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Comment by wnevets | Hacker News Reader

Whenever unions are mentioned on HN there always seems to be a coordinated effort to attack them in the comments, very interesting.

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There is lots of support for unions in HN comments. It may even be the majority position by a slight margin. (Police unions are an inverted special case right now.)

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...

Of course it's not a coordinated effort, any more than the pro-union comments are coordinated. This is just a classic issue on which the community is divided. The temptation to see opposing views as inauthentic and manipulated is somehow irresistible to most people on the internet. I just wrote about this in a completely different context, but the same argument applies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24356300.

This is why we have this site guideline: "Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken. If you're worried about abuse, email hn@ycombinator.com and we'll look at the data."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

After post has been out for a while there probably is a majority in support. However every single time I read the comments of these kind of threads the first several highly upvoted comments are almost always anti-union. Its not until the post has been on the front page for a while before the comments begin to turn.

Do I have sciencily evidence? Nope. Could it be a confirmation bias or just a coincidence? Sure. However it seems to happen a lot.

You may be running into the contrarian dynamic: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor.... If an article is about unions, the first round of objections is probably going to come from the "boo unions" contingent. Once those comments appear, a second wave of objections saying "wait a minute, unions have done good things" (or "I can't believe how anti-union these comments are!") would be expected.

I don't know for sure if that's what's happening in the threads you're talking about but it kinda sounds like it might be.

I doubt it’s a conspiracy or organized comment ring.

The popular narrative around unions is one of the employees versus their employer, but ultimately even the business’ customers or adjacent businesses end up paying some of the price.

For an example that will probably hit home for many HN users, try asking your trade show team about dealing with unions. The restrictions imposed by unions on trade show attendees are unreal. We had to spend extra to use tool-free fasteners and pre-wire our booths to avoid trigger union regulations that only union employees could use certain tools and do certain wiring jobs on the trade show floor. The union even sent someone to watch us to ensure we weren’t using forbidden tools or wiring one year. If we did, they would send us a bill.

Unions have their place, but it’s dishonest to suggest that anyone skeptical of union efforts doesn’t have valid reasons to oppose them.

I guess you can't let people attach whatever willy nilly and trip the circuits or start a fire. Furthermore, that requirement is set by the trade show not the union right? Surely they take a share from the bills.

It's clear you've never worked with a union if you think the rules make sense or if you think the tradeshow had any say in this activity.

Which is to say the company made you guys do all the work instead of paying people to do it for you.

I don't think money is the issue. For one thing, your company is paying you, so it's not like it's free labor. For another thing, it's often just easier to do stuff yourself.

For some tiny job it takes less effort to just do it than it does to ask someone else, especially when there are all kinds of union rules. One task leads to another, and then you need to find someone else to do that job.

What's amazing to me about that anecdote is that it seems like such a tremendously small reason to dislike unions, for all they do to improve worker safety, pay, and provide a stop against exploitation by corporate owners.

I would consider not being able to plug in my own gear at a trade show a small price to pay to show my support for unions and union workplaces.

Yeah the example they use is literally the union providing worker safety.

A total coincidence that 15 FWD: FWD: UNIon RUInEd My Life stories immediately dominate the conversation whenever a story like this hits the front page.

Yes I too used to belong to a scary union. I was forced pay dues and there was this bad employee that didn't get fired! Now at my non-union job we only have the best employees and managers because we are allowed to fire the bad ones.

From HN guidelines:

Please don't post insinuations about astroturfing, shilling, brigading, foreign agents and the like. It degrades discussion and is usually mistaken.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Maybe because a lot of people on HN are small business owners, and unions take power away from business owners and can and will force you to do things to the detriment of your business if they deem it in the best interests of the union members.

The vast majority of people on HN are people who need to work to eat and keep a roof over their heads, and the companies they work for take power away from them, and will force them to do things to the detriment of themselves if it's deemed in the best interests of the company.

A union is a company that represents the interests of workers in the same way that a company is an entity that represents the interests of capitalists.

Besides, many people on HN work for tech companies like Adobe, Apple, Google, Intel, Intuit, Pixar, Lucasfilm or eBay, all of which were found guilty of colluding[1] to keep engineer salary below market value.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

That lawsuit didn’t require unions, though. If anything, it’s a great example of how our industry can overcome these issues without unionization.

People tend to forget that unions represent the existing employees, not aspiring hires. This can actually work to the detriment of juniors and newcomers to the industry. It can also work to the detriment of teams where it becomes intensely difficult to fire people who are legitimately underperforming. The public school unions keeping bad teachers on the payroll but keeping them idle in empty rooms is a prime example. Police unions defending bad cops is another very relevant example. If you’re an aspiring teacher or police officer with motivation to do well, why should those union employees take a spot on the job that you could otherwise occupy and do better? Switching the rules of the game to favor seniority doesn’t benefit people who rank low on the seniority ladder.

