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Comment by nerbert | Hacker News Reader

Seeing comments from previous posts on this forum, I'd say they kind of succeeded.

Yup, I truly don't understand why people in tech are so against this. It will likely be a net positive for all tech folks.

In Hollywood they have SAG (Screen Actors Guild) so a large union for high paying jobs isn't unheard of in America.

Most members of SAG are not highly paid. The median income for an actor is $43,760, and even the 75th percentile is only $60,760. The numbers for SAG represented actors is similar to these numbers. The thing is that not all tech employees are paid the same, nor should they be. Google and other similar companies often times pay multiple times the median tech salary.

[1] https://money.usnews.com/careers/best-jobs/actor/salary

NFLPA, NBPA, and MLBPA all exist as well. Those are definitely highly-paid members (minimum salaries of ~$600k/year for baseball and football, and just shy of $1million for basketball).

I think you just refuted your own point? Some actors are paid millions a year while half earn less than $43,760. This demonstrates that there are unions that represent workers who are paid multiple times the median salary.

Resistance to Unions in America is pretty deep. This is a 150 year old issue that previously involved hiring consultants with guns to shoot at anyone who dared to ask for an 80 hour work week. I doubt that a crew of modern consultants did much more than run up some bills on a corporate expense account.

*Note that support/opposition to Unions is often form from petty core experiences (first hand and family relations). For me it is a contest between a 2 minute promotional video, three years of my professional life, and 25 years of my uncle's work experience. Given these forces, you would be pretty hard pressed to change my thoughts on the matter in the abstract (particulars are what matter here).

And _currently_ involves hiring consultants to force employees to sit through hours of anti-union fear mongering the second management smells a whiff of pro-union organizing sentiment.

The 'American Factory' documentary has a great example of what this looks like in real life. Hearing that Amazon or Google or whoever else worked to convince employees to vote against unionizing is one thing, seeing what that effort is like on the ground is altogether more eye-opening.

Keep in mind they wanted to bring back a union similiar to the one that helped take down the old GM plant.

Yup, money wins, people will fight against their own interest, etc etc

It’s incredibly presumptuous to assume you know someone else’s best interest better than them. If someone makes a different decision than you, maybe it’s because they value things differently than you and not that you’re sooooo much smarter than them,

Ah, the old reductio ad puerilem.

I can't think of a single talking point in the union conversation that I haven't heard for 30+ years. I see the same old characters in this very thread, the bitter individualist vs the pious collectivist, both polishing the same ol' turds and lobbing them at each other from deep within their trenches, patting their colleagues and comrades heartily on the back, declaring victory when the volleys stop.

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