I don't know much about unions.
What are some downsides to joining a union? Are there onerous obligations?
What are some downsides to joining a union? Are there onerous obligations?
I would say in general, unions in Europe are viewed in a much more positive light. Collective bargaining allows for workers from blue collar to white collar work receive their fair share from the company.
I would try reading more about the labor movement in the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_history_of_the_United_St...
Please try and broaden your views. HN is an anti union echo chamber for the most part.
It depends on the country. When I lived in Poland my father complained a lot about his union (Solidarność, he worked as an industrial electrician), as the management was mostly old people who did as little as possible to not lose their position, and did nothing outside of being in the union (they were retired). You would have a hard time outvoting them because you'd need to get a certain number of votes from multiple plants, around a thousand of people in total - campaigning alone would take most of your time, on top of doing your work. I haven't heard many positive stories about unions to be honest, and I lived in upper Silesia, the most industrialized region - where there were lots of them.
To me, the benefits seem obvious but I couldn't think of downsides. So I was, in fact, trying to broaden my views, just in the other direction, I suppose.
I've never felt the need to join a union but, fundamentally, I see nothing wrong with someone controlling their own capital (time, labor, and skills) and freely associating others to pool those resources into something that's more than the sum of their parts.
I can see where it might be a problem if a group ended up with a monopoly on some skill, but that's a problem with any kind of pooling of resources and we have tools to deal with such a distortion should it arise.
It's cool to have the worker protections laws here, but sometime it feels like unions are just useless/wastefull relics.
I can imagine plenty of good and bad, and experienced a lot of bad.
My experience with some negatives:
- Unions love to get more and more involved in things, on a granular level because let's face it unfair things happen at every level of a job. The problem is negotiating that all out results in ultra prescribed jobs, job functions, and etc are all defined. Over time flexibility decreases and decreases .. and so on.
- Many unions love seniority, because powerful union members are often more senior. Not all, but many. There's few things less demoralizing than sitting behind a bunch more senior folks (i'm over 40 so this isn't just some ageist thing) who only want to learn what they want to learn ... and the union backs them at every turn. Promotions, choice roles and hours, all become about seniority.
- Limited relationship with your boss is another issue. I LIKE working with my boss and have all my career, but in a union situation it was a very prescribed relationship. My boss no matter what he felt couldn't treat me differently based on merit or anything else, it was all about the union rules. I could be the best, or worst there, it changed nothing. It dramatically changes that relationship. And no matter what anyone says your boss can still be a jerk if they want to and unions are sometimes unable to help. Thus...
- Unions can be surprisingly poor at helping out with individual issues. A lot of situations between the union and employer are negotiated out in detail. That means provided the employer meets various easily measured things, they can (and will quickly learn) all the things not negotiated by the union and can do what they wish there, and unions are surprisingly hands off at that point.
The fact is Unions are another bureaucracy and despite the goals they may not align with what you want, and they're more than happy to limit your options as much as any nasty employer.
For highly variable skill work, and where skill levels are difficult to track (at least in a non-gameable way), you can have lower skilled (or lower performing) employees that drag down higher performers, due to union rules requiring things like seniority-based pay brackets. So people that are really good at convincing their management that they are really good, and work in industries where there is high competition for their specialty, those are the ones that tend to be more anti-union for their line of work.
People make a lot of noise about union dues, but they're a drop in the bucket compared to the higher wages the union will negotiate for. The most onerous requirement is being prepared to strike (and a lot of union dues are to set aside emergency funds for people during a strike).
That said, not all unions are equal. And like any small democratic institution, they're going to preferentially represent the people who get involved.
My last job had a union and I was being paid 10¢ more per hour than minimum wage. Not exactly a “higher wage”
Edit, the article doesn't say this, but others have suggested the people joining the union may not be programmers...
Some unions abuse their power to negotiate with the employer to make union leaders wealthy instead of granting benefits to the employees.
Some unions work alongside gangs to rake in illegal profit.
Some unions force all employees to take the same position of the union on certain issues meaning that people who oppose the measure may be blacklisted and pretty much terminated if the union uses its muscle.
Again these are just some unions and YMMV, the history of unions has many pros and cons with some being notorious and others being very much necessary in this day and age.
A friend went to work at a company a few years ago. The copier was broke. They had to get a union guy out to verify that before they could get a new one. They then ordered a new copier. It arrived, but they had to arrange for union people to get it moved to their office. When the union movers saw that the dead copier was plugged in, they stopped what they were doing and left. It turns out they needed a union electrician to come out and unplug the printer. The office manager made sure that everyone in the office would keep their hands off the copier and not unplug it because they would likely be fired unless a union electrician did it. The union electrician showed up a week or so later and unplugged the copier. They then had to get the union movers back out to put the new copier in place and remove the old one. Then, they had to get the union electrician out to plug the new one in. This whole thing took several weeks.
My friend left the company and that company is now out of business, one reason being that they could not compete.
Unions go to extremes to protect jobs and find ways to unionize shops through intimidation. They prefer "card check" voting instead of secret ballots, because they can tell who voted which way. In Illinois, they even forcibly unionized people taking care of family members in their own homes.
https://www.illinoispolicy.org/news/seiu-fights-to-force-hom...
Without knowing more details of the situation, the most glaring problem here is that the State of Illinois asserted that recipients of Medicaid stipends are "state employees". It's wrong to use this situation to ascribe dirty dealing to unions generally.