Hacker News Reader

Comment by jcims | Hacker News Reader

For years now I've seen comments like this from Europeans every time unions come up in conversation online. You all need need to come work for a large union in the US. They are just not the same thing. I've had direct or indirect experience with Teamsters, CWA, NEA, IBEW and UBC. You can dress it up however you like but there are definitely 'union jobs' with all of the connotation that brings.

Yes there are benefits to the worker (esp when your job puts you in harm's way). Yes collective bargaining is awesome. Unions, if run well, are fantastic. In my opinion we tend to mess them up.

View on HN

This is the same argument I see americans make a lot.

"Unions are bad!", no, the concept is fine, you have some bad ones.

"Police are bad!", no, the concept is fine, yours are just untrained and overburdened.

"Public transport is bad, I need a car!", no, the concept is fine, you just have bad public transport and that forms your opinion.

Please give an example of good public transport. (I'm living in Germany)

Stockholm's subway. I have also had good experiences in cities like Madrid, Milan and Lisbon.

As someone living in Lisbon and has been to multiple European capitals: we're not a good example.

Hell, the underground in Kyiv is better than almost anything in the US, imo.

London. Everyone likes to bemoan it usually, but you have connections via metro, train, tram, bus, boat or cycle to pretty much every major location in and around.

Alongside that you also have (putting aside the longstanding battle between them) a plethora of on-demand taxi services.

There are decent (although not high speed) train connections to most other major cities in the UK and even to continental Europe, there's an airport literally 10 minute car ride from the financial district, and two major European airports under 30 mins train ride away (obviously all dependent on your starting location within the metro area).

As an integrated system it's not perfect, but I'd certainly argue it's a viable aspiration for many cities to hit "good".

I was really impressed by Amsterdam’s transportation system as a whole - roads, bike lanes, light rail. As an American it felt like the city was designed to encourage walking or biking followed by public transport with cars as a last resort.

In the very heart of the city of Groningen (also in NL), regular cars aren't even allowed. Just buses, taxis, police, ambulance .. and delivery trucks I guess. Especially at night it's wonderful, imagine all the space that isn't filled with metal boxes.

Western Netherlands, or more specifically, the "Randstad" area. People like to complain about train punctuality but really, shit's quite dependable. Trains run regularly and on a fixed schedule, trams in metropolitan areas, buses perpendicular on those trams and in the less-densely-populated areas. Higher education students get free usage of public transport during their studies. I have a driver's license, but I won't be using it often.

Switzerland. As an American, I wanted to move there after zipping around the country on their buses and trains.

That was such a good experience, even the tickrt app brought me joy.

Tokyo Subway is the most impeccably run system you'll ever seen in the world, it's really quite perfect. The trains even have warm seats in winter.

Aren't Japanese subway trains so crowded that a pusher is needed?

From the perspective of a person who travels a lot and exclusively uses public transportation; I think you don't value what you have.

American systems are not dependable, intercity and interstate travel is often not punctual to the point of futility.

There are very few examples that prove me wrong here (probably NYC<->NJ links being an exception)

Travelling around Los Angeles is just not possible, the buses are disgusting when they actually work and the time tables may as well be dinner menu's for value they bring.

Getting to LA from San Francisco required a coach, the coach was 8hrs late. There were no trains.

Going from NYC to Philadelphia by train cost me $300, when I returned it cost me $82 and was delayed by 4hrs.

Travelling around NYC using their underground was "ok" from a dependability standpoint; though I saw human excrement on many occasions, in one case it was smeared entirely on one of the benches where passengers usually sit.

I consider American public transport to be pretty poor. Where it is punctual it is disgustingly unhygienic. Where it is hygienic it is prohibitively expensive and non-punctual.

The rail networks prioritise freight and lines are fragmented heavily- it is common for one line of track to have several different owners as it progresses through a state. This causes delays as they do not seem to cooperate in using the tracks effectively, or delays from the use of a line causes cascading delays.

I've lived in Finland, England and Sweden- and I have travelled most of Europe (NL, DE, DK, FR, ESP) and have found public transport to be mostly punctual, in some cases it's actually "dependable" as in, I can rely on public transport getting me to my destination in a precise amount of time (+/- 10 mins).

This is definitely not the case in the USA outside of a few very major cities.

