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Comment by shakezula | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

> 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?

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