Unions have historically tended to reward seniority over merit. Tech workers should work to solve that if they organize.
I think a lot of problems caused by unions trace back to that.
Unions should come back to help recreate the middle class.
I think a lot of problems caused by unions trace back to that.
Unions should come back to help recreate the middle class.
Libertarianism was the cancer of our generation.
As soon as you have a union, you have 2 groups. People are who are in the union and people who are not. Tenure-based seniority obviously benefits people who are in the union to the determent of those not yet part of the union.
It's probably a solvable problem but I think it's pretty obvious why most unions end up with seniority-based policies; It's the natural consequence of a democratic organization.
Of course the business owner has strong opinions on what constitutes employee merit. To the business owner, the merit of an employee is largely a proxy for whatever is profitable for the business. That's fine for the business, but if the union uses that same metric as merit, they'd become little more than a proxy for the intention of the business owners. For a union to be merit-based rather than seniority-based, they'd need to find a measure of merit that was in the interest of the workers, not the business.
This usually directly means having the right people in the right places, to do an effective job, so there's not much time wasted. (Which is their time.) And so on.
Unions shouldn't try to keep everyone on board, they should simply counteract shareholder pressure to keep labor costs down.
Of course, the union should help members to retrain and then should help those members to find their place where they can contribute value.
Of course, the union can and should represent the political values of its members.