Honestly a big part of why I quit my last job was too many unproductive/unreliable coworkers.
Am I just Stockholm Syndromed?
Members of my immediate family don't have that luxury. They are hardworking and diligent people at physically demanding jobs. Yet they get treated way worse than I in my cushy office job.
Individually they don't have much bargaining power but as a group they can get a better outcome and negotiate eye to eye with business owners. It makes sense to carry a few underperformers with you if the benefits outweigh the costs.
In the end market realities still require the company to make a profit or nobody gets paid. But there is no reason why workers/unions shouldn't demand a greater share of that profit.
Look at almost any German International company for a working examples. All Auto manufacturers are heavily unionized and still manage to be innovative and make a very healthy profit. During the Euro crisis in 2008 Unions and business owners worked together to reduce hours and workforce because everyone understood the dire situation.
Added benefit: working at rather stable companies with more or less solid financials.
If not (let's say, 5% of the time you weren't), then you were the the unproductive or unreliable coworker, possibly due to factors in your life that you could not control. The idea of a union is that it insulates you from being instantly punished for factors you might not be able to control a little better than the market is doing right now. Look for news about new parents who were part of the layoffs recently.
Out of "individual performance and developing personal relationships", the "developing personal relationships" part of the equation is slowly fading. When was the last time you got a job purely on the basis of your personal relationships without having to jump through hoops to show your skills?
I am a little hesitant about unions too, but I'm at least willing to give them a chance based on the hack-and-slash behavior from industry leaders seeking to please their investors.
Most people have good days and bad days. Any manager who's crazy enough to punish someone for having one bad day isn't a good manager. If that happens it's likely a manager specific issue
> When was the last time you got a job purely on the basis of your personal relationships without having to jump through hoops to show your skills?
This isn't a bad thing. More merit, less favoritism. People are hired based off of qualifications alone (ideally)
How about 2 bad months due to an illness? US companies are pretty much set up so that people in those situations often end up being let go. It's not a "manager specific issue", it's a broader cultural one.
> This isn't a bad thing. More merit, less favoritism.
Sure, but then the OP's point about personal relationships is neutralized, which is why they (if not you) might want to consider unions if they want to protect themselves from the stark meritocracy that you posit.
> People are hired based off of qualifications alone (ideally)
Yep, and kept employed based on the same, and let go immediately if there might be someone cheaper or if market conditions change even slightly and "It's good for the business!". This is raw capitalism. What we have been discovering in the past couple of months of layoffs is that not everyone has the taste for it. Those folks, including OP, might want to consider unionizing.
Why would you prefer a system under which you have to know someone to get a good job instead of a system under which you just have to master a skill?
Since when has this been the idea of the union? Recall that nearly all union rules are set by seniority, not personal factors like having a bad day or having a child.
I'm unable to understand what you're saying here. Of course, union rules are not set by personal factors. I meant that they make it less easy to fire you for personal factors due to the heavier emphasis on due process in unionized workplaces.
In most non-union workplaces in the US, you can get fired because your boss had a bad day, or (practically) if you announce that you're pregnant. The latter case is theoretically protected, but it's very hard for an average person to get an appropriate lawyer, show a pattern and sue the workplace.
Unions will be delighted to adopt it.
The point of a union is not job security. It's about giving workers collective power they may not otherwise have. Historically unions have been painted as extremely antagonistic towards companies in the United States, but there's no reason that has to be true.
A well-run union recognizes that their survival is tied to the company's survival, and as long as both sides engage in good faith, they should reach an agreement that's mutually beneficial. To your point about job security, no one I know in unions wants to keep all employees no matter what. What people want is protection from being fired for no reason. Usually that means something like getting a PIP and six weeks to improve performance. Is that such an unreasonable ask? That way the employee has a chance to keep their job, and the company can potentially avoid the expense of hiring and training a new employee.
No, it's about giving workers currently employed by the company collective power. This means keeping potential employees out by setting a threshold for financial compensation or number of hours available to work. The victims here (unemployed and underemployed people) have no collective power and don't appear in data so they are ignored.
Isn't this what parent took issue with? If you can't fire the underperformers, where's the incentive to get shit done?
