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Comment by staticautomatic | Hacker News Reader

One can be pro-organizing but not pro-union.

Not sure how you square those two. Could you elaborate? Any less durable form of organizing seems likely to have its work undone by the very well-organized and durable cadre of owners/management

Many professions that tend to be highly individualistic and require complex mastery have historically been represented by a Guild. While Guilds these days are sometimes a specialized form of union, the distinctions are often significant. A couple examples that come to mind are the American Bar Association, the American Medical Association, the Screen Actors Guild, and the Writers Guild of America.

Well, at least in the case of SAG and the WGA, those are essentially just white-collar unions. Neither of those groups would describe themselves as pro-organizing, but opposed to unions.

To characterize unions-- especially contemporary unions in the United States-- as limited strictly to collective action functions, is factually incomplete and wrong. That unions perform other functions and aim to protect workers in other ways beyond collective action should be a totally uncontroversial statement.

Although unions proximately came into existence for the purpose of taking collective action against oppressive employers, it's equally true, and at least as important, to understand that they came into existence in order to fill a regulatory vacuum in labor law.

This should prompt some important questions:

1. Should the job of protecting workers from employers properly belong to any entity other than the government?

2. Is filling the regulatory vacuum with regulation theoretically or empirically insufficient to protect workers?

3. Are unions the only means of collective action?

4. Are the functions that unions serve beyond coordinating collective action actually necessary in order to protect workers? Would they still be necessary even if labor law was sufficiently well regulated?

My position is this: We should dramatically expand and increase labor regulation and enforcement actions, and we should allow employees to take collective action. Then we should ask ourselves whether unions are still necessary.

California already has laws that protect employees. Google and other tech companies are abusing loop holes in these laws by calling would-be employees "contractors" to get out of paying them benefits and providing job security.

Have you ever worked in a company where a significant number of people had morale-oriented complaints? IME it does not have an effect.

>One can be pro-organizing but not pro-union.

Agree 100%.

Im the United States most local and state ballots have measures on them generated by petition drives. Get X number of registered voters to sign a petition and it is on the ballot.

I always signs these when the someone approaches me. I may not agree with the cause or be a proponent of the goal, but the group organizing should have the right to appear on the ballot and have citizens votes on it.

Few if any are trying to eliminate the ability to have ballot initiatives, whereas plenty of moneyed individuals are trying to eliminate unions.

I don't think it's a fair comparison.

I think you may have taken my comment out of context. I was replying to the OP when they said:

"One can be pro-organizing but not pro-union."

My understanding is the OP Was looking at it through the lens of a worker.

My comparison was meant to say I support someone's initiative to have something put up for a vote, but that doesn't mean I will vote for it. I could have been plainer in the explanation.

Do Google and other big companies make the same distinction between labor organizing and unions? Or do they quash it just the same?

One should be both, with a careful eye towards aggressive governance and transparency of your union. No different than if you have equity ownership in a startup, the only difference is that you’re selling your time collectively instead of a product.

Unions are just corporations for labor sales. If you don’t like your management, replace them with your vote.

> Unions are just corporations for labor.

Not necessarily, some are democratic, like some in Sweden. The IWW is an example of an alternative to the centralized unions [1].

1. https://www.iww.org/about/official/OBU

My point is that unions only suck if you let them suck. The devil is in the implementation details, and the effort put forth by members.

Certainly.

> My point is that unions only suck if you let them suck. The devil is in the implementation details, and the effort put forth by members.

But that's the problem. The employee faces the same asymmetry when dealing with the union as dealing with the employer -- a single individual has difficulty driving a change in organizational behavior.

It's harder for an individual to fix a bad union than to leave the company for one without that union, so that's what many people will do. Which makes it even harder for anyone to do it your way, because many of the people who agree that there is a problem will have left.

> It's harder for an individual to fix a bad union than to leave the company for one without that union

Is that accurate?

Maybe? But it's like saying that it's harder to fix a bad country than to leave for another country, so its accuracy is possibly less important than its rationality.

It's a lot easier to switch employers than switch countries. Most people in fact do switch employers multiple times throughout their lives, whereas most people don't ever move to a different country from where they were born.

That's especially true when there are other jobs in the same industry and the same city but at a different company.

That depends on which country you are born into. There are several million South American immigrants living undocumented in the US who would beg to differ with that statement. Likewise, there are many expats who've chosen staying with a company over staying in their country. Finding an employer that treats you well may be harder than finding a country that treats you well in many instances.

Corporations are democratic too. Board meetings are all about voting.

Emoloyees aren't part of the corporation any more than the widgets they make are.

> Emoloyees aren't part of the corporation any more than the widgets they make are.

Which is why they're not democratic, opposed to say cooperatives.

Unions are monopolies on labor. Any competition could help to damp their excesses.

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