Hacker News Reader

Comment by trianglem | Hacker News Reader

The only union in America that needs busting is the cops union. Low skilled work that doesn’t even rank in the top 20 most dangerous jobs. Bring on personal liability insurance and call it a day.

View on HN

Interestingly, in the UK the police are explicitly not allowed to unionize. The fire brigade are and have occasionally gone on strike.

Instead they have three different professional organisations, because the UK is ridiculously class-stratified: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_Federation_of_England_a...

> Superintendents and Chief superintendents are represented by a separate staff association, the Police Superintendents' Association of England and Wales (PSA),[3] while the most senior officers are members of the Chief Police Officers Staff Association (CPOSA).

You’re being downvoted because of right wing teamism that dang and company refuse to address or are not equipped to deal with.

And the teacher's union... which will not allow the firing of bad teachers ("reassignments"), resulting in mis-justice to student in US who then fail to get necessary skills to succeed in this world.

How about any public sector union? They do services that have no competition, allowing them to extract taxpayer money with no substitute providers.

I agree. I cannot think of a justification for public sector unions.

The typical pro-union argument for companies is that they protect workers against abuses by the company.

In the public sector, the union is supposed to protect workers from the citizens? I haven't ever heard of a good theoretical argument for them. Would be interested if someone knew of one.

I guess (?) that they protect low level civil servants from the whims of politicians and political administrative changes.

Perhaps public entities should not enter into collective bargaining agreements with public sector unions, but freedom of association is guaranteed in the constitution, it's not going to be possible to ban unions in the US.

There is no bigger abuser of workers than we the citizens. We don't intend to, but we do generally expect extraordinary results for a pittance investment of resources with all sorts of strings attached.

Public sector unions are fine.

US government spending was $6.5 Trillion last year. I think it's OK to expect extraordinary results for that amount of money.

Sure. Let's start with the police, and then we'll go after whichever next union is killing people across the country.

Edit: Your downvotes only make it more obvious that you don't really have a counterpoint to the police's homicidal tendencies nor their unions' participation in crafting legal protections for their actions.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com