> Going from NYC to Philadelphia by train cost me $300, when I returned it cost me $82 and was delayed by 4hrs.

Next time don't take Amtrack. Using NJ Transit from NY Penn to Trenton then transfer to SEPTA train into Philly will be < $30. The delays are unavoidable if something is broken.

Those are the two routes I took, I can't explain why it was much more than $30.

> Travelling around NYC using their underground was "ok" from a dependability standpoint; though I saw human excrement on many occasions, in one case it was smeared entirely on one of the benches where passengers usually sit.

“Many occasions” sounds like BS to me. Until the pandemic I rode the subway at least 12 times a week, every week for the past 22 years, and only saw human excrement twice (and one time it was actually a pretty funny story.)

I don't really know what's "normal" on the NYC subway to be fair, I don't live their and didn't travel during peak times.

I do slightly suspect that peak hours are more cleanly than non-peak time due to various economic reasons.

But I saw:

* poopy seat (when I got on the train at JFK)

* little human sized nugger, near the door, nearly stood in it as I disembarked a train near penn station.

* sticky urine floor near the door, which took me a good 1m30s to realise was definitely male human urine as I inspected the piss marks up the side of the door that I was pressed against during a busy ride.

Oh wait - I wasn’t counting urine. If we are than yeah, many.

Even though it is ageing and could be cleaner, the subway in Paris is amazing to get you anywhere in the city. Add to it buses, trams, bikes + very well connected train stations, and you have a very good public transport.

Let it be known: I am about to indulge you knowing full-well that you're going to quibble over the definition of "good".

With that said, I have lived in the following places for more than a year, and found the public transportation to be good, if not excellent.

- Paris, France

- Lyon, France

- London, UK

- Amsterdam, NL

- Bayreuth, DE

Despite some well-known problems in some of these places (strikes in Paris comes readily to mind), the advantages remain enormous:

- Reduced motor vehicle circulation in the city

- A high degree of mobility at a moment's notice

- The ability to move around without breaking a sweat (sadly important when going to a meeting in a suit)

- The ability to get home while inebriated

- The ability for suburban (read: underprivileged) employees to participate in the heart of the regional economy

The list goes on...

I've never had issues with public transportation in Brazil (living in small, medium and large cities). For the 5 years that I worked in person, I took the bus to work every day and I can only remember it failing me once.

Admittedly sometimes I'd fall asleep and miss my stop.

Taipei's intracity transit, both buses and the metro system. Taiwan's intercity buses, rail, and HSR. Clean, very frequent, gets you everywhere.

How many times does a concept need to be executed badly before you can call it a bad concept?

Apparently 1, and you need to ignore all the ones that are executed well.

How many times must others get it right before you'll consider your own execution to be poor?

Well in the US we can only really vote on two opinions.

The 'left' argues for unions based on the concept. The 'right' argues against them based on their execution. So we go round and round and round and round because neither is willing to consider or admit that we might be talking past each other.

Makes for great web traffic though.

I don't understand how this is remotely relevant.

The point is: many (most?) first-world countries have unions that work well overall. Same with police departments.

What you're describing are putative reasons why the American execution is a failure.

So those proposing having unions in the US need to explain why this implementation will suddenly work differently than all the others in the US.

Sure, I'll freely admit that unions have worked very well other places, but the US seems to blow it every darn time. Why would this time be different?

Software engineering has this culture of innovation, invention, disruption, and reimplementing everything from taxis to space travel to payment systems to currency to food from scratch. Why couldn't they attempt to do the same to labor relations.

Why assume that the day after a tech union is invented, suddenly you're stuck with a massive clanking bureaucracy that's identical to the ones that were formed in very different industries many decades ago?

I guess we'll find out: https://kickstarterunited.org/

I think the burden of proof is on those saying, "This time it will be different."

Well, why don't we apply the scientific method and try it out! This industry was built upon experimentation and radical thinking.

Unionization is much more of a social experiment than a technical experiment.

And what is ridesharing, house-sharing, cryptocurrency, or social networking? Or open source software for that matter? As software eats the world, technical innovations are creating social situations that have never existed in the past, creating social experiments whether intentional or not.

The democratic left absolutely does not want unions outside of government which is probably the worst place for unions in general

"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Michael Scott

We're not going to get different results when we form a union in the US unless we make an attempt to get different results.

