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Comment by aiisahik | Hacker News Reader

It wasn't Amazon that did this. It was a generation of us growing up and realizing that all parts of the economy that used unionized labor in the US was slow, expensive, inefficient and unable to progress.

- government agencies

- construction

- public transportation

- the people at the post office

Every time i interacted with people in these fields i silently thought this person would have been fired if they worked in the private sector

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I’m getting tired of reading these articles that portray Amazon warehouse employees as being too dumb to make their own decisions. We need to admit that the people who made these decisions are capable adults who can decide for themselves what they want to do.

These opinion pieces that imply that Amazon workers were brainwashed or were simply wrong are distasteful. Let’s start having an honest conversation about why these people chose what they chose and stop pretending that they’re too dumb to have considered other options.

I’ve run into the same infantilism in HN discussions about the documentary “The Factory” and it strikes me as an elitist mindset.

SO: Why do you think they chose what they chose?

If you want to start that conversation, let's start it. I don't think it's gonna look good for conservative, anti-public-safety-net types...

Not the OP, but here’s how I’ve seen it framed.

Those employees against unionization arent stupid. They are often in dying industrial towns and they know they may scare away further industry by unionizing. Meaning, they (and their town) will ultimately be worse off. Its a pragmatic assessment between the lesser of two evils.

There’s also a moral component. They generally take these jobs because it’s better than the alternative offers they have in the table and that it’s fair given the circumstances. They may feel it’s ungrateful to push back just because they can. It’s possible to vote against your own self interest on moral grounds (see: wealthy people who vote for more progressive taxation).

While I may not agree with those perspectives, it would give me pause to think I am uniquely more qualified to assess their own situation. So why do you think you know more than they do about their own circumstances?

It's not that I think I know better than them about how to deal with their own circumstances, it's that I think the system is intolerable if those are their circumstances.

Having to feel like putting up with terrible conditions is the best option available because otherwise business will up and leave for a different set of suckers is a bad thing, full stop.

Desperate people will accept lots of things. Let's make them not desperate. I'm not arguing here with someone in that situation who voted against a union, saying they were wrong; I'm arguing with someone who's using "they voted against it, they aren't stupid" as a defense of US society at large. The moral responsibility is on US, not them, so that they aren't in a "take this abusive shit or have nothing at all" situation.

I can agree with this assessment. But i can also understand someone advocating for change the overarching system to avoid that lesser-of-two-evils scenario while simultaneously hedging within the current system by voting locally against something like unionization. Whether those two approaches can coexist long term, I don’t know.

While I think unions have their own evils, it's somewhat interesting to me that the sectors you listed are some of the more promising ways to be middle-class within the U.S. without concern for outsourcing.

Anecdotally, my area of the country recently changed from government postal workers to contractors. The service has gotten much, much worse since the change. So while it may be true that it's easier to be fired in the private sector, I'm not sure that corresponds to better service.

You're right, privatization doesn't automatically have to lead to an improvement.

Incentives are what lead to the outcome being good or bad. The trouble is that it's virtually impossible for governments and unions to have the kind of incentive structure we want. With the private sector, it's possible, due to competition. Remove the competition, and private business will instantly get as bad or worse.

In fairness to unions, I'd say most of the services the OP listed are bad mainly because they're the government, and not mainly because they're unionized. Obviously government cannot have any competition (when they do, that's called "war"). Therefore they have the most perverse incentive structures of any organization. Unions tend to oppose competition, but not with anything like the same effectiveness as governments.

I've also heard that Europeans really like their unions, while Americans tend not to. I'm of the impression that European unions are structured differently and they tend not to have the same sorts of problems. That said, European companies also don't strike me as particularly productive relative to American companies; though I'm sure that's not down to unions alone, productivity isn't everything, etc.

I agree with you on the incentives part and that's also why I'm apprehensive about public unions. I'm uncomfortable with the idea of a civil "servant" being able to strike and remove services, particularly those the government has a monopoly over. I'd like to think a democracy has better mechanism to manage civil servant disputes.

But I disagree that it's "virtually impossible" for unions to have the right incentives in the private sector. I previously worked in the automotive sector and the unions were incentivized to come to the table and adjust their previously agreed upon contract for the feasibility of the business back during the financial crisis. They knew if they took too hard of a line, it meant the company would not survive and that contract was worthless. Public unions, it seems, are a different animal though.

> But I disagree that it's "virtually impossible" for unions to have the right incentives in the private sector

Yeah, I might have gone too far with that statement.

I mean how much of the private sector, all without the input of unionized labor, isn't at least two of slow, expensive, inefficient, and unable to progress? Sometimes I feel like there's this romanticization of the agility of private enterprise when that attribute really applies to a considerably smaller number.

Just for example, any discussion of Agile SCRUM on this board illuminates startling differences in efficiency and drive between various companies

The vibe I get from growing up around unions, having friends and family in union jobs now, working with unions, etc is that enterprises and larger companies feel slow and lumbering if your experience is startups or growth-stage companies; however, (American) union shops and government agencies are in their own league. I'm not solidly opposed to unions in general or in the Amazon case in particular, but I do think there's merit in the idea that American unions (I hear European unions are organized differently and don't have the same problems) lead to the most bizarre, inefficient, and counterproductive work environments.

Most unions are for professional work, plumbing, electrical work, writing, acting.

Those are all just public sector jobs you named, not even necessarily unionized.

To be generous to the OP’s point, public unions have been growing while private union membership has been shrinking over the past decades.

The majority of construction work is also generally done by private companies, even the project is funded with tax dollars.

Yeah, this is the conservative pro-paying-people-less-money talking point, and I don't see the connection to Amazon, but which union do I have to blame for terrible customer service at Google? At least at the DMV someone will talk to me, even if it's slow sometime...

-nursing

-teachers

-police

-firefighters

-professional athletes

-engineers

How would you have even know these people were "Unions" if it wasn't already a mindset going in.

I certainly would have known teachers and police are unionized. Its very clear when interacting with them.

What behaviors do you associate with Unions?

Laziness

Engineers aren't unionized. Physicians on the other hand are unionized in all but name.

And, like a mirror, there is also a distrust of the capitalistically disorganized crowd-of-small-traders: Taxis which were so distrustworthy and dysfunctional that everyone prefers using them through Uber; Internet small shops (people prefer the same shop through Amazon); the litany of small individual hotels (people seem to prefer the stamp of AirBnb), etc.

As a capitalism myself, I’m always dissatisfied on how everything produced in mass turns into the untrustworthy mess of dollar shops, and good capitalism seems to require a bit of concentration.

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