What is it about trades unions that's so objectionable?
Is it the legal framework, union culture, being scared it means you'll make marginally less when your potential unicorn IPOs?
And are those objections inherent to unions, or just the way that unions are usually run when you've encountered them in the past?
If working conditions and pay suck, I much prefer a UBI so people can work less. It has none of the downsides of the below.
- I want my underperforming colleagues to be fired quickly. It's unfair and annoying that laggards are protected and free riding off their colleagues' (my) effort, and it leads to ineffective orgs.
- I don't want seniority or rank to be rewarded. It's unfair to young people (me) who are more competent and ambitious, and it leads to ineffective orgs.
- I want to negotiate individually because I believe I will make more money as an outperformer. I don't want a centralized handicapper to blunt my compensation.
- I don't like that unions are rent seeking in nature.
- I don't like that unions often are exploited by organized crime.
- I don't like that unions interfere in the broader political process and democracy via activism and political pressure (e.g look at the fact that the new EV subsidies will be going to everyone except Tesla, it's a perversion).
- I think people should be free to organize, but I don't like that the state grants special asymmetric powers to unions.
- I don't like especially public sector unions that I believe are doing significant damage to society broadly. For example police unions that shielded Chauvin after a large number of complaints.
I'm in the middle on unions, largely because research has shown that low skill labor is a monopsony market. The state needs to give asymmetric power to unions because employers have an incredible advantage in the low skill labor market. UBI would certainly help here, as we've seen during the pandemic, but I'm not sure it would be enough for people to decide that they just won't work anymore.
And you realize that there has been historically effort and money going into those exact fears being propagated and ingrained in the US worker's mind, because of strong anti-union company practices.
So that leaves us in a very weird place, where the pros and cons of unions become beliefs and opinions, but it should very much be something one can properly analyse from real data.
Many of them do not understand the need of a union because they don't work in a milieu to which unions were previously prominent, nor do they understand their purpose. They see anything that could affect the above conditions as unnecessary or "bad".
There has also been decades of corporate promoted anti-union propaganda. A simple google search shows that companies like Amazon will go to extremely intrusive lengths to control the narrative around unions by employing tactics like mass texting and communication campaigns, mandatory anti-union information meetings, etc. Do that enough and you get people who begin to earnestly support an anti-union sentiment, even if the union would help them.
First, culturally, US Americans are much more individualist than most Europeans. (Obviously I am painting with broad strokes here, but it’s true in a general sense, on average). US Americans are somewhat less likely to feel solidarity or a sense of common cause with coworkers, and more likely to value the freedom to negotiate their contract on their own.
They are also much more likely to distrust large organizations and bureaucracy, sometimes to an extreme extent that would be puzzling to Western and Northern Europeans. Rather than being on their side, many would perceive the union as just one more large bureaucracy trying to screw them.
Third, there are many current examples of unions in the US that have made industries meaningfully less efficient. And highly-paid US Americans are less likely to see themselves as oppressed by their employers and more likely to see themselves as making common cause: after all, they have a common goal of making a lot of money. If my company, say, found it harder to fire low performers (an almost certain consequence of a union), it would be less efficient, make less profit, and be less able to pay me my current high salary.
The fight for employee rights probably had a lot of bloodshed and now that we generally enjoy decent protection, we have forgotten the need for a union.
All these factors add up.
As an English person I have to disagree, there's certainly a level of cynicism towards bureaucracy in much of our society. Just look at a lot of British comedy, The Thick of It, Yes Minister, The League of Gentlemen, swathes of Monty Python, The Office, and many other examples couldn't have come from a culture where there's genuine deference to institutions and authority.
As such, fully 50% of the country thinks that any measure that prevents them from being fully competitive in the worker-exploitation race-to-the-bottom that is business in most commodity markets (such as minimum wages, unions, more than 2wks mandatory vacation, etc.), will mean that they’ll fail to launch that phase of their career, and have to go back to flipping burgers.
Of course, 50% of Americans will never be small business owners. It is thought by some that large corporations push this vision as propaganda, because voters who think of themselves as small business owners, vote for things that end up benefitting these large business owners.
And government unions aren’t a concern to them either, because this type of person also could never imagine themselves working for the government.
(Few seem to have the inferential capacity to realize that they are nevertheless a shareholder of their government, and a marginal dollar saved in taxes is the same as a marginal dollar gained in dividends. One might in fact call taxes a dividend that’s usually net-negative.)
Would people object to prosecuting the Jan 6 perpetrators unless they feel police shouldn't be interfering in right wing attacks?
