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Comment by lnanek2 | Hacker News Reader

> once unions disappeared in america, the working man lost wages

I've worked the same role in union shops and non-union before. Non-union paid more and had less deadbeat co-workers to navigate around. Depends on your profession and skills, honestly. Probably a benefit for amazon pick and drop workers.

Really sucks at mixed union and non-union tech companies, though. At my current company programmers aren't even allowed to move our own computer between desks because only union people are allowed to do that, and getting the union people to do it will take over a week and be done at an inconvenient time interrupting work.

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> At my current company programmers aren't even allowed to move our own computer between desks because only union people are allowed to do that

This is also likely an insurance limitation as well. Where I work most employees are insured for basic injuries on site. Only those required to move equipment have the add on that they might move equipment weighing 50 lbs or more.

So if I move a desk that weighs 51 pounds and throw out my back, getting work to pay for it might be difficult because I should have gotten facilities to do it as they have the heavy weight add on.

The network cable I want to plug into a open jack doesn't weight 50lbs though. I've worked in places where I need a union electrician to do that task though. Fortunately the union was cool in that location and just ignored my crawling under my desk, I'm told in other offices they were a lot more strict.

I work in a secure facility, when not WFH due to the pandemic. Each jack is numbered, and my computer is tied to that number. If I plug into another jack, I won't connect. I have to get IT to move it for me because it requires them to make some changes to switches. We're not union, but have the same rules.

It feels like you're trying to blame the union for pretty standard practices at established companies.

Does an electrician configure switches at your facility?

I think this was a case where no reconfiguration was involved.

I work in a non-union office and we also have the same policy. I don’t think this reflects it all upon unions.

At non-union shops it's not like you can move your desk wherever you want either, most offices without hot desks have a floor plan and an office manager who all seating changes go through. Don't blame the union for that.

And this office is not an office with hot desks, and not every office even wants hot desks. The behavior of unions monopolizing a job type in a company is absolutely to blame.

I'm pretty sure the OP is talking about how the Union requires that the equipment transfer is only done by a union employee. And, you'd get fined if you did it yourself. I don't think they're talking about the process being complicated, but rather that the union forcefully inserts itself into the process.

I don't see that as an issue, I see that as a feature. What good is the union if a company can just remove union workers from the process in the name of "efficiency" or whatever metric increases profit at the expense of the employees? The other commenter complained it took a week to get a new desk. To me that's another great thing. That means the staff doing this sort of thing aren't over worked and have some agency to dictate their workload, and me as a worker would respect that system since I too benefit from this ability to collectively negotiate the terms of my job. Personally, I don't care if my company is running the most efficient operation, because usually that means overworking and underpaying your staff to do so.

The culture these policies create isn’t proactive and healthy. It’s hard to explain if you haven’t experienced it. It’s dismaying and demoralizing to see someone deliberately punt on their job for hours or days without trying to hide it, just because they can. It makes you want to work somewhere else before you turn into them.

I've seen that behavior all the time in my work experience and I've never been in a union job. There are shitty, frusterating, lazy workers in every job at every level, from entry level to the C level, and plenty of them find a way to not get fired and keep skirting by. I don't think saying workers can be lazy in a union is a very compelling argument, especially considering the collective negotiating ability the union gives you that will just be gone if everyone was left to negotiate with management themselves. I've set to see an argument against a union that couldn't simply be pointed to a non union workplace just as well.

Yes, I don’t think there is any argument you cannot simply assert against to the negative or nullify with the same argument against other kinds of organizations on the Internet.

Oh come on, no need for this cynical sentence that gave me a headache just to parse in the afternoon :)

The two big arguments I see against unions are

1. lazy workers

2. corruption

And in the case of 1., I mean come on. Lazy workers are everywhere union or no. In the case of 2., yes this happens. Wage theft from the worker by management happens probably a lot more, on the other hand. It impacts at least 1/3 of minimum wage earners in cities like LA and Chicago, and for those who have experienced a pay violation on average they loose out on 12.5% of their actual paycheck (1). Just look at the second page of this report and see the horrors for the working poor in our country who are under very little labor protections; all of these issues would have been stymied by a union protecting labor.

At least with a corrupt union you have some recourse where you can drum up internal support among similarly exploited people, and change your organization via vote. As a nonunion worker, in contrast, you can't do anything to enact change if management isn't playing ball with labor, short of quitting your job and losing any and all your benefits like healthcare in the process.

1. https://irle.ucla.edu/old/publications/documents/LAwagetheft...

Sorry, yes, that wasn't the best written sentence. :) I wouldn't actually say the problem is laziness. Developers are famously lazy. It's more of a problem of malignantly wielded protected status. A helpful analogy to the non-unionized world might be a manager's pet employee or a nepotic hire. A bad union environment systemically rewards this in addition to reducing wages through dues and reduced opportunity for good workers.

Wage theft is serious, but has enforcement paths independent of the presence of a union and if reform is needed, it should start there.

I am sympathetic to the plight of the poor but they can be harmed by labor practices supposedly friendly to them.

That kind of thing can happen in any work environment, frankly.

Sometimes people end up in the "yes I can do that" status group.

Could be they have union representation and contract rules that give them considerable agency coupled with low cost and risk.

Could be they are untouchable for some other reason too, principle friend, family, lover, child, sibling... Or, could be they have secured it through various relationships, power, leverage.

Unions do not cause this.

Poorly functioning workplaces can permit it to happen, and any workplace, union or not, can be poorly functioning for a ton of reasons, legal, contractual, managerial, financial...

Where that agency exists, sometimes people exercise it, simple as that.

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