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Comment by fouldiplomacy | Hacker News Reader

"showing how necessary labor unions are"

Chicago is a great example of labor unions and how well they work out.

"Eschew flamebait. Don't introduce flamewar topics unless you have something genuinely new to say. Avoid unrelated controversies and generic tangents."

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

The GP comment stepped a foot over that line but this is crashing right through it. Please don't. We're trying for curious conversation here, not repetitive bashing.

I’ll attempt to “not flamewar” but you are being rather sensitive about this. A decent moderation is necessary but i fail to see any reason for the watchdogs to hate on my post.

Fact is Chicago is very much underwater because unions have gripped the city’s pension to the point that they cannot pass meaningful budget resolutions.

Unions had a place at the beginning of the industrial age for worker safety and reasonable wages. With OSHA and a long list of other laws, unions are largely outdated.

Please contribute something useful and not rules that are hardly being bent otherwise you are cluttering “curious conversations.”

It was a cliché one-liner on a divisive theme that was far off topic. That certainly counts as flamebait. This is not a borderline call!

Sometimes people make a more substantive comment in response to a moderation scolding—sort of explaining the background that was in their mind but which they didn't say earlier. I'd say your second and third paragraphs here count as that. If you had included that in your original post, it would at least have been not a one-liner and less of a cliché, and I probably wouldn't have replied.

Only the biggest, nastiest unions were able to survive the purge.

The claim that unions are horrible may be true for some large, high profile unions, but what everyone seems to ignore are all the small, totally unknown unions that get shit done.

A good rule of thumb: if the union is so large that it has enough bureaucrats that they have their own Union, then it's likely most of your dues are spent on propagating the Union bureaucracy and not necessarily on aiding the employees the Union represents.

> Chicago is a great example of labor unions and how well they work out.

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

Chicago ain't the world! Here, in Germany, labor unions are not perfect either, but pretty effective. It's a question of culture: if something never can grow up, into a solid state, it will cease to succeed. In the US unions get constantly hated and attacked. It's difficult to develop a healthy personality under such circumstances.

I loooove me some fallacies and biases. I work diligently everyday at work to avoid them.

However; I think this is misplaced as a quick search of Chicago news will inform the reader that Ms. Lightfoot has her hands full trying to balance a budget while not crippling the city because of unions. There is no fallacy here, only truth that is uncomfortable to some.

> There is no fallacy here, only truth that is uncomfortable to some.

There is, though. And it is an association fallacy.

You wrote:

> Chicago is a great example of labor unions and how well they work out.

The error in your logic:

Premise: Chicago's labor unions are labor unions.

Premise: Chicago's labor unions are bad.

Your conclusion: Therefore, all labor unions are bad.

What are some other examples of how well they work out? Paid holiday? Days off? Working environments that weren't deathtraps? Sounds pretty good to me.

You don’t have those in your non-union job? Everyone I know in tech already gets paid time off, and safe work environments.

Of course I do. Don't be a childish, passive-aggressive dickhead [0]. You know as well as everyone else here that these were fought for and won by unions.

[0] I make no apology. I really don't like that kind of phony bullshit pretend question. Its dishonesty is corrosive to discourse.

That seems like an inappropriate overreaction. Also, no, they were not. Companies who have never had unions offer these things, because we would not work there if they didn’t.

Even if they were, the fact that they are ubiquitous today without unions would mean that this is historical trivia, and not an argument that supports having a union today.

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