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Comment by advisedwang | Hacker News Reader

There's a long case history in front on the NRLB about whether or not employees can use employer's resource (ie notice boards, email system, slack) for organizing. In general the rule has been that if employees can use something for general non-work purposes (e.g. setting up a baseball game on the weekend) then the company can't stop them from using it for organizing.

However the specifics (e.g. what if there is a policy about what topics are OK, but some OK topics are non-work, or what if there is a general work-only policy that is selectively enforced against organizing) have gone back and forth depending on the administration.

Apple's behaviour is probably a result of a 2019 ruling [1] which opend the door to this kind of thing. Given that the administration has swung back to being fairly labor friendly, it'll be interesting if this gets to the NRLB to see if they find a way to make this illegal.

[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/labor-board...

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Meanwhile in Germany an employer has to provide rooms and resources for a works council (Betriebsrat) to meet and organize, and has to pay all necessary trainings, including all related travel expenses.

The works council system in Germany and Switzerland (and some other countries) works a lot better than American unions. I'm not sure why. It seems they are more co-operative and have fewer BS rules.

Not starting out adversarial with management is a big part of it. Unions in the US feel like they need to have strict rules because otherwise management will take advantage. Management in the US is often very strongly anti-union. This is a situation where social conventions and government regulation could yield better outcomes than an adversarial system. But Americans love adversarial systems.

Wow this is a fantastic point. Unions in the US are always on the defensive.

Why is being adversarial a problem?

Adversarial expectations shift games to zero sum that don't have to be.

Because going into a negotiation with a belief that both parties are expected to be reasonable and negotiate in good faith tends to give you better outcomes.

Whenever I buy nearly anything negotiated (car, house, boat, large software license, other business deal), I simultaneously expect both parties to be reasonable and negotiate in good faith, yet all of those single-trial negotiations are entirely adversarial. It seems perfectly reasonable and fairly efficient to me.

I've not done a lot of negotiated purchases other than cars, and car salesmen are notorious for negotiating out of bad faith.

Think prisoners dilemma. A car /house/boat purchase is basically a one-off interaction - you’re not likely to be dealing with the same salesperson in 5-15 years when you buy your next car - so the strategy both parties should use is different from the strategy when it’s going to be frequent repeated interactions as in a workplace.

In the case of the car, it's definitely not a one-off purchase. People will go back to the dealer to get the vehicle serviced, and from what I understand this can (mainly for new cars) have a greater total lifetime value than the cost of the vehicle itself.

Even if this weren't the case, if you're ripped off by a used car salesman you will tell every single person you know that they're a snake.

Even if you don't do that, there are arbitration courts you can take them to to both waste their time and force a refund (VCAT where I am, I'm sure there's something similar overseas).

I really don't think it's in a used car salesman's best interests to lie and swindle.

You're mixing situations. I was imagining a NEW car sale, not used cars. In that case the product itself isn't in control of the salesperson, so there's no room for swindles there - but you have an adversarial relationship in terms of price, features / upsells, etc. That said, you're hardly going to blame the dealership if you get talked or dark-patterned into an upgrade you don't need or even regret. "Caveat emptor" and all that. We're so used to adversarial situations like that we blame ourselves more often than not.

A collaborative approach is a lot more like when you ask you're knowledgeable friend "what kind of bike should I buy?" and they ask you about your needs, goals, and budget then guide you towards specific options. They're helping you make a purchase, without pressuring you into something that's not useful to you.

>adversarial relationship in terms of price, features / upsells, etc.

I get what you mean now. As someone who "does sales" a fair amount in my work (owner of a second-hand video games business) the adversarial stuff is actually really frustrating.

I always try to give the customers the same advice I'd give a friend or family, even "downselling" them from a $100 purchase to a $25 repair if that would be more suitable, yet still so many people are adversarial and distrustful.

From my experience, this distrust hurts (non-expert) consumers even more than it hurts the businesses. Ideally, you'd have an honest salesman pointing out the pros and cons of all the different products so that the consumer can make an informed choice. Maybe that product that costs $50 will last for 20 years of continuous use, whereas the $30 version will break after 18 months.

Instead, because salesmen can't be trusted, they rely on their own instincts and buy products whose prices are completely uncorrelated with quality.

The difference is that you buy or don't buy the car if negotiations fail.

At work you have or done have a job or even revenue if the only thing employer and employees are doing is trying to throw wrenches into the machinery to get the upper hand.

I assume car sellers - especially for used cars - are negotiating in bad faith. It definitely seems to make the process less efficient. Standard advice is to get a car inspected by your own mechanic before purchasing. Dealers disclosing the results of an inspection and being trustworthy would be a more efficient process - it would avoid redundant inspections by multiple prospective buyers, and it would avoid people wasting their time on cars in condition that they didn't want to deal with, and it would avoid people who don't know how to play the game getting ripped off.

If you're buying a large software license today — and I bet this holds true for at least some houses, cars, other "high-pressure sales situations" too — the vendor definitely won't think of the negotiation as adversarial.

