Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hedora | Hacker News Reader

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Unions would be much more attractive if US were an open shop country. Instead, we’re closed shop, which means that, once a union is in place, you can’t choose to join a different union. This routinely leads to situations where corrupt unions abuse their own members.

For an example of how this works in practice, look at the UAW’s conduct with UC’s grad students.

Years ago, they negotiated salary caps for grad students, and then negotiated contracts that severely cut health care benefits for women over their own members’ objections. Getting anything done involves baroque red tape, so even complaining about this sort of thing would take dozens of people multiple months (and almost certainly wouldn’t cause the union bosses to take action).

Recently, they ratified contracts when the rank and file protested at union meetings, and some UC campuses voted against the contract.

This led to illegal “wildcat” strikes where the students walked out because they couldn’t pay rent. The university then fired them.

This was only possible because of closed shops. If people want to switch unions, they should be allowed to.

Where did the closed shop restrictions come from, did it come from anti-union lobbying or some think tank somewhere? This smells completely like "the government is useless", then going in and defunding things that the government is responsible for.

Such rules come in at the state level and are usually pushed for by the large national unions to bully and push out local and regional small unions. Every major union from UAW to SEIU has been guilty of this.

This is not true. Unionization based on enterprise-level votes was put in place with NRLA in 1935. The NRLA and Taft-Hartley would have to be amended or replaced to change this. I have no idea if large unions have ever lobbied against replacing them at the Federal level, but there hasn’t (in recent history) been any serious push to do so that these unions would oppose.

Your intuition is correct. Workplace-based bargaining was put in place with NRLA in 1935, which requires that unions be formed on the basis of shop votes. This was done to prevent labor from having the same political power that sector-wide unions have in Europe. The sector-wide Hollywood unions were grandfathered in, which is why they remain as successful and powerful as they are today.

I did not think all union contracts where closed shop in the USA.

And this case why on earth where professional roles being represented by an Auto workers union.

If you look at modern unionization efforts, new unions tend to align with existing larger unions to leverage their legal representation, experience with unionization efforts, and general resources

I don't know, but I go to school at Michigan State and many of my professors are in the UAW.

> why on earth where professional roles being represented by an Auto workers union

An innovation in organized labour from around the turn of the 20th century known as the "industrial union" (as opposed to the "craft union") wherein the union seeks to organized all workers in a particular industry rather than a particular job. The idea is that this prevents workers of different jobs being pitted against one another, and provides more power as a strike could shut down an entire industry.

Yes I know that but normally you would expect a union to stick to that industry, also blue collar unions don't always know how to organise and represent professional workers and some members may not want "their" union to represent mangers eg the CWU in the UK

Trying to go back to the ancient one big union just wont cut it

Managers are not eligible to join the one big union: https://iww.org/membership/

In US law, closed shop refers to something different, which is illegal. It means that you have to be a member of the union to be hired in the first place at a certain employer/job site.

However, what is allowed is to require people who are hired to join the union, with the exception that if they do not want to join the union, they can opt to pay only "financial core" dues, to compensate the union for its work negotiating an agreement that the non-members supposedly benefit from too. The effect of this is that workers remain governed by collective bargaining, pay a lesser amount than members, and have no say in union leadership. They are also exempt from union discipline (ex fines for strikebreaking).

In some states, with so-called "right to work" laws, the employees who do not want to join the union pay nothing at all. This is actually not inherently a right of the states to make such laws, but an option they are delegated as part of the federal laws. After a recent SCOTUS ruling, all government employees can do this in any state.

In any case, what OP said is true re: our collective bargaining system is built around one union (whether or not everyone is required to pay dues) representing all workers, whose pay/benefits/other matters cannot vary from the union contract. Whether or not non-members must pay any dues

As to your point, the names for the old unions are largely historic vestiges. The "Big Labor" unions are massive conglomerates (just like the companies they rail against) that grow as big as they can. Ironically, the true hard-leftists like the IWW originally advocated for "One Big Union" as opposed to small, factional unions for each trade--but they would hardly be pleased with the highly-capitalist mammoth unions we have today.

that "lesser amount" is often close to 95% of the union amount, though, so you still end up financially supporting an entity that you disagree with, and not being able to use the full resources they provide.

If you are philosophically opposed to unions, you shouldn't have to pay them at all.

>If you are philosophically opposed to unions, you shouldn't have to pay them at all

You don't. Work somewhere else.

If you benefit from the union's work, you should absolutely have to pay for that work.

Chances are that you benefit from open source code that I wrote. Where is my money?

Well, you choosing to donate your time and effort to an open source project is really not analogous to a union's work improving workplaces, but! As it so happens I do believe that having huge swathes of the tech industry built on unpaid labor is also a pretty bad thing, that the political stance taken by large parts of the FOSS community that "free means no restrictions, EVER!" is foolish, and that companies should have to pay for their use of FOSS. It enables exploitation of individual maintainers by massive corporations.

And to loop back around to the topic most of us are discussing, if there were some type of SWE Guild, standardizing rules around FOSS usage and remuneration for FOSS creators and maintainers should be high on that guild's list of priorities. There're thousands of people in the entertainment industry making comfortable livings off a combination of some work and residuals; why can't that be us? Why shouldn't people who've created, maintained, and improved projects that companies have leveraged for billions of dollars of profit see some of that money?

Well, you choosing to donate your time and effort to a union project is really not analogous to a human's work improving lives by making open source software.

What you said is cool and all but I am still waiting for my money for all of the open source software that you are using.

Sane countries make you pay only if you want to participate in the union (such as when you vote).

The idea of having individual employees choose which union they want sounds a lot like the idea that consumer choice drives change (which usually does not work except in the case of huge boycotts, which are limited in their effects). Unions are about democracy in the workplace. If everyone is in a different union, there can be no legitimate democratic decisions on behalf of the workers.

EDIT: There's a bit of an exception. For example, in universities, sometimes graduate students have a union and faculty have a union. It doesn't make sense to place them both in the same union because the faculty boss graduate students around. However, it would make sense for the two unions to cooperate against the administration.

EDIT2: Another reason unions should be as concentrated as possible is so they form a united front against the bosses. If every employee is in a different union, how can they achieve anything without great difficulty?

> Unions are about democracy in the workplace. If everyone is in a different union, there can be no legitimate democratic decisions on behalf of the workers.

Wut?! TIL where people got the belief that single communist party could rule democratically. We all know how about those experiments played out in history

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