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Comment by ppod | Hacker News Reader

Because it's vague and hearsay. The most frustrating thing about these debates is that the pro-union side are so hostile to anyone who questions anything, as though they assume that anyone who doubts the union must be a business owner. I'm a worker, I would like to be part of a union that worked. But I don't see unions that work, I just see unreasonable and propaganda-like articles like these. When there is a dispute, if I try to look at it dispassionately, I usually find that I disagree with the union. So where does that leave me if I want to improve my rights as a worker?

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You can be anti-union, that's fine. It's even legit to be pro-union but to say that for you personally, you're such an amazing performer that employers are fighting over you and so maybe the union is good for most but not you personally. For example, maybe NBA players would make much less without the union but LeBron personally would make more. Maybe you're the LeBron of developers! (There's no debate on whether bargaining collectively leads to greater leverage in negotiation overall. It clearly does.)

And you're also not the person who wrote the initial comment.

But it seems dishonest of them if they first said:

> I fail to see how any of the things mentioned in the article are "intimidating and harassing"

...but to then shift the goal posts to saying that yeah, okay, the things left out would be intimidating and/or harassing but they just don't believe the allegations to be true.

>There's no debate on whether bargaining collectively leads to greater leverage in negotiation overall. It clearly does

Totally! That's why I want to be pro-union. I don't know much about NBA, but I don't think I'm a top 10th percentile developer. It just sometimes seems like all the unions fight for is the bottom 10th percentile.

I'd love to see a study on this topic. My priors lead me to believe gains are far more distributed and far more come out ahead, but I haven't actually researched the degree.

The NBA players union is much more of a cartel (maybe trade guild?) than a union.

What they definitely aren't is a union representing the employees of the NBA. They are a tiny minority of the employees, who take only for themselves.

Wow, that is quite the reframing. It’s a union of the players, not everyone involved in making an NBA game happen. There’s no arena to employ people if the game doesn’t exist. And the history of professional sports is filled with worker exploitation. I would have thought an industry that is a true meritocracy might be the one place all of the 10x developers here might understand a union’s purpose.

No, it's a union; you can find them listed on the DOL website as a union if you look them up.

It's not uncommon for different workers to be represented by different unions in a single workplace. UNITE HERE, among others, represents some stadium workers.

I don't know if you've looked around the thread much, but there's just as many anti-union posts decrying it as communism, leftist propaganda and more. The idea that it's just the 'pro-union' side being hostile is a lie.

And more importantly you should consider who is pro-union vs anti-union. Considering you're posting in a thread about Amazon wielding its power to intimidate workers. To me, it doesn't seem like you're looking at this dispassionately: It seems like you've already staked out your territory and decided anything beyond that is wrong.

The most frustrating thing about these debates is that the pro-union side are so hostile to anyone who questions anything, as though they assume that anyone who doubts the union must be a business owner.

The same exact thing happens on the other side; those vehemently against unions assume you want to usher in a new age of communism and start implementing mass killings all in the name of progress and equality.

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