In an unending game of the prisoner's dilemma, either you all win or you all lose.

How is a house purchase not adversarial? For every extra $1K the buyer does or doesn’t pay, $950-ish goes to or comes out of the seller’s pocket.

I wouldn't use the term adversarial for this. Ideally in a house transaction, the main thing is that both parties want the deal to happen - the seller wants the money and the buyer wants the house. They very much have the same goal of getting the deal executed.

Now obviously all other things being equal, I'd rather pay less money (or charge more money)

But in most cases, neither the seller nor the buyer operating in good faith will really try to squeeze the other because losing a multi-hundred-thousand (or even million+) deal by being too anal about $1000 is in neither one's interest.

If a seller got very "adversarial" most buyers would say "fuck you, I'll keep looking."

If you're a worker sympathetic to the organizing effort, it's probably not. Depends on your presumed union leaders.

If you're in management, being 'the adversary' probably means being on the back foot in terms of negotiating and probably compliance with local labor laws.

An unenviable place to be (said with a wee bit of sarcasm).

I’ve heard union leaders say getting workers to “hate the boss” is an important part of organizing. Entering in to negotiations where the goal is to punish the boss as opposed to getting the best deal for the workers is toxic.

Union leaders tend to be rewarded for doing the best thing for the union, which is not always the best thing for the workers. The principal-agent problem is hard to beat.

The quickest way to beat it is to not allow closed shops. Give employees the freedom to join a union of their choosing, independent of their current employer, and you'll fix a lot of (doubtfully all) of America's problems with unions.

Are we going to ban exclusivity agreements for all organizations or just for labor unions? The business doesn’t have to agree to a closed shop

To clarify a technicality, closed shops are illegal (hiring o ly those already in the union), and union shops (where you must join upon hiring) are legal.

It isn't businesses that want it, but unions demand it as a power move- power against the workers. By being forced into a particular union, workers lose their recourse against unions that behave badly.

For one thing, it undermines their ability to screw over new hires at the benefit of those with seniority, and allows them more wiggle room in wasting the money they collect in dues on things like retreats to remote islands.

There are a few instances of places throwing off bad unions, but it is a long process, unions will fight back in courts, and you have to be prepared for retribution from your coworkers who disagree.

Having union membership in any way tied to your employer is nothing but a way to abuse you, the worker.

Union leaders are all elected by the workers, so at least they are accountable at some level. That definitely isn't true about your boss.

It gets in the way of cooperation.

You can end up with insane rules that ultimately benefit no one. An old boss of mine told me about a time he was working for a big auto manufacturer. They were rolling an update to a major system. It looked like everything went well, so people started to go home.

Pretty soon though, the team started to see issues with the update, up to and including a major LoB system going down. They immediately rolled back the update but found they had a problem- they needed some servers restarted to pick up the update, and the sole person who by union rules could restart the server had left for the day and wasn't picking up the phone.

Now there were people who technically had permissions to restart the server, but they couldn't cross the union rules. They spent over an hour (with the major LoB, business critical system down) trying to get in touch with the people who were allowed to restart the server until they finally convinced the physically datacenter ops people (who were still on duty) go physically unplug and replug the servers in question.

He couldn't disclose the total cost of the outage, but I was lead to believe it was in the millions of dollars.

A functioning owner/management/worker relationship might fight over how the earnings of a company might be split, and even how or what to invest in, but they should all be working to making a company successful as a whole. An adversarial relationship prevents the sort of cooperation and good-faith assumptions that allow the different parties to collaborate and work to everyone's benefit.

That being said, that non-adversarial relationship is a two way street, and ownership+management need to be participating in good-faith as well.

Sounds like management dropped the ball of having the appropriate number of trained people in that position.

Alternately: sounds like the point about adversarial relations stands; a more collaborative culture prioritizing the success of the business (the collective interest) might have yielded a less expensive reboot.

If American businesses wanted a collaborative culture then they would share the rewards. As it stands for most work in the US you make the same amount of money whether or not you make the company succeed. The businesses could easily rectify this by including stock as part of compensation so that incentives have aligned.

Tech has realized this and as an industry hands out a good amount of shares of the business to employees. I can’t really empathize with businesses who cry for the need for labor to care about the success of the business but refuse to hand out anything but the minimum of rewards

Why is it appropriate for a union to determine who has the right to accomplish specific tasks (you can't restart the server, but you can unplug it or you can plug in a lamp but you can't change a light bulb)? That's not a management failure. Sounds like they had people who were trained and had the technical ability. It was bureaucracy that caused the problem.

> Why is it appropriate for a union to determine who has the right to accomplish specific tasks

It's just an exclusivity clause. The employees and management willingly entered into a contractual agreement containing a provision that management ostensibly understood and then completely failed to account for.

