We definitely talk about corporations in this way. All the time, in fact!
Edit: For those who disagree, how many modern societies are there without corporations running a majority of the economy? Not a single one. So as far as we know it doesn't work. It can work in theory, but it has never worked in practice. There are however many examples of modern economies with very little union influence, USA is an example, and USA is a better place to live than most countries. Unions can help, but countries that focused on strengthening unions and banning corporations did much worse than for example USA. Strengthening corporations and weakening unions however might have had some small negative effects but nearly not at the same level.
No? Do you consider the fact that very few people have working conditions like those outlined above an enormously valuable thing for society?
Great. Then you agree that Unions have created enormous amounts of value as well.
I'm all for labor engaging in politics, but they can do that without paying union dues for working at a company. The problem USA's workers face today isn't lack of unions, it is lack of proper representation in their democracy.
Ahahaha, do you also think that voting rights and anti-segregation laws were due to the 'civil rights movement', and not civil rights activists such as MLK jr or civil rights organizations such as the NAACP?
And so if the people in these movements made smaller organizations to advance the goals of the movement at their workplace, in their local communities, and the national level... we might even credit those organizations, yes? Just like we do with the civil rights movement?
>Labor organized in every single democracy regardless if there were unions or not.
Some economies skipped steam power too, but every early industrial economy had labor unions predate modern labor standards.
For example, why even have a vote? Why have enforced term limits for unions that you can't kick them out before the limit is up? Why no bargaining as a group without a vote?
A movement that hopes to continue must become an organization, that is, a collection of humans who agree to engage with each other according to an agreed upon set of rules.
Your whole “movement != union” is a distinction without a difference.
> what we call unions today are not that.
Unions don't involve organizing, protesting, or fixing problems? How do you think unions ever get a contract?
Your comment makes frustratingly little sense to me.
Likewise, unions aren't "politically created structure": they're not created in a top-down manner by the state. They're a form of collective organization and bargaining, the sort that is singularly responsible for the quality of life and workplace protections that we all take for granted.
Then why are you so upset that people don't want to create the "politically created structure" version of unions? Why not just organize as workers and call yourself a union? Can even create a workers party, like they have in basically every other single other developed country, and then that workers party can stand up for your rights. But that workers party isn't a union. Basically every single developed country except USA has labor parties. Democrats aren't a labor party, they are a party of mostly lawyers.
I'm not. I'm not a communist, and I don't think I asserted that I wanted a state-enforced union anywhere. Stronger protections for collective organization and bargaining would suffice in my book.
Edit: And, for what it's worth, you can't just create a union in the US. You need to be recognized by the NLRB for any collective action to be considered legitimate and protected under the law.
It's fair trade in the beginning because of high risk during the founding of the company but the tradeoff becomes less fair as the risk lowers and the company becomes more mature.
If we were truly looking for more advanced forms of organization beyond the status quo, I would expect that economic imperialism would not exist. Instead, even more aspects of basic society are capitalized and in recent decades also codified using the inflexible mechanisms of computer code. The last remaining hold outs do so at their own expense[3]. So no, I don't think we're exploring the possibility space of superior economic technology, we're stagnating.
1. As a self-preservation principle
2. See M. Fisher, Capital Realism - https://libcom.org/files/Capitalist%20Realism_%20Is%20There%...
3. Market, political, cultural, economic forces all contribute to the complete and total capture of universal capitalism. Those who wish not to comply face political, social, and economic sanctions from the individual to national levels.
There's no metaphysical Lockean value production going on inside of a corporation. When it produces value, the value it produces is the value that its employees produce. Waxing poetic about the value of corporations is thusly mostly a game of smoke and mirrors that obscures the real source of that value (the humans doing the work), and detracts from the actual advantage that comes from incorporation (i.e., solving the coordination game and thereby extracting more value from workers).
In my experience the value of incorporating has not been to hire people but the legal protections and ability to create certain tax structures for retirement planning that benefit the owners.
> A corporation doesn't require any employees.
In reality some employees are required in order to keep the corporate designation that allows the use of certain retirement plans.
I know in context you don't intend that but just a pejorative based around the fact corporations are a legal structure. Although I'm always puzzled by what the actual problem with this is. And I'll go on a tangent from the topic.
The legal system is fictional in basically the same way a corporation is. So is all other aspects of a government. Even the legal rights that a real person has are just about as far removed from flesh and blood as the legal entity of a corporation is from the brick and mortar and people that make up a corporation (for those corporations that have such corporeal bodies).
Having almost no appreciation for legal systems or their history, I would also guess that the idea a stroke of the pen suddenly gives birth to corporations which spread their ruin across the earth is backward, or at least much more complicated. Usually it is the legal system catching up with reality, solving problems like regulating existing practice of the time. Laws are shaped by society as much or maybe more than society is is shaped by laws, in my opinion.
I mean, argue specific problems of corporate law, but the general disparagement of "legal make-believe" I don't understand. The entire legal system is built on it, there's a lot of good things that are done with it.
But even if I was right there, I would agree I was trying to be overly pedantic and ended up distracting from the point I was trying to make.
The US is arguably pretty subpar in terms of quality of life compared to other developed nations (little vacation, really expensive school system, poor health system for the masses leading to a lower life expectancy, high criminality rate, etc.). Of course, not all of it is due to unions, but they are all the consequences of policies being “pro business” instead of “pro people”.
