Comment by stormbrew | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stormbrew | Hacker News Reader

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Most unions don’t allow managers to join, as they’re generally considered to be part of capital’s collective bargaining side, if not part of capital themselves. I think most modern labor theory includes a “professional-managerial class” to account for this.

There’s an argument to be had about where this line makes sense in modern megacorps but local managers in blue collar work tend to hold a lot of power over their employees in particular regardless of the shape of the corporation they’re under, so it would be surprising if they could.

Edit: fair points in the replies about management unions and that I was focused on a North American perspective. I was interpreting the post I replied to as saying the managers would join the union (as in the same one), but they didn't actually say that.

I can definitely believe that things would be different in a less union-adversarial environment. But it's still pretty unlikely that warehouse bosses at amazon would be welcome in the same union as the workers, or be likely to manage to unionize themselves successfully. The incentives just don't really align well in this context: corporate has too many carrots and sticks.

Every group can organize. There's no magical barrier. Dunno about the US but unions for management does exist in other countries.

This is one of the ongoing problems with discussion about "unions"

"Unions" in the US are very very very very very different legally than "unions" in EU and other nations, personally i think they are so different we need a different term for them...

The closest we have to a EU style union would be something like SAG, or the other entertainment unions, which often referr to themselves as Guilds.

The employment unions like being formed at amazon are different animals all together which have ALOT of downside for even the workers in them.

> which have ALOT of downside for even the workers in them.

Do you have examples?

As someone in the UK I don't see anything different between the Amazon workers Union and the unions here except for age and experience. They all just want to not be treated like dirt.

The big difference (and please correct me if I get UK info wrong, I am not an expert in UK Labor, I am versed in US Labor) that in the UK you have sector unions, not enterprise unions. A company may have employee's working under several unions, and I believe there are even competiting Sector unions that an employee can choose to join finding the union that best suites them

In the US, typically, the is a 1:1 union, enterprise relationship. If you want to work at company X, you must join Union Y with no options to join a competing union, no options to opt out, and no regress if you do not feel the union is representing your interests.

referred to as "closed shops" there is large amounts of corruption, favoritism, and other negative quality to many US Unions.

closed shops have been illegal since Taft-Hartley in 1947.

That is a technically in terms only. So apologies for using "closed" [1] instead of "union"[1] shop which are functionally the same thing, and Union Shops still very much exist which is clear from my description of what I was talking about in my comment, (i.e I clearly stated employees were required to join the union post hire)

Right to Work states are a counter to Union Shops, which there is active efforts to do away with Right to Work laws

[1]Closed Shop A company that only employs union members and requires them to secure and maintain union membership as a condition of employment.

[2]Union Shop A company that doesn’t require employees to join a union in order to be hired, but they must join within 30 days of employment.

This makes sense, terminology can make a huge difference when trying to research and understand a subject.

You haven't been forced to join a union in the US - or pay dues if you don't join - since 2018 when the SCOTUS ruled against the practice (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janus_v._AFSCME). You could potentially start a competing union for, say, pipefitting, but the NLRB needs to approve it (federal agency). But now you are fighting management and a national union that already absorbed local ones over the last 150 years. Unions tend to consolidate over time because it gives more negotiating power for the members.

That is a misinterpretation of that ruling, which applies to non-union members being forced to pay dues

Union Shops, where by in Non-Right to work States the union negotiates with the Employer (private not public) that all employees of the group will be represented by the employer the employer can still be required to force employees to join the union with in 30 days, normally this is an automatic process for "union shops"

Again this varies by state, and Right to work states can not have such a provision, however Janus decision DID NOT outlaw union shops.

Also none of your comment seems to refute or attempt to explain the differences between UK or other EU unions and US unions, which is the context we are discussion, gotcha technicalities do not go to this over all conversation which is the vast differences between how unions operate in the US vs other nations.

> in the UK you have sector unions, not enterprise unions.

This is not correct, we have both much like the US.

We have unions for a particular company for example, here is the Wikipedia link for the Nationwide Union, a building society. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_Group_Staff_Union

Certainly over time they will consolidate, but that goes back to my point about age. If other warehouses unionise, at some point they will group together to prevent the closure of warehouses just because Amazon doesn't like the people working there.