The assumption with you guys is always three parts:
1. That the company actors know what good performance is, therefor they can determine underperformance
2. That underperformance is meaningful in the context (taking care of a sick kid for a month is underperformance, but not meaningful when the kid is no longer sick)
3. That the company actors are being truthful about the reason
The point of a union is not job security. It's about giving workers collective power they may not otherwise have.
What people want is protection from being fired for no reason.
That’s in the case of a traditional trade union anyway, there are other models, and if there’s one big union that represents horseshoe workers (blacksmiths? Puddlers? Idk how a horseshoe is made I guess) and rubber tire manufacturers well, uh, they’ve got some things to discuss.
Anyway, much ink has been used discussing this by people better informed than me, but yeah, I agree, it is nuanced.
To your point about labor restrictions, unions gave us two day weekends and forty hour weeks. Modern labor practices are almost entirely defined by things unions fought for and standardized. The restrictions we have on work now didn't nebulously appear from the goodwill of employers.
People are absolutely fired for no reason all the time. Sometimes their boss is having a bad day. Maybe their manager is prejudiced against people wearing green shirts. Sometimes people are (illegally) fired for joining a union. People are not always rational, and that doesn't change between their work and personal lives.
To your point about labor restrictions, unions gave us two day weekends and forty hour weeks. Modern labor practices are almost entirely defined by things unions fought for and standardized. The restrictions we have on work now didn't nebulously appear from the goodwill of employers.
Why so antagonistic? By the way getting antagonistic doesn't make your argument better, it just makes you look frustrated and sour. Using logical fallacies like false binaries also isn't helpful.
The point isn't that one set is 'rational and good' and the other is 'frivolous and bad', the point is that in order for markets to work (labor is a market) there must be a even playing field so that parties can leverage their value for others without getting exploited.
When you have a society setup like the USA, without a real safety net and where periods of unemployment lead to instability financially, personally, and healthcare-wise, then employees are not able to properly leverage their value.
The proposal of 'work for me or your life falls apart' is pretty devastating to labor markets because it makes people settle for bad deals.
Unions are one method of trying to level this, by saying 'if you try to make me work on a ledge and don't give me a harness, then we are all going to shut down your business and not let you hire someone more desperate to do it' then one person is able to leverage the actual value of labor to bargain with the employer.
in a 'blue collar' job like manufacturing or shipping or any of the trades like plumbing or mechanical maintenance, the only part of the business that doesnt see meaningful pushback is the labor. My job performance as a TIG welder in Texas as part of an oil and gas company was stellar, but not stellar enough to keep me from things like "mandatory overtime" and having to show up at a frigid gas field at 4 am to fix a line in chronic disrepair. part of the reason for this is a rosy picture of the rugged life of a tradesman, a misunderstanding of just how hard this work is, and a disconnected culture of leadership that see us as expendables/undesireables/expenses. Personal relationships only go so far when your op supervisor only shows up to berate you about tardiness or demand you work a weekend.
The union isnt a third party agency, its you. you decide what needs fixing, what doesnt work, and what you want changed to make your job more effective and a lot of times that includes your pay. when our shop unionized we did things like reduce shop floor noise, change how overtime gets assigned and made it voluntary, and even added paternity leave (we also get a say in our healthcare and opt in or out.) We even amended the companies equal opportunity employment statement to include LGBTQ+, something leadership resisted for a long time.
unions dont guarantee everyone works hard (thats culture), but they help to make sure everyone whos hired to work is treated fairly and with respect, and they fight to prevent common excesses in trade like wage theft, mandatory overtime, unfair scheduling, retaliation, and dangerous work conditions. They can push back on myopic or bad management decisions that harm customers or degrade quality.
The relationship isnt perfect. strikes can and do happen but when they do its mostly for good reasons like demanding sick leave (go get em CSX railworkers!!) and health insurance we were told the free market would provide us (looking at you Starbucks.) Federal law requires good faith collective bargaining, regardless of how many hit pieces on the evening news try to spin it any other way.
The above should be obvious as cruel sarcasm, but based on how people talk (and vote), it seems that some people genuinely believe such things.
don't worry, minimum wage laws keep those pesky people unemployed
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
Everyone can already set their own price floor under which they will not work. There's zero good reason to make it illegal for people to choose their own minimum. This is third parties making the decision because they feel icky about it. No one who's ever had a low wage would've preferred to not work at all. Ask all the people e.g. who worked for $10/h before California raised the minimum wage to $15/h.
