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Comment by akudha | Hacker News Reader

One sad thing I have noticed in American workplace is high levels of stress and higher levels of cruelty. This story is one such example. Another one is that Texas law, that eliminated (or limited, can't remember) water breaks. What is weird in this story is it is a government agency doing it, not a private entity :(

It looks like everything is designed to keep workers stressed, worried, scattered etc. Tying healthcare to jobs, preventing unionization at any cost, filling courts with as many pro-business/anti-worker judges etc etc.

It all looks well coordinated, deliberately planned and calculated.

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The importance of "The Economy" doing well is baked deep into the American psyche: if the economy is healthy, the country is healthy. And "doing well" is understood to mean businesses are healthy (revenue/market/profit growth). That means working as much as possible, for as few benefits as possible, is the accepted standard. Because who wants the economy (and by implication, the country) to do poorly? And if some, or a lot, of people suffer from stress and mental breakdowns, physical injuries, or death, well, that's a price our business and political "leadership" is willing to pay. (Some sarcasm there, in case it isn't obvious.)

Recently there does appear to be more noise around employee/worker benefits (including wages), hence things like the striking screen actors and auto workers (and attempted strike from railroad workers, who have shockingly terrible benefits), and renewed interest in unions.

The health of a country ought not be measured solely by its GDP and financial markets.

I think a lot of this is because of the shift from pension plans to 401Ks and IRAs. When an economic downturn means that you have years of retirement savings wiped out, of course you'll want the economy to do well.

Pension plans and 401K/IRA are invested in the same thing.

The only difference is a pension plan board/fund manager is an additional middleman that can be stupid/corrupted, hence more agency risk for the benefit recipient.

Taxpayer funded pension plans offset that agency risk with the power of being able to increase taxes, assuming their tax base is sufficient.

Historically, many pensions were defined benefit, rather than defined contribution. Market risk (and benefit) fell upon the employer rather than the employee. My understanding is that defined benefit pensions are pretty rare these days.

The problem of pension is that it doesn't come out of thing air. Someone still has to pay for it. In US the company pension get raided. In France pension is gonna run out soon and it put much pressure on the young people. Unless you have deep pocket like Norway oil money, pension would always favor the old. I have never seen a pension system that favors young people instead of the old yet. I think 401k style of you get what you pay is at least fairer to the individuals.

I remember Bush got a lot of flak in the press over his attempts at partial privatization of Social Security, with a payroll tax going into named accounts invested in broad-based equity indexes. (The details differ substantially, but it was somewhat like making 401(k) contributions mandatory and deducted from every paycheck.)

Increasing the size of the investing class and putting names and yearly balance statements on accounts (so voters will call bloody murder if the legislature raids the funds like they currently do with Social Security) both seem extremely useful to me.

Though, increased transparency would likely force reductions in benefits for current retirees, with current workers being the beneficiaries. Also flooding so much money into the major indexes would likely bring down investment returns, but likely resulting in a slight narrowing of income inequality.

And the risk of the employer not existing or being profitable enough decades in the future still falls on the benefit recipient, so just another agency risk.

It's interest rates that are screwing the worker. When they say they're fighting inflation they mean wage 'inflation.' When wages go up working class people are more able to repay their loans without incurring penalties and interest, which isn't good for mortgage companies or banks. Don't confuse the two, the interests of capital and working people are necessarily at odds when it comes to interest rates.

That's one of the contradictions of capitalism. As wages are pushed down, so does the ability to purchase the wares and services they produce. This also hurts the profits of companies.

In the case of USPS, there is a section of the American population who wouldn’t necessarily support better conditions. A relative of mine was a letter carrier. That whole branch of family, who you would think would, qua family, be sympathetic, regularly scoffed at the relatively decent working conditions he had at USPS. Comments like “You can’t tell me that he should be getting over $20/hour just to deliver the mail”.

Some of that was possibly jealousy. But another factor is that unions for public-sector employees have always been more controversial in the United States than unionization in general.

USPS has 3 unions. This is just a speculative rant, please don't do that here.

Where did I say USPS doesn’t have unions? The whole point of my post is that this is a unionized sector, and that unionization got results.

