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Comment by simpixelated | Hacker News Reader

Along with the unionization at Google, I think it's a good trend to see them happening at big tech companies. As it says in the article: "Unions are a prominent presence at Amazon in Europe, but the company for years successfully fought off labor organizing efforts in the U.S."

It's sad that Amazon, along with FB and Google, etc. have managed to squash unions so completely here in the US. There's a lot of propaganda around unions that helps prevent them from every gaining much power. Obviously Amazon warehouse employees desperately need unionization much more than software devs, but I think both are needed.

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The propaganda unfortunately also comes from folks direct experience with unions. In the US, most unions are public sector. So folks see that

Police unions may protect bad apples via union.

Teachers unions may care more about teachers including bad ones then teaching kids. We had a famously terrible teacher at my school - unfirable - as kids we thought it was hilarious. As a parent now - not so cool. Non unionized schools seem to be coming up with innovate workaround during pandemic (outside / park / hiking classrooms etc).

Absolutely horrendously drafted laws that make life miserable even for folks trying to do right (AB5, schools not allowed to keep reserves) that are union drafted, and require endless exceptions and modifications.

Google employees unionizing and striking and walking out and otherwise throwing very highly paid fits over things that don't connect with average person.

When you call what people have first hand experience of "propaganda" they may immediately will discount everything else you are saying.

The real rule should be all poorly compensated folks paid $14/hr or less should automatically be in unions. That's where the real need is.

Just one comment on this:

> Teachers unions may care more about teachers ...

That's precisely the point of a union. It's an organization to protect its members. It's the purpose of the school system overall, including principals, school boards, and so on, to care about teaching kids.

The #1 concern with a school should be the children, not the teachers. Public schools bend-over-backwards to help the teachers over the students. Public schools have remained essentially unchanged for 120 years - one teacher divulging knowledge to a room of kids in silent observation. Nothing will change when unions are in control - they have absolutely no incentive.

That is a failure of the public education system not unions. It is not as if the governments are trying to push innovative teaching methods and investing more in public education especially for the underprivileged.

There is pretty much zero chance of being elected to the public school board without the union endorsement.

Untrue and a little absurd.

I've personally known three people who got elected to their local school boards without any endorsements at all. They all had big families, literally just a lot of people knocking on doors evening after evening, no prior political experience even.

Non-union private schools can innovate at will, but so far it's not clear whether any of them have found a solution that works better than the one in place at public schools, while also satisfying the legal requirements put on public schools to accept all students, etc.

And unionized cannot? Maybe my children’s school is unique but the teaching there is radically different than my own.

A couple of years ago there was endless complaints about new ways to teach math.

Last I heard (twelve months ago) the results for "charter schools" were statistically no different than any other.

There are anecdotes to support the point of view they are bad, and anecdotes to support that they are good.

The source of funding does not seem to be the problem. The quantity of funding, definitely.

It's a strange system we live in where teachers get fired at the drop of a hat for seemingly innocuous offenses like teaching evolution or breaking up a fight, while also being absolutely untouchable.

That's because it's not "a system", schooling in the US is thousands of systems.

You all realize half the reason we have "bad schools" is that families home lives have been falling apart for decades, and schools are the only government agency (except for maybe the police...) interfacting with those families on regular basis?

That and hyperlocal funding.

We can't like society as a whole fall part and expect schools to keep on performing well.

I'm honestly kind of surprised to see the teacher union hate in this thread.

The teachers that I know work tirelessly, don't make very much money, and do literally everything they can to help students. This is doubly true during the past year when they've had to re work plans so that they work over zoom or in person.

I think perhaps the point of friction is that all of this is true and the city can't afford to pay them more, so they get other concessions.

I fundamentally disagree with your claim about lack of innovation - in a public high school 15 years ago your story doesn't ring true, much less seeing my friends who are teachers talking about lesson plans today.

>>I'm honestly kind of surprised to see the teacher union hate in this thread.

I mean, have you seen the American Education system? Millions of people thought Betsy Davos was a good idea. MILLIONS. The DOE under her tenure was basically a full on assault against public education in favor of charters/private schools. I've had hours-long, in-person arguments with people who are CONVINCED teachers have the easiest jobs on the planet and we pay them too much.

Not to mention many HN commenters in general tend to strong pro-management stance which pushes them anti-union in general.

> .. That's precisely the point of a union. It's an organization to protect its members ..

That's just it, the union is there to represent the interests of the senior officers and no one else.

> Teachers unions may care more about teachers ...

Teachers union is easily one of the worst Unions in USA which has turned public education system into a wasteland of incompetent teachers protected at the expense of competent and unemployed. It has turned our education system into a soviet styled "jobs program for adults" instead of a schooling system for children.

If Americans ever wanted an example of how much damage unions can do, look no further than Teachers union.

And if you want the second best example, take a look at the MTA union. Rife with corruption for the union managers at the top, projects delayed by years to decades, cost overruns in the billions, etc.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/28/nyregion/new-york-subway-...

The point that the OP is making is that the negative propaganda against unions is not just entirely made up, but also something that many people with kids in school have experienced first-hand. This does factor in when that same parent then goes to their workplace and is pitched to form/join a union. I am not saying they won't agree to it, but they might remember the negative aspects of dealing with the concept of a union in another aspect of their lives.

It is very rare that the best propaganda is made up. The best is true but incomplete, anecdotal in this case.

To hold up it must be true, but misleading.

What are you basing this on? For years the Nazi went on and on about the Jews being the inferior race, about how it was science based, they indoctrinated the youth.

I don't particularly want to go on hate sites to find examples at this moment.

But the gist is, there are statements that are not falsifiable, like that "inferior race" that is not fact, it is the conclusion, but it is not falsifiable easily because there is no clear metric being used for that judgment.

If you look at U.S. race based hate sites that are easiest to find now, you will see things like accurate references to crime rates and such. The number is true, but it is missing all kinds of context and correlations and such.

For example, I have seen many references to lower IQ scores for certain groups. There are many ways to interpret this, but the racists use it as evidence. The "number" is true.

Also, the anecdotes they tell are largely true, but to pick and choose emotional one off examples is misleading.

By warping "true" things, you maintain credibility.

Look at some of the election stuff. For example, if someone said "They were bringing suitcases into the polling place" (I can't remember the exact details) There is video it is true, but it is not nefarious. But it takes a long time to rebuff the implication and explain proper procedure.

Now, I may have overstated "best", because the best is emotional, and a lot of that is art, nothing to do with fact, and portrayal of the enemy. You see this in a lot of the Nazi imagery. It has nothing to do with facts, true or false.

You can find a million more horror stories related to corporations abusing workers than you can of unions keeping bad workers employed, yet one of these types of organizations is always under an existential attack.

If I didn't know about the sustained US corporate anti-union messaging as a thing, I might wonder why that is.

Maybe if student unions weren't a complete joke, the situation would improve. As it stands, teachers unions keep terrible teachers employed, against the interest of the students, while the students have no real representation or organization to provide balance by looking after student interests.

My mother was a middleschool teacher when I was in highschool, and drove me to highschool in the morning. Because she was a teacher, she had to get there before the school obstensibly opened, which wasn't a problem for me or my brothers because the administration of the highschool was reasonable and let us sit quietly in the office until the school opened. A handful of other kids had this arrangement too. It worked fine until my junior year, when the teachers union decided to throw a hissy fit. The result of that was all students being made to stand outside in the cold until the school was officially open. The teachers Union said that allowing students into the building before school hours unfairly saddled them with more labor... never mind that we were all quietly sitting in the office receiving compliments from the secretaries for being well behaved.