When less experienced workers agree to receive less in compensation it's because they understand that they are not just being compensated financially, they are also gaining experience.
Would the bosses really care if you are the fastest chicken skinner or bolt screwer?
And so on. All of these and more are the result of unions. You by your lonesome wouldn't stand a chance negotiating all of the above with the captains of industry, no matter how rare your talents.
Sadly I think we can honestly say that the unproductive coworkers exist in many different professions and a significant drawback of unions is that they can thrive there.
Unions, done well, perform a lot of similar functions to insurance providers: they allow many people to collectively bargain in a way that can level the playing field in negotiations.
If this market power assymetry doesn't exist (for example software engineers in San Francisco), unions are not beneficial to the society but at least slightly beneficial to the average union member assuming the union is making good decisions. Because more market power is always better than less market power. It's always advantageous to be a monopoly.
If you're a highly productive employee, the company doesn't have market over you, you can easily find another job. But this may be different for an average employee.
Uhm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
If you've been treated with dignity and fairly compensated for your effort at your previous jobs, that's great! Not every employer is like that, though, and no amount of personal relationships can change them. In that situation, you gotta demand it together with your fellow worker.
Even if worker solidarity isn't you're thing, just for your mental health down the line you should adjust your thinking a little bit.
One could argue about job perf making no difference in union shops (as if people don’t have some pride in their work since they’re spending a third of their life there and the vast majority of people are not trying to work in bad faith) but I think the implicit idea that non-union places have more than the most fat fingered and office politics dependent perf rivals is something to think about. We all know the coasting founder and the absentee manager
I think that during layoffs in a union shop at least management has to think a lot harder about cuts, and how to do them.
A factory worker installing bolts on a panel in some car isn’t gonna get opportunities to show “individual performance” or get to develop “personal relationships” with their supervisor who’s probably managing dozens of people
In context of white collar salaries jobs, esp software engineering I agree with you 100%.
The wave of tech layoffs should've made that clear.
The USA's primal hatred of unions will always blow my mind. There's power in a union my friend.
A union protects your specific job for a specific employer (or set of employers or subset of industry). Networks and reputation protect your ability to get paid for the thing you do in general. The degree to which either approach is successful is going to depend on one's industry and position/skill-set therein.
Edit: This shouldn't need to be said but the above should not be construed as an endorsement of either approach.
I'm not in a union, but I'm also roughly in the 1%. If I was anywhere below the top 5% or so, I'd have joined a union in a heartbeat, and like commenters above I find the US resistance to unions utterly bizarre, not least because US unions were instrumental in laying the groundwork for a lot of modern labour protections, to the point of losing lives as part of those battles.
Even May 1st as an international day for labour demonstrations came after a request from the AFL in part as commemoration of the Chicago Haymarket Massacre, and as a renewal of the multi-decades fight for the 8 hour working day.
I wish unions were not needed too, then I hear about shitty employers exploiting poor people and I accept that unions are needed.
I guess what I'm trying to say, is that even working with a guillotine above my head feels preferable to having to pick up the slack of people coasting and not meeting their commitments.
Unions have a place for fighting against unfair dismissals of an individual, but they are primarily for when everyone is being treated badly.
American public sector unions are cartoonishly bad. Recent example from San Francisco. Fourth grader hasn’t learned math in six months. Their math teacher had a concussion and can’t work. The substitute doesn’t teach math. (?!?) The original teacher can’t be replaced. (They deserve disability, but students deserve instruction.) Substitutes must be drawn from a list, on which there were two options, and the other person didn’t want to do it.
So students get babysat while their peers learn math. Because every stopgap, including another teacher dropping in, or a parent volunteering, or hiring an off-list sub or even temp, or telling the sub they have hired to knock it off, it’s grade school math, they can probably find a decent YouTube series, is contractually prohibited.
At the larger scale, your choice is to try to convince your co-workers.
The downside of joining a minority union / members only union is not that different in the US as elsewhere, in that you generally have no legal right to be treated as a bargaining agent or in the case of some such unions they explicitly don't even try get recognition.
But even the US has examples of minority unions being voluntarily given some degree of representation:
https://eu.freep.com/story/money/cars/2014/11/12/uaw-volkswa...