One lawsuit was a Department of Justice antitrust investigation (quickly settled) that required a bunch of lawyers, discovery, and having the conduct run up against the Sherman antitrust act. I think a tech union is very unlikely but would rather things get fixed before they get that far.

My understanding is that the related civil class action suit recouped small fractions of estimated lost wages, though there's a lot of hand-waving there and both sides are going to wave their hands differently.

I might be mistaken; this didn't affect me too much, and I most mostly just amused how incredibly afraid of Steve Jobs everyone was.

> I think a tech union is very unlikely but would rather things get fixed before they get that far.

There is no need to wait for a "tech union" to unionize tech offices. Kickstarter unionized last year under the Office and Professional Employees International Union.

Most of people on HN work at large tech companies. In my experience the majority consensus in the industry is that a union would do more harm than good, but of course that is infinitely debatable.

> the majority consensus in the industry is that a union would do more harm than good

Most people also think they are smarter than average. I have seen people that thought they were great at negotiating their own wages/benefits in a ritualized yearly pissing match with their boss only to be outdone by new hires. Lots of overinflated egos around that would rather rip their own arms of than pull on the same rope.

>Maybe because a lot of people on HN are small business owners,

A lot of small business owners who also happened to work for a union and had a bad experience? That seems like a lot for a site largely filled with software developers. Is HN more mainstream than I'm giving credit?

HN is not mainstream but has a diverse audience. The subset commenting on any story is a self-selected group that likely has more experience in or devotion to the topic. Find a thread about math or physics and you’ll find an outsized representation of mathematicians and physicists commenting; does that indicate the site is full of mathematicians and physicists? No, they’re just self-selected to comment. Same here.

I don't think there's coordination happening on HN necessarily. There is a very high degree of anti-union propaganda in the broader culture, and many have taken that propaganda on without considering or hearing much from the other side. None of the stuff people say about unions on HN is anything I haven't heard a million times in casual conversation with others.

Maybe a lot of people just have had negative interactions with unions.

Maybe a lot of people have been told nebulous negative union stories repeated over and over by big business.

Can't speak for other people, but my views are from personal experience. Granted low sample size of 2, but that's what I have to judge by.

Entirely possible, but also maybe people who have positive experiences with unions can't be bothered talking about them when the popular narrative of 'unions are bad' means they're inevitably going to have to defend them and explain every bad thing that has ever happened at or adjacent to a union.

I'm a union member, but man do I think twice about ever commenting on anything to do with a union because of the huge negative wave that comes your way.

I for one would like to hear more about the positive experience. The narrative in the US tend to be polarized, and I do wish we can have a civil discussion on the merits and perspectives from both ends.

The positive experience isn't drama filled :)

We, along with other unions, negotiate a collective agreement with my employer and then do our jobs. The agreement is renegotiated every 3 years or so. If that's the end of it then we're happy. Industrial relations doesn't _have_ to be a fight to the death.

In my last job, I was a member of a precarious workforce and, during my time at the company, this workforce successfully unionised and won a contract with the employer. This led to guaranteed annual pay increases for members, improved and secure benefits, and a formalised process for dealing with grievances. It really made a huge difference to a lot of people.

Because not all unions are angelic as they are portrayed in popular culture.

I am a 34 year old immigrant from a country where unions are synonymous with both corruption and workers rights.

US also has a similar history.

https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=518184...

Edit: downvoted for pointing out facts. Your downvotes won't change reality, as much as you think it does.

I don't understand this sentiment. Why is

1. an allegedly corrupt democratic institution that you personally have influence over which exists to fight for your rights

a bigger problem than

2. a definitely corrupt authoritarian institution run by self-interested plutocrats that exists to squeeze as much free work out of you as possible?

A couple possibilities:

1. There is a conspiracy to bad mouth unions to protect the capitalist class.

2. Unions have problems and people are expressing their opinions about those problems

with just how little power unions have in America, I'd wager it's more likely the former. especially in tech spaces

> Whenever unions are mentioned on HN there always seems to be a coordinated effort to attack them in the comments, very interesting.

I doubt it's a coordinated effort, it's just resident libertarians getting agitated by a concept they've been conditioned to fight against.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Californian_Ideology

Yeah, it’s discouraging. But Hacker News is a place for capitalists (self-identified) or wannabe capitalists to hold discussions, and the site is run by a venture capital firm, so makes sense. Still discouraging to see the lack of education HNers have on unions. Maybe ignorance is a better word.

> Still discouraging to see the lack of education HNers have on unions. Maybe ignorance is a better word.