No doubt about that.

I’m just arguing that the concept is fine, and the implementation is corrupted. Removing the corruption would be great but the issue is not the concept itself.

What if the concept is what leads to the corruption?

E.g. communism.

Im for unions, it beats the current situation, but im weary of the sales pitch.

But there are non-corrupt unions in other countries?

Even some in the US as some commentators have suggested (Screen Actors Guild being one)

Sure, there are non-corrupt unions in some other countries, the question is however how much % of them are not corrupt.

So? I didnt say it forces you to be corrupt, i said it may lead to that.

Are you arguing that unions lead to communism? While Europe has a rich weave of social-democratic governments, that would hardly constitute communism. In fact, I'd daresay actual communist parties in Europe with any real power are a distinct rarity.

Socialism is a step towards communism. Unions taking quite a lot of power from the owners of companies is any a way abolition of private property.

No,my point was that certain power structures encourage corruption.

Hell maybe they all do. Maybe that is why modern day democracy actually works (checks and balances) and has very little to do with comunism vs capitalism.

The "sales pitch" that is relevant here is the one put forth by the DoD and their enormously powerful SIGs for the last 75 years, namely "unions = communism" and "communism = bad".

As much as I would like to believe that there is a massive pro-working-class institution in the US that can afford to spend billions per annum on under-the-table PR/propaganda campaigns to shill collective action, it just isn't the case. The MIC on the other hand... putting those socialized taxpayer dollars to work against the evil working class (around the world).

I dont understand whats the pentagons propaganda machine got to do with me?

Not american.

Ps, i was not saying communism == unions. Thats fucking retarded on so many levels.

American military hegemony is a worldwide phenomenon. Unless you are in what is deemed by the MIC as "communist/terrorist/drug-dealer" country, there is going to be a sizeable media+political influence from Western/US interests in your country.

No, the concept is different in the US. It's conceptually not the same as an EU union.

If you think EU unions are great - then you'll need to first educate American union advocates about what they're doing wrong.

Yes, like dijit said, something modeled after the Screen Actors Guild. You rockstars get your million dollar salaries, no one gets overworked.

Great point. Guilds in general are a great way to reboot collective bargaining in the US. That thought occurred to me earlier this year and I completely forgot about it in this thread.

What's the difference between a union and a guild? Do Americans just have an aversion to the word union now?

A guild is a collection of independent contractors, a union is typically your own employees. Also guild sounds way cooler.

Guilds (I assume) involve more mead and iron working.

Probably. See the “Seattle Police Officers Guild” which is definitely a union... police aren’t independent contractors, or craftspeople, etc.

Classic definition wise guilds had a legal monopoly or regulation over a certain trade occupations including the quality and the maximium supply through control of pipelines of licensing and training.

Historically they were a often a feudal "link" of control for administration. They meet with the head haberdasher to discuss carrots and sticks of taxation and licensing so they pay willingly and let them shout about unlicensed competitors instead of trying to chase down every last haberdasher to tax.

Unions are more "if you piss off every affiliated habberdasher in the city they refuse to make hats until their demands are met".

Although as one anecdotal counterpoint, read about some of the experiences Mike Jittlov had making Wizard of Speed and Time. He is playing it for effect in the film but it is at least semi-autobiographical.

https://www.nytimes.com/1990/01/31/movies/review-film-a-wiza...

One of the liveliest things about ''The Wizard of Speed and Time,'' aside from the frantic Mr. Jittlov himself, is the film's animosity toward Hollywood in general and the movie unions in particular. Mr. Jittlov, who himself resigned from the Directors' Guild in order to make this film free of union requirements, includes a sequence in which he visits one union office after another, being told in each that he must play by expensive and archaic rules if he expects to play this game at all.

When he tries to rent studio space, he is given a list of costs right down to the fee for a parking space, and winds up shooting in his own garage. And when he films an outdoor sequence in a park, a helicopter appears overhead with a loudspeaker to chastise him for trying to film without a permit. ''Maybe I shouldn't make films for a living,'' he muses dejectedly at one point. ''I've got a bicycle. I could deliver Steve's Pizzas.''

We don't have 'some bad ones'. We have a different definition and different goals for them. The unions are trying to pad jobs and pay, while keeping employees safe. Too much under one umbrella perhaps. But not just stupid American's who do it wrong. US unions are doing a great job, but to the wrong ends.

