Hacker News Reader

Comment by kevingadd | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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) ?

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com