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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Just a friendly reminder that every charitable donation or cause that a company--any company--supports is marketing. A less charitable interpretation is "virtue signaling".

Companies will pay millions to union-busting law firms because labor organization is really the only thing that will improve the material conditions of their workers.

To anyone at Starbuck's, Amazon, Apple or really any other company, this should be all the evidence you need that you should join a union because it's the one thing your employer will spend millions to avoid happening.

Ultimately, your relationship with your employer is adversarial. Don't forget that.

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Yeah. Don't avoid seeing it as being exactly as adversarial as it actually is. It's not diametrically adversarial, like for instance with fighting a criminal on the street, everything that helps you hurts him and everything that hurts him helps you[1]. That's diametrical.

And in fact with the whole union-busting I would say that also is diametrical at an eventual point, Cuyahoga Falls Massacre for instance. The other thing is once there is a union get back to a less adversarial mindset--be at odds to an extent as always, but not opposite.

[1] Not going to say viceversa in this situation.

> Companies will pay millions to union-busting law firms because labor organization is really the only thing that will improve the material conditions of their workers.

Don’t better working conditions attract better employees? If labor organization is the only way to achieve this (as you claim), wouldn’t companies be encouraging unionization to improve their competitiveness in the labor market?

No, companies don't need to compete on that level, because the labour market is (usually!) weighted in the favour of employers. People are desperate enough to take any job they can get that companies don't have to make concessions like tolerating unionization.

No thanks. Unions might be good in theory but I don't trust my coworkers to collectively make decisions that are in my best interest.

I would rather negotiate on my own and save myself union dues. Unions are basically like a HOA, and I would never lock myself into one of those either.

You're never negotiating on your own, you're negotiating against the entire labor market and what practices have been standardized or adopted. Nominally this can work if you work on the edges of the labor market (smaller shops) but standards are often set by the big tech companies as smaller ones seek to emulate their success.

If you don't trust your coworkers, then you're placing your trust in companies to make decisions for you. And that's why we're seeing the rise in unionization again because it hasn't worked out that well.

> If you don't trust your coworkers, then you're placing your trust in companies to make decisions for you

Why do I have to trust either of them? My coworkers often seem intent on doing as little work as possible. They are somewhere between bourgeois and champagne socialist. Management is comprised of the same people. I think many are just lazy and have gotten worse over the last two years.

You know depends on the job. For a coder no, I don't know, maybe not. Still would appreciate many of the things a union could do for me, but it doesn't line up that neatly.

Whereas for a carpenter definitely. Or working in construction, I'm going to be part of a union somewhere, if there isn't a union I'll go to where there is one, if it's small and weak make it larger and stronger. And work like fuck while inside it, I love doing that, doing perfect work and sweet alienation while working. It's just too dangerous without a union, one of the big wins a union gives you is workplace safety. That's not a fucking joke, bosses do try to push you into bad working conditions for marginal amounts of money, just scream at you to work faster, that's just wrong. I could have lost fingers working under the Chilean minimum wage. I could have damaged my spine working a bottling station alone with three people on the other side, rotating my back too much too fast (like do I have to be a fucking doctor to know that that's harmful, if it hurts the wrong way I have to deflect that work). And plus, the wages are much better with unions, you get better raises, and you can actually--get this--bring up win-win situations for the company without getting cheated out of your upside completely.

And I would love to pay Union dues. They're such little money, like nothing, like 1% or some meaningless shit? Even if they were 8%. The money you spend that you get nothing back from directly is the money that really gives you dignity. Like taxes, I love paying taxes too. Pay the fuck out of those taxes. Knock out those taxes.

> Don’t better working conditions attract better employees?

Nope. Perception of better working conditions attracts better employees. Actually improving working condition is one way to boilster that perception but companies have found cheaper alternatives, like beanbag chairs and brand cults.

Yes, you will see examples of this in the Nordics. However, the equilibrium is fragile and does need cooperative legislation to disallow obviously bad behaviour leading to races to the bottom. Things such as Reagan/PATCO and union/mafia ties are probably making it very hard to restore any sort of healthy equilibrium in the US.

I'm assuming your comment is given in good faith.

What you're describing there is intentionally or unintentionally capitalist propaganda. What this ignores is the extreme power imbalance between the employer and the employee. It also ignores human history where the improvements in labor conditions through the Industrial REvolution came through labor organization.

Maritime is a good example of how market forces don't work in the favor of worker safety. The Titanic is a famous example where there weren't enough lifeboats for everyone on board but that capped off centuries of ships that weren't seaworthy and other issues.