If I sign an employment contract that explicitly says "I will be your exclusive provider of X service, I am not available on weekends", the employer shouldn't be surprised when I refuse to come in on Saturday and Sunday or sue them for breach when they hire a second service provider.

and this would be the core of the "hostile unions are suboptimal" argument you are trying to sidestep.

If the core of your argument is that contracts are suboptimal for people who want more than what is in the contract, it's not hard to sidestep.

It's also suboptimal for the employee not to get paid twice as much, or work half the hours.

> Why is it appropriate for a union to determine who has the right to accomplish specific tasks (you can't restart the server, but you can unplug it or you can plug in a lamp but you can't change a light bulb)? That's not a management failure.

On the contrary, that's a two-sided negotiation and if management have failed to protect their interests then that's on them. I've heard plenty of stories like this where it turned out the real reason was that management's own rule was that anyone who touched that server without that certification became personally liable for damages, and management had been warned about their lack of certified people but refused to send more people on the xyz server training course, and or something on those lines.

Because otherwise your boss could tell you to sweep the floors while your software was compiling.

The negotiation of specified work duties resulted in an agreement between the company and the union representing the employee. If that doesn't matter, then why negotiate at all? Do employees get to decide that they're not going to do something because they don't feel like it?

If you want flexibility, you negotiate flexibility. You don't negotiate the reduction of work duties against wages, and then demand that employees do whatever they have the technical ability to do. If I have the technical ability to do accounting, but I'm employed as a bus driver, can my employer demand that I balance the books?

Employers don't own employees. There's a contract that promises specific wages for specific work.

> Because otherwise your boss could tell you to sweep the floors while your software was compiling.

And if the floor was really dirty and he had a good reason (showing off the office to a visitor and nobody else was available), I'd be like "sure thing, lets get the place nice for the visitor; I'm not busy". Or, if he was just a neat freak and constantly asking people to do work they weren't hired to do like that, I'd say no.

> Do employees get to decide that they're not going to do something because they don't feel like it?

Generally, you're hired with a job description. Anything outside that description is up for discussion. I mean, I'm a software developer, but if I had to have a union contract that said I wasn't _allowed_ to empty my own garbage when it annoyed me that it was full... I'd go elsewhere.

I don't expect the owner of the company to prioritize my interests over those of the company or his own. But I do expect him to consider my happiness and well being when making decisions that effect me (or, more generally, groups). And, along the same lines, I prioritize my well being over that of the company, but the well being of the company matters to me, and I'm willing to be flexible to help it succeed.

First, as others have mentioned, the union did not unilaterally choose how the job specs at this plant were written.

But to answer your broader question, the reason unions sometimes point for seemingly narrow job specs is to prevent management picking and choosing titles in a way to keep pay and membership down.

Let's say that in this situation, you have 5 Server Janitors and 1 Sysadmin, with corresponding pay rates of course. Maybe the janitors have the skills to turn on the server, but the spec says only the sysadmin can. Whose fault is it that there's just one sysadmin? And if the job spec says anyone can turn the server on, why give anyone the sysadmin title?

Exactly the scenario I had in mind with my comment. A lot of places are now "two tier" where the newer employees have no path to the higher rate. You have one guy hanging who can press the button for $43/hr, and anyone who replaces him will top out at $32/hr.

Not to mention the history of labor battles (actual fisticuffs) and police departments in many parts of the country... talk about adversarial!

This sounds more like someone who just wants to blame a series of poor management decisions on those damn unions.

It's management's responsibility to make sure they have the right people on hand when they roll out an update to a major system. It's also their responsibility to come out of union negotiations with the right contracts, which would have at the very least included some sort of force majeure clause to account for technical disasters.

It is impossible to account for every edge case without infinite resources. Being flexible is very important when resolving things that you didn't consider.

It’s not really clear to me why all the blame for the adversarial nature of American unions is placed on the unions themselves. Shouldn’t some of the blame be also blamed on American businesses too? It does after all take two to tango.

If businesses simply acquiesce to employee demands unions would not be necessary. However and instead, the moment organized employees submit their demands, they are met with resistance so both sides have to engage mono a mono until the entirely unnecessary conflict is resolved.

I mean, bosses literally hired armed thugs to shoot labor organizers. There’s a damn good reason why labor activists don’t trust the bosses; they shouldn’t.

By this logic, the average person shouldn't trust union bosses, as there are incidents where union bosses commit violence to achieve their ends (the mob/racketeering history).

If you can prove that violence among labor organizers was more prevalent than violence by bosses towards workers, I’d like to see it. I personally am quite dubious.

Sounds like the business wasn't willing to pay vital staff to be on call, so why should the worker have their life outside work be impacted without suitable compensation?

Having 24hr operations without adequate technical support is 100% the fault of management.

This is why on call exists. What if their worker had been drinking, or awake for 36 hours, but decided to head into the office to help out the team? There is plenty of caselaw on this very circumstance when people are killed or get arrested.

> but they should all be working to making a company successful as a whole.

Unless workers own equity this is not at all as much of a truism as it sounds. Could be rephrased as “but they should all be working to enrich their bosses”.