I understood the US has the same situation, with groups like United Farm Workers or the Federation of Teachers.

>>We have unions for a particular company for example, here is the Wikipedia link for the Nationwide Union

The question I would then have is do the employee of Nationwide have to join the Nationwide Union or could they if they wanted choose a different union, or no union at all. Practicality or downsides aside is it legal for them do make that choice.

That is not the question, they claimed that the UK doesn't have enterprise unions, but sector ones.

Closed or requirement after hire is both illegal in the UK, and the EU, as well as not popular positions for the unions. In that sense we are not the same but, again, that wasn't the discussion.

I am the person that made the claim, I am pretty sure I understand what I am trying to talk about.

This seems to a terminology / definitional problem we have, something I am trying to get beyond because like I said from the beginning a "union" in the US is not the same as a "Union" in the UK/EU, that is my point from the start

So when we have these international discussions and people from the UK/EU are aghast that anyone in the US would be opposed to Unions they are talking from what they understand from the Unions on their nation, which IS NOT what we have here in the US.

My attempts to convey the differences has failed with terminology issues and technicality gotchas largely due to a massive political bias in favor of unionization so any time anyone tries to convey a negative about a union is gets drowned out either by people not in the US that have no idea what a US Labor union really is like, or by people in the US that only understand the concept of a US Labor union but not the reality of it

> Most unions don’t allow managers to join,

That would be a really daft rule for a union of Amazon managers to have.

Or maybe I misunderstood you and you were replying to some uncharitable interpretation of the parent’s suggestion that managers join a Union?

I added an edit explaining my own misunderstanding. I'm pretty sure I added it before you posted this, so I'm not sure how you missed it, but it's there.

I did miss the edit. I guess I assumed for something that bad, you'd just delete that part of the comment.

The point stands, that you would never have made such an unforced error if you didn't have such a laser focus on a comically uncharitable interpretation of the original parent's remark. As if the existence of manager-banned unions could ever be relevant to a comment specifically suggesting what a manager should do.

What was going on in your head? "Hm, someone suggested a manager unionizing. Oh! He must mean one of the unions that ban managers! What an idiot!"

I misread "join a union" as "join the union." Literally I mistook one article for another, which is what I said.

I feel like you're kinda throwing stones in a glass house here by imparting a whole bunch of really bizarre motives to me (I certainly didn't call -- nor did I think anyone was -- an idiot), apparently not reading my entire post, and then accusing me of not reading things charitably. I can assure you I am a fallible human being capable of misunderstanding things people say without malice.

Many people just plain don't know that unions (at least in north american blue collar work) are often not open to even middle management being members. I was simply trying to add information to the thread.

Anyways, deleting the part of the post that made a mistake would have made all the replies awfully confusing.

You're missing the key takeaway. The issue is not that you misread a comment. The issue is that your reply is non-substantive, and that you would have picked up on that, had you entered the discussion with a healthy, productive attitude, rather than the attitude you apparently came in with, of "how can I show myself to have superior knowledge?"

Let's say you hadn't misread the comment (i.e. it was as you originally perceived). Would your reply be helpful then? No. The parent was obviously suggesting that managers face workplace abuses that could be remedied by unionization. Even if they had said "join the union" -- as you leaped at the chance to correct -- was your comment substantively replying to this (actual) point?

No, it wasn't. Whatever the structure of unions-as-they-exist, the proposed solution most assuredly does not involve "join a union that prohibits you". So the existence of unions that prohibit managers isn't relevant. At most, if you really needed to show off your knowledge, you could have said something like:

"That might help -- but, nitpick, it would probably have to be a separate union from 'the' one representing warehouse workers, as there are reasons that US unions separate out representation by role. <insert historic and legal context>."

But then, phrasing your objection appropriately like that makes its value to the conversation seem even more dubious. Whether or not unions prevent this kind of manager abuse is irrelevant to the implementation details of how those managers unionize.

>I feel like you're kinda throwing stones in a glass house

No, the situations aren't the same. You recognize your comment would be irrelevant had you correctly read the comment you were replying to. But even if I had read your full comment, my reply would still be relevant, as a guideline for how to notice when you might have misread someone, and how to ensure that you're substantively replying to a charitable reading of someone's remarks. That advice is still relevant, and still serves as a useful takeaway.

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