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Comment by rapind | Hacker News Reader

It's hard to pinpoint where it originated but anti-union sentiment existed conversationally my entire life. The view being that union's are big inefficient bureaucracies of lazy people who get nothing done.

It parallels the view of government I grew up with.

Never really questioned where this view came from though, but my guess would be persistent long term marketing by interested parties. "Nudging" if you will.

That's what socialism, union's, and co-ops are up against. A sentiment that's been groomed over a long time, that makes you feel like a Commie or a conspirator if you question it.

It's lead me to think that capitalism has become a religion. If you question it you get labeled subconsciously by otherwise reasonable peers.

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Live through the 1970s when unions became far too political, there was the oil crisis, out of control inflation (in part from abandonment of Bretton Woods. p.s. this is where moves to the Euro originated) and most economies suffering badly and you start to understand.

Strikes and disruption with unions using the tactics of previous decades - when they had fought for and won sorely needed rights, was no longer fit for purpose. They'd achieved the hard part now were fighting battles fewer and fewer outside the union cared for. When your refuse, electricity, heat or bank is disrupted for a lengthy period, while everyone is struggling, sympathy dwindles quickly. Resentment sets in, even for a fair and deserved pay rise, if it triggers yet another strike.

What does surprise me somewhat, is the complete lack of resurgence, or even much recovery, in US and UK after being effectively neutered during the Reagan/Thatcher years. Europe seemed to fair better, so they have kept more union presence than the Anglosphere. Yet it's pretty clear we need something sticking up for worker rights once again.

Coops are a completely different animal, and I've never encountered or heard of objection or resentment to those across my life. Capitalism, and most especially the modern neoliberal variant are indeed religions, with just as much dogma.

It is interesting that to most "Made in Germany" is a sign of high quality and that most think Germans have the best work ethic in the world despite also having the strongest labor unions.

If anyone has read a critical piece of work on what constraints in Germany allowed unions and companies to co-evolve instead of adopt the adversarial position that characterizes the American interactions, please share.

There is something categorically different and I'm not sure how that came to be.

Edit: I'm rate limited for comments. Thank you, my dude, for the recommendation.

I'm glad you asked! Can't recommend this book enough; it's beautifully written and also short - in matters of philosophy, less is most definitely more. It's a general work on the adversarial legal tradition and while it doesn't touch on German labor unions specifically it does go into some detail about the differences between the (Anglo-)American and continental European approaches.

Adversarial Legalism by Robert Kagan. https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674012417

You forgot corruption. In the US at least, unions can't seem to stay clean.

Now, do the benefits to the workers in a dirty union outweigh the benefits to working for an abusive corporation? I have no idea.

I always find this an odd thing to say... as if corporations and states have less corruption...

> I always find this an odd thing to say... as if corporations and states have less corruption...

If there are two corrupt things, why add a third one to increase the misery?

Are you asking for the purpose of a labor union and insinuating that all labor unions are corrupt?

I lived in the Michigan for a couple of decades and observed the behavior of the Teamsters and UAW firsthand so insinuation is not even necessary.

The Teamesters and UAW [1] are not all unions. It's a big world out there, so don't insinuate things about unions that you don't even know exist.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anecdotal_evidence

Nor should you pretend you know whether a future union at HCL is going to be one of the good ones or one of the corrupt ones.

If you pay closer attention, you'll notice that I made no such claim.

If you're an auto worker, how easy is it to get completely get away from UAW?

Because the third 'corrupt thing' operates in favor of the employee.

Instead of the corrupt company doing everything it can to exploit employee labor, it has to fight the corrupt union doing everything it can to exploit the corporation. Otherwise if you want to argue that we should remove all corporations like we do unions because of their corruption, then I'd be all for that.

While I’m opposed to corruption in unions, according to the BLS, workers are better off with unions than without them:

https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2013/04/art2full.pdf

"workers are better off" is a statistical nonsense regardless of what's written in that pdf. This type of arguments can convince only non technical or not very smart people. A proper analysis would split workers into subgroups and give specific numbers for each subgroup. A proper analysis would use words like percentiles, median and distribution. When I see that "something is better on average" I always think that I'm being lied to.

That's just his/her paraphrasing of the complete source - if you actually had read that one you would see that it does give specific numbers for subgroups.

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