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Comment by sudosysgen | Hacker News Reader

Unions are at least nominally directly elected by their constituents and beholden to them, which is why they are protected when engaging in politics.

If you think they do not represent them, then maybe the solution is to develop better union structures that are more democratic and representative.

But by and large, teachers do not support the Libertarian party and instead favour the Democratic party, quite heavily in fact. So why is it wrong that their alignment follows their base?

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Agree with your points.

However, using that line of thinking people voluntarily join a company too.

Often to work for a company with union rep one HAS to join, whether one agrees or not, so it’s not entirely voluntary in a strict sense.

All this said, I do believe Amazon is treating their warehouse workers unfairly and they deserve pushback though I admit I do not favor bringing in a Union due to my past member experiences with them.

The one time I worked in a union shop, I was told that I didn't have to join, but I did have to pay dues. If I chose to join, there were certain benefits provided by the union to members (optical coverage IIRC).

> people voluntarily join a company too

A choice between starvation and warehouse job at amazon where you’re penalized for taking a bathroom break is not a choice made freely.

I agree. We need better labor laws. I just don’t like having a middle woman or man in there because they have other motives.

How do you get better labor laws without middle men groups lobbying? The same Amazon workers have neither the time nor energy themselves.

In SV parlance unions are rent seekers. They are a bandaid over the symptom not the cure.

Unions do not rent seek. They provide value to society via higher wages and act as a counterbalance to externalities from capital.

They are indeed not a cure, but the cure to the symptoms we are seeing is nothing short of a total overhaul of the capitalist system, which is both not politically feasible, and requires something like unions to make politically feasible to begin with. That is because by definition such a changé even if it was in the larger interests of society wouldn't be in the interests of capital.

There were and are workers’ unions in communist countries. They didn’t always have their worker’ best interests in mind. Often they were a tool of the communist state to control workers. In addition sometimes you had student movements pitted against workers’ unions and so on.

Exploitation or at the minimum the potential for it exists in every economic system. It’s not a feature exclusive to capitalism as much as people dream it to be so. Even in a barter economy, can I not take advantage of another worker? Of course I can!

I never said that we should install Soviet socialism/state-capitalism, it's not a good system.

Workers unions in socialist countries were basically illegal, there was only one legally allowed union pretty much. In the Soviet Union the role of labour unions were mostly for the state to resolve interpersonal problems, and in theory to allow the state to receive feedback from employees to optimize production, but not in practice due to dysfunctions because of the broken political and economic framework.

"There were and are workers’ unions in communist countries." Most independent unions in those countries were/are destroyed. The "unions" in China, etc. or the former USSR were/are essentially arms of the Stalinist Communist Parties, and rarely if ever have any political independence or ability to oppose the employer (the state, or a company that the state has given privileges to).

I completely agree with you, but I think you might have replied to the wrong post.

I replied to yours because HN wouldn't let me reply to the child comment. Not sure why. Figured my leaf node would show up next to the sibling :-)

Minimum wage laws and excess credentialing can definitely be considered rent seeking.

Minimum wage laws are unrelated to unions, and prevent corporate rent seeking in welfare states.

Those activities only fit the definition of rent-seeking if you consider the value of labor as only what the market will bear. By that logic, if I offer a job at $5/hour and someone takes it, any attempt by that employee to get paid above $5 is "rent-seeking".

But that brings us right back to my original point: if my choice is starvation or $5/hour, I'm going to take the $5, but that's a coercive choice. I was forced into it by the threat of death. Now explain to me how that's different from holding a gun to someone and forcing them to work? You didn't determine the value of my labor, you determined that I don't want to die.

So an attempt to increase the cost of labor (minimum wages, credentialing/protectionism) is an attempt to extract the true value of labor, even though the threat of death-by-starvation remains. Like a previous commenter said - unless we want to radically re-org our society - that threat of death is irreducible. For example, if every person was granted enough arable land to subsist off of by the state, we'd see a very different labor market.

I agree but I have yet to see a better solution than unions. Companies will constantly use their influence to erode workers' rights and unions do levy a constant cost on society but it's a cost that's being paid to counter that otherwise imbalanced influence.

To repurpose a famous Churchill quote "Unions are the worst solution to labour equality except all the others that have been tried before."

There is a huge difference. People have no choice but to work, and once you are employed, you cannot have any democratic control over the company.

In contrast, for the union, even if you were forced to join, you'd still have democratic control over the union itself.

So there is a big difference. It's the difference between choosing in which dictatorship to live and living in a (sometimes direct!) democracy.

By that argument, Trump's behavior is OK because he was elected.

One thing I'd like to see is competing unions. The UAW supplies labor to the big three US automakers, putting them in an unfair negotiating advantage; the UAW can easily bully them around. The UAW ultimately hurt themselves because it put the Big Three at a big competitive disadvantage. Some manufacturing left for right-to-work states, and some business left for (mostly) Japanese automakers.

I think that could help. Some unions at least, like the UAW shoot themselves in the foot. It’s very adversarial from both sides and often the worker in the middle is the one who loses out. Example the steel industry. They made labor so expensive the companies folded. Admittedly the industry ran aged inefficient systems that made their process uncompetitive. But the Union only cared about protecting itself. The companies only cared about immediate profits.

That's not at all what happened to the steel industry. 50% of all US steel production capacity has been built in the past 30 years and steel production has seen continuous and massive improvements in productivity. In 1920 it took 3 man-hours of labor to produce 1 ton of steel in the US, now 1 man-hour produces 300 tons. The contraction in steel employment during the 70s coincided with a recession and the development of the electric arc furnace. From 1974 to 1999, global steel industry employment fell by 1.5 Million people with large decreases both in developed countries and developing countries like Brazil and South Africa as employment per ton of production fell everywhere. The actions of one union in one country had nothing to do with it.