> teachers unions keep terrible teachers employed

Are there a bunch of would-be teachers clamoring for those jobs?

I think the lack of desirability is what keeps terrible teachers employed. There also aren't great ways to measure how good someone is at teaching.

> Are there a bunch of would-be teachers clamoring for those jobs?

Emphatically yes, particularly at nice well funded schools. I have numerous long-term friends who have become school teachers, many of then had to move quite a distance just to find schools with openings. Most states have teacher certification reciprocity with Pennsylvania, which gave them a leg up in this regard. Even so, searching for open positions was clearly stressful for them. But for them it was worth it; the work is rewarding and socially important. They like working with kids, and they like getting several months of vacation every year. There is no other job quite like it.

> Emphatically yes, particularly at nice well funded schools.

I emigrated up to Canada a while back where teachers are paid very well[1] and the bad teachers get weeded out really quickly since there are plenty of enthusiastic replacements. I am sure that at well funded schools in the US teachers do great - but most US schools are terribly funded[2] so I'm not surprised folks are willing to move across the country if a well reimbursed position opens up.

1. https://www.blogto.com/city/2020/09/average-ontario-teacher-... [TL;DR 108k including benefits] - also they've got great pension options.

2. Taking New York as a random counter example since cost-of-living is probably pretty close to Toronto https://www.glassdoor.ca/Salaries/new-york-state-teacher-sal... [TL;DR 42k probably excluding benefits - which were about 12k for toronto teachers]

Anecdotally, the schools with the worst funding also have the most troubled students. I think many new teachers are up for a challenge and low pay at first, but are disturbed by the reality of what they find and seek better schools for their own mental wellbeing. From what I've heard, these schools get a steady supply of freshly minted young teachers straight out of college, who burn out after a few years. Their teacher supply problems come from a failure to retain teachers, not an inability to hire them in the first place.

The url says New York State. NYC teacher salaries are publicly available - ~$60-125k USD based on education and tenure. It's a solid upper middle class living (as much as you can say that in a HCOL city with insane real estate market, but it starts higher than the median household income for the city) with great benefits, pension, and job security.

https://www.uft.org/your-rights/salary/doe-and-city-salary-s...

There are cases like NYC's "rubber rooms"[1] where teachers are paid to sit in a room and not to teach.

1 https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/08/31/the-rubber-roo...

If you were to ask the teachers and people who went to school for education that I happen to know, all of them would tell you there is absolutely more people who want to be teacher than there are open positions.

My best friend gave up on getting a teaching job and went into industry work, while my sister in law has gotten multiple certifications to be able to teach different subjects and is still only able to get part-time substitute teaching work.

Sorry, but are teachers employed by the union who then sells the teachers labor to the school? Or do I misunderstand?

I find these stories from the USA about teachers unions fascinating. My prior is strongly pro union, so for a long time I disbelieved them. But I hear them so often from so many sources...

We had problems back in the day here (Aotearoa) as the union movement became the battle ground for the larger social class conflicts, that whilst meat hook reality overseas, made less sense here (here it was racial conflict and colonisation that mattered, another story, another day).

The union movement was smashed in the conflict. Too corrupt and ossified to fight back against a revitalised state in the 1980s and 90s. But the public sector unions survived, and were are strong now. The teachers union here is mighty.

But we see none of the problems (bad teachers defended, stupid rules enforced arbitrarily - well some, there is still bureaucracy). The unions campaign very effectively for their members, some political agents try to stir up concern (American issues leak through here) but mostly no body really cares. When my children were at school I never gave it a thought.

Good luck to the Amazon workers, I hope it goes well.

Teachers and police officers are public servants. If they want to bargain, they should be negotiating with the public, not government officials. Otherwise, it's just collusion.

If not with government officials, i.e. the executive part of the system taking care of public concerns, how should they negotiate with "the public"?

Any negotiated increase in salary or pensions should require a vote unless if there is a budget surplus. Municipalities are incurring way too much debt without taxpayer knowledge, let alone approval.

Government workers already have a lot of job security, so I don't think unions should be allowed to affect that.

I do think that public servants have a right to negotiate safety and other technical issues without public approval.

I want to vote on your salary.

The difference is that my salary doesn't force you to take on debt.

> Any negotiated increase in salary or pensions should require a vote unless if there is a budget surplus.

Generally, they do require a vote of the appropriate governing body, with all the associated public information and opportunity for input that goes along with that.

> Municipalities are incurring way too much debt without taxpayer knowledge

If true, its because taxpayers don’t actually care. Because if they did, even if they were too lazy to find out themselves, it would be too convenient a lever for opposition to whoever the current majority is in the relevant governing body to use with the public to unseat them to go unused.

> If true, its because taxpayers don’t actually care.

They do care when they're forced to pay extra taxes to cover interest. Your average voter doesn't have time to audit their city's finances. Both the unions and public officials knew that public would not agree to tax hikes, so they decided to go with unfunded pensions instead. Even though it's technically transparent, they're still abusing an information asymmetry, much like pyramid schemes.

The government are the public’s representatives.

Or should a developer negotiate with a shareholder for a bonus?

With the public for ransom.

Many/most supporters of unions argue that police should not be able to form or join unions. "Cops are not workers" is a common phrase I've seen.

Why only cops and not all public sector employees? I don’t see how you can make an argument that police work isn’t work.

The argument that cops are not workers, in a Marxist sense, is because they work to protect the interests of capital, rather than do "productive" work that is useful to the rest of the working class.

It's not a broadly held view, even among communists.

What a profoundly disconnected notion of what police do. Stopping violence and reckless behavior (e.g. driving drunk) has nothing to do with protecting the interests of capital.

As a worker I appreciate the fact that when I was burgled a decade ago there was someone to call to inform about the burglary.

I also very much appreciate the fact that "having police" (even vaguely, and even ineffective ones) is a pretty good deterrent to (most) random folks murdering other folks[1].

There is a hell of a lot wrong with American policing but they do productive work just like managers (that don't produce anything themselves) and HR and all the other "non-productives" people like to point out. I think it's perfectly fair to question just how much value police (and other "non-productives") are actually producing and a lot of businesses could do with trimming a bit of labour out of middle management - but there are reasons these jobs exist and they can add a lot to team and societal productivity.

1. I don't ascribe to theories on anarchist utopias where if everyone can kill everyone else no one does out of politeness, I've played Rust.

What did informing the cops about the burglary do, precisely?

One specific feature (at least in the US) is that a police report is required for an insurance claim - but there's no fundamental reason this system requires a police report, as opposed to, say, a sworn statement to a clerk of court or a public prosecutor. And even so, that's about getting some form of recompense after the crime happened, not stopping the crime (the burglary still happened to you, did it not?).

Along the same lines, I don't believe that the presence of the police prevents people from killing others. I certainly believe that the presence of the legal system does, by imposing strong penalties against murder. I'd believe that detective / investigative work (which a small fraction of the work the police do now, yes) aids the legal system by making those penalties actually happen. But I think you will find that there are very few potential murders where a cop is around and able to respond (by shooting first, I guess?) in time to prevent the murder from happening.

Even if you think of the favorable portrayal of cops in, say, Law and Order, they're generally investigating a crime that already happened, and it's pretty rare that they end up in a position by the end of the episode to stop a crime in progress and find themselves in a shootout.

