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These are odd criticisms to bring up, because they apply just as well to companies and governments. It's not like unions should be rejected for failing to be an improvement in every possible dimension.
And this is worse the more consolidated an industry is because you have fewer chances to find unencumbered employment, but those are the industries where unions tend to show up. So it's much better to break up those companies so their employees have lots of employers to choose from and therefore more bargaining power, than to consolidate the workers into their own monopoly that concentrates the harms of every bureaucracy.
> you go and work for the non-sexist company. But then that company gets a sexist union
The union would primarily be people already at the company who unionized, so it wouldn't make sense to claim your coworkers became sexist by unionizing when they weren't before.
That is possible, but so is the other thing. And having both a sexist union and a sexist company is still worse than only having a sexist company, because their activities still overlap. The hiring manager avoids hiring women or only hires them when they're pretty or massively overqualified, the union excludes them from union leadership roles where they might advocate for maternity leave etc. while also precluding them from negotiating directly with the company, including different managers who may not be as sexist.
> I could equally ask, what about a sexist company, and a non-sexist union?
Then you would still have to work for the sexist company, about which the union may do nothing even if they're not overtly making it worse, and if they do focus on that it requires them to burn your negotiating leverage doing something about that when you would have been better off to go work at the non-sexist company. Which is much easier when more such companies exist because the industry is less consolidated.
> The union would primarily be people already at the company who unionized, so it wouldn't make sense to claim your coworkers became sexist by unionizing when they weren't before.
"The company" in this case refers to management. It's completely possible to have non-sexist management and sexist workers. In blue-collar occupations this may even be more common. It's also possible for predominantly non-sexist workers to elect sexist union bosses for reasons unrelated to sexism.
> Unions have arguably been good for straight white native born men.
Where "arguably" means "it's trivial to claim but I have absolutely no supporting evidence."
For starters, there is no such thing as the "Newspaper Guild;" the News Guild represents staffers at the NYT and a number of other newspapers. While it does set minimum wages based on seniority, it does not mandate lockstep wages or anything else like that; guild members are free to negotiate higher packages than the minimum, and many (like Maureen Dowd) did.
https://www.inquirer.com/news/inq2/more-perfect-union-trade-...
> Racism, couched as union solidarity, has always been a part of the trades – embedded in their founding stories, their mythology. Their very success, some historians argue, was built on the exclusion of Black workers.
[snip]
> The local building trades have refused to share demographic data on the workers they represent. But the most recent available data from 2012 show that the industry’s union workforce was 99% male and 76% white in a city that is nearly 44% Black, and where other major labor unions are predominantly African American.
As if the 1920 bosses took over the collective opinion.
Thankfully in most European countries where they are active, they happen to apply across the industry, regardless of the specific profession.
But Europe also has a lot of problems that the US doesn't it's unemployment rate is nearly double that of the US, and its GDP per capital is about 70% of that of the US. I won't say that's all due to the higher union participation, but you can be sure that when firms discuss international expansion plans, the prevalence of unions in Europe gets brought up.
Yes they definitely need education on European work laws, I have had the pleasure to explain multiple times how it goes over here, to clueless bosses trying to overdo their power outside work hours.
US international firms should also take care some day Europe might play a China move, and refocus on internal markets.
All the ongoing conflicts show how globalisation is slowly reaching its end.
Our tech companies just did rounds of layoffs to suppress workers and the field is still anti-union.
Meanwhile, unions are getting 30-40% wage increases while tech salaries stagnate.
Silly.
So you mean the construction industry? The dairy industry? The film industry in some aspects?
It's also not in anyway a counter to the necessity of forming a union.
I criticize unions all the time, but your comment is so incredibly ahistorical and out of touch it makes me rethink my position because I don't want to be confused with people as clueless as you are.
Nothing in US history has come remotely close to improving race relations like the union movements of the 1930s and 1940s. The ruling class deployed racism to divide working people and unionization brought them back together, making the civil rights movement viable. People like you who spout nonsense they know nothing about disgust me and I hope your employees unionize ASAP.
Workers support unions (71% of Americans, the highest amount in 60 years) because they’re tired of having the shit kicked out of them by the American employment arrangement. Workers who are members of labor unions in the United States make 18% more than their nonunion counterparts, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' annual report on union membership.
> The survey also found about one in six Americans live in a household where at least one resident belongs to a union.
> Of the union members surveyed, 65% cited better pay and benefits as the top reason for joining a union. The second-most-chosen reason was employee rights and representation.
Your profile indicates you work at a FAANG company. I recommend some perspective on median working conditions and compensation for the average American.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/aug/30/americans-su...
There are people who get there by a network and people who get there by merit. But unions regularly eliminate even the possibility of merit-based advancement or compensation by demanding systems that assign rewards based on seniority.
> Workers who are members of labor unions in the United States make 18% more than their nonunion counterparts, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' annual report on union membership.
> The comparisons of earnings in this news release are on a broad level and do not control for many factors that can be important in explaining earnings differences.
...in fields where "merit" is a meaningless measure, such as factory work, housekeeping, retail, etc.
In fields where merit is meaningful and measurable, like most white-collar and higher-paying jobs, unions set minimums and individual workers are free to negotiate higher pay. (See, e.g., the Hollywood guilds, the newspaper guilds, the video game unions, the sports guilds, etc. But contrast to government unions, where pay is generally lockstep based on seniority.)
In what sense is it meaningless? Factory workers could have higher output, housekeeping staff could be more efficient, retail workers could make more sales. Anyone can make fewer mistakes or identify ways to improve operations.
