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Comment by realslimjd | Hacker News Reader

I feel like you missed my point that it is not in a union's interest to protect low-performing workers. A union cannot survive without jobs, and union members are just as frustrated as anyone else when someone is not pulling their weight.

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.

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All of this is true but there are companies that were driven out of business due to unrealistic demands from their union. As you pointed out, humans are quite often irrational and there's no reason to think that unions will always act in a rational manner that protects workers from losing their job through employer bankruptcies. Certainly, it is the goal to prevent that from happening, but humans being humans, often don't see how a particular short-term goal can end up harming their long-term goals. Of course, most companies, no matter how profitable, will cry poverty to each union request that's going to have costs to the company, so an adversarial relationship builds, with both sides insisting the other is acting in bad faith. Plenty of times, it's true for both sides.

So according to you unions are rational, omnisciencet and benevolent agents, while entrepreneurs are dumb irrational idiots who will randomly fire people all the time for wearing a green shirt.

  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.

What enabled more leisure and higher living standards for workers was harnessing efficient sources of energy, especially in the 19th century and creating machines to do a lot of hard work. Without efficient energy and machines, everything has to be done by humans, so reducing work hours means worse living standards. The fact that living standards were rising while cutting back on hours tells you there was something else doing the hard work and that was machines powered by efficient energy sources. That was the real enabler of leasure, cozy office work and high living standards.

> So according to you unions are rational, omnisciencet and benevolent agents, while entrepreneurs are dumb irrational idiots who will randomly fire people all the time for wearing a green shirt.

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.

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