> What did informing the cops about the burglary do, precisely?

It mostly just made me feel better - the chances of recovering items after a theft or burglary is nearly nil. However, after having my home invaded by a stranger and my personal belongings rifled through it was quite cathartic to report the crime, give all the information I could to try and make sure the criminals were eventually caught, and help restore my sanity by just seeing a system in place for these issues.

I received no recompense for the crime and, at the time, I wasn't insured, but I was also dirt poor and didn't have much to lose except my privacy.

On the topic of murders I agree that detectives and investigators are the ones that will end up catching murderers and beat/patrol police do very little to apprehend criminals but they do make the system dramatically more visible and do a lot to de-escalate situations[1] from becoming as dangerous. The chances that you will be mid-being-murdered and be rescued by the police are nearly zero - the chances that someone who may have murdered you decides not to do so is more significant and, I think, aided by a visible patrol police force - even if they don't significantly contribute to resolving justice.

So I both agree with you that police are pretty useless when it comes to dealing with crimes after the fact - but disagree with you about their general efficacy. They should exist to de-escalate situations before they become real problems and make visible the rules of society that we should all abide by.

Oh, this is all very much my opinion so I've not got a lot of sources or references to pull on as to how to make police into a force that does that.

1. In this point I'm speaking as a now-Canadian - I don't really feel qualified to speak on the US system as 1) I'm white and 2) I haven't lived there in over a decade. So please do excuse this statement if you (the reader) have personally suffered unreasonable escalation of force.

True.

The right to strike is tricky for essential services.

Perhaps a underlying problem is the adversarial nature of many of our social relationships.

I take it a step further and reject all public sector unions. Teachers, cops, firemen, dog catchers, you name it.

There’s just too many perverse incentives for politicians to give in to union demands in exchange for buying votes. Unlike the private sector, the ones agreeing to the union demands care little about the long term costs associated since they’re not the ones paying them.

> There’s just too many perverse incentives for politicians to give in to union demands in exchange for buying votes

If politicians were looking to maximise votes, wouldn't they target parents not teachers: there's a lot more parents than teachers.

Teachers are alot more likely to be single issue voters over important aspects of their job than parents will be about things they might not even know about, I'd imagine

I don't understand. Unions, private or public, represent a massive special interest voting bloc. Instead of "I will be able to directly raise your pay if you vote for me" it's "I will directly benefit your company/industry if you vote for me".

Why do you think Mitch McConnell cares so much about coal?

I'd say they are allowed to have unions, local governments just need to be able to exert meaningful oversight even with the unions.

Well I think the issue is that the policing unions form state and national agreements but local governments are left to negotiate on their own. The DOJ (or something at the national level) really needs more oversight when it comes to policing so that we can have collectivized bargaining on both sides. Local councils can't realistically stand up to police unions in a meaningful way since the national charter can drop a ton of money on elections to get troublesome members ousted... Again, another side effect of terrible election finance laws.

The situation with police union contracts in the US is so bad I think it will lead to courts needing to overturn them as they are not in the public interest.

Given that the police budget is formed by public allocation and the nature of the job I think that policy absolutely should have the ability to form unions. Being forced to work long shifts in dangerous work environments (whether dangerous to you or others) is pretty unsafe. The issue is that, whether intentionally or not, the public has bargained away some pretty valuable things over the year to the union including employment record availability and retention requirements.

That union needs some serious reform and it isn't going to come from the inside, but there are some really good reasons for police to have good bargaining power.

Honestly, this probably all comes back to the US massively underfunding public services as a general rule - if the policing budget had been slashed like the education budget regularly is then we'd have nothing but vigilantes in the police force.

Where, specifically, has the per-student education budget been "slashed"?

Unions are like corporations - there is good and bad, benefits and drawbacks.

One thing I've noticed, is that where 'new unions' are forming, there is' probably a good reason for it.

There is no good reason for it. Employees at top companies are forming unions because they think that will allow them to say whatever they want on the job, and if Google says no don’t talk about politics at work it creates tension and conflict, they will say sorry where are union you have to listen to us now. It’s spoiled, overpaid techies upset they can’t use work time to preach political and social issues.

Read anything about amazon working conditions.

>There is no good reason for it. Employees at top companies are forming unions because they think that will allow them to say whatever they want on the job... It’s spoiled, overpaid techies upset they can’t use work time to preach political and social issues.

... you do realize you're making those broad, blanket statements in the comment thread of an article that's about the unionization of Amazon's warehouse workers who aren't "spoiled, overpaid techies", yes?

There are many people working at Google that are not full time employees. They are treated completely differently when it comes to their pay, sick leave, vacation, or even just certainty that they will have a job when their contract expires. The benefits for them from being unionized are a lot more important than you’re making them out to be.

I tend to agree, but the flipside is that we need trust the workers' judgment when a new union doesn't form. I see a troubling tendency among union organizers to assume that anyone who's thinking clearly would want to be in a union - if a unionization vote fails, that can only mean the company must have tricked or bullied people into casting the wrong vote.

Please keep in mind that sometimes employees are punished for considering unionization, so it's possible that them not unionizing is a reaction to that.

Assuming no external pressure, though, I absolutely agree: if workers don't see the benefit in unionizing, they should not unionize.

(Of course, I would also like to see them able to unionize if they do see benefit from it)

True, and I definitely don't mean to deny the existence of illegitimate union-busting efforts.

I used to think that, but then some new grads at Google decided to start one. I think the head of their union has only been in the workforce for about a year.

Unions are awful. They come in the guise of protecting people, and protecting employees, but they quickly become a weapon against non union employees - if you don’t join the union can’t work here. Which pressures people to agree with union groupthink in order just to have a job. To hell with unions. All unions are bad.

How can the union stop the employer from hiring non-unionized workers?

In most union workplaces, one of the first contract demands is exclusivity, where the employer can only hire members. This is referred to as a " closed shop" [1] When a closed shop forms, works have a choice to join or leave. Some places allow non-union workers, but they must pay part of their salary to the union. This is called and "agency shop" [2]

For example, if you become a police officer and do not choose to join the union, you must still pay fees which are spent by the union on political lobbying.

I am generally pro union but think that all unions should be optional to the workers.

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

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

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/free-books/employee-...

Well, since the Taft-Hartley act of 1947 banned closed shops, I'm not sure that that's really the first of contract demands anymore, at least in the US.

You’re right, I mixed it up with union shop, which is very similar

It demands that all members pays a fee to the union, which is essentially the same thing. The big problem is that there can only be one union per workplace in US if at all, so workers have to vote etc. You can't just pick the union fitting yourself best and keep the union as you move between companies, instead USA ties your union to your job like it does everything else. Why tie healthcare, union and a lot of other unrelated things to your job? Doesn't make sense, and as we see unions in USA where they have this nonsense rule are much less popular than unions in Europe where you mostly stick to the same union your entire career.

Interesting. I believe this would be illegal in my country (Norway). There's often only one union, but membership is entirely voluntary (and you don't have to pay fees if you are not a member). I think the only trade where membership levels is close to 100% is the elevator fitter union which is known to be a very strong and "militant" union.

But I think the main reason why we have higher unionization rate in Europe especially northern Europe/Scandinavia is that the relationship between labour and capital is almost legalized. There's rules in place that dictate when tariffs should be negotiated and how they are negotiated, what kind of leverage the parties can use and when they can use it. In other words, the relationship between labor unions and employer organizations are regulated. Seems to work quite good, but it is a product of history and can probably not be emulated directly somewhere else.

