Uber recognises a union for the first time
bbc.com
bbc.com
Unionisation like this is always a positive for the workers and I hope it brings about positive changes for all of Ubers drivers and leads to further unionisation efforts in the ride sharing market around the globe. If you're an uber driver in the UK get active and push for the improvements you need, and if you're an uber driver around the world start organising!
The most notable yellow union is CFDT, which is one of the largest cross-sector unions in the country. A saying I heard once was "Management could establish slavery, and CFDT would negotiate the weight of the chains".
But yeah, people who identify with the more militant unions kind of despise the CFDT types.
France has multiple versions of unions based on politics for those that didn't know.
Supporting Owen Smith (an anodyne career politician who is now a PR flack) in the Labour leadership election in what looks like a rigged vote isn't indicative of a pro worker outlook, either:
https://voxpoliticalonline.com/2016/10/17/who-do-you-trust-w...
Except when the unions actually actively try to destroy the company.
I have worked on a successful UK recognition campaign BTW
The GMB are a large, well-established, general union. It wouldn't surprise me if Uber were much keener on having them as the sole recognised union than, say, the Independent Workers' Union of Great Britain[1] - who are also organising Uber workers and are smaller, scrappier, and more militant than the GMB.
[0]: https://www.gov.uk/trade-union-recognition-employers/statuto...
[1]: https://iwgb.org.uk/
More power is stripped from me in this case as it always happens; Union = less freedom for an individual.
I would argue having zero leverage against rich corporations is always worse than sacrificing a few freedoms. In some cases though workers don't actually agree on what they want. This means the workers are not actually united in their cause and the union of course breaks down.
I am all for unions. Go and organize people. But unions can't have special privileges granted by politicians (who very often are just bribed by those that run the union), and unions must never be mandatory to join. Mandate to join an union is immoral.
In principle, no one. The whole idea of a union is everyone wants the same thing and will refuse to work if these wants are not met. If people want different things, the union doesn't actually exist.
> But unions can't have special privileges granted by politicians, and unions must never be mandatory to join.
> Mandate to join an union is immoral.
I agree in principle but in practice things get ugly fast. For example, developed countries have immigrant workers whose legal presence in the country is conditional on their continued employment. Corporations have a huge amount of leverage against these workers and will probably exploit them. Their ability to exploit these people leads to significantly diminished power of unions. I just have no idea how they're supposed to solve this issue in a way that keeps these principles intact.
The exploitation of people is obviously wrong but I suspect the unions is not the answer.
The solution in this case is to somehow make companies ignore these economic opportunities. Make them pay immigrants the same salary they'd pay a worker from their own country.
By way of analogy, imagine if you training to become physically more attractive made other male suitors less attractive to women in general. You did not, by virtue of making yourself more attractive, impose a negative externality on other men, as they were never entitled the affection and engagement of women in the first place.
Moreover, the absence of labor regulations and social democratic policies is associated with more rapid economic growth and larger wage gains, so the premise of the notion that there are negative externalities emanating from contract liberty is wrong. The free market is far and away the most efficient way to organize an economy, because the market is the ultimate coordinating tool, and helps raise productivity, which has enormous positive externalities.
These sound like the fundamentalist tenets of an ideology, that just happen to further the interests of the rich, but the statistical/empirical evidence has constistently validated these assertions, as do rationalist deductions based on game theory and widely accepted economic axioms like supply and demand and the efficiency of equilibriums established by them.
By 'free' do you mean unregulated?
And efficiency (which you seem to equate with 'return on capital') isn't the only positive value, nor is efficiency necessarily a good proxy for all other positive values.
In any case, while a theoretical perfect market without any asymmetries might be most efficient, in practice we have markets that are imperfect in many ways that induce market failures, and regulation is needed to compensate and restore market efficiency. The market for labor is no exception, as the asymmetries in labor relations are huge.
Efficiency is the only thing that matters. Take two countries: Pragmatia and Utopitia. Pragmatia solely pursues efficiency, in line with its pragmatic ideals, while Utopitia pursues social democratic ideals, in line with its utopianist ideals.
Pragmatia consequently sees GDP grow at an annual rate of 5% a year, while Utopitia sees its GDP grow at 2.5% a year.