Alternatively, it could be rephrased as "if the company pays its workers an amount they [the workers] are happy with, then working to keep the company successful is in the the workers best interest, because they are likely to continue to be payed well". Alternatively, "If a company is paying you well and help cause it to fail, you are sabotaging yourself".

Say I enter into a contract with a hosting provider who only offers support between 6am and 10pm.

There's an issue with one of my servers at 3am and I'm pretty sure it just needs a physical reboot.

No chance they'll let me into their data centre to fix it myself. Even though in this specific scenario I might be able to solve the problem with no cost to them.

I can also think of a lot of reasons why I wouldn't want just anyone to be able to restart my servers.

Sure this sucks, but maybe I accepted the terms of the agreement because I figured there was a low chance of having the issue and I wanted to save a few bucks.

Because it creates a false dichotomy in people's minds. It pushes everyone into a zero sum mode.

They have to win at the opponent's expense.

Instead, both parties should be looking for win win solutions to all the problems they face.

In adversarial systems, the successes of the other party can be seen as a relative loss, even if everyone benefits.

At a friends workplace, the union recently fought management and prevented a prevent work from home policy from being implemented. This was something that both the workers wanted and management wanted, but the union saw it as leverage to push for other demands.

People get really confused when I say I am pro-union, but anti-american-union.

Workers deserve representation and protections. But American unions are still closely tied to organized crime and are effectively a form of rent-seeking (you must pay us a percentage of your earnings or you can't work here). As recently as 2017 the FBI arrested members of the Lucchese crime family and members of the LIUNA Local 66 for applying a "mob tax" to new construction projects. SDNY settled RICO charges against the Teamsters in 2015.

You know who else is tied to organized crime? Major financial institutions.[1]

Corruption happens everywhere, including every major corporation and every government. Singling out unions for the same problems is a smearing tactic, not a moral stance.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/paul-manafort-money-laundering-ar...

Corporate crime/ Blue collar crime gets ignored a lot

American unions are far from perfect, but I feel like you’re drastically understating the good they did for American workers during their heyday.

I think everyone understands the historical good unions did for the average worker. But, particularly for workers who most often frequent sites like HN, unions have not had much of a positive impact, contemporarily.

Yeah but only one tech company has a union, right?

And the workers there seem to think it's valuable. Here's the oral history I've been listening to.

https://engelberg-center-live.simplecast.com/episodes

Perhaps that’s less about unions becoming less good, and more about the collapse of unionization rates? Union membership is at an all time low, Occam’s razor says that the fact that most people aren’t in a union is the most likely explanation for why unions haven’t don’t people anything good recently.

Possibly, but since we’re hypothesizing: it could potentially be that unions are better suited for aiding those working in some professions and not others.

Perhaps highly educated knowledge workers can better manage salary/benefits and quality of work life better than a slate of hired guns?

Maybe because the skill sets and work output is generally more unique, knowledge workers can more easily move jobs than those who work in traditional union shops?

> it could potentially be that unions are better suited for aiding those working in some professions and not others.

Possible, but unionization rates are also down in industries that used to be unionized, such as manufacturing. This strongly implies that the issue is less “unions are bad” and more “unions were good, so bosses fought to get rid of them”. Companies wouldn’t need to hire anti-union firms if unions weren’t at least attractive to laborers, right?

After all, it’s not like life in those sectors has gotten so comfortable that laborers don’t think they need unions anymore.

> Perhaps highly educated knowledge workers can better manage salary/benefits and quality of work life better than a slate of hired guns?

Huh?

I think you’re calling union reps “hired guns”, which is deeply ironic given the history of bosses hiring actual men with actual guns to actually shoot labor activists.

> Maybe because the skill sets and work output is generally more unique, knowledge workers can more easily move jobs than those who work in traditional union shops?

I mean, unequal professions do unionize all the time. Take a look at professional sports. Unions are extremely useful in negotiating between labor and capital about things other than just pay. Length of contracts, benefits, safety regulations, etc.

Regardless, it’s pretty silly to argue that unions are useless because “they’ve had no impact” for this crowd when this crowd has never really had the opportunity to join a union. Hell, even quitting software and finding a union shop to join would actually be very hard in any field, given the low rates of unionization in this country.

> unions were good, so bosses fought to get rid of them

It's also worth noting that "unions were good" doesn't necessarily mean "unions are good". It's entirely possible that most of the things unions can do to help works has already been accomplished and enshrined in law (osha, breaks, overtime, etc). While I believe that there's still good unions can accomplish, the cap on how much good is much lower than it used to be.

That’s plausible if you ignore pay. Pay is the one area where it’s self evident that something has gone horribly awry, which makes it hard to accept the “labor won” argument. Obviously other factors can be at play here, but it’s certainly not the case that everything is honky dory and that’s why workers stopped unionizing. The decline of union membership over this time frame is not conclusive, but it’s something worth investigating!

