corporate owners who have devalued all the public stocks while keeping the private stock for themselves. We don't live in a republic in the US anymore, we live in an oligarchy.

You know the single most efficient medical insurance? Medicare. Government doesn't need to be a bureaucratic mess, but when half of government is literally platformed on making government fail to prove government is broken, it's not really difficult to see why we're in the mess we're in. All I want is us to pay down our deficit instead of kicking the can down the road.

Aren't government contractors, which are private corporations that probably don't have unions, also notorious for inefficiency?

As someone who also hasn’t worked for a union and not an owner of a company, my views are also negative in my experience.

In my opinion, unionizing teachers has created a perverse incentive to fuck around and do nothing once tenured and to screw over the newest members of the union when forced to downsize, regardless of performance for teachers.

For police officers, it’s incentivized understaffing to reward members with overtime as well as an unreasonable amount of legal protection for cops who do horrible things like kill innocent people due to “feeling threatened.”

For public transportation, we also have workers who somehow accrue all of the OT as it’s offered in tenure order. This ensures that remunerative benefits is only a function of time and not skill, and also somehow prevents the most reasonable solution such as hiring another worker.

Unions exist to improve the lives of workers and provide more work opportunities for their members, not necessarily improve the organizations said workers are employed by.

Unions are responsible for some of the benefits we tend to take for granted - weekends, 8 hours workdays, corporate healthcare, retirement plans, etc. At the same time, any organization with power can become corrupt, or at least have its interests diverge.

Some examples that come to mind are the myriad of stories my mom tells me about working as a teacher.

One thing that annoyed her to no end was the IT labor union at her school. Teachers, even ones with technical skills, were forbid from touching any of the computers (even so much as plugging keyboards back in if students unplugged them). When computer Labs were being set up, one worker would put in all the computers, but a separate worker would come in the plug them in. Seriously, they'd come in for two hours to attach power cables.

However, when the school started 'not renewing contracts' after 3 years of continuous employment but then 'rehiring' after a month, so that teachers wouldn't get tenure, the union got the school to stop.

The union's power base came mainly from holding the school hostage - you 'couldn't' work there without joining the teachers union, else the union would have the teachers strike...

My father was the owner of his company. My mother was in the union whose workers he employed. I’ve grown up around both sides and understand quite deeply that there are no absolutes in this. You can have good and bad unions just like you can have good and bad companies in the world.

I don’t have much else other than anecdotes to add about the benefits of unions for both sides. What I would like to point out is that if you flip your post and replace union with company, it still holds 100% true. Just food for thought.

> If I were a company I would be terrified that such inefficiencies are protected by a union.

You can't 'be' a company. You can run one, at best.

And if unionized employees terrify you in a country where unionization is legal then maybe simply do not start a company?

> can someone more knowledgeable in this area explain how a unionized workforce benefits both employees and the business hiring them

In theory - not always in practice - unions create a more level playing field in the asymmetrical relationship between employer and employee, it restores some of the balance of power. Collective bargaining means that employers can no longer reduce negotiations by serially negotiating with one employee at the time, but have the negotiate with all employees at once. This has had a remarkable effect on the division of the value created by those employees over the years that we have had unions.

Now, in practice, of course not everything is quite that simple and unions can be co-opted by the company, and there are plenty of examples of unions that ended up being self serving power structures in their own right but we - collectively, the voters - still believe in most countries that unions are such a big net effect that retaliation against employees for wanting to unionize is illegal under the law.

> Collective bargaining means that employers can no longer reduce negotiations by serially negotiating with one employee at the time, but have the negotiate with all employees at once.

Now I understand why my original comment is the most down voted comment I ever made on HN in about 5 years.

Based on what you wrote it sounds like union vs non-union seems very much related to a political topic of socialism vs capitalism which is usually a good idea to avoid talking about on public forums.

With that said, I'm bowing out on this conversation!

Unions are present in just about every capitalist society, in fact I'd wager they are far more effective there than they would be on the opposite side of that particular fence, simply because most capitalist societies have somewhat functional legal systems as well as democratic institutions.

In other countries union bosses are found dead with alarming regularity.

I appreciate your sensible take on this. From what I've heard from a KS employee, it's been anything but sensible, from both sides.

To add to that. Said employee described the lack of product leadership (constant changing vision, wasted efforts, etc.). At this point I would not bet or invest in KS.

"You can't 'be' a company. You can run one, at best."

FBN/DBA says otherwise.

I'm sure a construction worker could write an unflattering paragraph like your second, observing isolated flashes of workdays at a software company from his perspective, and, with equally broad strokes, paint the software world in a (IMO not entirely undeserved) bad light.

I don't know much about unions either, but found this recent NPR interview to be informative. Like many interviews, the guest is selling a book.

https://www.wbur.org/onpoint/2019/08/14/labor-unions-beaten-...

Steven Greenhouse, author of "Beaten Down, Worked Up: The Past, Present, and Future of American Labor." Reporter at The New York Times for 31 years, who covered labor and the workplace for 19 years. (@greenhousenyt)

that's an extremely biased point of view.

I'm from the US and myself along with almost everyone i know tend to associate unions with the reason they have a decent standard of living. I'm sorry you had to see some construction workers being lazy. I hope you're able to recover someday.