The problem is when anecdotes about isolated abuses are used to reject unions outright rather than looking at whether unions as a whole would benefit society.

You could argue from personal experience that you went to a bad school therefore all schools are bad, or you had a bad experience with <insert skin color, ethnicity, or religion> therefore all people of that sort are bad.

It's just not very convincing.

For every anecdote of an isolated case of union abuse, there are probably hundreds of unheard cases of corporations abusing their workers. But that doesn't matter for most people, simplistic logic says therefore all unions are bad and capable of corruption, and ignoring that most of the time, the status quo is far, far more exploitative for the average worker. Once again, perfect becomes the enemy of good, and conditions do not improve.

Wage theft is the most common crime in the US, is estimated to occur to ~20% of all employees and equal tens of billions a year, and no one talks about it.

How many union members do you think experience wage theft?

The US Department of Labor takes wage theft very seriously. If you report it to them, at no cost to yourself, they will investigate it and almost certainly scare your boss shitless so he'll never try it again.

Probably they could do a better job of advertising this to workers. Many workers experiencing wage theft probably are not aware of their options, and that's a problem. But when used, it works. I've seen it work.

> The US Department of Labor takes wage theft very seriously.

As, often, do state labor authorities.

If they take it so seriously, why is it so underused? I don't think this is a lack of information; people who are highly precarious can't take these kinds of risks, even if they're just percevied.

There are all kinds of de jure considerations that purport to protect workers, but they fail without an organization by and for workers to actually ensure they're enforced.

The first real job I had was the first time I saw the efficacy of the Department of Labor. I was working at a bean processing plant; semi trucks with trailers full of fresh green beans from the fields dropped beans off at the plant where they were cleaned (my job was to pick out the bits of small animals the harvesters chewed up), chopped, cooled, and loaded onto another truck. The entire operation hinges on the trucks arriving just in time.

Well sometimes a truck is late, that's just the way the world works. In one of those cases, my boss asked us to stay at the plant an hour late; the truck driver was on the phone and said he'd be there shortly, but we had nothing to do but sit around on our asses twiddling our thumbs. One of my coworkers, more experienced than me, asked if we'd get paid while waiting. My account of the conversation that followed:

Boss: "Well uh, we're all just sitting here doing nothing so.."

Coworker: "The Deparment of Labor says..."

Boss: "WHOA WHOA WHOA! I was just kidding of course you'll get paid!"

Immediate backtrack. He turned on a dime as soon as he realized there were workers who knew their rights. I think information is the key. There is no substitute for workers knowing their rights.

For some union members the dues achieve the same result.

  How many union members do you think experience wage theft?

Essentially all do, when "dues" are mandatory.

It is a matter of incentives.

To substantiate and engage PR over abuse of workers by a corporation, the livelihood of individual workers who give witness to the allegations are at stake.

To substantiate and engage PR over abuse of the public weal, customers or the corporation by a union, usually no one's livelihood is threatened by giving witness.

It isn't surprising abuses by unions are easier to publicize and and more commonly substantiated. This dynamic will not change until workers have the equivalent of FU money. Or like in one sci-fi story I read, a genetic mutation causes everyone to fix chlorophyll in their pigmentation and get all their minimum bodily energy requirements by standing around in the sun for a few hours each day, and have to be convinced to work. I suspect a more near-term, practical direction is some solution along the lines of an intentional community co-op.

> isolated abuses

It's not isolated abuses, it's a feature of unions.

I think the point should have more nuance. Nobody looks at enron's abuses and says corporations are blanket bad (okay, many do, but not most). Nor do they say enron's abuses were fine because corporations as a whole benefit society. Most look at enron and say corporations have the potential to do good or bad, so let's figure out how to keep them from going bad.

It's not unions good or unions bad. The focus should be on how to get unions that don't lead to the abuses people are afraid of. When it comes to unions, the discussion seems to be much more take-it-or-leave-it.

People do look at multi-level marketing schemes and label them as blanket bad. Unions are an organizational strategy just like MLM schemes are. One relies on the Shirky principle to stay alive, the other relies on people wanting to be fooled. Both are a con with opportunists hovering overhead.

It’s not “anecdotes about isolated abuses.” Even parents I know who are solidly on the left are outraged by how completely inflexible teachers’ unions have been during the pandemic. Even people I know who are ardent Democrats in states like Illinois grumble quietly about the government having no money because they’re crushed under pension obligations.

The problem is that, in the US, most peoples’ experiences with unions is with public unions, which are the worst kind of unions: https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2019/10/29/coolidge-and-...

> For decades, that was the mainstream Democratic view, too. “The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt affirmed in 1937.

"It's not only anecdotes" and giving more anecdotes isn't an argument.

They said "It’s not anecdotes __about isolated abuses__". At a certain point, anecdotes become universal experiences, and therefore inform general political views.

>At a certain point, anecdotes become universal experiences, and therefore inform general political views

In reality though we just went from one anecdote to two. We are unable to tell when something is universal experience just by hearing more anecdotes.

> In reality though we just went from one anecdote to two. We are unable to tell when something is universal experience just by hearing more anecdotes.

And even if we somehow got to negative universal experiences, those very well could be:

1. Part of a conscious tradeoff (e.g. firms being less profitable due to higher labor costs). A lot of anti-union rhetoric seems to amount to complaining about not being able to have one's cake and eat it too.

2. Artifacts of law (either direct or indirect) that could solved through legal reform. My understanding is that at least some of the "adversarialness" of US unions derives from the requirements of US law, and German unions (for instance) operate very differently (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany).

> Even parents I know who are solidly on the left are outraged by how completely inflexible teachers’ unions have been during the pandemic.

As a dueling anecdote, I know plenty of libertarian/right-leaning folks who privately tell me that they totally understand that teachers (regardless of unions) should not have to face a highly infectious disease in classrooms just so a bunch of double-income parents want to keep doing their office jobs over Zoom. The current problems have almost nothing to do with unions directly.

Though you don't need unions for that. Enough teachers at a local school refused to go in individually that the administrators were forced to make sane policies.

The plural of anecdotes is called data.

There are plenty of examples of unions being really bad in the US, the burden of proof is now on the other side of the court.

So you need a handful of people to tell you anecdotes of how a union helped them?

I'd welcome the testimony to cross-examine.

> The problem is when anecdotes about isolated abuses

What makes you jump to label that complaint an "anecdote" and an "isolated abuse" rather than evidence of structural rot and public union corruption?

Well, if you look at large-scale carefully controlled data, unionized firms tend to be at least 10% less productive than their non-unionized counterparts.[1]

The most defensible thing you can say about this is that the cost is primarily borne by the shareholders rather than the consumers. Thus you tend to see that the best unions for workers tend to be in large, established, highly profitable firms with little to no competition. A prime example are the American automakers before the 1980s when foreign competition kicked in. Working on the GM assembly line in 1970 was a very good job.

However Amazon is barely profitable as it currently stands. Since there's essentially no room for lower profitability. The only give is either higher consumer prices or deadweight loss, i.e. fewer customer and therefore fewer (but higher-paid) employees. That might not necessarily be a bad thing, especially to the extent that the average Amazon customer is wealthier than the average Amazon warehouse worker. But given Amazon's extremely thin profit margins, I don't really see anyway that consumers won't end up paying for the sizable bulk of the unionization costs.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001979399204600...