From a starting point as equals in 2022, Pragmatia acquires a 3 to 1 per capita GDP advantage over Utopitia within 50 years, providing Pragmatia's residents with a vastly better standard of living than Utopitia's, irrespective of how large of a percentage of the latter's GDP was expropriated by the state for social democratic redistribution.
This was basically the story of Hong Kong vs Mainland China from the 1950s to 1980:
https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer_why_the_world_needs_cha...
>>In any case, while a theoretical perfect market without any asymmetries might be most efficient, in practice we have markets that are imperfect in many ways that induce market failures, and regulation is needed to compensate and restore market efficiency.
Imperfect markets don't imply that wages are below what they would be under free market conditions, or that a crude intervention, like granting labor unions with collective bargaining monopolies over companies' hiring practices will counter-act the wage-inhibiting effect of some market inefficiency, let alone do so without introducing far larger and more significant inefficiencies of its own.
Basic supply and demand theory tells us that the employment standard mandates, like minimum wage controls, advocated by unions, to the extent that they have an effect, harm economic efficiency. In the absence of the ability to conduct controlled experiments to prove definitively its effect one way or another, we should opt to trust basic economy theory.
>>The market for labor is no exception, as the asymmetries in labor relations are huge.
Asymmetries are irrelevant. Apple is worth over $2 trillion, yet cannot force me to buy a Macbook Pro. It can only induce me to do so by offering more value than competitors.
If we let Apple and its social justice PR firms convince us that we need the government to control the consumer electronic market, then Apple could, through regulatory barriers, keep competitors out, or through taxation, force us to indirectly buy its products, by funding the state that does.
Efficiency is the only thing that matters. Take two countries: Pragmatia and Utopitia. Pragmatia solely pursues efficiency, in line with its pragmatic ideals, while Utopitia pursues social democratic ideals, in line with its utopianist ideals.
Pragmatia consequently sees GDP grow at an annual rate of 5% a year, while Utopitia sees its GDP grow at 2.5% a year.
From a starting point as equals in 2022, Pragmatia acquires a 3 to 1 per capita GDP advantage over Utopitia within 50 years, providing Pragmatia's residents with a vastly better standard of living than Utopitia's, irrespective of how large of a percentage of the latter's GDP was expropriated by the state for social democratic redistribution.
This was basically the story of Hong Kong vs Mainland China from the 1950s to 1980:
https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_romer_why_the_world_needs_cha...
>>In any case, while a theoretical perfect market without any asymmetries might be most efficient, in practice we have markets that are imperfect in many ways that induce market failures, and regulation is needed to compensate and restore market efficiency.
Imperfect markets don't imply that wages are below what they would be under free market conditions, or that a crude intervention, like granting labor unions with collective bargaining monopolies over companies' hiring practices will counter-act the wage-inhibiting effect of some market inefficiency, let alone do so without introducing far larger and more significant inefficiencies of its own.
Basic supply and demand theory tells us that the employment standard mandates, like minimum wage controls, advocated by unions, to the extent that they have an effect, harm economic inefficiency. In the absence of the ability to conduct controlled experiments to prove definitively its effect one way or another, we should opt to trust basic economy theory.
>>The market for labor is no exception, as the asymmetries in labor relations are huge.
Asymmetries are irrelevant. Apple is worth over $2 trillion, yet cannot force me to buy an Mac Pro. It can only induce me to do so by offering more value than competitors.
If we let Apple and its social justice PR firms convince us that we need the government to control the consumer electronic market, then Apple could, through regulatory barriers, keep competitors, or through taxation, force us to indirectly buy its products, by funding the state that does.
Can corporations have special privileges granted by politicians?
Seems to me that without special privileges granted by politicians, corporations would not actually exist at all.
The only extra-contractual benefit the state grants corporations is limited liability for tort.
Right, and the power of the corporation comes from turning individual owners into a group.
Both are complete legal fictions. But only one of these is seen as naturally occurring in this discourse.
works like this: it's all fun and games until the union can get to the point where union participation becomes mandatory for joining the sector/company. after participation is no longer optional, workers essentially end up feeding two owners, with unions demanding higher fees, red tapes requiring more union mandated bureaucrats, while promises to workers get delayed or forgotten
I'm all for unions, but there's some truth in being skeptical and attentive around them. if requirement for mandatory union fees and automatic union participation for sectors could be outright outlawed, I'd be much more optimistic, but these aren't and I don't.