> unions for public-sector employees have always been more controversial in the United States than unionization in general.

For good reason. Unions pool workers' interests against the opposing interests of the employer; which means for public unions, they go against the interests of the public at large. There are countless examples of this.

Naturally, in a country with a deep history of skepticism of centralized government authority, people don't view public-sector unions very favorably.

>Naturally, in a country with a deep history of skepticism of centralized government authority, people don't view public-sector unions very favorably.

This feels contradictory to the sentiment in the preceding statement at first glance. If the people are generally skeptical of centralized government authority, why would they also be skeptical of unions who push back against that centralized authority, as opposed to seeing themselves as on the same side?

As I understand it, it's the rank-and-file "unelected" government employees that are perceived as the real problem. And all government spending is always bad. And unions are commie pinko bastards. And taxes are always bad. Add it all up, and government employee unions are corruption on corruption, fighting to screw the voter out of their tax dollars.

An argument of the left, however, goes that the employer of public-sector employees isn't actually the public at large, but rather a state controlled by the bourgeoisie that only claims to represent the public interest. In that case, both the public at large and public-sector employees are on the same side and both deserve union protection.

> For good reason. Unions pool workers' interests against the opposing interests of the employer; which means for public unions, they go against the interests of the public at large. There are countless examples of this.

Or against the politicians / political class. And given the amount of gerrymandering that goes on in the US, whether the elected politicians actually accurately represent the public at large is debatable.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REDMAP

See also "Teachers are now five times more likely to have a side gig than the average full-time worker":

* https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/4/4/17164718/te...

* https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/07/01/about-one...

Perhaps some public sector employees need unions because they're getting steam-rolled. (Of course some unions (e.g., police) may be too powerful.)

The police ones aren’t actually unions. In most countries they aren’t even called that.

USPS workers have at least 3 unions: City carrier, rural carrier, and clerks.

> It all looks well coordinated, deliberately planned and calculated.

It may look that way, but it is much more likely an emergent cultural phenomenon.

UAW is getting good media coverage but if you watch Shawn Fain's live streams (available on YouTube) he mentions numerous unions currently striking all over the US. A lot of them with tens of thousands of workers.

I think it boils down to leaders being self-centered. Being the boss isolates you. Isolation leads to self-centerdness. Being self-centered is isolating. It's a vicious circle.

It's cruel to embue one person with sole decision making power because it's leads to psychosis.

You said weird... But it's completely fucked up... At that point government needs a makeover

It's called a capitalist economy; not a laborist one. What I've never understood is how this is a surprise to anyone or why labor chooses to vote against their interests.

That said, the heat this year in Texas was brutal (speaking from personal experience) and I don't know how people who work outside do it and how they'll continue to do it as global warming progresses.

I thought the USPS was a government agency with unionized employees. What’s the explanation for this abhorrent behavior?

Louis DeJoy is still in charge.

Unions simply existing don't magically make thing amazing for every employee and the US government doesn't actually care about people any more than corporations do.

If you read the article, it's pretty clear that this abhorrent behavior is coming from management, with the union pushing back. I'd guess it will be an issue during the next contract negotiations.

Agreed. Management’s actions, which are shameful regardless, seem further exacerbated by their ability to track carriers’ position to the minute and possibly having too few employees [0]. The latter may be the after effects of a requirement, since repealed, that required USPS to pre-fund pensions. (That’s not in the article)

To re-emphasize, these factors don’t excuse management’s actions.

[0]: https://apwu.org/press-release/angry-about-late-erratic-miss...

Its an "independent agency", which as we've seen, acts more or less like a capitalist corporation.

Unions for government employees are usually weird and impotent, because the government has either gutted the right to strike, or is straight up willing to just fire everyone.

Or much much worse, just completely ignore all bargaining that the Union attempts. This puts the Union in an odd position in that, people don't usually want to strike, but negotiation doesn't happen.

How did the USA end up in this position? Here, whenever the gov tries to limit the right to strike, the unions respond with an all sector whole country mother of all strikes.

I have a friend that lives in Delhi.

He told me that laborers are dropping dead on the job. It's not uncommon at all.

It's not uncommon at all

Yeah, that is the problem. It shouldn't be common

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