Well that and there’s Frito Lay workers striking to end “suicide shifts” that literally killed people from exhaustion. It’s kind of hard to argue that labor won these issues when they’re dragging the corpse of a worker off the assembly line of the potato chip factory after working 12 hour days for weeks on end without a day off finally killed them. That it took a strike to fix that also implies that labor law needs some more work.

Workers didn't "win". It's just that the conditions for workers are MUCH better now than they used to be in the past. So unions are able to do less for workers. That doesn't they're obsolete, just that the line for the decision for "are they worth it in _this_ situation" has moved.

The Frito Lay workers issue is a prime example of "in _this_ situation" mentioned above. Some places are greatly benefited by unions, some are/would not, some are gray areas. And, to a large extent, there's a personal opinion component to it, too.

> Workers didn't "win". It's just that the conditions for workers are MUCH better now than they used to be in the past.

Only if you ignore pay. Most workers pay has remained flat adjusted for inflation, while housing, education, and medical costs are growing faster than inflation.

> So unions are able to do less for workers. That doesn't they're obsolete, just that the line for the decision for "are they worth it in _this_ situation" has moved.

You’re ignoring the other possibility: the fear that unionizing will draw retaliation from the bosses that’ll make life worse. It’s not like we haven’t seen plants close down and move in response to unionization before.

Of course if that’s true, it implies that unions could help and bosses fear that.

> The Frito Lay workers issue is a prime example of "in _this_ situation" mentioned above. Some places are greatly benefited by unions, some are/would not, some are gray areas.

Right, but the original thesis was “labor activists got all their non-pay related demands codified into law, making unions less desirable”. The frito lay situation obviously disproves that.

Most highly educated knowledge workers I know are killing themselves with overwork,but it's better paid, so it's easier to justify it to yourself.

Most highly educated knowledge workers also get stock options, which at best compensates them for business success, but at worst can trick workers into thinking that the business’ interests are the same as their interests.

I think there’s a persuasive story to be told about the slow change of how startup options work and the changing mood of the tech scene.

I don't think Occam's razor says any such thing. I see, all the time, first hand accounts of unions acting in ways that cause harm to nearly everyone except those in the union, and only actually benefit a select few. Examples like

- not being allowed to plug in your monitor at conference center or vacuum your area; instead needing to pay a union member a minimum of 30 minutes of time for 2 minutes of work.

- union members verbally and even physically abusing people that are just minding their own business, trying not to get involved; you're either with them or against them.

Unions have done great good for the American worker, and continue to do so in many cases. But they also do great harm and, when leadership is looking out for itself over it's members, can provide very little practical benefit.

It's a rough topic because it's VERY polarizing. It seems like the vast majority of people fall into 1 of 2 camps; they either love everything about unions and can't see the negatives, or vice versa. It's very hard to improve on the situation when that's the case.

I’m sorry that you’ve had some bad experiences, but a few personal anecdotes are not persuasive about such large scale concerns. Obviously seeing someone physically abused by a union member is bad, but “unions are bad” does not logically follow from that experience.

The American union is pretty bad it seems to represent the lobby arm and is totally out of touch with employee needs. It’s not a local org of your peers it feels like just another rent seeking corporate entity.

[Citation Needed]

Personal experience. All our local unions got sold out by union headquarters when it came time for contract negotiations. They did things like surprise votes over holiday weekend and negotiating contracts without involvement from local reps

How many unions are we talking about here? One, a dozen, a hundred? Is it enough to draw a reasonable pattern from, or are we in “I had a bad experience with a union therefore all unions are bad” territory?

Teachers union got sabotaged, machinist union got sabotaged, engineers union same deal. Different kinds of tricks but it seems pretty consistent story. Big Union hq negotiates a contract that’s not great for local members but skirts by at 51% vote under suspicion conditions.

I’m not anti union. I mean union do provide slightly better pay conditions for members but they seem to be super corrupt as well. They are like a mafia, they provide services for members and Mafia members do slightly better but it no co-op.

So two private sector unions and a public union. Not exactly a strong base to build a trend from.

> the good they did for American workers during their heyday.

It's not their heyday anymore, though. We need new structures and leadership for labor rights to prevent the (admittantly rare) abuses like this.

I've been listening to the Oral History of the Kickstarter Union and I don't believe the charge of rent seeking or the implication of close ties to organized crime is accurate.

Rent seeking usually refers to creating new income streams for yourself without providing any benefit by acting as a middle person, and unions do provide benefits to workers, in the form of collective negotiation for individual benefits, but also a seat at the table when it comes to how the business is run.

I also get the sense that the organized crime connections of unions are overblown. Like that settlement was I believe a way to end the consent decree that's been in existence since 1989.

And the arrest of the Lucchese crime family in 2017 didn't seem to include any members of liuna local 66. I believe the mob tax is actually a reference to crimes that happened back in the late 90s involving the Scalamandres brothers. If they were doing anything with the union it was exploiting it, and blaming the victim doesn't seem fair.