It is not. If you are looking for a job, and a union has monopolized all of a corporation's positions and imposed restrictive employment rules constraining who the corporation can hire, it reduces your leverage in negotiating to gain a position, by making it harder for you to offer a compelling deal to the corporation.
You can't offer to work for below the minimum wage, or to forego some benefit, for example.
Unions only appear to help workers if you look at it superficially.
Most (maybe all?) unions are meant to oppose the company. Their stated goal is get more for the workers, which means less for the company.
But to be fair, some unions actually end up helping companies that can't understand that treating your workers well actually has benefits for the company, too, and if you treat them too poorly, there will be a net detriment to the company. These unions actually help everyone, but it requires that the company really have their head up their ass.
So it's not surprising to me that every single company fights the union. The whole point of the union is to fight the company on behalf of the workers.
When I was in college I worked for a roofing company where there actually seemed to be a pretty healthy relationship between the local unions and the companies employing their members. The unions ran a great apprenticeship program, were super strict on safety, and seemed to have a reputation in the area for doing good work. This meant that companies had a good idea what they were getting when they paid the premium for a journeyman. My impression was that being a "union shop" was a differentiator for businesses and that there were plenty of customers that were willing to pay more for the confidence that things would be done right.
Of course the common complaint for a situation like this is that you end up with journeymen who abuse their position and don't meet the standards they are supposed to, but I didn't seem much of this. I got the impression that the union did a pretty good job of keeping their members in line, especially when it came to safety infractions.
It's a shame that this doesn't seem to be more common. It was an amazing program since if you could land an apprenticeship (and they were desperate for people) you could theoretically climb the ladder from poverty to the middle class in 5 years.
It's entirely possible for unions to be bad for both the company and the workers. A loss for one is not inherently a gain for the other.
isn't it possible that they are good for the majority of workers, but bad for a few? Maybe it is that minority of workers that hold this perspective?
> I keep seeing this perspective and it is baffling to me.
It’s baffling to you because you haven’t considered that many companies have good relationships with employees and are interested in that relationship staying non-adversarial.
This wasn’t true in literally every business I’ve worked for.
If you expect someone to behave adversarially and you act in kind (forming unions), then you’ve already poisoned the relationship.
Perhaps it’s different because I’ve been in highly skilled labor pools but you’re setting yourself up for a life of bare minimums and limited advancement if you assume every business relationship you go into is adversarial.
No it’s not. You literally just quit and move on. This is one of the easiest environments to find a job in if you have a decent resume of actually working somewhere for more than a few months.
However if you have unique needs, or desires then your needs will take a back seat over the "majority"
In modern society we seem to have a majoritarian view of everything, and are losing individualism.
An example of this is the often advocated for Maternity / Paternity leave, this is something that is often fought for by unions as the majority of employees need / desire that leave. However if you are someone that do not intention of ever having children then you may prefer more Vacation time, or more PTO time, or greater health benefits in some other arena, your desires however will be ignored because the Majority wants the Maternity / Paternity leave
Then you do not join any unions. Union membership is never mandatory in the United Kingdom: https://www.gov.uk/join-trade-union/trade-union-membership-y...
> What if I don't want to join any unions and I just want to do what I want?
You already have freedom from union membership, and you're exercising it. What's the problem?
Also, you asked:
> What rights does the government have to tell me that I must join an union?
Common misconception. A union can compel an employer to be a closed shop through a bargaining agreement. The government doesn't tell you that you must join a union; the employer will tell you that you need to join the union because their relationship with the union is more important than their relationship with you. What the government can do is forbid the employer from union-busting, and also forbid closed-ship agreements.
Out of curiosity - what has that got to do with unions?
Anything else?
I've got to conclude you are deliberately misconstruing the points I've made because you have some kind of "Unions are evil" agenda to push. Otherwise how the hell did you come to the conclusion that an employment benefit that doesn't even affect your fictitious scenario is somehow a demonstration of unions are bad.