> unionized firms tend to be at least 10% less productive than their non-unionized counterparts

That's not entirely surprising. Unions aren't optimizing for company productivity, but for the conditions and pay of the workers. And conversely, a company can abuse its employees to a large degree while reaping productivity gains from it.

> However Amazon is barely profitable as it currently stands. Since there's essentially no room for lower profitability.

Amazon is "barely profitable" because of clever accounting. They rake in tons of money, and reinvest it into growth. There is plenty of buffer to eat the unionization costs. But of course Amazon may opt to pass these costs to customers instead.

Honestly, 10% is less than I would have thought, and is something I’d trade in a heartbeat for greater benefits.

That sounds like Unions doing their job really well. The entire point is for workers to better capture the value they create. From a combination of lower risks and or higher compensation.

Amazon’s warehouses for example have some serious safety issues which they largely ignore. One example being heavy items being stored in such a way vastly increase the risk of back injury. Stuff can be good for efficiency and a really terrible deal for workers.

Thank you for a well reasoned argument, and linked evidence. I do want to point out for anyone who does not click through the link that the study is focused on just one industry (sawmills) in one year. It may well be a solid contribution to a bigger story, but it should not be represented as necessarily generalizable to a very different company in a very different world

> Well, if you look at large-scale carefully controlled data, unionized firms tend to be at least 10% less productive than their non-unionized counterparts.[1]

It's not large scale or even necessarily generalisable. I don't think a study limited to 83 "Sawmills in the Western U.S." can be presented as an example of unionisation in general.

> However Amazon is barely profitable as it currently stands

Amazon actively avoids profitability... Modern economies do not reward profitability, they increasingly reward the promise of potential future profitability. Amazon is perfectly capable of earning a healthy profit, but it is actively incentivised not to in favour of chasing further growth. Uber, WeWork, and Doordash all exemplify this attitude; although it could be argued that they are incapable of profitability at all.

Companies are actively choosing to remain in the red in order to stack the house of cards that little bit higher, steal a little bit more of their market before they turn around and exploit the fragile and artificially inflated position they've bought their way into.

> The most defensible thing you can say about this is that the cost is primarily borne by the shareholders rather than the consumers.

Surely the most defensible thing is that the workers are fairly compensated and work in humane conditions? We seem unable to convince Western corporations to not use child or slave labour, but at least we don't attempt to justify it by saying "Iphones would be more expensive without Uighur work camps".

I totally agree with your concerns about people being kept in their job for unjustified reasons. I think it's something we've all had experience with.

At my first job, I had a horrible boss. A friend tried to speak up against him and was promptly fired. Turns out he was a relative of the CEO and was thus unfireable.

Just a few weeks ago I also spoke to someone who told his experience of reporting someone for sexual harassment at a major tech company, just to learn that they were well aware of it but refused to do anything because of good performance.

We should absolutely consider the role uninions can play regarding unfirable employees. Being able to push the company to get rid of them can have a huge impact on the well-being of workers.

If sexual harassment really exists a lawyer will be glad to help. Companies that don't take care of it end up in big trouble - to your lawyers advantage.

Sexual harassment is one of several things that the legal system takes seriously.

I think the fact that you read that message and this was your conclusion is kind of concerning.

Either way getting a restraining order or whatever on someone you work with is definitely not going to improve your situation, if you can even prove it in the first place.

Surely the lawyer would be for pursuing a lawsuit, not a restraining order.

That's just objectively false. Look at all the cases of sexual harassment coming out where the perpetrator had been doing it for decades to dozens of people without any consequences.

Getting sexual harassment claims taken seriously is an uphill battle and often harms the careers of the people who complain.

I agree, but staying silent is not the answer.

Google employees walked out to protest the golden parachute offered to two serial sexual harassers on their executive team and the conditions that allowed people like them to rise consequence-free through the ranks at the company.

That you believe it's a "fit" thrown for causes that "don't connect with the average person" is reflecting pretty poorly on your priorities. Nobody wants to believe your boss is skipping over you for promotions because you rejected their sexual advances.

The most recent drama was about a researcher having her quitting ultimatum called by a manager. It wasn’t anything to do with sexual harassment or anything about underpaid or unsafe workplaces.

Google has a white supremacy problem. The James Damore incident was a highly public display of that internal tension. It's a sign they have made little progress resolving it with the firing of Timnit Gebru, an eminently qualified data scientist that focused her work on that exact issue.

A union is not just about how "highly paid" employees are, it can help protect employees from those kinds of institutional deficiencies.

And this is the problem with the Google Union. The ideologies already commanding way too much of the discussion are going to be hyper-empowered by the union.

By 2025 I imagine that if you Google "conservative" you'll instantly have all your Google Services wiped, get banned from the platform, and be reported to the Progressive Thought Technology Alliance Union, so that Twitter and AWS can do the same to you.

> The most recent drama was about a researcher having her quitting ultimatum called by a manager.

No, it wasn’t. Even to the extent that might be considered a superficially correct description of part of what happened, its not the center of the “drama”, which is more centrally about the treatment which led up to that.

But that’s the point. The “treatment leading up to that” was a mid 6 figure income and nearly free reign to do research in her field of interest. Not relatable to most of the lower or middle class in the US.

> The “treatment leading up to that” was a mid 6 figure income and nearly free reign to do research in her field of interest.

No, the proximately preceding treatment was restrictions on her research that were inconsistent with those imposed on other Google AI researchers (the extent to which that is due to its subject matter, the extent to which it is due to her internal advocacy on gender and race issues, and the extent to which it is due to her own race and sex is unclear.)

> Not relatable to most of the lower or middle class in the US.

Being singled out for adverse treatment either for raising issues related to gender or race equity or for one’s gender or race are, actually, quite relatable to lots of the lower and middle class in the US, certainly including those in that group who are also black and/or women.

It being about her gender was heavily disputed even inside of Google. The only thing that can be agreed on was that her research publication was restricted by Jeff Dean and co.

The fact that there isn’t really any direct evidence of gender bias in this case is why this is so unrelatable.

A likely millionaire being asked to defer a last minute publication is not even something that would register as an annoyance to the huge portion of the US workforce that doesn’t give two shits about their job.

Ironically or perhaps not your entire comment reads like pure anti-union propaganda. Sure unions protect bad apples but it also protects decent people from being treated unfairly by employers who in this country have overwhelming power over their lives.

Would you also throw out all welfare systems because a handful of people abuse the system?

> Police unions may protect bad apples via union.

I think it's pretty clear that at least some police unions work strongly against the interests of society -- but I haven't seen any evidence that they work against the interests of their members.

Sure, if you're an honest cop it probably stings that a murderer can collect his pension like nothing happened; but on the other hand, you know the same protection would be available to you if you were accused.

Or consider that, famously, the NYPD doesn't consider itself beholden to the Mayor. I can't believe that attitude would work without the union. And the unions can also very publicly take political positions that are contrary to their employers' or even the majority of the citizenry -- which looks to me like a serious demonstration of power.

At least in the case of police unions in the US, I can't see how they are a negative example from the point of view of people who might end up as union members.

How are any of those things bad?

You need to look after your interests first. Your anecdotes do that. It's not your job to make sure everyone has a "fair" life. You job is to make sure you get as much as you can. That's what capitalism is.

> The real rule should be all poorly compensated folks paid $14/hr or less should automatically be in unions. That's where the real need is.