This is a very subjective conclusion that is likely very dependent on what economic class you fall into. Many folks on HN (myself included) fall into the category white collar or professional workers. For many other parts of the labor market, you're literally trading sweat and toil for money.
Add to this that labor intensive jobs tend to lead to a lot of physical wear and tear with less medical benefits than white collar professionals typically receive, then just by quality of life and welfare alone most people doing physical labor would come to opposite conclusions re: pro union vs pro cooperation economic/governmental policies.
Corporations are just a vehicle for organizing work and profit around a venture. There are many other ways to organize work that have nothing to do with corporations or unions. Consider partnerships, sole proprietorships, cottage industries, co-ops, and more specific arrangements within those vehicles like profit sharing, limited partnerships, and employee ownership (not to be confused with stocks/options, though they are similar in concept).
Capitalism can take many forms, and not all of them require we turn the way we organize work and wealth generation into a zero-sum game between entrepreneurs and laborers. It's just the first thing we've found that's worked out in the environments it's been attempted in. I think there's room for businesses and economies to try out novel models for organizing work, and I suspect many of them could get us better or more efficient trade-offs between profit, productivity, and general welfare for all parties involved.
None of those have proven to work at scale though. So as far as we know corporations is how you have to do it. You can believe that there are other ways, but you cannot know that there are other ways as nothing else has proven to work.
In the US, we have:
1. A poor social net, meaning employers need to take on the onus of providing many basic benefits like health care.
2. A political environment that conflates communism/socialism/collectivism, which really muddies the waters around organizations that aren't hierarchical.
3. A work culture that prizes profits over all else. Orgs do not have to be this way, and if you look at expectations/obligations of similar entities in other countries they're expected to balance profitability with things like social welfare.
I think you're right in that within the US, corporations have shown the best ability to scale, but I believe this is a consequence of the economic/regulatory/political environment of the US than inherent superiority of corporate governance.
[0] https://www.mittelstandsbund.de/themen/internationalisierung...
There are too little countries hostile to corporations remaining today to compare, but I'd still argue that today's US has subpar QoL compared to France in the 80s which was arguably on the anti-corporation side (with price control and a state-owned monopoly for most economic activities – or, when it wasn't a monopoly, the biggest actor was state-owned)
Anyway, I'm not arguing that we should get rid of corporations, but we should dramatically reduce their power and influence on the economy, which is now at a level far above what's desirable.
Taxes are "hostile to corporations", but you wouldn't categorize a country as "hostile to corporations" based solely on the corporate tax rates. There's much more to the corporate landscape than just taxes.
Canada, the UK, Sweden, Germany [1]— there's plenty of countries that have higher union membership than the USA and are also arguably better places to live.
[1]: https://www.statista.com/chart/9919/the-state-of-the-unions/
The comment you're replying to didn't say anything about hostility to corporations, just hostility to unions, which are categorically not the same measurements. Germany, for example, is extremely pro-union while also being very pro-corporation. Their quality of life metrics are generally much higher than the US as well.
No there aren't. USA is not an example, every significant aspect of modern employment in the US has been shaped by unions.
Edit: Labor movements often called themselves unions though, but that was just a group of people getting together to protest and demand rights and has nothing to do with how modern unions works.
What you wrote in your edit is what a Union means in Europe, it's just formalized as an entity.
For example: "an organization of workers formed to protect the rights and interests of its members" - https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/union
Honestly I think this is just continuing a very uninteresting semantics discussion - now we have to decide what "labor party" means. The point here is that you seem to have a different definition of "union" than the average person, which is fine, you should just be aware of that and watch out for misunderstandings when you're discussing with someone so you aren't talking past each other.
Unions don't have to be bad. I'd just argue that the labor law system in the US is pure awful.
"running a majority of the economy" doesn't seem to necessarily be the relevant metric to be optimizing for. But I'll cede that many of the largest countries in the world do not have solid union rights.
Playing devil's advocate, what you say is probably true on the supply side. However, the other side, consumer demand, is mostly driven by people unaffiliated with corps. That is, families arguably drive the majority of the economy. (That said this argument feels more than a little pedantic, but it must be made!)
There's reasons other than being an absolute requirement for why everyone's currently using something
Just like the US has three branches of government there are really four fundamental organizations in society: government, corporations, religion and unions.
They work best by keeping each other in check. Right now unions have been decimated and corporations have bought out the government and religion.
Unions aren't optional, we're just slowly and corrosively finding out why, despite their flaws, they need to exist (and they don't work if people aren't involved in them).
(We can take that comparison further: people on HN sometimes do suggest that Uber drivers might be better off if they could only be hired as salaried employees but almost never say that about highly paid freelance developers. It's pretty similar when we're looking at the respective cost/benefit of collective bargaining arrangements for local bus drivers vs highly skilled developers earning two orders of magnitude more than bus drivers in an job market that offers practically unrivalled opportunities for people with their skillset.)
But it is always about individual bad actors, not "corporations".
When MacDonald's franchises get press showing they're stealing employees' wages, people blame MacDonald's, or the individual franchises.
When some union leader embezzles money, people talk about "those unions".
There really aren't. Perhaps if there were, union representation wouldnt be so desperately needed.