If there was genuinely no way to do a better job than anyone else then what excuse is there for seniority-based rewards or anything other than perfectly uniform compensation?
> In fields where merit is meaningful and measurable, like most white-collar and higher-paying jobs, unions set minimums and individual workers are free to negotiate higher pay.
In which case the union becomes a gatekeeper excluding new entrants, because it benefits existing union members to keep out anyone who might displace them in well-paying jobs, and the prospective entrants don't get a vote.
No, they couldn't. Factory workers don't control the speed of the line, so it doesn't help if one individual on a line is faster if that speed isn't replicated throughout the line. They'll end up with extra downtime, or with a backlog somewhere else. Similarly, the speed at which housekeeping staff clean depends on the cleanliness of the room before they start cleaning, and many guests, especially post-COVID, are absolutely disgusting pigs. And retail workers don't generally make sales, which is why they're classified as retail workers and not as salespeople.
If there was genuinely no way to do a better job than anyone else then what excuse is there for seniority-based rewards or anything other than perfectly uniform compensation?
That's your strawman. Merit being a meaningless measure doesn't mean that one employee can't do a better job than another, or that experience is irrelevant. It means that attempting to objectively measure merit is meaningless because the factors affecting that measure aren't within the employees' control.
In which case the union becomes a gatekeeper excluding new entrants, because it benefits existing union members to keep out anyone who might displace them in well-paying jobs, and the prospective entrants don't get a vote.
Ironically, that's what people outside of the tech community say about the leet code interviews that are specifically intended to gatekeep.
Sure it does. They can give your station more to do if you can still do it in the allotted time.
> Similarly, the speed at which housekeeping staff clean depends on the cleanliness of the room before they start cleaning, and many guests, especially post-COVID, are absolutely disgusting pigs.
It also depends on the efficiency of the staff, and you can measure this on a statistical basis across a period of weeks to smooth out the effects of the initial state of the room.
> And retail workers don't generally make sales, which is why they're classified as retail workers and not as salespeople.
Sales is a subset of retail.
But even if you're talking about workers whose only job is to ring up orders, someone can still do it more efficiently or with higher customer satisfaction.
> Merit being a meaningless measure doesn't mean that one employee can't do a better job than another, or that experience is irrelevant.
But what? Doing a better job than someone else is merit. Experience may be a proxy for it, but you can often measure it directly, or at least measure a more direct proxy.
> Ironically, that's what people outside of the tech community say about the leet code interviews that are specifically intended to gatekeep.
Leet code is an attempt to measure merit. That's the intent, even if it's imperfect. You have to use something to choose between applicants. Plausibly it could be improved.
Unions imposing requirements on membership isn't even an attempt to use merit, it's just an entity with a monopoly on the right to work leveraging that monopoly for its existing members at the expense of other workers who want to be members.
No connections required.
Indeed, I accidentally qualified for SAG membership purely on the basis being a background extra for fun, and I can qualify for IATSE Local 695 sometime in the next year if I work on another camera crew as a camera assistant when filming resumes. I got my start on the camera stuff by walking up to the camera guys when I was an extra and asking about their cameras. (There was a lot of filming activity pre-strike; they literally didn't have enough bodies and were hiring people with any sort of relevant experience.) If I didn't have a non-film day job I would already have done enough work to join the union.
> Indeed, I accidentally qualified for SAG membership purely on the basis being a background extra for fun
It appears that the SAG-AFTRA "Initiation Fee" is $3000, so if you're an aspiring actress working as a waitress for minimum wage, you need to do more than qualify unless you know someone who can get the fee waived for you (or pay it for you).
> There was a lot of filming activity pre-strike; they literally didn't have enough bodies and were hiring people with any sort of relevant experience.
It sounds like you had an atypical experience as a result of an unusual circumstance. How easy is it to get that kind of work when there isn't a crunch on to get everything in before a strike?
https://home.treasury.gov/news/press-releases/jy1706 (FACT SHEET: Treasury Department Releases First-Of-Its-Kind Report on Benefits of Unions to the U.S. Economy)
They commissioned a partisan report. It opens with the classic move where you put a graph of two things that happened in the decades following WW-II, find a big correlation or anti-correlation between them (because the post-war period moved the needle on nearly every graph of everything), and then imply causation.
Much of the paper is just listing broken things in the economy, like high housing costs, and hand waving a theory that unions could help with that somehow. But that doesn't even work -- if you have housing scarcity caused by restrictive zoning, raising wages without alleviating the shortfall only makes people bid up the existing housing stock and transfers most of the higher pay to landlords. To actually fix it you have to build more housing.
And increasing the pay of only some workers can even make it worse, because it increases the cost of goods and services -- like new housing construction -- which then raises prices for everyone, both the people getting paid more and the people not. Which is made worse because unions are less able to monopolize unskilled labor than skilled labor, so unions will tend to increase the price of skilled labor (in monopolistic industries) while unskilled workers only get higher costs.
But the fundamental point -- and the fundamental problem -- is this one:
> At these firms with market power, unions engaging in monopoly behavior of their own can bargain for workers to share some of the high profits earned by firm owners, executives, and shareholders
Unions can only extract something from companies in uncompetitive markets because competitive markets have slim margins, but uncompetitive markets are bad and those industries need to be broken up, not have the monopoly rents shared only with the workers in those industries while everyone else continues to experience inefficiency and high prices.
And unionizing those industries creates a new lobby to prevent that necessary antitrust action, because those unions will not want the industry to be made competitive if they're extracting part of the monopoly rent being paid by the general public.