This way they get to be compensated at 12/hr

All workers should be in unions. With few exceptions, workers collaborating forms the basis of their power vs management. Management has money and the ability to wait out vs an individual that needs a job. Only groups of employees can successfully negotiate for major concessions outside of rare circumstances. An older tradition that would be even better is unionization on an industrial/sectoral scale so you don't even need to unionize your current workplace and workers across the industry can enforce demands.

Your politicians do nothing, your bosses do nothing. What do you have to lose? Fight for what you need together.

Unions are absolutely necessary but I think the situation is more complicated. From the perspective of the company, dealing with unions is expensive and time consuming. It'd be better just to give employees fair benefits and pay without dealing with a union. But if there's no union, only the threat of unionization incentivizes actually following through.

Similarly for workers, no one wants to have to work harder to be treated fairly along with paying the overhead of unionization. What you end up with is an unstable equilibrium for the creation and destruction of unions.

“All workers should be in unions”: as the owner of a business with 2 employees, I respectfully disagree.

> The propaganda unfortunately also comes from folks direct experience with unions. In the US, most unions are public sector. So folks see that

That's like arguing against private business by citing anecdotes about people's direct experiences with car dealerships and Comcast.

Schools have been kept and are largely opened during the pandemic in Europe. I think the common understand is that kids need to go to school, there's no way around it.

After summing all factors unions are still a positive influence.

It's undeniable that sectors with strong unions provide better working conditions to employees than comparable sectors without unions.

American unions are quite different from European unions. European unions spend a lot of time running apprenticeship programs and doing things like advocating for more productivity. Like trying to figure out how to make the shop floor more efficient. American unions spend time preventing bad employees from being fired (like the NY teacher's rubber rooms and police unions fighting the firing of cops with 5 excessive force violations). Or spend time advocating for extra unneeded employees or forbidding employees from doing two different job roles. You can watch the longshoreman's season from the Wire for illustration. It's supposed to be a defense of unions, but accidentally illustrates why they are utterly broken in the US.

There is a use for unions that advocate for increased pay and clearer benefits. But as constructed and run in the US they are poison to the company. A whole layer of weird incentives the company (and workers!) have to deal with. A lot of the sinister sounding anti-union education the companies do points this out. And there's enough truth that it's very effective.

Pro union folks are always tweeting that companies spending $1 million to avoid an extra $100,000 a year in labor costs is evidence of a widespread conspiracy by the man to keep the working class down. Really the union is like adding a whole extra layer of horrible bureaucracy that costs way more than that $1 million. From that viewpoint shutting down a store or warehouse that unionizes make perfect sense.

So how do we get european style unions here in america? How is it that they are able to avoid those issues and what lessons can we take that aren't "america just can't do unions right."

It would be great.

I sometimes think that something like a "credible threat of peace" would be useful.

"We are forming a union. If you vote for this union, we will allow workers here to chose other unions. We will never get in the way of firing someone. We will never create job roles that don't let workers move laterally or up. You can lay people off. We will not use our members money for political campaigns. Our workers can move into management without us freaking out.

We will advocate for more pay, benefits, productivity, and training."

Pretty sure that union would be so weak as to be worth disbanding.

Seek to be useful rather than powerful is good advice for people and organizations.

Repeal Taft-Hartley.

"The Taft–Hartley Act amended the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), prohibiting unions from engaging in several "unfair labor practices." Among the practices prohibited by the act are jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns. The NLRA also allowed states to pass right-to-work laws banning union shops. Enacted during the early stages of the Cold War, the law required union officers to sign non-communist affidavits with the government. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act

I think part of the stark difference in how unions operate is due to the societal pressures applied to them. All of those "good" unions that would help advocate for employee education and protect workers who were unjustly fired were easier to brand as socialist and ended up being broken up as they failed to devote all of their power towards politics and staying alive. This ends up contributing to that image that unions don't do anything since, in the US, they are constantly maligned by politicians and the press - and since anything even loosely connected to communism (like, here, collective bargaining) has to fight an unhill PR battle in the hearts and minds of Americans.

Unions should exist to serve their workers and the fact that most public unions gain the most power by constantly funneling money into political campaigns is a real problem that just leads back to election finance laws.

i mean, yeah, is it really a surprise? most of the purpose (in terms of "the purpose of a thing is what it does" thinking) of organized labor in the US is basically countering ridiculous labor conditions: child labor, not having weekends, etc. when that didn't work, in came the police and the pinkertons (read: violence by the state on behalf of capital, or just violence via capital itself). so it's no surprise that the relationship is adversarial.

plus, i don't really buy this anti-union propaganda. there's a strong correlation between between union membership going down and wealth inequality going up. i didn't say that was causation, but is it interesting enough to warrant consideration? hell yes it is.

i'm guessing most people on this sites are of engineering mind, where they see an "unnecessary" layer of abstraction upon something as worth refactoring out. well... this ain't really in that lane, you see. it turns out that capital is so powerful in the 21st C. that they can straight up move your job to a country with worse environmental and labor regulations, and we all cheer it on in the name of "efficiency". little do we appreciate that that attack on labor is rotting the hell out of the country itself.

1965 was 56 years ago. Unions need to be relevant for 2021.

>> European unions spend a lot of time running apprenticeship programs

Trade unions in the US do exactly that

Unions in the US and unions is Europe are completely different. In one they cooperate to see that the company succeeds...and in the other they seek to drive up the cost of doing business to the point that shitty products are extremely expensive (GM, Ford).

Unions used to be for protecting the workers and ensuring that companies were getting the very best skillsets when hiring. Now they protect the lazy, promote the well connected and drain efficiency from businesses. Longshoreman are the most shining example of how to destroy businesses...Port of Portland is now shuttered because they intentionally slowed down work to the point of forcing companies to go elsewhere. ILWU was hit with a $19M judgment because of the things it did in Portland.

The quality of a union is a function of membership engagement and organizational structure. Shitty unions, shitty companies, these are all who is in charge and how they're governed and the transparency available.

Better to admit we need better operating models for unions (and that unions need to work in partnership with management to create sustainable relationships and businesses), rigorous governance and oversight of them, and that that is likely superior to the current situation of labor's collective power to continue to erode over the last four decades. Not only does labor need a seat at the table, employee ownership should be strongly encouraged through policy (this also financially aligns incentives between management and labor, which is a good thing imho).

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

But in many cases you can't choose which union you have to do business with. Do work at this location you have to do business with this union. Many examples of unions fighting other unions because they think they should get the work.

I agree that better operating models could exist (more like European ones)...but the current unions in the US have a lot to lose by doing so.

It is also a function of "closed shop" unions in the US. Rarely do you get to pick a union to join when you work at a company; if the company workers are represented, it is often exclusively by a single union.

The result is that unions have the exact same leverage over employees as the companies themselves do, and do not often have sufficient accountability. It is not as simple as voting a union out once it has gotten in, and it takes on a life of its own.

Also, stories like SEIU collaborating with the DFL in Minnesota to get family members of disabled adults declared "in home caretaker employees" of the state so that the union gets a cut of the disability benefits is terrible. There are surely good things that unions can do, but that doesn't mean they are an intrinsic good, or that they are appropriately structured in the US.

Edit: reference: https://www.thecentersquare.com/minnesota/after-trump-rule-c...