In theory unions are great. In practice America's implementation of unions end up as a crappy caricature of the theoretical one and are nothing like their European counterparts.

Maybe recently, with many American unions struggling just to survive, but historically (in the late 1800s to middle 1900s) American unions have been incredibly effective and pioneering.

> but historically (in the late 1800s to middle 1900s) American unions have been incredibly effective

So basically unions were good for ~50 years until the Mafia infiltrated the Teamsters?

Unions in the western world in the post-war period made historical compromises with industry that helped contribute to 30-40 years of relative labour peace and high middle class prosperity. They purged communists and other radicals from their ranks, took anti-Soviet positions, and adopted cooperative and conciliatory bargaining positions that gained higher pay and job security by dropping some of the more classic demands of shopfloor control and political change.

As a result unions started to look more like guilds than classic unions, they became managerial organizations like the businesses they were attached to, and they often lost legitimacy with their own memberships as a result.

When the economy started to contract in the 70s they weren't in a good position to fight, and their influence waned. And when the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 80s they lost any kind of bargaining position -- nobody was afraid of the reds anymore, so they didn't need the unions or social democrats or Keynesian liberals to pacify the population and stomp out communist sympathy.

I think it's maybe a bit more subtle. In our industry there's what I call the "California Ideology" (after the classic essay: https://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/californian-ideo... which is a bit dated but still stands the test of time)

At one point this perspective was fairly counter cultural -- computing technology fused with Alvin Toffleresque third wavism, a tinge of libertarianism but without a suit and tie, some LSD, some cyberpunk, wear jeans to work, "change the world", etc. But that sheen is increasingly wearing off.

The reality under the surface dressing is we are part of an industry with deep military ties, and it doesn't matter if you wear jeans to work and get vegan treats in the cafe, there's nothing particularly radical about computing technology and while we're "changing the world" it's really not in any egalitarian or progressive way.

We're part of a semi-managerial class that is doing on the whole pretty damn well financially, but there's no reason to expect that to last forever.

A lot of us ran around saying "information wants to be free" in the 90s and so on, it looked a bit naive to me then, but now it just looks comical and sad.

> and while we're "changing the world" it's really not in any egalitarian or progressive way

There is a good argument to be made that increasing the GDP is a moral imperative [0]. I know it's increasingly trendy to think all of capitalism is evil and we should tear the whole global economic system down (and to tweet about it from your iPhone while sitting in your air conditioned home, eating your meal delivered by Doordash). As much as it is true that inequality is higher than it should be, and there are lots of things in the world that should be improved, it's also true that for the vast majority of people in the US and around the world, their living conditions today are much better than they would have been at any other time in history. Which is the simple result of compounding economic growth.

Talking about "changing the world" by building an app sounds a bit quaint and too self-serious these days, but I really don't think it's true that the average person working in tech contributes nothing positive to society.

[0] https://www.mercatus.org/bridge/essays/economic-growth-moral...

I don't fully agree with your point, but I've upvoted you anyways, because this is an entirely reasonable response argument to the points I made and that's how HN is supposed to work.

But please note I didn't say anything like "the average person working in tech contributes nothing positive to society." That's pretty ad hominem, and I don't think that, otherwise I wouldn't work in this industry.

Well I appreciate the good-faith discussion. And fair enough, I didn't intend to put words in your mouth, I was interpreting "not in any egalitarian or progressive way" as meaning "not in any positive way". But I can see how you might not have been making that strong of a claim.

> As much as it is true that inequality is higher than it should be

I just spent time with a friend who is working two jobs during the pandemic and cannot afford to live on their own in our relatively low cost of living city. They have to ride the bus for 2 hours to get to one job. This isn't even global inequality, this is an order of magnitude income difference between "haves" with high tech jobs that realistically produce no value, and "have nots" who actually make society function.

Well I'm sorry that your friend is having a tough time. But you really didn't respond to, much less refute, any of the main points of what I wrote here.

My point is extracting the maximum value from people by paying them almost nothing because it "increases the GDP" isn't a moral imperative. It's absurd on its face to say that growth at any expense is ethical because of some trickle down bullshit.

Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...

Well-informed, good-faith disagreement is possible on a range of topics, including this one.

I agree wholeheartedly, though I'm not seeing much disagreement or discussion, I'm just seeing downvotes on any comment that even suggests the remote possibility unions might actually be a good thing.

The same happens whenever anything is discussed that would actually improve the lives of the very vast majority of Americans - healthcare improvements, UBI, tertiary education that isn't crippling debt, unions, better public transport, etc.

There are extremely rich and powerful people who will sink hundreds of billions of dollars into making sure those things don't change.

America is just so profitable the way it is.

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