Comment by saas_sam | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saas_sam | Hacker News Reader

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My anti-union sentiment arrived from my experience working with a large established union in an industrial plant. The union protected some of the worst, laziest, most unsafe workers I had ever witnessed in any job before or sense. It blew my mind how difficult it was to remove obvious bad apples, and how the best workers were forced to wait in years-long "seniority" queues before they could get promoted. I would get threatened with grievances for trivial acts like carrying a single lightbulb myself without a union worker.

Every institution has a STATED purpose and an ACTUAL effect. Institutions become inefficient, corrupt, decoupled from their original goals. What keeps institutions aligned with their stated--noble--purpose, is the institution's internal incentive structure. Unions often have very bad internal incentive structures.

I would be SHOCKED if you could not find counter-examples where unions are great. It's a big round world we live on where silver linings abound. For anything. To me, right now, I do not find pro-union activists persuasive in the slightest. But I am open-minded.

> I would get threatened with grievances for trivial acts like carrying a single lightbulb myself without a union worker.

That whole thing about requiring union workers to do tasks is stupid. One year I was attending a fan convention and decided to check out the rules for vendors. The convention center used unionized labor so one of the rules was that the vendors were limited to carrying like one case of stuff over to their spot. All other moving and setting up had to be done by the union workers. I get what the protection here is, it prevents loopholes for getting around using union workers at all (which, if it was possible to do, would make a union ineffective). But hell, why can't they pay the union workers as if they would have to do all the work but then let people decide if they want the union workers to actually do something or not?

The problem always comes down to bad actors.

If I, as a vendor, could have my people do the work of moving and set up and elect not to use the convention center staff, then there's a way to circumvent the convention center staff and fire them all.

You just hire a "vendor" with their own crew to do all the stuff. With no actual work to do, it's justifiable to fire the convention center staff.

If people weren't bastards, we wouldn't need such weird rules. But then again, if people weren't bastards, we wouldn't need unions either.

Why does a convention center have enough staff to do that setup? That seems wasteful in itself. Sure they need a few janitors to sweep up afterwords, and someone needs to know how to flip a tripped breaker, so they can't be staff free. However the needs of each event are different enough that staff for vendor setup doesn't really make sense.

Because the convention center might be one of the only source of jobs around

What do you think of the Screen Actors Guild? That seems to have been a huge win for workers in the industry, seemingly without the negatives you describe.

In general the Hollywood unions are very good for their members.

If there's a downside, it's that they used to act as a bit of a moat for the incumbent studios. Studios have entire departments devoted to processing issues raised by union members, which is of course expensive to do. And union members can only work on union productions, which meant tiny indie films could have problems getting talented people budget-wise. It's not just pay, it's meeting the requirements of the dictionary-sized "Basic Agreement" in terms of other aspects of production. That said, SAG has led the way to finding ways to accommodate smaller budgets and it's not as difficult as it once was.

It has a $3000 initiation fee that loads of people pay and never see the benefit of.

You will have to pay it just to do a short television appearance. It is certainly not worth that to everybody.

Then there are annual dues, whether or not you actually earned any money.

Then there's recent discussions of them kicking out long-standing members over their political views.

There might be a difference. Studios must first look for actors in the actors guild. That said, a studio has freedom not to use an actor. Similar, a studio does not need to use a bad script, and the studio does not need to pay a writer if it doesn't use the writer's work. In contrast, a factory has to pay for a worker, or even assign some work to the worker, no matter how bad this worker performs.

Which organizations have figured out how to handle their bad apples?

It’s not a binary outcome. Of course all large organizations will have people of varying types. But it’s an order of magnitude easier to clean house outside of government and union shops.

Am big fan of Peter Drucker. Believe management is a technology.

I'd LOVE for someone to research this. Case studies. Metrics.

My experience with unions has been mixed. Same with non-union shops. Recognizing that I'm just a simple bear, I haven't been able to figure out any rules for what works, or doesn't. My hunch is governance. eg Unions that are more democratic, accountable perform better. I have zero notions about what might make non-union shops better or worse.

All of the ones that last. If you don't handle your bad apples and your business requires generating a profit to survive, you will not prosper for long if you don't prune the bad apples (and you may not even survive, unless the business throws off such huge profits that it can afford to carry the dead weight).

It's as simple as "Please clean out your desk". Have you never seen The Apprentice? Do you believe that people never get fired?

Every non-unionized place I've worked suffers from many of the same problems. These are real problems, but don't outweigh the benefit of unions to people's material well being.

Have you worked in a large unionized organization? I've worked in both. Unions are worse.

My spouse (medicine) and several of my peers (journalism) have and they would disagree. Spouse has experienced both sides of the coin, and has seen better benefits and better pay in the unionized workplace than the non-unionized one. Very much the same story for my journo peers, but in their case, they unionized the workplace so the only variable that changed to improve their lifestyle was the introduction of a union -- not a change of location or management that a bad-faith FANG-worshipper would use to muddy the comparison.

I'm sure those aren't valid examples anyway, as the only unions that matter in discussions on this hellsite are the ones that also exist in Randian works of fiction.

> better benefits and better pay

You are only considering one side of the question -- and actually a limited form of that one side (namely, the material benefits/pay for the unionized employees).

What about the productivity of the firm and workers? The profits? The cohesiveness of the market strategy? The sense that the workers were participating in the success of the firm itself (and not the success of the union)? The creation of healthy relationships between management and labor?

It's probably beyond dispute that unions introduce a "middleman" between management and labor, but we are probably arguing about whether or not that middleman is (most often) a good or bad thing. (I do not dispute that sometimes unions can be healthy and might align its incentives with company success, but I tend to believe that this middleman is not usually a good thing except in extremely unhealthy companies -- perhaps like Amazon, and I must confess that in working with about 50 companies, of which less than 10 were union shops, I've never actually seen a union shop where labor didn't put union goals over company goals, to the detriment of both.)

I guess it depends what outcome you want, higher income inequality or not. I happen to think higher income inequality that directly follows from the lack of unions is a bad thing:

https://files.epi.org/charts/img/172988-21725.png

https://www.epi.org/publication/labor-day-2019-collective-ba...

The ultimate solution to wealth inequality is to destroy all wealth. Bring it to $0. Everyone's equal. Is that a win? Or is there perhaps more to the story worth considering than inequality? Overall wealth, number of jobs, ability to get hired and promoted...? If you have charts on those things I'd be interested.

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