What's sorely missing from this discussion is the understanding that different cultures are differently suited for each system of government. There's simply no reason that what works in Sweden will work in the US, or China, or Zimbabwe, etc.

The last two generations of western civilization were raised, out of good intentions, to be culture blind, and now with what's happening in the country we are seeing the result.

This kind of thinking reminds me of biotruths, eugenics, social Darwinism, and other authoritarian concepts which seek to explain why it’s okay to have inequality between and within countries.

We should seek to raise rights and standards of living for all people. The focus on whether other people have cultures compatible with specific forms of government seems very suspect. Such talk keeps people down. Self-determination is a human right; therefore, it is a society’s right to determine government and culture. Your focus on culture is very strange; it suggests that the culture is a thing that justifies itself independent of the people. The culture is a thing people live and do. Your phrasing makes culture seem insidious, seeking to resist changes to status quo. Some monoculture advocates reject alternative cultures and seek to outcompete them. By implying there are singular cultures, you wipe away self-determination.

>kind of thinking reminds me of biotruths, eugenics, social Darwinism, and other authoritarian concepts which seek to explain why it’s okay to have inequality between and within countries.

I don't know where to start with this comment. Perhaps you should stop grouping arguments by stereotype.

At an individual level, different people require different interventions, because they have different personalities. Some people can handle responsibility. Some people need financial motivation. Some people respond to love. Others best learn through violence or fear (I was far too smart to listen to my parents until they threatened a spanking, for example).

If you take all of these different personalities and force them to live under together under a single set of rules, regardless of whether their needs are met, they will compete, if not for resources them for social clout. It is human nature. Particularly in a universe where resources are scarce and time is short.

Though large scale human interaction has a normalizing effect, within the high dimensional space of human belief and behavior there is ample room for these same micro behaviors to be reflected by macroscale cultural trends. And, similarly, because the "ideal" form of government depends ultimately on widely varying beliefs, forcing multiple peoples with significant cultural distance will inevitably lead to inequality and clash - this is not a statement of superiority, sand though it can be used as part justification for some of the antisocial beliefs you raised, that doesn't mean it isn't untrue or that these real problems that we are seeing emerge across the world will simply go away if we ignore them. This pattern has been repeated across time and space and is an unnecessary source of unacknowledged strife in the modern world.

All people should have self-determination, culture be damned. All societies should have self-determination. Period.

That’s why I drew the logical connection to authoritarian concepts. No one is forcing anyone to be more free. That would be impossible. Freedom is a choice one makes for oneself, individually. Keeping someone from being free can be forced upon another. Society can do this collectively through laws. These are nuanced differences between freedoms and liberties, which some people don’t have.

I don’t know why you focus on the culture when people are why the culture exists as it does, not the other way around. The status quo benefits from dominant culture and from keeping established power structures in place. You can’t use the culture as an argument to justify a form of government that removes human rights. Just like I can’t sign a contract that gives up my Constitutional rights. Those in less free countries are not given the choice of more freedom.

I hate to use the most cliche word from California startup culture, but... maybe someone needs to... umm... disrupt unions?

Could you start a new kind of union as a kind of non-profit startup?

If I wanted to do this I'd leverage modern information technology to create covert communication channels for organizing and leverage big data, machine learning, and game theory to drive organization and bargaining strategies. You could apply pressure across supply chains, not just in individual industries, and you could really be quite a pain in the ass. Cambridge Analytica for the working class?

Also ditch the work rules and other antiquated industrial era ideas. Just go for pure financial and quality of life outcome. Work with industries if they're willing to play ball, but be a major pain in the ass when they don't. Negotiate, you know.

Honestly the hacker in me would be tempted if I had the time, skills, background, and connections. It would be a chance to wear a black hat and feel good about it. :)

If you did this you'd also have to be damn serious about opsec and tradecraft. When you threaten to increase labor costs, the gloves come off. I'd be about as worried about security doing this as I'd be running a dark web drug market.

Have you ever dealt with a cartel in real life? The idea that you can apply a "hacker" solution or "black hat" the cartel itself is naive. The whole point of any cartel (legal or otherwise) is to control and punish any attempts to operate outside of the rules and contracts that leadership negotiates. Anyone who considers doing something like this should be very aware of the career, financial, legal and physical risks of doing so.