So, it sounds like you're agreeing with me? Collective action is admittedly work. The alternative is, as we've seen, worse in my opinion.

https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/

> From 1979 to 2018, net productivity rose 69.6 percent, while the hourly pay of typical workers essentially stagnated—increasing only 11.6 percent over 39 years (after adjusting for inflation). This means that although Americans are working more productively than ever, the fruits of their labors have primarily accrued to those at the top and to corporate profits, especially in recent years.

> Rising productivity provides the potential for substantial growth in the pay for the vast majority. However, this potential has been squandered in recent decades. The income, wages, and wealth generated over the last four decades have failed to “trickle down” to the vast majority largely because policy choices made on behalf of those with the most income, wealth, and power have exacerbated inequality. In essence, rising inequality has prevented potential pay growth from translating into actual pay growth for most workers. The result has been wage stagnation.

https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/declining-worker-pow...

> "Declining unionization, increasingly demanding and empowered shareholders, decreasing real minimum wages, reduced worker protections, and the increases in outsourcing domestically and abroad have disempowered workers with profound consequences for the labor market and the broader economy."

There's a distinction between collective action and government-sanctioned monopolies on labor. It's one thing for workers to bargain collectively. It's another thing when the government prohibits the company from finding another labor pool, and effectively gives the union a monopoly on labor. The latter is when corruption runs rampant, and unions have no competition.

I actually know a bit about the german union model.

A couple of factors - the overall labor force is pretty highly educated and skilled - so less free riding overall.

Strong social safety net - so folks not suited to a job have a place to land with health care etc.

a MUCH more cooperate relationship with management -> the unions in Germany at least also want productivity / common sense stuff.

In the US, you can have totally illogical and inefficient work rules and unions will keep them on purpose just to drive up bargaining power, even though it hurts everyone (ie, being able to no show for work with no call etc).

Not all of europe is the same. The french unions have a different approach than german unions etc.

When I refer to the European model I'm probably talking about the German model. Many years ago the articles I was reading had been going over the VW union so it was likely Germany. The cooperation part and inefficiencies you mention are exactly the problem. Here in the US the union and company are enemies that battle each other...and like you say illogical rules that just benefit the union.

That's a bit of a special case as well - historically overall good relationship even when there were cuts / restructuring in 2017.

Situation is very different in places like greece / italy / france even with much more militant unions and more protectionism for sectors. So it's def not EU wide.

---

“I cannot complain about the cooperation with the works council,” VW brand chief executive Herbert Diess said at a news conference, citing “very constructive” dealings with the unions.

VW’s mass-market brand has been undergoing heavy restructuring since it agreed with the works council on plans to cut 3.7 billion euros ($4.41 billion) of costs per year from 2020 and slash 23,000 jobs in Germany via natural attrition.

Unfortunately the US auto unions try to capitalize on the good nature and cooperation of the VW union to say that they should unionize the VW plant in Kentucky or Tennessee (I think that was where it was). Saying that VW has unions already so it would be no different...except everyone that knows anything knows better.

Greece has terrible unions, but many of those seem to be the public unions like teachers and transportation workers.

"Port of Portland is now shuttered because they intentionally slowed down work to the point of forcing companies to go elsewhere."

Unions should be everywhere, so these companies could not escape them by relocating.

Capital trying to feel the country should also be taxed heavily for the same reason.

Sounds like a planned economy. We know how well that works.

China has been doing okay using that sort of high level planning, where the government supervises a lot of the economy and limits the movement of capital.

You really think that? Talk to any of the chinese citizens that have fled the country to live elsewhere. Certain parts of how that government runs may look good from afar, but not if you are actually living under their rule.

I don't think the people have it good, but the economy has grown massively for ~40 years running.

That "sort of planning". But are they requiring unions, taxing all companies and preventing capital from fleeing?

No.

China has the strictest capital controls there have ever been.

The other stuff, sure no, but I wondered if you were making a broader point about a controlled economy, which would be a point that China increasingly contradicts.

Now China has capital controls but that's a more recent development.

They went to the port of Seattle and LA...same union but different local leadership. They weren't much better, but better enough to relocate and pay to truck goods up and down the I5 corridor.

>Unions used to be for protecting the workers and ensuring that companies were getting the very best skillsets when hiring.

Labor unions in the US formed primarily to combat exploitation by employers, often in the face of great oppression and cronyism that led to literal bloodshed[0]. This is one of the reasons unions can't be part of the companies their members work for, unlike in Europe. Unions in Europe formed from trade unions that had a longstanding history in European economy. That said, all you have to do is look at union activity in France, where there seems to be nationwide strikes every year, to dispel the myth that they are somehow more cooperative or amenable to making concessions.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

French are no measure for strikes, as somebody living just across the borders the norm is some form of strike few months per year, every year. Colleagues can't get to work, public transport goes to standstill so everybody drives (very ecological).

Its a double edged sword at best - government is properly afraid of the citizens. But overall the economy suffers badly. This is just a small part of overall french 'package' - high social benefits, its extremely hard to fire people, tons of paid holidays days per year, early retirement etc. Result is startups start elsewhere, companies move away whatever they can (even state semi-owned like car industry). Another result is tons of monopolies, which distort the market and make very small amount of citizens profit at he cost of everybody else.

Economy is weak compared to Germany, I would say salaries are 1/2, although there shouldn't be the reason - big smart well educated population. But then comes the french mentality and way of doing things...

I think you mean exploitation.

i did ty

what I'm astonished by is the degree to which American firms are allowed to sabotage unionisation efforts despite, as I understand it, the US actually having similar protections for workplace assembly as other Western countries.

If you tried interfere with unions here in Germany you'd run up against the law, the media and so on very, very quickly, it's one of the things you don't want to screw with.

It isn't surprising once you reframe the issue. These unions are successfully suppressed for the exact same reason that people are inclined to form them. The labor class in the US simply doesn't have (or perhaps more accurately doesn't yield) the political power that the labor class does in many other countries. The forming of unions will help them get more power, but the act of creating a union already requires a certain level of power which many US workers haven't yet achieved.

That is by design, really. The working poor in this country have been ideologically divided by moral wedges such as abortion for decades now. Few poor republicans and poor democrats would like to admit that they are in the same economic boat, and as a result typically the former votes against their own economic interest on the grounds of their moral principles.

For the wealthy in this country, the political footballism is the perfect machine to ensure their position on the economic ladder remains at it's lofty heights, and inequality continues to widen by the year. I really don't think republicans like Mitch McConnel care at all about an issue like abortion, they just use it to drum up votes from their base in order to further their economic policy goals.

> Few poor republicans and poor democrats would like to admit that they are in the same economic boat

They might agree that they're in the same boat, but they'll disagree with why they're there.

Poor democrats will blame corporations for keeping wages low and sending jobs to China and lack of government assistance programs. They think the solution is to increase taxes on the rich to provide better social programs.

Poor republicans will blame illegal immigrants for stealing their job, or they somehow think the government is in their way. They think the solution is to cut taxes on the corporations to create jobs (regardless of the fact that this never works).

The labor class has tons of power. The labor class just doesn’t care much for unions in the US.

I'm not, most politicians receive large campaign contributions from large corporations and lobbying groups. It's a largely quid pro quo system that's one step away from legalized bribery.

Lots of states in the US have "right to work" laws which make it much harder to workers to organize unions.

Entirety of EU has right to work laws, that isn't the problem. The problem is that you even need to vote for a union in US instead of just letting workers join them as individuals.

