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Comment by imglorp | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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