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Comment by ramesh31 | Hacker News Reader

I know there's a lot of hate for the Teamsters union in particular. Corruption exists in every human institution. But in the modern oligarchy that is the US, where politicians are completely bought and paid for with corporate money, organized labor is literally the only tool we have left against a capitalist dystopia. It's easy to forget that we had to fight literal wars in this country to gain things like the 8 hour work day. This stuff doesn't come without a fight. And you can nitpick about the quality of an organization, but you go to war with the army you have.

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The unions also buy off politicians to disastrous effect. In California, you can’t win an election unless the teachers union or the police union backs you, which has led to all sorts of insane policies.

Even with that, teachers and police officers are terribly underpaid and also mistreated by the California government.

Unions might be the answer. However, the US has a closed shop system where a few unions have a monopoly on labor relations.

As a result, the existing national unions have repeatedly demonstrated that they’re not interested in improving working conditions for their members.

I was a union member for many years. I’m in management now in the same org and am no longer represented.

Everyone rags on unions. But you know, I have great healthcare at a fair price, salary is good, protection from management fads like stack ranking, etc. The only real downside IMO is the focus on seniority.

The big argument is usually that unions breed mediocrity and incompetence. My staff and colleagues are good at what they do and deliver. I regularly work with contract and consulting companies… they don’t consistently outperform our folks.

My sister works at a big tech company. Her negative experiences with idiots, bad managers, etc are pretty similar, and consistent with my past Fortune 50 experiences. Big orgs always have that.

When you can't fire bad apples, you end up with problems like the police force having violent cops or racist cops that make everyone look bad. Or you have teachers that refuse to go back to work even though there are vaccines available to them.

I think unions make sense in circumstances where a company has a monopoly granted by the government... For example Boeing. Boeing has completed a regulatory capture that makes it nearly impossible to launch competing airline building companies.

Unions do not make sense where they do not have a counterparty to negotiate against... Basically there should be no unions for government employees because politicians generally already are willing to do the will of the workers over that of the best interests of the citizens. Unions also do not make sense in highly competitive spaces where if a company underpays or mistreats its employees, those employees can just switch jobs immediately.

The reason why cops don't get fired isn't just unions. Union workers get fired all the time for much less. The reason cops don't get fired is political.

If you fire a cop for a reason that the cops don't like, their political connections will come breathing down your neck.

For some weird reason I "can't quite put my finger on", it's almost as if cop unions are uniquely different from other unions.

Perhaps reading into why Union Federations never take in cop unions will help.

In my home school district, it took years (and many months of formal observers) to fire teachers who habitually came to work drunk or simply didn't do their job, and pre-tenure teachers would all get axed when the economy went downhill. Cop unions aren't that special.

You're just describing tenure?

If your high school has a tenure system, it's not a teacher issue, it's a systemic issues.

Cop unions are incredibly special. The thing about cop unions is that they're the same everywhere, there is no city where cops are fired adequately for cause. There are plenty of cities where teachers can get fired.

There is no profession with the same universal tolerance for abuse anywhere as cops. The reason has to do with their function as cops, not their labour union.

Tenure and firing protections and procedures are negotiated with the union. Unreasonable protections can be a concession to union bargainers in lieu of pay, and are common in union shops for that reason.

You keep claiming everything else is an issue where the common denominator is unions themseleves.

No? It isn't?

Cops everywhere in North America have the issue of being unfireable despite literally committing crimes.

Electricians don't have this issue.

Both of them are highly unionized.

So clearly the common denominator isn't unions. Even before their mass unionization cops were able to get away with far too much and they get away with far more than any other profession, unionized or otherwise.

Because cops work for the government, which has a monopoly on policing services and the tax revenue that pays for it. The unions can therefore be far more abusive, as their patron and customer, which is the taxpayer and resident, respectively, is captive, absent these two groups being able to successfully organize a strong enough political coalition to counter the Democrats in the electoral process.

There is a causality issue in this thread. Folks that are anti-union overly focus on police unions as a metric.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Target_fixation

Public sector unions, particularly those in essential services, are very different from private sector unions. If the cops go on strike, the city falls apart. If Amazon’s workers go on, it creates a competitive opening.