And all of those are certainly opinions, but trading them as fact is overreaching.

Not really your main point but there are quite a few US "metro areas" with fairly sparse layout/wide scope, so I think public transit actually is a harder problem in the US than it is in e.g. Europe. That said even the cities that don't have this excuse tend to have mediocre at best transit here (for example Boston).

You would expect that the surplus of space in many US metropolitan areas would make it considerably easier to install and operate metro transit lines, but this seems not to be the case. I suspect the systemic bias towards road users is much more of a problem than geographical scale.

Dedicated lines need density for them to make financial sense. We tend to not have that (except where we do, but those places already have lines)

The point is not lack of space. If the metro station in Europe has 10 times as many people in 1 km radius around it as a metro station in US, you’ll have 10 times as many people riding it. If you have too few people riding it, the capital costs of building the metro (which, by the way, are much higher in the US than in Europe for some inexplicable reason) will be ten times higher per rider. At the same time, low ridership will also result in reducing number of trains per hour to control the costs, further reducing the ridership. The result is that you get a very expensive metro system that nobody is actually using, because most people don’t live close enough to use it, and the train schedules are less convenient than driving.

Interestingly enough there is much more revenue generation for the state in traffic violations. When one is walking or using public transport it’s more difficult for cops to harass them. But people can have a taillight out at any moment that warrants a traffic stop and subsequent fishing expedition. Our urban planning, especially in the West has been heavily biased toward cars.

You have your causation backwards there. If you look at virtually every metro area in the US, the history goes: dense core -> policy decisions to favor cars above everything else, usually with a healthy dose of racism tossed in -> suburban sprawl.

That's definitely possible, I don't know enough about the history, but now that there is a lot of established sprawl it does have a causal effect in discouraging public transit.

Also, in the context of comparing to other countries, I would think many did not have the land available to spread out in the same way at the time cars were available? I'm just curious how much of this may be related to the timing of the US

OK - but your response could be abstracted to

Q: "Why is X so bad?"

A: "You're doing it wrong"

Could it also be that Y is always/sometimes just better?

If the evidence is that American institutions fail where the vast majority of developed countries succeed, the onus would seem to fall on the “American” part and not the institutions. The same logic applies for healthcare, public transportation, and representative democracy.

You are failing to acknowledge the underlying issues associated with all your examples. This isn't American's whining about anecdotes while the system overall is sound. The system overall is a setup for unions, police, public transportation, etc to turn out bad way more often than they should (and probably way more often than they do in Europe, hence the confusion about why people are hostile to these things). People pushing the superficial and polarizing positions you've listed do exist sadly but largely, IMO, because they directly benefit from that polarization or they've been lied to and manipulated intentionally into taking those positions for the benefit of special interests and large corporations that dominate what laws actually get passed in this country.

Don't forget "I don't trust the government [to regulate X]".

It would really help if people would just use some qualifiers "US Unions", "US Police", "US Public transport", "US government".

Is that not exactly the point? "It's not unions that are bad, it's the concept of union jobs. Collective agreements would solve the problem you're pointing out."?

Here’s the thing, if you set up a new union, you don’t have to follow the same model as the ones that don’t work well in the us, you can follow the ones that do. You also don’t have the same incentives or personnel as the unions you mentioned, an engineering union would look quite different just in terms of the personality types of the people involved if nothing else.

You don't get to just decide how your union will run in a vacuum, the US has laws that standardize a lot of things about them.

Sure, as I said, model it after the unions, in the US, that work. There are many examples to pick from and many lessons to be learned about what not to do from the others. The US has not and cannot legally mandate a union to be completely useless, at least this side of a dictatorship it can’t.

Sounds like American individualism tends to skew work arrangements to the point of them instituting what outsiders would say is corrupt systems. American unions are positioned in opposition of their management, when the situation is supposed to be collaborative cooperation. And I suspect this situation is a result of active opposition by the businesses. Individualism is a nice word for selfish.

I don't think it's that the unions are bad, it's just that definitions of work came from factories, where moving or installing equipment would come as a part of retooling assembly lines.

Those definitions should be loosened in an office setting, rather than dismissing the entire idea of a union.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com