On a related note I've found that those who most vigorously defend the 'rights' of workers to be exploited are usually not in the position of actually benefiting from all those 'rights' that they are proposing as so vital. You know what the average uber driver wants? Some financial security. They want health insurance, not libertarian fan fiction.
In Germany, we have a special class of jobs ("450€ Jobs") for side jobs - regulated under labor laws, no need for fake "self employment" stuff.
What if I, as a boss, only want to promote women that have sex with me? What if I as a hiring manager don't want to hire black people? What if I as a teenager accept to work for a dollar an hour with 2x unpaid overtime? Why should I even pay taxes to support social programs? All these are against my 'freedom'
There is a big big big difference in power between Uber(others) and individuals, and just because someone small minority of people will have their 'freedoms' trampled, it doesn't mean that we shouldn't do what is best for society at large.
You can say all that you want about working 4 hours on friday night with uber, but here is the thing, Uber has 100% full control over if you will or not work with them. You have 0 control. Bad ratings? Too many drivers? You come from some nationality that is known for 'bad driving' (pick whatever the fuck you want as an excuse). They have 100% the power. You have zero. If they say: 'if even one person gives you less than 5 stars, you are out of here' and you have no recourse whatsoever.
This is what we as a society want to prevent. This unilateral power dynamic. I'm european. I have seen good unions, amazing unions, and very shitty ones. I'm not 100% pro-union, but I believe that there should be mechanisms to protect the ones with no leverage, because if we don't, the less fortunate will just be modern day slaves to big corporations, only the name will be different.
They set their conditions to a level that is most beneficial to them, and you have zero ability to negotiate with them. As long as there are enough desperate people to accept their conditions, they have no motivation to change anything. Why would they?
So you go and organize with other drivers and then you can go to Uber and say: if you don't accept our conditions, you'll get no drivers full stop. Suddenly the negotiations are among equals.
You seem strongly anchored to your freedom, but the reality is that vs a huge corporation, you have none to begin with. Unless you are independently wealthy, you don't even have the freedom to stop participating in the labor pool.
Now what if productivity doesn't rise. Do we want to force companies to reduce shareholder profits in order to pay workers more than what the unrestricted actions of people in the market would result in them being paid?
No we don't, and if you doubt me, I can link to you the economic explanations for why that is, which includes an explanation of the role that the profit earned by investors plays in increasing productivity and wages.
Uber is a complete legal fiction. Unless the state decrees that there is such a thing as a corporation, and lays down the rules and parameters of that corporation, there aren't two parties at all. Just many tens of thousands of people who all want to engage in some kind of common enterprise without a formal way to do it.
The rules are completely arbitrary, and all of them were created out of thin air, by precedent and mutual agreement and various forms of governmental action.
Which is precisely the same way the rules around unions were created too.
To see a corporation participating in the market as some sort of observed natural phenomenon and a union participating in the market as some kind of artificial creation is to fundamentally misunderstand what's actually happening here.
There's very little upside to uk unions but there is very little downside either, they're basically pointless...
Thank god. I wish it was a standard for absolutely every job that has unions. Leave it to the individual if they choose to.
If you don't think that's true, then why not start a company where you build in a union from the start? You can even have all workers be owners with equal voting rights. There's nothing stopping you from doing that! Or join an existing one, as they exist, even in the US. It's completely legal and you won't be opposed.
Forcing your model on existing companies is where it becomes objectionable. Start your own if you think it's a better approach. If it is, it'll win out and you won't have to force it on others. They will copy it willingly and eagerly.
There 100% is something stopping you from doing that: No investor will put money into a worker owned company. This means anything which requires up front investment is not really possible.
Want to start a software company like this? You better be profitable on day 1 or otherwise have a whole team prepared to pay for servers out of pocket and work for free.
I don't really think this is a fair comparison when Uber's business model is literally to undercut the competition in a market to drive out local competitors, then raise prices once they're basically a monopoly in an area.
The GMB (originally General, Municipal and Boilermakers) Union vs the App Drivers and Couriers union (who is fighting Uber in court).
This is effectively Uber helping the GMB union expand their turf, killing the App drivers and Couriers union. I assume in return, the GMB union has promised to be toothless.
It's the union I'd choose if I were Uber.