Here are my references for the above

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/manhattan-us-attorney-a...

https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdny/pr/alleged-street-boss-and...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rent-seeking

https://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/15/nyregion/brothers-plead-g...

https://engelberg-center-live.simplecast.com/episodes

Unions in the US (with some small exceptions) have to negotiate better working conditions which benefit all workers, regardless of whether they are a part of the union or not [1]. If there was no mandatory fee, then unions would likely suffer from the free rider problem and be suboptimally funded.

Of course, this doesn't mean that all unions' fees are justifiable for the value they produce, nor does it mean that all unions which impose mandatory fees improve working conditions for all workers. But I think it's hyperbole to call mandatory fees "rent-seeking" when there might be a perfectly rational explanation in some instances.

[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/about-nlrb/rights-we-protect/the-law/em....

rather than a mandatory fee, it seems like a better solution would be to allow unions to not represent members who don't want to be represented

Mandatory fees are rent-seeking either way, it's just possible that imposing the rent is justified.

Off-hand, I'm not convinced. I'm leaning more and more against systems designed to prevent free riders—our culture is so primed to value "fairness" that we're willing to impose significant net harm to achieve it. I usually think about this in terms of public policy (free public transport, subsidizing the unemployed/homeless/etc...) but I think it applies here too.

I would not be surprised if a union that had to justify its dues to workers would be more effective for workers than one with mandatory dues because there would be more direct pressure for the union to be transparent and effective. I am not entirely confident in this though, in large part because I don't understand the politics around unions in practice! Mandatory dues do seem like a viable point of leverage against union-busting attempts from management, which could be a more important effect.

You are not using rent in the conventional, economic sense. Rent is specifically a payment made to an manufacturer of goods or services that is higher than what is necessary for that manufacturer to bring those goods into existence; (i.e. higher than the profit margin that would have incentivized that manufacturer to produce the good in the first place).

For a trivial example, if a union makes no profit and its actions provide more utility to its employees than their mandatory payments, then it is not receiving any economic rent.

> I'm leaning more and more against systems designed to prevent free riders—our culture is so primed to value "fairness" that we're willing to impose significant net harm to achieve it.

I'm not sure if you fully understand what free rider problems are. The whole point of preventing free riders is that by imposing a tax or mandatory payment, you increase net utility. If imposing a tax truly imposed significant net harm, then the problem wouldn't be a free rider problem by definition!

Free rider problems are really coordination problems. Essentially, there are situations where if everyone cooperated, then everyone would be happier. But there is no incentive for any one person to cooperate because they can choose to defect, yet still receive the benefits of cooperation.

> free public transport, subsidizing the unemployed/homeless/etc...

First of all, these are not solutions to free rider problems. Second of all, it is not clear that they impose significant net harm. For example, you might claim that welfare reduces the incentive to work and or educate themselves. This is the typical conservative market-fundamentalist argument.

But practically speaking, humans need to take care of basic needs before they can start working or learn. The positive effect of nutrition, taking care of basic needs, etc. might overwhelm the negative effects from reduced incentive to work. So you need a lot of sophisticated analysis on real data before you can claim that these policies actually impose net harm.

But Americans love adversarial systems

This is an underrated point actually. I've thought about this for a while and there's a case to be made both for and against some of the adversarial and arguably antisocial aspects of American ethos.

I am not an expert on German unions, but I think one key factor is that German unions tend to have company-level decision-making and representation. In the USA, it is common for unions to be industry-wide, with little or no significant company-level decision-making authority.

These monolithic unions strike at one company or another according to what will most benefit the rest of the union. This means that the union is 'attacking' one company, and helping their competitors, subsidizing the costs to members at that company with money earned by members from the competitors. This is something like blackmail, and is bound to cause animosity with management.

> In the USA, it is common for unions to be industry-wide

A lot of the ones in Germany are as well. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_trade_unions_in_German...

Yes, I've read about that, but it seems like those unions give each branch/local/company significant independent decision-making authority, which is uncommon in top-down US unions.

The biggest reason is that in Germany, unions actually take part in decisions. It means that in addition to representing workers they take the company interests into account, after all, employees can't be paid if the company doesn't make money. In other countries they can only protest and so, they work by opposing management instead of trying to find a solution that suits everyone.

A lot of Americans tend to believe that American culture and human nature are the same thing. That humans are irredeemably selfish, and that cooperation can only occur as an emergent property of pure selfishness and greed. Those of us who live in more cooperative cultures know this to be false.

> Those of us who live in more cooperative cultures know this to be false.

How does your culture "motivate" those who aren't interested in cooperating the way you'd want them to? Gulag?

Yeah all those gulags we have in New Zealand.

Yeah because it is required for them to be on the boards of the big companies too.

The US should play around with board composition from both the legislation side, as well as a consequence for all fines and settlements and court orders.

I don't know about that. We had a German employee who sexually harassed multiple people and it was the work council that basically made it impossible to fire him.

Anonymous anecdote on the internet vs objective statistical measurements that prove overall efficiency?

