Hacker News Reader

Comment by appleflaxen | Hacker News Reader

The recurring theme in the comments against unions can be captured by a simple truth: Unions don't protect your interests; they protect their interests.

Which is fundamentally true, and cannot be changed.

So if your employment situation is so bad that you need a second, massively powerful, self-interested entity to negotiate with the massively powerful, self-interested entity in the hopes that your interests may happen to align then a union is the right choice.

But if not, you are adding an order of magnitude of complexity to your political work environment (yuck) and will come to regret it.

And if it comes to pass, it is absolutely critical to structure the union in such a way that the interests are aligned with the employee members.

View on HN

Unions also fuck non-union members, which in turn creates a lot of economic deadweight and inefficiency.

No, that's just normal anti-union-FUD. A union doesn't have to imply that it controls everything, or that everyone has to be part of the union to work somewhere.

A union could also just be a large entity that collectively bargain on behalf of the workers, and can do so better than they could separately. Often that involves stuff like better safety, pay, getting rid of bad stuff like non-competes etc. And where I'm from those new things are enforced company wide, not just for the union. So every worker profits from the union, even non-union members.

If anything, the non-union members are the deadweight where I live. They get the benefits, without paying any membership fee.

>A union doesn't have to imply

As there's no set definition that would capture every union/guild to have ever existed...a "union" doesn't imply a thing other than some collective decision making apparatus.

However, turning from Plato to my good friend Aristotle, history shows that unions tend to not notice non-members or - even worse - actively work against them. It's not FUD; it's a pattern.

It's not anti-union FUD. Unions killed housing bills in California this past year.

This is not FUD, this is the rationale behind "right-to-work" laws.

Unions want to represent every worker, because it gives them more power. This isn't a conspiracy theory, this is reality.

Some workers do not want to be a part of the union, but in states without right-to-work laws, they can be compelled to be part of the union.

> massively powerful, self-interested entity

The difference is the union at some level ultimately has to answer to the workers who comprise the union, whereas the corporation is ultimately responsible to the majority stockholders who are expropriating surplus labor time from those working at corporations.

What's the difference between exproprating labor time and compensating for labor time (in Google's case excessively well)

The difference is labor time compensated for is compensated for, labor time expropriated is not.

Labor time compensated for by Google excessively well is also labor time where workers are producing wealth excessively well. Ken Thompson had a hand in creating an enormous amount of wealth before he stepped foot in Google. Where does all this created wealth come from? The work done by those who work and create wealth at Google (and the uncompensated primitive accumulation of web content - and the taxpayer funded grants to Stanford and for ARPAnet development etc.)

> the union at some level ultimately has to answer to the workers who comprise the union

yes, and a democratic government has to "answer" to its people ostensibly. ask russians how it's going for them.

unions are just another power structure adding on to the infinite pile of things that are constantly trying to fuck me over as an individual human being. no thanks.

Right, so you should just let corporations keep fucking you then. That sounds like a great plan.

One obvious way this manifests is in seniority-based provisions whereby union members demonstrate a preference for their own interests over the interests of future new hires.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com