Large unions become huge political contributors, and affect policy decisions to an extent that often outweighs any influence they could get without that money, and that rubs people the wrong way as well.
* The corruption in the unions gets a lot of press, now and historically.
* There are lots of stories where union workers can't be fired so they just sleep at their desk.
* We don't have good worker protections. There is no political appetite for it and also no strong public sentiment for it. This sounds counter intuitive but there is this attitude that people get what they deserve. "They could just get a different job", "No one is forcing them to work there". Even look at our vacation policies compare to Europe. There is a mentality that hard work (even being exploited) is a goal to strive for.
So sadly, someone with a 1099 job at Amazon or McDonalds is much more likely to have anti-union sentiment, because they are much more likely to have been exposed to a "union education" pamphlet or "educational" video at work.
I often see people promoting or defending unions who have never worked for/been a member of a union, which is interesting.
I suspect that the HN demographic (and I include myself in this) is particularly prone to this sense of illusory superiority [1]. We're a demographic that is more likely than most to have grown up constantly receiving external validation that we're exceptional via good performance in school, getting into elite universities, occupying extremely high paying jobs, and so on.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6029792/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority
I feel in Europe people dream of having a cottage somewhere cute and pleasant, and just relaxing with good friends, having a drink at the pub, rinse and repeat. That's the "good life". But in America, people dream of being number #1, the best athlete, the richest man, the biggest CEO, etc. That's the "good life".
So in America you want to be the best richest most famous most accomplished, and Unions seem to go against that. You're looking to compete for the top spot, not find a happy compromise, your coworkers are competition.
In Europe, work stands in the way of your dream of leisure cottage life and caring to your hobbies. Unions seem to help with that, by amortizing the job/compensation, you can reclaim some of your time for yourself, have a better pension, work less hours, all things that'll help you have more free time.
A Union in Europe and a Union in the US are not the same thing! They have the same name, but they are not the same type of organization.
That's why you are confused. European style Unions do not exist in the US.
One huge difference is in Europe the employee picks their union, while in the US there is a single union for the employer.
Here you'll hear the same things over and over:
"My (friend) was working at (someplace) and had to wait (2 hours | half a day) for a Union Electrician to plug in an electrical cord!" (Who cares! You got a free break! Enjoy the time slacking!)
"Unions are corrupt!" (Ignoring the difference of scale of corruption in the corporate world vs a union)
"I am paid because of my productivity! I am a Super-Worker! I resent the people who simply punch the clock at their CAREER." (Here you have wage slaves who were given a salary+perks and have been swindled into thinking that they have common ground with the Capitalist Class. Dividing workers into hierarchical groups is a old and great way to insure against any movement towards solidarity.)
and on and on... but in the US, every argument against any form of worker solidarity you'll see the complete absence of consideration of the abuses and priorities of the Capitalist Class. It's never workers vs ownership over here. It's workers versus the narcissistic individual "Top-Performer" (self-described).
This is exactly the mentality that demonstrates everything wrong with unions.
Now I sit on my ass all day long and write code. I make enough now that I'm in the class of worker that's allowed to slack and pretend I don't. Sometimes I slack and post to Hacker News in the middle of the day. No union needed!
When the city bureaucracy cant’t process your permit application without an extra 3 months delay, and you wonder why they don’t speed up the process, or work a bit harder to handle things: thank the union.
When you can’t train more doctors, because it is in doctors interest to be scarce: thank the ~union~ guild.
When the factory shuts down, and the town loses its primary industry altogether because it can’t be productive with American workers fighting modernization: thank the union.
I don’t like unions because they do nothing but cause problems and make society less efficient for everyone. We already know how to make life better for workers, which is to run the economy hot (basically one of the few things Trump got right; economy was looking good for marginal workers ~2017-2019) and use labor regulations in the cases where that isn’t enough. Running the organizations inefficiently is not actually necessary to improve conditions for workers.
Doctor unions wield no power, thankfully. Source: wife’s a doc
Those organizations help foster that.
I wouldn’t say “they do nothing but” although they certainly can.
That said …
When companies hamper the efficiency of the markets, they get countered by antitrust laws.
When unions abuse their “market positions” to hamper the efficiency of the market, e.g. block automation thus make the rest of society pay the price in form of the resulting inefficiency just to benefit themselves, who is there to stop them? Serious question.
There was an article on HN a couple of days back about how the ports of LA being some of the least efficient on the planet.
Much about why Unions are a plague on the economy can be found in there.
or teachers refusing to get vaccinated and prioritizing themselves over children