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Comment by kethinov | Hacker News Reader

Saying you don't need a union because your wages are good is like saying you don't need democracy because the king is nice to you. All that can change very quickly, and when it does, you're going to want the power that collective bargaining gives you in those negotiations.

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Not disagreeing with you - if you have a mortgage and kids keeping you somewhere and a king that will abandon you and leave you to starve if you vote for Democracy - you can die on that hill if you want to, and the King probably won’t care. He’ll move next Area over, have the same or better deal, and you and your kids will starve.

At that point the question is - why should you starve so someone else can be happy about Unions?

These issues only get solved with society wide action. The poor sap casting their single vote here can’t afford to make this call on their own, and they’re just happy their particular king is generous enough to grace them and not more abusive. Because there are a LOT of more abusive ones , and they’ve probably seen that first hand unlike most of the posters here.

Unions outside the US are "society-wide". We have per-company union organizing because of quick hacks applied to the legal system, the same way our healthcare system was created. Sectoral bargaining systems like Europe are less antagonistic and the employer has less motivation to fight against them. It can make the company more efficient since the execs don't only hear what middle management tells them.

There are a whole ton of asterisks on that kind of statement. Most European unions are at most national (which geographically is more equivalent to a specific US State than pan-EU). Many of them are regional, which is even scoped more like a city.

Conditions for a laborer in Bulgaria, Romania, and the UK are on a completely different level. This is not that dissimilar.

Things can also change when rising costs of manufacturing due to a unionized, aging, and over-paid workforce cause the company to decide to shut the factory down. It works both ways.

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