Comment by 4ec0755f5522 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by 4ec0755f5522 | Hacker News Reader

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When I was very young I worked a tough job that had a mandatory union and it was quite terrible / weak. Working conditions were pretty bad, physical labor, etc. But it was not until I worked a job with no union that I realized every element of that job that didn't suck was due to the union. For example we had supervisors but they didn't follow you around and micromanage you. You were just expected to do your job. If you didn't you would be reprimanded of course, but no one was on your case at all. Supervisors had to show you a base level of respect: there were rules on that stuff. There were a lot of rules, actually, and even though the union didn't have a lot of power I'm pretty sure every single positive one, anything that gave employees even a sliver of autonomy and power, were things that the union fought for and got for us.

I still was kind of anti-union after that. "Anti Union" is the wrong phrasing, it was more... I was very suspicious of their structure, their own profit motive(s) etc. People working for the union had it so much better than the people actually doing the work, and we were the ones paying for and funding it, right? That aspect of it I never got over, but I now think that it may have been the wrong point of view.

I have recently come around full swing and am 100% pro union. And it is stories like this. Starbucks, Google, Amazon, these companies will spend millions to fight unions. This is prima facie evidence to me that unions benefit workers. These companies all talk the same talk: "we believe companies work best when team members can work directly with the company with no union in the way". As though Amazon warehouse workers have some kind of communication path to improve their working conditions when they are being managed and fired by an AI. What a buncha fkn BS.

Things cost. Good things cost money. You are paying for someone to fight for your interests and not the company's interest. Maybe that is worth paying for. And if you don't pay money to a union to fight you pay with your physical health, your safety, your respect, your mental health. If you work for Amazon you pay with your life when they threaten to fire you if you try to leave in order to hide from a hurricane. We should all be in unions.

> Starbucks, Google, Amazon, these companies will spend millions to fight unions. This is prima facie evidence to me that unions benefit workers.

Technically, that does not follow. What can be inferred is that companies believe that unions will cost the company money, but this does not necessarily mean that the employees will get any of that money. One could imagine a theoretical evil union which takes all the extracted profit from the company and gives it to themselves, and not to the employees.

We can infer from labor history itself. All of our benefits today came from workers who lost their lives in fighting for better working conditions.

But even if we don't look at history, the fact that all companies worldwide consistently unite together against this one issue (unions), as well as spending millions to counter it, should make any employee suspect. In contrast to millions of dollars lost due to bad CEO leadership or fraud, employee attrition/retraining, managers favoring nepotism, etc. Curious how they don't unite to fix that stuff when it plagues all companies just as hard.

Just a note: I agree that spending millions fighting unions is strong evidence unions are bad for the company. It's not necessarily obvious this means unions are good for the employees.

It really bothers me that we've all accepted (not you or me specifically, but every time I see unions discussed it's the subtext) that we have two choices: no union or a shitty union.

Why can't we work for a union that is good? If the answer is that humans are involved and it'll never be possible, then that could be applied to anything and is an absurd answer. This is not a strawman, I've heard that argument many times.

In USA, unions mostly represent blue-collar workers who tend to elect low-quality union leaders. A union at Google could end up with better leaders than the company itself.

I doubt that very much to be honest. Not that I believe that there aren't any smart people at Google.

I expect a Google union to force me to go to some sensitivity training instead of fighting for wages (which to be honest are pretty high as they are). So would it be about workplace safety? Probably not. Military projects? My deepest sympathy to everyone that is critical here, but maybe not really a classical union topic to be honest.

I guess Google also employs low wage workers for some tasks. Maybe they could use a union the most.

I took Google's sensitivity training. The class is called "Unconscious Bias". I learned a lot. I would not have learned those things in my day-to-day life. My social skills improved. You should take sensitivity training if you get the chance. You won't regret it.

A Google union would probably focus on problems that affect most employees:

- Employee compensation (perf) is decided in secret by managers. There is no transparency and therefore no accountability. Getting rewarded for effort is unnecessarily stressful. Some managers are bad and exploit their team members. The lack of accountability creates dysfunction across the entire organization: Google managers reward people for completing projects that make the managers look good on paper. Nobody checks that the projects meet needs for users. The managers do not align incentives with shareholders (long-term profitability), customers, users, or the rest of society. This is the root cause of Google's dysfunction. Many employees feel dissatisfaction with it, even if they don't talk about it.

- The noisy & crowded workspaces. This is a direct result of the first problem of mis-aligned incentives. The office management division (REWS) is not incentivized to make Google offices actually meet the needs of workers.

- Most Google jobs are located in an area with extremely high cost of living and terrible commutes.

I don't think a union is a vehicle against unloved management, it would just be piling discontent on people that were singled out. If you believe you can make the case your manager works against business interest you should talk to him about that first. If that doesn't net results, you can talk to his supervisor with a reference to the meeting you have had and what you were talking about.

I agree on the noisy work spaces. That could be a union issue indeed. Maybe the problem of living costs too, but this has probably numerous reasons and it would be difficult to get everyone behind a common position.

Everyone has biases and it is okay to have some for that matter.

There's also another factor at play: in many states, the power of unions is quite weak. E.g. public-sector employees in NC cannot collectively bargain, which is why they're able to get away with paying teachers horrendous wages. Want to strike? Go on ahead, pay your sub for the day (or your contract will not be renewed) and go down to Raleigh, where the legislature will recess and most of them will literally just go home and ignore all the people with picket signs.

It's a lot harder to get behind unions when they can't really be very strong.

Blue collar unions probably don't have bad unions because they are uneducated, and you probably won't love a programmer's union because the leaders have postdocs.

For white collar equivalents with bad unions, consider the teachers unions, and the constant fight over tenure and charter schools. Or the American Medical Association and their successful constriction of supply in the world's most overpriced Healthcare environment.

Which would then obviously make it attractive to switch from working from the company to working for the union. And now the union is even stronger.

This is a very wise answer.

The way I take this is that, as a civilization, we don't know how to reliably produce a good union. Coordination is hard, especially when politics and money are involved, and there are some well-known common failure modes.

To me, "a good union" is a lot like "a sufficiently smart compiler". It'd be great, and I'd love to have one, but the unions we currently have are the best we've been able to make so far. We can see many cases where we could do better, but theory is significantly ahead of practice, people keep reinventing the wheel, etc.

I'm far from educated about the history of unions, and I'd be glad if anyone could correct me.

I think it's worth noting that perfect efficiency is not a precondition for positive outcomes— much like with companies themselves. There's plenty of good CEOs and efficient companies, but there's also plenty where upper-management takes ludicrous bonuses, underperform, and a lot of potential efficiency is lost in politics and incompetence.

The real question is wether in spite of the inefficiencies, as a whole, unionization yields the expected results; and in general it has. Thanks to unionization we've gotten 8-hour workdays, the end of child labour and the weekend, for example. There's also data showing a strong correlation between union membership and the middle class’ overall share of income [1].

[1]: https://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/economy/news/2...

Yeah, I feel our standards for unions are way higher than for most other things (in companies). It's frustrating.

The quality of a union heavily depends on its leadership, which must be accountable to union members. But yes, a carefully conceived structure would make that possible.

Problem is when said leadership starts to advertise particular interests instead of focusing on compensation and safety (work place safety, not neurosis compensation). A young union cannot really focus on much more because it is unlikely that it will get the support it needs initially.

...which must be accountable to fellow union members...

Union members comprise union leadership!

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