Because nearly everyone in Germany is in some sort of union.

Entirely different climate, sort of like life-long employment culture in Japan.

> Because nearly everyone in Germany is in some sort of union.

This is not true. DGB (comprising most unions and all major ones) reported less than 6M members last year [1] out of ~45M working population total or ~34M of dependently employed people [2].

A lot of people might end up benefiting from a union due to them often negotiating contracts for whole occupational groups, but they are not members.

[1] https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/5837/umfrage/...

[2] https://www.destatis.de/DE/Themen/Arbeit/Arbeitsmarkt/Erwerb...

One big failing of American worker unions (not all but increasing in numbers) was when they agreed to two-tier systems for pay and benefits. Such unions basically compromised new hires benefits and pay to continue high pay and benefits for tenured union workers.

A little tidbit is that unions in the Netherlands usually bargain for all employees, while that isn’t the case in the US in my understanding? You still get a few little union bonuses (like employers paying union fees) and bargaining by unions pre-disposed to their (usually older) membership. But all in all unions bargain for everyone, not just their members.

It is the same in France, but they are still powerless because they are not present on the company's board unlike Germany.

In France it is only the government owned companies who can strike, strikes in private companies are rare. It only happens when they are all fired, but it is too late..

> It is the same in France, but they are still powerless because they are not present on the company's board unlike Germany

Not exactly powerless, some decisions and some changes need to be accepted by the worker's councils. But they cannot make decisions and force the company to go in a certain direction.

Grand parent might refer to the fact that German companies with > 2000 employees have to have a supervisory board where 50%-1 vote a held by representatives of employees: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitbestimmungsgesetz

Interesting side note, in mining and steel companies by law the vote is split 50% between employee and owner representatives and there’s a neutral member as tie breaker. This is often justified by safety arguments but actually stems from the WW1 and WW2 experience of these industries were pushing for war (good for business) and a neutral member was thought to temper these tendencies.

who are the neutral members? where does one find them, and how is their neutrality ensured?

Seems like a nontrivial task.

They’re usually (former) politicians. For example RAG AG has the former president of the federal parliament as the neutral member.

That's after the employees vote though, and only if the unions win the vote. The employers do not have to provider resources before the vote has been done.

The problem is Betriebsräte still aren't unions :( Collective wage agreements are rare in the tech industry, it's a real shame.

I've been wondering why German Software Engineers are paid so much more.

Funny that you say that, in fact I was waiting for someone to say it, because pay is considerably higher in companies with a works council than without. Tech companies are famous for lacking works councils.

You can go to your works council and request to see the salary and bonus structure for your peers that work the same job as you. Exactly the thing that is being shut down in the OP.

So instead of making a point about how a works council lowers tech workers' pay, you made a point for creating them.

No, he makes a point for leaving Germany for higher pay. As a talented individual, one needs not rely on unions to fight for some mediocre salary everyone gets, one can negotiate it on their own and get a salary worth the skills.

Talents leaving the country is an actual problem (for Germany, not the software engineers), no wonder there’s a term for the shortage: The famous Fachkräftemangel.

And yet most of those same "talented individuals" are having their wages kneecapped by wage fixing (https://time.com/76655/google-apple-settle-wage-fixing-lawsu...), lack of wage transparency (this article), etc.

The system we have (in north america) benefits a handful of individuals at the expense of MOST people. That's not a good system.

Also, speaking as a Canadian, we've got plenty of "brain drain" here, and it's not because we've got socialist labour laws - because for the most part we don't.

> The system we have (in north america) benefits a handful of individuals at the expense of MOST people. That's not a good system.

The US system can be summarised as "Fuck you, I got mine".

That said if we are honest we have to discover the positives of an individualist system vs a more collective system.

One of which is that exceptional people do on average do better than they would in a more collective system.

It's whether those people doing better is sufficient to offset all the people doing worse that is the debate and I think on balance no, it's not.

That said I'm also not one of those exceptional people either (not many of us here actually are) so that will colour my view, I'm a decent to good developer who writes stuff that works, provides value and gets paid so to me strong worker protections whether enforced by government or union make sense otherwise the power is all on the other side of the table.

Well if you think that some combination of being exceptional, or being hardworking + a bit lucky, or some such gets you further in the US than other places, then you can bet that the exceptional and hardworking people are going to end up coming to the US.

The Fachkräftemangel is largely driven by pay, not by actual shortages. Nearly all software companies have open positions for a software engineer with masters degree and 10 years of experience with sap, haskell and c++, 36k anually before taxes. All those open positions go into official statistics where they appear to the public as some kind of shortage. The labour market is okay and migration statistics show that it's apparently not worth leaving germany for the better off except for migrating to austria and switzerland.

/s?

Yes it was sarcasm considering American engineers in the top third of pay absolutely dwarf even the highest paid german engineers unless they are working for an American FAANG.

Funny you ask that, because people in Germany's software sector are about the least organized ones.