Interesting.
Uber was never suppose to be a full time job and by unionizing/legitimizing it, it's going to decrease ridership.
The fact is that Uber workers who are members of the App Drivers and Couriers Union, one of the smaller UK unions, got recognition in the UK Supreme court that drivers are employees. They brought an effective legal challenge against Uber that made the firm recognise contractors (in name only) as employees. This was a landmark win that made a real difference in the worker's lives. Clearly Uber was under threat, since this effective challenge by a smaller union built a lot of momentum for a muscular recognition deal. So they jumped before they were pushed, and recognised GMB, since it was the best deal for them as the employer.
ADCU's statement: https://www.adcu.org.uk/news-posts/statement-on-uber-respons...
If you read the FT report, GMB agreed with Uber that there will be no right for the workers to negotiate over pay or minimum wage, which is one of the key reasons (and benefits) of having a recognised union in the workplace. True, the conditions of precarious workers are terrible, but also the pay and minimum wage is abysmal, and the employers in these situations are basically only operating the way they do because of the terrible wages they pay their workers. Uber drivers have to pay for their car and fuel out of their own pocket, so in this case the employer has every interest to not negotiate wages, since they pay little to no operating costs.
(Snippet quoted: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/E2WG95hXoAIl12J.jpg)
The Uber workers are now in a pickle. Due to UK trade union laws, if they wanted to switch unions to a better more militant one, they would have to wait til the recognition agreement's been in place 3 years, and then wait 3+ years until they can apply for recognition with another union, which is a condition baked in to all recognition deals in the UK. This kind of inertia is the death of any organised labour movement amongst workers. As is clear, this is what the trade union act of 92 was supposed to do -- make it impossible for workers to quickly build momentum when advocating for better conditions for themselves.
So in signing a bad deal for a bit of press coverage, GMB are hanging Uber workers out to dry before they've begun, potentially for 6 years if the workers dislike the deal. Precarious workers aren't served by a yellow union rearranging deckchairs with the employer, they deserve to It's potentially a worse situation than doing nothing at all, or waiting for better terms from the employer. Workers deserve a militant, fighting union.
In fact, in "big three" GMB are far less militant than even their counterparts, Unite and Unison. In 2019, Unite and Unison both balloted 245 and 234 times respectively, while GMB only managed a bit more than half that (125).
Now, GMB have half the members (roughly) of those two, 600k compared to the 1.2m and 1.3m of the other two. But then you have the case of smaller, more militant unions, like the RMT, who did 126 ballots in the same year, with only 80k members!
Data: https://airtable.com/shrEgY32g6wTezsmV/tbl92F0cWh74D8al3
Proportionally it's not about size of the union. GMB is, for my money, deserving of a spot in the "big three". And indeed is of a size where it should be holding more ballots and sticking up for it's members more. Even if Unite or Unison had signed this deal, they wouldn't have signed away one of their workers key demands: the right to be paid a living wage.
GMB should be congratulated for it's recent work on "fire and rehire" campaign at British gas, but in this cynical expansion into new industries, it's proving itself woefully inadequate to represent workers in the 21st century, and could turn into another "yellow" union which exists only to serve it's own bureaucrats and robber baron patrons.
The only degree to which they benefit is from whether this leads to an overall societal trend that might benefit them. Its unreasonable to expect journalists not to comment on any element of the public sphere that impacts them in some way. E.g. you might as well say BBC staff shouldn't cover the NHS because they get NHS care.
Case in point:
Vox writers, who eventually unionized, spent years publishing articles arguing for laws limiting the gig economy, like this one:
"The gig economy has grown big, fast — and that’s a problem for workers" [1]
Three years after the above article was published, its agenda succeeded, and a new anti-gig-economy law, that was heavily by major unions, was passed in California. That law in turn forced Vox to let go of hundreds of gig economy freelancers, thus reducing competition to the full-time journalists who used their media platform to lobby for the law:
"Vox Media to cut hundreds of freelance jobs ahead of changes in California gig economy laws" [2]
The media being fully unionized means that it is extremely biased in its coverage of these kinds of stories.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2016/10/26/13349498/gig-economy-profits-...
[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/16/vox-media-to-cut-hundreds-of...