When parents can take their kids out of public schools more easily, the teachers’ unions lose power.

I’m a union public school teacher. I am not protected from being fired, I simply must be given a PIP and I can request a Union lawyer help represent me in disciplinary meetings. This is after several years of at-will employment. If my boss wanted me gone next year, I would be.

The statistics in New York at least are not encouraging:

https://www.the74million.org/article/investigation-nyc-tried...

Going off-tangent: collective bargaining for teachers is also correlated with decreased lifetime earnings for males:

https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20170570

I agree those numbers seems low for such a large staff, but the country is big and broad.

Assuming that unions are actually bad for the economy at face value

Is union is doing wonders for the officers and teachers the actual workers ? Making sure their rights and preferences are catered to ? Then the union is doing it's bloody job.

If you are an employee at big co that is abusive or exploitative earning minimum wage then the government has already abandoned you . Should you then see the wider societal implications and scarifice your needs for greater good or actually say fuck that and unionize and try improve your quality of life and not have to pee in a bottle during work,(Amazon) or catch COVID-19 and die cause your company doesnt care (meat packing)?

Even if it is bad for the economy/society unions still have been good for the actual workers as a group. We still have lot of work related deaths, long term issues and basic hygiene requirements missing, you absolutely need unions.

The competition is not with low paying jobs in cheaper areas of US or cheaper countries like mexico or china. It is with automation and robots, you can't compete with that. Without strong worker representation employees of unskilled workforces like Amazon are going to face worsening conditions in the future as they are made to compete with automation

> Everyone rags on unions. But you know, I have great healthcare at a fair price, salary is good, protection from management fads like stack ranking, etc. The only real downside IMO is the focus on seniority.

I have those things (well not “protection from stack ranking” but my employer doesn’t do it) without the focus on seniority. A union is not requisite nor sufficient for those things.

They are not terribly underpaid. They take home about twice the median income after retiring as early as 50 years old!

https://californiapolicycenter.org/evaluating-public-safety-...

> Even with that, teachers and police officers are terribly underpaid and also mistreated by the California government.

The average police salary is $104k in California [0], 35% above the national average. In 2018 at least.

And then the pension is 50% after twenty years or service or 90% after 33 years [1], in LA at least.

This is one of the best jobs in the country, pay wise. So it’s unusual to hear someone say that police officers are underpaid.

[0] https://www.careerexplorer.com/careers/police-officer/salary... [1] https://www.lafpp.com/post/tier-5-pension-plan-information

Voters like police unions and teachers unions, but what they don't like is paying more in taxes. As a public employee, I make $74k a year while living in the Bay Area. I'm at the top of my salary band. Sure, I've got pretty good health insurance, but no better than I would get in tech. I've got a pension, but it will not be enough to live on, and CalPERS has huge liabilities because the voters are unwilling to actually fully fund it. I get three weeks of vacation. I guess that's pretty OK.

The one thing I have (besides a job I absolutely enjoy doing), is job security and stability, and that is thanks to my union. It sure would be nice to have a higher salary, but someone has to be willing to pay for it, and nobody wants to do that. Instead, public employees get things that only indirectly cost money, or that don't have to be paid off until sometime in the distant future when the politicians and union bigwigs who agreed to all this stuff are no longer around.

> The unions also buy off politicians to disastrous effect.

Any sufficiently entrenched bureaucracy is indistinguishable from corruption.

With apologies ...

The union I'm in repeatedly demonstrate they ARE interested in improving working conditions for our members in California. Perhaps AFSCME and AFLCIO are different than the unions you are talking about.

Teachers and police officers in California make salaries well above the state median and are entitled to eye-watering pensions as well

The average income for teachers seems to be $67k in California? That doesn't really sound eye-watering.

There's a lot of people who say "teacher and police unions" or even "public sector unions" when they really mean "just, exactly, police unions."

“Pensions” is the eye-watering part. The retirement programs are great.

