Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

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Unions have suffered from a bad reputation in the United States over the past few decades.

Some of it is deserved BTW; some big unions were/are corrupted and some were connected with organized crime. Even more innocently, unions have been quite conservative; as jobs and technology changed some were very resistant and fought modernization (requiring people who were not needed to be around). But a lot of it also stems from corporate resistance to unionization and the high regard in which ordinary people hold the opinions of corporate managers in the USA.

All that being said, unions have been very good for labor, and when I've worked in union shops (not in a unionized role) they've been really great in terms of qualified people and high quality work. I built my house using union labor and I'm glad I did.

Europe is not immune to these diseases by the way. Certain French unions certainly negotiate against the greater interests of society. And in Germany my non-unionized brother in law (a mechanical engineer) was not allowed to work late at VW -- he was trying to finish a project one evening and a union guy came by and cut his PC's power cable while he was designing a part.

Most of the bad reputation is deserved. Most US unions are horrible organizations. There are still some good unions, just not many.

That doesn't make the concept of a union bad. They worked much better 50 years ago, even. It's a great concept, but the implementation got corrupted over the years.

I don't think we'll fix unions' reputations without first fixing unions. And we really need more unions and more credible unions.

As a footnote, in my local school district, under coronavirus school closures, the teacher's union negotiated that the teachers get paid, but they don't need to remotely teach students. Some teachers continue teaching for some amount of time, but essentially on a volunteer basis. Many teachers are just sitting at home, doing nothing except for collecting a pay check.

Are you sure it was the union which forced the district not to remote teach? I live in an area where teachers are not unionized and the teachers are still getting paid and not teaching. The school district has signed contracts with the teachers which doesn't have any terms which stop payment because the schools close during the year and the district is not requiring remote learning because of equal access issues.

> doesn't have any terms which stop payment because the schools close during the year

And so they shouldn't! In many (most?) US states, the public schools are unconditionally funded by the state based on student enrollment figures. Cutting teacher pay during a closure under such a system would be a purely greedy move.

If my comment seemed to imply I thought they shouldn't I didn't mean to. I agree that they should get paid.

I don't know how it works in the majority of states but I know the model of mostly state funding based upon student enrollment is not universal. In my state the majority of funding is from local tax revenues. For example the budget for my local school district is approximately $1.3 billion. $370 million comes from the state and $30 million comes from the federal government. Another $40 million comes from "misc other sources" and $860 million comes from local tax revenue.

I hadn't considered the local tax aspect. I understand that many areas are projecting large shortfalls in the near future, so I suppose there could be some issues. I guess it would probably depend on how the education taxes were levied in a given jurisdiction (property, sales, or something else).

California funds schools by actual attendance, not enrollment, and we're around 10% of the US school population.

Sources: https://edsource.org/2019/californias-school-funding-flaws-m...

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d13/tables/dt13_203.20.a...

Wow, that's terrible IMO. Public schools are quasi-governmental entities with largely fixed costs. Aren't the taxes getting paid either way? Doesn't regulation require a specific number of school days per year? And there are certainly truancy laws on the books.

In their defense, developing content for a classroom is a shit-ton of work. Flipping that over to Internet-only is going to take some time. If they are just sitting at home getting drunk and trolling facebook that's one thing, but it's going to take a couple of months for teachers to effectively pivot to a mode of teaching that they've never had to do. Until then you're just going to see a trickle of work even from the best of them b/c they are going to be focused on trying to develop a game plan to close out the year.

My wife taught K12 for 12 years and then became an instructional coach teaching teachers how to teach. There's a shitload of work if you want to do it right, and at least half (in our district anyway) will stretch themselves extremely thin to do so. Half of the rest are 9-5'ers and the remainder are shitheads.

Well, I'm pretty sure. The negotiation between the teacher's union on the administration is a closed-door meeting, but I follow district politics very closely.

Perceived equity issues fed into this as well. The result, of course, is that parents who have time to teach kids have kids who are learning, while the vast majority of the district is learning nothing. With remote learning, the results would be less differential. But I guess the districts feels worse about inequities it contributes to than ones that arise out of inaction. We have a 1:1 program, so all students have technology.

But I would the union preempted this, and is what made this discussion moot.

When my mother was a school teacher, the union had mandatory fees which went to partisan political campaigns against her ideology and self interest. I think this was eventually challenged and overturned in court, but it left a terrible impression.

This is my biggest gripe with unions in the US: that they can basically force you to join the union against your will if you want to perform certain jobs. The Teacher's Union is notorious for this.

There was a fairly recent ruling from the SCOTUS that struck down compelling non union members to pay union dues. It was as recently as 2018 or 2019. Cant remember the case name, but it originated in Illinois (a very, very pro union state).

