Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nerdponx | Hacker News Reader

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> tech engineers dont need it - because if you dont like it you can simply leave to another employer.

This is my whole point. This is only true for some, and it's not distributed according to merit. People get mistreated all the time at both tech and non-tech companies, even in career fields that are traditionally high-paying and high-mobility. The only way to stop that in a way that also promotes a relatively free labor market is for workers to self-organize, and for the government to legally protect their right to do so.

I understand your concerns about communism. Nobody in their right mind is proposing that we bring communism to the USA. The fortunate workers who have market power uniting to support for their fellows who lack market power is not itself communism, nor does it lead to communism. American labor unions are not communism, and never will be.

The USA once developed a strong tradition and culture of organized labor that brought us out of the brutality of the 19th century Industrial Revolution. There were plenty of smaller socialist and even anarchist groups at the time, but in general most people were not that radical, and no group anything resembling the Bolsheviks ever gained popular support in the USA.

Ironically however, communism indirectly enabled big business to crush that tradition of organized labor, because the Red Scare of the early 20th century allowed them to label pro-labor policy as socialist or communist and therefore anti-American and anti-freedom.

If anything, the kinds of labor unions that people join the USA are a uniquely capitalist institution, being dedicated specifically to the purpose of balancing asymmetric market power.

> it's not distributed according to merit.

How do you define if it is or not distributed to merit?

Arent market forces the ultimate invisible hand of merit?

I mean literally any worker can gove notice and change employers, it is at will employment on both sides.

You enjoyed it during great resignation, where IT workers would jump ship every year and get 50% raise.

You realize labor union will put a hard stop on job hopping? You will have to work for the same company for decades with 1.5% pay raise at best! Imagine working for sweatshop amazon for a decade lol

> How do you define if it is or not distributed to merit?

Work performance?

> Arent market forces the ultimate invisible hand of merit?

No. The price system is very efficient at certain kinds of allocation, but not in all or even most cases.

> I mean literally any worker can gove notice and change employers, it is at will employment on both sides.

Only if you have enough savings to survive without income and/or you can easily find a comparable job, which is not even true for many high-wage tech employees anymore.

> You enjoyed it during great resignation, where IT workers would jump ship every year and get 50% raise.

Yes, that was temporary.

> You realize labor union will put a hard stop on job hopping?

It won't, because it currently doesn't. This is not at all an established phenomenon.

> You will have to work for the same company for decades with 1.5% pay raise at best! Imagine working for sweatshop amazon for a decade lol

This simply isn't true. Even labor unions that struggle to negotiate with management are doing better than 1.5% over a decade. I'd be interested to see some data on this, but I'd bet that median union-negotiated wages are rising at about the same rate as median non-union-negotiated wages (read: slower than inflation). I say "median" and not "average" because there will be high earners who have seen huge pay increases recently that would skew the mean upwards.

I trust myself and market forces more than labor union executives tbh and am not willing to outsource my agency to labor union

You do know that those "executives" are almost always your coworkers, right? There are extremely few "labor union executives" because there are extremely few unions that have grown so large that they require managerial training to administer them. The vast majority of American unions are small and composed of your fellow coworkers. For all that talk radio likes to rant about the Teamsters and other giant unions, most unions are composed of people who know the job intimately.

one example: unionized truckers earn less than owner-operator truckers.

I am in camp of owner-operators, cause I see myself one day creating a startup and hiring engineers and I dont want to deal with unions in any capacity.

This reminds me of the quote "John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

the full quote from Steinbeck's article "A Primer on the '30s." Esquire (June 1960), p. 85-93 tells more about socialists/communists, than it tells about capitalists class:

"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.

"I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew — at least they claimed to be Communists — couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves."

Cool, it's a false attribution or at the very least a very mangled quote. The fact that the popular version of the quote has staying power isn't because of the authorship, it's because people recognize the truth in what the popular version of the quote is saying. It's kind of like the false attribution of "America is great because America is good. If America ever stops being good, it will stop being great," to Tocqueville. The quote continues to be shared not because most of those sharing it give two cents about Tocqueville, they share it because it speaks to them (well, that and in the case of the "good/great" quote you can fill in the blank for what "good" and "great" mean with whatever you want).

"Unionized truckers earn less than owner-operator truckers." I'd be very interested in how this is spun as by all measurements unionized truckers overwhelmingly have a much higher hourly wage than contractors. Are you talking take-home pay at the end of the year because the contractors work more hours? Or that there are more contractors so the expenditures of trucking companies go more towards contractors than unionized truckers?

Unions gave you 40 hour workweek. Market forces worked children 12 hours a day including weekends in unsafe conditions. You are blinded by ideology. I've seen it before with people from ex-soviet countries. They jump so far to the other side and believe unfettered capitalism is the answer that it's just sad to watch.

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