(German) https://www.heise.de/newsticker/meldung/Viel-Arbeit-wenig-Mi...

Also, there is nothing special about software developers in Germany. They don't fare any worse than other technical staff. The biggest predictor for pay is the size of the company.

Having worked in the US for almost a decade, having seen a lot of different software companies because of my role, and now, long back in Germany, working for a new software company that I own a sizable part of (co-founded between "veterans" of the software industry), and looking at my country with new eyes after coming back from the US (and it took me quite a few years to come to the conclusions):

It seems obvious to me (now) that overall the US is quite a bit richer than Germany (questions about wealth distribution, inefficient health care, and education notwithstanding).

Software in particular is not exactly a strong suit of my country. We don't have the scale, we don't have the investments, we don't have the expertise (comparing the levels between US and Germany), we don't have the same kind of market outlooks to justify similar wages.

That last bit is just my own conclusion based on my own thoughts and observations, I did not study the subject. Even just walking around in what are supposed to be the best parts of my big city, after having seen much of the US where I traveled a lot and looked at many places and neighborhoods because I really liked exploring them, I am damn sure US "wealthy" is on another level to German wealth. I'm not looking at the top 1%, but top third or quarter. Below that it's harder to say, and when including questions of safety net or health the comparison is different - but we were talking about well-paid software engineers.

In my opinion, we (Germans) are not nearly in as good a position as we think or are told about ourselves. I think software engineers (and engineers in generell) simply can't be paid that much more here. It's not that all the money goes to somebody else, it's not there to begin with.

For example, the EU and the US as a market are not comparable. It is much easier to sell to all of the US than to even sell to just a few countries within the EU. It may be not too hard legally and logistically, but culturally the EU countries really are completely different countries. Germany is not exactly known as an exporter of software either, apart from SAP.

Don't remember hearing about Rocket Internet firms having works council's or recognition agreements.

Right. But now how much does the average software developer make in Germany vs the US? I don't think the German way is all roses either...

and yet my company’s betriebsratswahl was plagued with fear, managers having meetings saying why unions are bad, and so on. and it failed by 1/3 of 1 vote.

Heck Apple should want employees discussing this stuff in an internal channel rather than all over the internet. Employees getting together and talking about pay, job titles, tenure, team structures, project names, executives and probably more on a random Discord server with no way to verify user identity sounds like a security nightmare.

Regardless of what the NLRB thinks, we can have our own opinions. If employees want to talk pay equity, let 'em.

I disagree. It is almost as if at work talk on work provided media like slack, should be work related. What is next? People complain about mutiny related chat rooms being banned by the Navy?

Not being allowed to mutiny in the navy is related to the whole violence thing. It’s also the case that people in the navy can’t just quit when they want to. I don’t think you want those kind of rules applying to most workplaces. Talking about pay equity is a good thing to be encouraged.

If you're seeing organization as "mutiny" then you're going to be able to justify anything the employer does to the employee.

Not comparable.

Discussing salaries is a federally protected activity, unlike mutiny.

Lol. In what society is pay unrelated to work?

Ok, then perhaps Apple should ban the channel about fun dogs.

Looking at my company slack, we have a ton of channels with a "soc-" prefix, which we use to designate a channel that's there for social purposes rather than work. I think my employer would have a mutiny on their hands if tomorrow they decided to shut that down.

How much people are paid clearly matches the scope of “... Apple business and must advance the work, deliverables, or mission of Apple departments and teams,”. Paying people fairly advances the Apple teams.

Plotting mutiny is a crime. Angling for pay equity is legal. The equivalent here would be if Apple broke up a #insider-trading Slack channel where people exchanged Apple’s MNPI.

That's a strange analogy. The military can compel you, by force, to walk into a hail of bullets. It is not a "job". Though everyone's salary is public knowledge :)

How is discussing pay not work related? It's a very important part of why the employees are working there.

Pay seems like priority #0 at work. Nobody would be there without being paid to be there.

But it's not always work related. My fiance's work has a slack channel called dev-urandom where people can share, among other things, cute puppy pictures. Before covid, my work had a smash bros channel to summon people to play and post new character releases.

This is a kind of tangent, but I'll put it out there..

What would happen is Twitter the company employees tried to unionize and used the twitter service to organize. Could twitter ban them or suppress them? Would twitter have to let them do their thing regardless?

It would probably be an unfair labour practice for Twitter to do so, as it's pretty clear that twitter employees can use twitter at will and such a policy would be purely suppressing their organizing.

Of course twitter is a terrible medium for organizing anyway, so maybe Twitter would want them to use it! I hope if twitter employees do try to unionize they don't try and do it in tweets.

I guess I’m curious whether Twitter would be compelled to allow tweets that “violate” its tos.

Let’s say it’s a rally: “Let’s organize and prevent Twitter from requiring proof of immunization status.”

It’s about unionization and demanding that Twitter not demand proof of immunization (if they were to require it), but it could be any number of things that are contrary to their liking including unionization.

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