Elon Musk says Tesla needs to cut staff by 10%, pauses all hiring
reuters.com
reuters.com
Corporations tend to "vote with their feet".
That is exactly the kind of behaviour that any particular individual has no chance to stopping but the ability to negotiate collectively would make that a very unattractive option to a corporation.
Are you going to offshore the entire company as a way to try and get around it? I can’t think of any examples where that has ever happened.
But without that collective bargaining power you are always vulnerable to exactly this kind of thing happening.
Don’t let the ideas of morality, ethical norms or bad PR be your only defence against it happening. It’s sensible to have some other cards up your sleeve to protect your rights.
Aside: I’m not US based but if any of this sounds interesting here’s a group that was on my radar that is tech focused you may want to check out but I don’t know a lot about them in any real detail other than that they exist and are relevant https://techworkerscoalition.org/
If you have some concrete examples you would like to point to I suspect we are both going to quickly discover that they are going to be a lot more complicated than the scenario you are describing here.
Same industry, same country, same economy, same timing.
1. In any negotiation the idea of a single individual vs. a giant company like Tesla in this particular example is about as clear as an example of a textbook power disparity as you can imagine. Like you just don’t have any kind of meaningful influence.
2. Employers are by their nature going to act in their own interests.
3. The interests of the employer and the employee are going to be in conflict at least some of the time.
Therefore, by negotiating as a unified voice rather than as an individual you can start to reduce that huge disparity of power in the negotiation and therefore you as the employee are less likely to get screwed over.
That’s the entire value premise there. It’s good, it’s in the interest of both you and your coworkers, more people should do it, especially if you are in the US which has notoriously lacking labor laws / protections compared to many other countries. Don’t let bad examples be the reason to doubt the entire concept of organising.
Unions popped up around 19th century in Europe, when unregulated capitalism was the policy of the day with consequences like working 16 hours a day, 6 days a week for meager pay in dangerous environment able to maul you or crush you when you done smallest mistake.
Same like pain is a response to damage of your body, union is response to abusing your employees.
You're correct that those downweights prevented this submission from making the front page, but that's the system working as it is supposed to. Front page space is the scarcest resource on HN. The default pressure is all towards sensationalism and copycat filler, so we have to do things to keep it more interesting than that. This includes software penalties, manual moderation, and community moderation (e.g. flags). The system is far from perfect, but I wouldn't single out this case as an example of brokenness.