What really changed was in the 1970s many unions in the US had become bloated and corrupt. A famous example is Jimmy Hoffa continued to be paid $100,000/year as the union president from jail in the 1960s. The late 70s saw the rise of Thatcher in the UK and Reagan in the US. In the 1980s, labor unions were completely eviscerated. Thatcher in particular went on major union-busting efforts gainst the coal miners and the newspaper industry.

Is it really any surprise that real wages have remained stagnant since the 1980s? At what point are people going to realize that the only way to correct this is for labor organization?

Labor organization is the only way a worker can keep more of their expropriated surplus time, and the wealth they created during that time, as opposed to the heir who collects dividends from AAPL.

Hairs can be split, but not on that.

That's why the lack of a union is more of a problem in fields where workers are commoditized. The trick though is to unionize before you're a commodity, when you still have leverage.

I had to throw a table at a software developer because he was laughing and calling idiots some people who were wired at our company for trying to set up a union (in Germany)

In case software development change course the developers will be in a bad state for their ignorance of the world of the world outside the display :(

Privately owned companies have the direct responsibility to care for their employee's and view their employee's as necessary partners to the company's success helps avoid _some_ of what you are describing. This is reliant on decent ownership of course.

Unfortunately, even private companies have an ultimate obligation to maximize profit (or else they're overtaken by another business which will). This means that employers and employees ultimately remain opposed.

One reason for this is that it's hard to measure the value of an individual employee's contribution to the company [0], but it's easy to measure their cost. Since things that are easy to measure get weighted more highly [1], companies tend to see employees as costs rather than assets.

[0] except sometimes for salespeople who bring in big accounts, which is why salespeople in many companies are better compensated than engineers.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McNamara_fallacy

"Be careful what you measure because that's what gets managed" or some such.

Nothing is in a vacuum, and employees (myself included) feel the opposite responsibility. I want a paycheck and to get that I need my employer to stay in business. There is a synergy there.

Maybe this is a scale issue. As a single owner of a business I feel personally responsible, and my actions in business are the same as in my personal life. But with a business I share ownership with, I have less personal responsibility, therefore by default I am simply not responsible (and feel less so) about the effects the business has.

Multiply this out to thousands of shareholders, where this connection of ownership -> responsibility towards employees dilutes to the point of non-existence.

Adversarial? Not in my case. When animosity arose, as it did a few times in the past, I just quit and moved on. Life is too short.

Ultimately work is just like any other trade. You trade your time for money. Would you like to go to a store with the attitude that all customer transactions are adversarial?

At one place where I work frequently, I watched the union clique screw over someone who wasn't in the union because their target was a competitor for a big prize. To me, the union ends up being another layer of management

You're talking about a resolution to conflict, not the lack of conflict. Voting with your feet is a great option if you have it. Not everyone thinks they do. Either way, the fact is that employers want the cheapest labor cost they can get while meeting their labor needs (rational decision) and labor wants the greatest salary they can negotiate (rational decision) and this puts them in adversarial positions. This doesn't mean street fights or even curse words get said, it's just a way of describing the situation accurately. When someone wants the opposite of you, you're adversaries.

Unions, like any general collection of people, will have good and bad actors leading to good or bad hierarchies. Your anecdote sounds like a shitty situation. Not every union is the same, and there are plenty of times when a union seems like more stress than it's worth for the people involved, and that's all fine.

To your anecdote about going to the store: Yes, I go to every store with the assumption that they will, through active or passive means, attempt to take as much money from me as they can. It's why I check sold prices vs advertised price, it's why I confirm I wasn't accidentally overcharged on my receipt. The company wants to make as much money as possible and I want to spend as little as possible, and those are both pretty rational positions.

>A less charitable interpretation is "virtue signaling".

It wasn't like that before. Especially for Apple. It used to be borderline Marketing. If you could call it that. But Apple never did any of that. Steve doesn't even want his donation to be known. Somehow Apple went from one end of the Spectrum to the leader in "virtue signaling".

> Ultimately, your relationship with your employer is adversarial. Don't forget that.

That is a sad way to live.

The correct word is transactional.

Employee/employer relationship is the same as buyer/seller relationship. Do you declare war every time you go to buy a load of bread? Of course not. You negotiate a price both of you are comfortable with.

Of course when you have an hammer (and sickle) everything starts to look like a nail

Adversarial: involving or characterized by conflict or opposition.

Nope, this is correct language. Your company wants to buy labor for the lowest possible cost to them. You want to be paid the highest possible wage. You are in conflict, direct opposition. A negotiation, by its nature, is a way of resolving conflict. War would be another. But the fact that unionists and socialists remove the social niceties and get down to brass tacks doesn't change the nature of the labor market.

When you have a hammer and sickle, everything looks like the class war, because it is to us.

A negotiation need not be adversarial. See my example of buying bread.

With employment, you're negotiating the means to buy anything.

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