Most places have thresholds to be met before an employer can be forced to recognise a given union. It's not unusual for that threshold to be 50% per unit and for people to still opt to stay members in a minority union, which you can in the US too.
The main way the US distinguishes itself in terms of unionisation is by low union membership, and as such the lack of significant minority union locals in the US is more a factor of few people joining a union unless they'd be paying agency fees anyway.
Shortly after starting, he was approached by the local Union bosses, and sternly told to slow down. Not only did he make everone else look bad, if people worked that much, that would lead to layoffs.
Not wanting trouble with the Union, he and his pal switched to only working about 4 hours each night (it was usually night shifts) and then sleep the remaining 4 hours of the shift.
> I massively prefer the work-life balance and workers protections high union participation has created in Norway over the UK
Sure, though it comes at a pretty significant cost in terms of efficiency and of the ability of the more productive part of the workforce to generate income for themselves.
Over time, this kind of setup tends to lead to loss of competitiveness, often resulting in fewer jobs / layoffs, lower salaries or to requiring the rest of society to pay subsidies, trade barriers and/or for consumers to pay more for their products.
Case in point would be Norwegian agricultural unions.
And maybe worst of all, a society dominated by unions may cause some of the most productive citizens to seek better opportunities abroad ;)
While there have at times been overzealous union people and I obviously can't know the conditions specifically at your dads old workplace, closed shops have typically been far more unusual in Norway than e.g. in the US, and the few attempts there have been have increasingly faced legal opposition and are now considered illegal in part based on interpretation of the freedom of association in Council of Europe's social charter from the 1960s. The main exception in the past have been for employees of the unions themselves, and even there closed shops became unusual a long time ago. But of course you won't make many friends at a workplace if you actively place their working conditions and employment at risk.
> Sure, though it comes at a pretty significant cost in terms of efficiency and of the ability of the more productive part of the workforce to generate income for themselves.
Health and safety and the general wellbeing of workers tends to come at a cost, yes, it doesn't come from nothing. The question is not whether or not to do so - not a single country in the world allow employers free reign in deciding workers conditions - but where to draw the line.
So then you have a choice of how much of your own well-being you're willing to sacrifice for the sake of maximising profits for someone else. Of course there is a point beyond which pushing working conditions and salaries up becomes net detrimental. But given Norway tend to rank near the top on almost all quality of life metrics, it does not seem Norway has hit it (and in case you drag up oil: Denmark and Sweden tend to rank equally well)
> Over time, this kind of setup tends to lead to loss of competitiveness, often resulting in fewer jobs / layoffs, lower salaries or to requiring the rest of society to pay subsidies, trade barriers and/or for consumers to pay more for their products.
Come to the UK and experience the life of an average worker here and see how fucked up their situation is compared to the average Norwegian, and see if you consider the trade-off worthwhile. Høyre would be considered far-left extremists by UK standards, with policies in their program more radical than what Corbyn proposed (they support more generous parental leave policies for example, and Solberg stood up for continued government ownership policies that'd see her branded as a communist here). And we live the result. The UK tends to rank well below the Scandinavian countries on most quality of life metrics.
> And maybe worst of all, a society dominated by unions may cause some of the most productive citizens to seek better opportunities abroad ;)
I didn't leave for the salary, and I stayed for family reasons. We need to earn far more here for the same standard of living as in Norway because we need to compensate for a welfare system that is far less generous, despite the fact we on average work far longer hours. Yet the average worker here earns less than in Norway. For me, at a far higher salary than average, it's close to a toss up, but had I been on an average salary I'd be back in Norway in a heartbeat rather than put up with the shitty conditions most people here deal with. For my part, I intend to leave the UK well before I retire, because while money can compensate for the direct impact on me personally, it can't compensate for the negative effect on the society surrounding me.
He. I suppose it's pretty common for expats to keep the mentality they had from their country of origin, and even romanticize it a bit.
I'll not quibble with you a bit, just bring my own anecdote:
About 15 years ago, I was called in to help an Accenture team that was about to fail a software project for Posten. When I arrived, the situation was kind of critical.
The Accenture project was led by an architect/PM from London, and staffed by a couple of devs (one of them lead dev) from Norway, and a larger number of devs in India.
