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Comment by winphone1974 | Hacker News Reader

winphone1974

Well I grew up on the other side of unions where my parents couldn't get jobs because a strong union protected those lucky enough to get in early, with no concern for their skills or performance. The same behaviors that people here are so shocked by are busy as common in the old school unions you're proposing as the solution.

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This specific criticism goes both ways and isn't unique to unions, though. Even in a non-union workplace, the bosses' friends are likely to be protected from termination despite bad performance. Maybe one of your parents ends up sick or injured so their performance at work is suffering and you really want them to be protected while they get through that temporary hurdle instead of being laid off and replaced with cheap new labor. Eliminating unions doesn't eliminate the issues you're talking about.

As far as not being able to get a job goes, it sounds like your real complaint is that there aren't enough jobs. That will be true whether or not a workplace is unionized in most cases since the employer has a certain amount of work they need done by a certain number of people.

> Even in a non-union workplace, the bosses' friends are likely to be protected from termination despite bad performance

Maybe one or two, but not a large proportion of an aging workforce riding purely on the protection of the union

I think the federal government is a good example of what happens when you have a union that protects bad employees. It’s very hard to get fired from the government, because the union protects the bad with the good. A great example are the rubber rooms where they have to put bad teachers because the union forbids them from being fired.

Unions had their day, now they are just slush funds and protections for bad people.

> A great example are the rubber rooms where they have to put bad teachers because the union forbids them from being fired.

Actually teachers in those were those who had been accused of misconduct and then either they were awaiting arbitration, mostly because the state wasn't paying their agreed proportion of arbitration fees, or arbitration had cleared them and the state wasn't returning them to their jobs as agreed. Some may have been bad teachers but most were just people the admins had taken a dislike to. Blaming the unions for that is pure propaganda.

At what age specifically do you believe an aging tradesman should be stripped of worker protections? 30? 42? 60?

How long specifically should you pay a worker who is not productive at their job and is killing the business? 5 years? 10 years? 20 years? Until the business dies?

I don't think you really interpreted my statement fairly. Perhaps I should have chosen another word instead of aging, but I was thinking in the traditional factory sense where there is a correlation with age and performance doing manual labor. Age should not be the indicator, performance should.

My experience with unions from from (a) conventions centers and (b) aerospace. In both, they are a net negative from my POV.

At convention centers they inflate prices by passing rules that no one but a union worker can carry anything into the convention center. The monitor broke and your booth and you run to best buy to get a replacement. Sorry, find a unionized person to carry it in for you or GTFO. Oh, you want to plug in it in? Sorry, call a unionized electrician or be sued.

An aerospace it meant everyone's role was super strict and trying to do anything outside your role was against the rule. In software that would mean things like front end programmer not allowed to touch backend code. UI programmer not allowed to touch business logic code. Etc.... Maybe someone will argue that's a good thing but AFAICT it just slowed work to a crawl and made people uncooperative

Having done sweng in various roles, I think in aerospace I wouldn't want a UI programmer working on autopilot or fly-by-wire code, but that's just me.

> An aerospace it meant everyone's role was super strict and trying to do anything outside your role was against the rule.

Was it because of regulations (ie who's certified for maintenance on X airplane type) ?

Some unions did some bad things, therefore everything unions did is bad. That wasn't my experience with unions, I see kids now being treated very badly by dictatorial management, things that just wouldn't happen with a decent union presence. Sure unions need to be kept in line, but no unions isn't a good solution imho.

Unions have a well deserved reputation for putting seniority over merit. If we ever figure out how to Unionize with meritocracy as the focus we can solve a lot of problems for labor.

How do sports unions work? They seem to have no issues with negotiating salaries that are multiples of the league minimum for superstars.

Unions I’ve worked in or am familiar with do care about seniority over merit as you mention. They also make it so new jobs need to go to internal candidates over external candidates. Furthermore, internal candidates are even provided retraining opportunities. Management needs to show there is no one in the organization capable of doing the job before opening it externally.

The only thing the absence of that union would have changed would be more money in the owners' pockets. If hiring your parents would be profitable the owners would do it; if not, not, not. That's true regardless of how profitable or not the other employees are.

That's a short-sighted take. The presence of a union completely changes staffing decisions. If hiring his parents would be profitable, the owners are out of luck because they are fully staffed with worse performers who are protected.

My grandfather worked in a Coopermill and you had to be a member of the union. If you tried to leave the union, as a few people tried, your legs got broken. Unions can be effective, but not if you forced everyone to join it.

In Europe many appreciate the benefits they get from union agreements, even without belonging to them.

Ironically I have never heard of anyone going to management stating that they wanted to be out of the agreement that was settled for the industry they were in, regardless of their actual job.

You can disagree with something because of second order effects.

If the government came out with a monthly 10k usd handout, I'd call it shortsighted and dumb. Doesn't meant I'm not taking it regardless.

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