My wife, two of her brothers, their spouses and obviously many of their collective friends are public school teachers in the US. The teacher's union in our state is largely a spineless organization that will protect the points they negotiate into a contract but leave legitimate educators high and dry when it comes to real issues. It's one of the worst unions that I've had the occasion to see up close and personal...and I'm a former member of the Teamsters.

A lot of the challenges come out of the specifics of the laws surrounding unions. They were written in a much rougher era, where corporations and unions were very much in direct opposition. If we could re-write those laws, we could open the door to much more cooperative relationships between unions that the current laws do not allow. Unfortunately, there's no sign of the republican and democratic parties getting together to make a grand bargain on the laws, so we're stuck with them as they are today.

"much more cooperative relationships between unions"

Sure, cooperation sounds good in theory, but don't we have examples (in the US) of where management of a company and management of their union ended up very friendly at the expense of the workers? I'm pretty sure I read about stuff like that in the context of the recent automotive union corruption scandals.

Past performance isn't always indicative of future performance. Cultures and worlds change. In many cases, people confuse poor concepts with poor execution (or vice-versa: bad concept with excellent execution or good luck can be successful).

I say try it maybe in one state and see how it goes.

I'm thinking more like things like works councils, and other ways that the employees could play more of a role in running the company, rather than the adversarial setup we have now. Here's an article from 1981 that gives some background: https://digitalcommons.law.msu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic...

It has to be said that most employers are corrupt in the US too, non-compete, arbitration, weird ways of paying salaries, generalized surveillance of employees, brutal layoffs, Gag orders in exchange for severance, etc.

You forgot "Flex PTO"

as a salaried worker I refuse to participate in flex PTO, it's not how the labor laws are written. I work for a significant part of the day and have a legitimate reason to stop, I do not submit any leave requests.

My company recently granted an extra 40 hours of COVID PTO to use for flex, which is nice, but they could just stop trying to work around labor laws.

Having a 2nd hand experience with Hollywood Unions, there are so many outdated rules that make filming a nightmare. If you're producing a union film then you need to hire people for certain jobs and you're not allowed to do those jobs yourself even if it would make everything go smoother. If you don't abide by union rules then you're not eligible for certain awards or screenings.

I had another experience in college where the TA union put up barriers for undergraduate students who weren't TAs to apply for university teaching opportunities. Any discussions or office hours must be held in the presence of a TA and if your schedule didn't work out then tough luck.

Having 1st hand experience with Hollywood unions, (and being 1 background extra gig away from SAG eligiblity) I can say that none of the rules are outdated, and they definitely don't making filming a nightmare.

Yes, if you're making a union film you need to hire union members for positions covered by the union agreement. But unless your studio has signed an agreement with the unions, you're not subject to union rules. Generally, only the big studios and the bigger indies are subject to the Hollywood union rules.

If you don't abide by union rules then you're not eligible for certain awards or screenings.

This doesn't apply to the Academy Awards, Golden Globes, or other major awards. Many of the films nominated for these awards every year don't abide by union rules because their weren't subject to them.

Building your private home with union labor is a completely different thing than unionized work forces in companies.

When building your home, you have the option of hiring non-union workers. Workers have the option of not joining the union. The union essentially acts as a service provider to the independent workers. These individuals charge quite a bit more than non-union workers, but often have astounding levels of competence, productivity, and workmanship.

When a company is unionized, none of those things are true. Instead of the union being a de facto endorsement of a particular worker, it acts to protect its own power over the workers. Instead of the company having a choice about who to hire for a particular role, it is forced into one choice. Instead of workers joining a union for their own benefit, they are forced to join because of legal coercion. The union is highly motivated to control and limit its members--freedom for the members means destruction of the union.

Instead of the union being a de facto endorsement of a particular worker, it acts to protect its own power over the workers. Instead of the company having a choice about who to hire for a particular role, it is forced into one choice. Instead of workers joining a union for their own benefit, they are forced to join because of legal coercion. The union is highly motivated to control and limit its members--freedom for the members means destruction of the union.

All of the statements in that paragraph are false.

Downvoted not because I disagree with you (I do), but because you offer up no counterpoint/arguments to support your opinion.

The original quote doesn't offer any arguments to support its claim. It's just a statement of opinion as fact.

> Unions have suffered from a bad reputation in the United States over the past few decades.

When I see "unions" such as "game worker unite" which is more of a communist political party than a union, or what Kickstarter union wants (have more say on what campaigns can be featured on Kickstarter or not, which is not what a union should be about), I understand why American unions have such a bad rep. These 2 examples aren't what unions should be about. What does a say in moderation policies on a platform has to do with worker conditions? Nothing.

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