Every afternoon around 15:45, all the devs would be gone, and it was just me and the architect from the UK remaining, trying to sort out all the issues in the code.
As we were working into the evening night after night, we got to know each other a bit. As it turned out, he felt like he was trapped in a hell hole, with a team that was not willing to put in any extra effort even though the project was about to fail. I kind of gave him the story that you gave me above.
But he insisted that live was MUCH better in London. Not only was Oslo dark and freezing cold (this was during the winter) and lacking the kind of cultural attractions of a city like London, for someone like him purchasing power was also much better.
While his peers in Oslo had to leave the office before 4pm every day to fetch the kids from daycare, in London he was able to keep a nanny to both provide more personalized care and also provide more flexibility to the parents. In Oslo, families that can afford that usually make significantly more than a software architect.
My point isn't that one system is better than the other, rather that the patriotism can go in both directions.
And for countries trying to be as agalitarian as Norway without the oil revenue, the downsides are even more pronounced, of course. Norway may be the closest to a social democratic Utopia one can get.
Really? I'd far rather not have a guillotine above my head if the trade-off is a few lazy colleagues. Why should that be my problem?
The unproductive lazy people at the union job didn't have to kiss ass and bullshit quite as much. That's it.
P.S. Oh, and we had significantly better health care benefits at the union job.
Your statement brings to mind this quote from Martin Niemöller, who was sympathetic to the Nazis until he witnessed the escalation and reach of their beliefs:
> First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. > Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. > Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. > Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. > —Martin Niemöller
Unproductive? Then you must really be exercised about the heirs who own the majority of stock, who can and often do siphon off the created wealth of those working and creating wealth, via dividend profit of expropriated surplus labor time.
Oh, I see no such complaint. Just some co-workers who are "unproductive".
You wouldn’t happen to own any stocks, would you?
Edit: I misunderstood. I thought the complaint was that the heirs were taking a lot of created wealth from each worker. Not simply that they were wealthy.
But I was speaking from a US perspective (since I'm from the US and this story is about the US), and our biggest, most profitable businesses are mostly under fifty years old, not over.
It is not regulation nor taxes that make it hard for "tech" start ups in Europe. It is harder access to Venture Capital and smaller adressable markets, overall the European Market is huge, but harder to access due to language barriers.
Just because the companies change doesn't mean the owners do.
Bill Gates' mom was on the board of directors of a bank and gave him an intro to IBM execs. [0]
Bezos parents invested 250k to fund Amazon. [1]
Upper middle class is generational wealth already if it passes a generation.
[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/how-bill-gates-mother-influe...
[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/02/how-jeff-bezos-got-his-paren...
And none of them were "heirs who own the majority of stock" nor support your claim that "just because the companies change doesn't mean the owners do".
Edit to reply: You don't need to tell me about the social mobility of people living in poverty. I was born into a family of construction workers, and escaped poverty by learning to program. I know from experience that new businesses create opportunities to escape poverty, even if that isn't measured or sufficiently weighted by the index you cited.
I'm not as concerned as you with the various strata of richness and the mobility between them.
I'm much more concerned with the social mobility of people living in poverty, which is pretty bad in the US compared to Europe. [0]
Key factor in that? Unions.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index
Zuckerberg bought Instagram from Kevin Systrom who went to Middlesex high school, which costs at least $55,000 a year.
At this point it becomes a parlor game of who is rich, and who is "upper middle class", which apparently means spending $55,000+ a year on your kid's high school.
Edit: Zuckerberg's parents were a psychiatrist and a dentist. Well paid jobs but still jobs. I'd hardly call it generational wealth.
Do you think the child of a poor single mother trying to make ends meet is given the same opportunities?
Steve Jobs father never graduated high school and fixed cars for a living.
Larry Ellison grew up in an apartment in the South Side of Chicago.
Starbucks founder Howard Schultz grew up in a public housing project.
edit: downvote with your words you nerds
In the end, in the US at least Unions induce inefficiencies and add drag to a company. Yes, on the one hand companies don't voluntarily want to provide more benefits than the bare minimum but on the other hand they want to avoid the straightjacket that Unions tend to bring.
I'm not saying we don't need unions but I am saying they are a very uneasy relationship for all parties but the union bosses.