$48k are eye-watering? https://www.teacherpensions.org/state/california

Yes, when you consider how little relative time has to be put in to earn that.

>As a result, the existing national unions have repeatedly demonstrated that they’re not interested in improving working conditions for their members.

It always comes down to this. And you can argue endlessly about the various failings of modern organized labor. But ultimately it's all we've got. The capitalists have demonstrated for centuries over and over again that left unchecked they will always take capitalism to a level of borderline subsistence for the working class to maximize profits. Your boss is not looking out for you; ever.

To have an organization with funding and influence that has at least professed to defend your rights gives a more realistic chance of having your voice heard, no matter how slight.

So if they say they'll help and then make things worse, you'd gladly support them?

Because that's the impression I get from the other comments that you're responding here; That they have negligible impact on member welfare, but introduce a pile of corruption and bureaucracy into the mix.

> That they have negligible impact on member welfare

That is some -really- strong hyperbole, especially against teacher and police unions as the parent is referring to.

I would argue that the benefits teachers get and the relative job security of police offices is a good indicator of a strong labor union for both roles.

Sure, pay sucks, but teachers would probably be treated worse than amazon workers at this point if they didn't have them.

Source: worked for ed tech startup that supported teachers. Also dated a few.

I'm not American, so I've little personal interaction with these. This is just the impression I get from here, as well as other American core communities I frequent.

That I frequently hear how public school teachers are unable to do anything about literal abuse and such does give them credence though.

> I get from the other comments that you're responding here

You should be better off ignoring comments from people you do not know, with unknown agendas, and without sources.

Amazon is well known for astroturfing and creating "fake" profiles: https://boingboing.net/2021/03/30/twitter-bans-fake-amazon-w...

That does not mean that your fellow commenters are Amazon infiltrates or the like, but they can just be repeating misinformation from Amazon anti-union campaigns.

What type of person puts words in someone else's mouth? Nothing you say seems to have any basis in reality.

I find the idea of closed shops insane, like all employee have to be union members and there can only be one union

Then you'll be glad to hear these were forbidden in the US in 1947.

And so where are coming from the "closed shop" the parent was talking about?

No idea, I can only imagine they redefined the word. Closed shops were made illegal by the Taft-Hartley Act. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act

The teamsters earned every bit of that distrust.

Successfully representing their members would go a long way to helping earn it back.

Generally though the Pinkerton's beating on union guys or the union guys dealing with scrabs resembles a gang war more than a "literal war"

>Generally though the Pinkerton's beating on union guys or the union guys dealing with scrabs resembles a gang war more than a "literal war

I assume they were mentioning the regular use of the National Guard against strikers, like in the Ludlow Massacre.

Good point.

>Generally though the Pinkerton's beating on union guys or the union guys dealing with scrabs resembles a gang war more than a "literal war"

That's the quaint history book narrative we like to think about in relation to the labor struggles of the 19th/20th century in the US. But the reality is that men, women and children were mowed down with machine guns and sniper fire. It was a struggle for life and death between two classes.

What should I read to learn more about this?

https://www.amazon.com/Herrin-Massacre-Scott-Doody/dp/130089...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludlow_Massacre

The first aerial bombing on US soil targeted striking coal miners, at the Battle of Blair Mountain:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

That seems more like "literal war" than a gang turf war.

Teamsters has a lot of baggage to bring to the table. Brand power for sure. Not sure Brand Power > Baggage though in this case.

The unions didn't stop a capitalist distopia, they carved out a portion for themselves and their cronies. Doubly so in large cities.

Well, it's more complicated than that. Anti-capitalist unions were cracked down upon, often violently. The unions that agree with you tried what they could and it took violence to stop them.

Sorry to disappoint you, but there's hardly a more capitalism-friendly organisation than a union. Their whole existence depends upon capital-based enterprises requiring labour. By seeking to standardise the units and price of work, they fall right in line with classical Adam Smith.

This is hardly surprising; the first priority of any institution is to perpetuate its own existence, so far from being at war with capitalism, unions are locked in a symbiotic embrace with it.

They may sing along to the Internationale but the lyrics are the Wealth of Nations.

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