There's a long history here. The American labor movement secured a lot of those protections in the early and mid-20th century, and they were strong for several decades. It was a hard, violent fight. People died at strikes for those protections.

As we entered the 80's and 90's with the rise of Reaganism and then neoliberalism, however, US businesses as well as the federal and state governments started chipping away at them. Now, between insufficient oversight, "right-to-work (spare me)" laws, lack of NLRB enforcement, and a robust cottage industry of private-sector union-busters, labor has less power in America than it's had in a long time.

It's good to see it start to change.

> It was a hard, violent fight. People died at strikes for those protections.

Just a personal anecdote, my biological grandfathers trunk was firebombed by the Philly Roofers Union (UURWAW) due to a dispute with them. The K&A gang in that area is well known to be tied into the union[0] and was known to fairly regularly engage in violence like that to prevent "scabs". My point being, the violence was omni-directional and this fact is often omitted by those in favor of unions.

[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K%26A_Gang#Roofers'_Union_corr...

Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I've heard a major difference is that in Europe you generally have a choice of multiple competing unions, vs. the US where you're generally in or you're out.

The competition forces the unions to remain focused on the desires of the general population, otherwise they just lose membership.

Not really, at least in the UK. You can join any union that will have you, and there are several big 'general' unions. But most employers will only recognise a single union (if that) per group of workers.

So, if you're an academic like me, you can join the University and College Union, and there will be a local organisation, probably a collective bargaining agreement with the university, and so on. Or join a different union and get no local representation and only 'central office' services. There are some places with multiple recognition (when I worked in local government Unison, GMB and the T&G were all recognised, with membership strengths in different parts of the council) but it's often just one. And that's if you're lucky: many employers recognise no unions.

Of course, the UK also doesn't have the closed shop (union membership is strictly optional) so there is a competition between member and not-member that keeps some pressure on the union organisation. And each European country has its own traditions of union organisation and different working cultures, so this probably doesn't extend outside of Britain.

Fairly similar in Norway, but many of the "competing" unions both have agreements with the employer organization. My wife actually switched union because the other union had an agreement which allowed a certain type of shift schedule that the other union did not have.

> I think it's a good trend to see them happening at big tech companies

Isn't the trend the rise of 'big' companies. I wish there were a lot of small/medium companies, instead, that were competing for workers, then we won't need 'solutions' like unions.

Looks like we are just accepting these 'big' companies as fact of life and moving on to finding solutions to deal with them.

"I wish there were a lot of small/medium companies..." I hear this from a lot of different circles, and I'm not trying to target you, just more or less generically voicing my frustrations. If people wish there were more small/medium companies in the US, then by all means, go to your county courthouse and officially establish a business. You could found a sole proprietorship just to get started. I own a side business and I'm part of ownership at my main job. It's a lot of work, but worth it. If you feel you have a good idea and a good way to form and keep a customer base, then nobody is stopping you. That's one of the greatest aspects of living in the US. And since I'm on my rant now, I often times hear something along the lines that people need to form together to combat something they feel isn't fair in their place of work. While I sympathise with that, I also know for a fact that there aren't a lot of CEO's out there that are waking up asking themselves how they can screw over their employees - that just isn't how the world works. How it does work is often times when times get tough, more than not CEO's and other C-Suite managers will put their own assets on the line to ensure the company can make it through a rough patch. If the rough patch is looking more like the norm, then they may have to make really tough decisions to let some people go. That sucks for them because they're losing talent to (potentially) a competitor. Last thing: if people really don't like that company X doesn't give them some perk - whether that's forming a union or even giving away free popcorn, then start looking for a job that does that stuff!!! Don't expect your employer to just make those changes. Sorry for the rant, but I think it's important to share a view from a different perspective.

I'm down for unions, but don't want a single cent of my pay to go to one. This is why I actually enjoy 'right to work' states.

Google didn’t unionize. Their “union” isn’t federally certified and they have current membership of 700/250000 workers. Google is under no obligation to work with them on anything. In the future, they could get a majority of workers agree to have a union represent them but that’s not the case at this time. What the Google union did was obstruct real unionization efforts at Google.

Source: https://www.wsj.com/amp/articles/googles-fake-union-insults-...

I agree with the general thrust of this, but it seems misleading to describe an organization belonging to CWA Local 1400 as fake or not really a part of the labor movement. For better or worse, the labor movement believes these kinds of non-majority pressure groups count as real unions.

The fact that google's union needs to be federally certified and isn't also says something about unions: they are a monopoly in the bad sense. Either the union doesn't need federal certification, or it should automatically be.

It's hard to compare Google's "union" to this one. This one would be much more like the old factory workers banding together. The people at Amazon make far less than the people at google and often don't have the luxury to think about "societal concerns" they just want to put food on the table. I think all around it's good, but this would be a much different type of union and probably better be much larger or it will get squashed quickly

I’m sure Amazon can justify non union stand by one of their Leadership Principles.

Have you read anything about the Google "union"? It is a basically a joke that .0001% of the company signed in on. You shouldn't use it as a data point on any kind of trend.

where can i learn more about the union activities at amazon in europe?

The problem is that EU cannot be considered as a whole. What you see in particular markets can largely differ one from another - what you have in UK, doesn't apply to France. What you have in the latter, doesn't apply to Germany, and so on...

Unions in Europe represent individuals and not companies. Anyone who wants can join a union and let the union represent them. Therefore there is no point in trying to hurt unionization efforts etc, because there is no switch to flop, workers will slowly go there if they feel they benefit from it.

Fortunately most tech employees, including most Google employees, understand that unions don’t make any sense for them. Warehouse employees are very different, and it might make more sense there.

Google and Amazon unions represent quite fundamentally different kinds of organizing principles.

The Amazon union is of the much more classical form, is well past due, it's not entirely necessary, but it would be beneficial.

I don't actually think that regular Google employees should be unionized, rather, it should be the non-technical staff, contractors and so many people not in privileged positions that should be probably be unionized to the exclusion of the talent, who want to form their union for entirely different reasons. I do not believe that the Google Union is oriented towards helping those who actually are powerless.

Google technical staff are the most privileged and well taken care of workers literally in the entire world.

So whether workers should be allowed to unionize should depend on which changes they are fighting for? Where's the line of powerlessness a union's beneficiaries need to be under in order for the union to be valid in your perspective?

It seems like the main actions taken by the Google employees' union so far have been to push the company to behave more ethically, not to enhance their already-significant (indeed, outrageous) privilege. I see that as using their privileged positions as leverage for positive change, and I hope they succeed.

The Google Union is being formed so that specific employees to try to parlay their version of ethics - the assumption being that what they think of as 'ethical' is universally applicable, but this is definitely not the case.

I don't trust Google Employees one bit more than I trust Google Management, as far as certain issues of ethnics, I'd much rather have intelligent and pragmatic regulation.

Also, I didn't really hint at 'what was within their rights' or not.

Finally, and ironically, if we're going to be concerned about 'ethics' it might start with tidying up their own household and using the tools of organizing like Unions for which they were intended, which is to say helping those who have no power i.e. the gazillion of 'secondary' actors at Google.

If Googlers want to have more influence I'm not sure the Union model is it, because far more often than not, it's a system of entrenched power that will use their base to carry out the wishes of the vanguard. Student unions for example, tend to take positions that are wildly inconsistent with what the average student would want, but voter participation is low, the system is opaque, and many students don't pay any attention and are just resigned to the system. I don't know what the answer is, but it's probably not a union.

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