Old outdated technology (not sure about the stance the unions had back then on productivity improvements that would lower headcount) plus outsized pay demands for the given the productivity.

Old and outdated compared to what? Outsized pay demands compared to whom? Everyone around the world switched to the new technology at the same time. Employment per production fell everywhere simultaneously. This was not a case of labor becoming too expensive, it was a case of labor becoming unnecessary.

In other countries (e.g. the UK), this is exactly how unions work.

The libertarian party supports School Choice, Actual Education for children, and less protectionism based on "seniority"

So it is no wonder that unionized teachers would oppose the Libertarian Party, libertarians want children to get a good education and allow parents to choose the type of education their child gets, taking away large amounts of power from Teachers who believe they should supplant parents and "know better".

This has never been more clear than in the Age of COVID where the hypocrisy of Teachers and their union has been on full display with their refusal to teacher (aka their job)

At best it's very arguable whether school choice results in children getting a better education.

I dunno. School isn’t primarily about academics. It’s mostly about moulding pupils, their minds to their current society. It’s mostly political in that sense. Whether it’s patriotism, community building, stressing this over that, etc.

The three Rs are kind of incidental.

Now to be clear, we do need to grow up to be functional adults, but public schooling is not the only one option to achieve that.

To be clear — when people refer to "school choice", they usually mean a system that funnels taxpayer dollars to private schools based on student attendance. Similarly, when people oppose "school choice", they usually oppose that appropriation of public funds specifically, not public school alternatives in general.

It's a sneaky name designed to make you conflate the two.

I always thought that school choice means a system that funnels taxpayer dollars to any school, public or private, based on student attendance. Parents can choose to send their children to public school, if they feel the outcome will be superior to alternatives.

That is what school choice is,

Every parent has a voucher, that voucher can be redeemed at a school of their choice, could be the public school, could be a private school, etc.

It is important to note that that voucher only has a fixed value so those parents choosing to send their children to private schools still need to make up the difference out of pocket. That results in a wide variety of school choice for the rich and a smaller number of choices for those less well off. This voucher results in funds being diverted from public schools while the capacity requirements on those public schools may not be impacted but there is a larger issue IMO. If the more influential parents move their children to private schools then the amount that voucher should cover becomes less important and various parties can argue to shrink the voucher as a cost saving measure - that will end up strongly effecting those residents with less wealth since the money they are paying toward the value of that voucher is being multiplied due to the effect of progressive taxation brackets - while the more affluent residents will end up paying less money overall the smaller the voucher is since their tax revenue is going to subsidize school vouchers at large.

School vouchers can easily lead toward incentivizing minimizing education spending.

Oh also, private schools are often not held to the same standards of avoiding religious teaching as public schools are (by virtue of being a public service). The result is that the vouchers can end up funding religious education, but that's a whole other can of worms.

It is worth noting that many area;s where this has been tried the private schools were more than capable of providing better education for the same money that the public schools do since the public schools are wasteful and have no incentive to spend tax payer money wisely

It is completely false to charatice a school choice program as "more choices for the rich" as the rich already have those choices, poor and middle class people have zero choice because their money has already been taken to fund the public schools. redirecting this money to better more efficient systems is preferred and gives the poor and middle class choice that is normally reserved for the wealthy

>> This voucher results in funds being diverted from public schools

yes, that is by design and the desired outcome of libertarians.

>>Oh also, private schools are often not held to the same standards of avoiding religious teaching as public schools are (by virtue of being a public service). The result is that the vouchers can end up funding religious education, but that's a whole other can of worms.

Another red herring and strawman, but I (and most libertarian) are fine with the limited amount of religious education that would result from school choice if it means dismantling the failed and unethical public school system we have today.

I am sure you are a huge supporter of the Public School System and see nothing systemically wrong with it. We disagree with this position

> I am sure you are a huge supporter of the Public School System and see nothing systemically wrong with it. We disagree with this position.

I do actually see a lot wrong with the school system, I think the fact that education is largely funded from local property taxes goes strongly against most ideals around American opportunity and that the highly localized management means that a cartel of local officials can run a system into the ground with only limited options available to the DoEd to address is quite problematic.

There's a bunch of things wrong with the school system, certainly, but I can't see how partial privatization would do anything but exacerbate the issues.

Public schools are by definition taxpayer funded, so I wouldn't describe allocating tax money to them as "funneling". And of course, absent school choice policies, parents are still free to send their children to private school — they just wouldn't receive public funds to do so (which is why the name is sneaky). But yes, you're correct.

If you are trying to espouse the virtues of Libertarianism I would say you're not doing a very good job.

People here are already set in their political tribes, if you were already a libertarian (or republican) then you just agreed with my post. If you are an Authoritarian you just down voted it.

Nothing I say will change anyone's minds on this topic, it is one of those things where no amount of data or facts will change minds. You either believe in a unionized Public school that only fails because we do not spend enough money, or you recognize that giving a monopoly over education to a group of people based on geography will always result in bad outcomes no matter how much money you spend.

I had heard Libertarians are bull-headed, self-righteous, think only they understand the facts, think everyone who disagrees with them are Authoritarians. I heard wrong.

By definition anyone that disagrees with Libertarianism is an Authoritarian.

While Libertarian and Authoritarian do exist on a spectrum in some ways, you are either on the Libertarian side of that spectrum or the Authoritarian Side.

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