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Comment by brianwawok | Hacker News Reader

Just about every American union is very much about

a) Years at job = pay. Absolutely no pay increase or decrease for working harder or being better than average.

b) You are near impossible to fire unless you do something really dumb (caught watching porn at work multiple times, punch someone). You can be far below average and kinda sorta do your factory job and keep it for life.

Both are 1000000% against every fiber in my being, and would make me 100% never want to work at this kind of union. This is how like the autoworker and Police and teachers unions work.

There is no reason say a programmer union couldn't exist with different tools. And it could totally allow merit based pay and all of that. So by absolutely no means do I say that all unions are bad. I just know the standard American Union does not get along with my life goals.

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I spent quite a few years working for a company unionized under the Communications Workers of America (700,000 members). Neither of these claims were true then or are true now.

A specific job title would have a wage tied to the agreement, that increased based on years in the title and other negotiated increases. There were absolutely performance bonuses... as per the agreement, not at the whim of management.

Management gets to set a wide scope of performance requirements, and those he cannot meet them lose their jobs.

What I do see is that unions do a good job at preventing arbitrary abuses by management... and management really hates that.

*per friends who still work there

This is a very tired trope of propaganda against unions.

Unions don't dictate your pay, they set a range and the company pays in that range for performance. It's no different than what your employer does to you today, except with a Union the ranges are known and negotiated collectively instead of the company dictating them.

Unions don't prevent people from being fired, they just require cause. Because the flip side of this is corporate firing people without cause days before the qualify for 401k matching, pension plan, or another stock vest or other such nonsense. You want to fire Bob because you don't like him? Tough luck, we're not here to be friends, we're here to work. Union says show evidence Bob isn't doing his job, then you can fire him.

I think some of this perception is due to many people on HNs primary experience with union jobs is through government employed unions (e.g. public school staff) where there is essentially zero wiggle room for pay; it's a simple algebraic formula that you can calculate yourself. They also seem to be loath to fire people at all, to a degree I haven't seen in e.g. factory union jobs; I think the whole "If the guy next to me fucks up, I could end up injured" helps in those cases.

People try to say that it's hard to fire teachers because of unions, but they never mention the massive teacher shortage we have. It's really hard to fire someone in an essential job when you know that no one wants to take their place.

Unions don't set pay-levels, just minimum pay and percentage pay increases, generally.

Furthermore, just look here in California to multiple successful white-collar unions: the WGA (writers), the DGA (directors), and SAG (actors). If you're bad at your job or people don't like to work with you, you won't get hired, yet meanwhile, the unions guarantee everything from health insurance to minimum pay to pension to residuals and therefore allow much greater mobility between studios, jobs, and shows.

I really appreciate this comment because it gets to the root of my unease with unions in the US. It's good for society, the individual, and the employer when people have room to grow/work harder/contribute more and be rewarded for it. When I hear pro-union talk around me, it does come packaged with "working any harder than the minimum is evil" vibe that I find disruptive on whatever level it is accepted.

IE - if you accept "work the least possible" as an individual, you yourself will do poorly. If the organization is forced to accept it, it will decline against other domestic competitors. If the country is forced to accept it, it will decline against international competitors.

My union representative is currently working with my boss to get rid of an employee that isn't pulling their weight. It is harming both the company and colleagues when someone doesn't fulfill their duties. In the Nordic countries it is quite easy to get rid of workers, as the welfare state is supposed care for people til they find other work. It makes for a quite flexible labor market.

This is the missing link that I've rarely if ever seen in the USA - the Union needs to "police itself" so that they are guaranteeing a certain "value of labor".

In the US the biggest group complaining about lazy union employees are the other union employees.

>In the Nordic countries it is quite easy to get rid of workers

What, where? In Sweden it's definitely not easy to get rid of workers. If you're doing layoffs rather than firing an individual you can't even pick and choose who to fire, you need to follow LIFO.

You're allowed to have a "trial period" for new employees though, during which it's easy to fire them.

"According to the Economic Policy Institute, wage theft costs U.S. workers as much as $50 billion per year — a number far higher than all robberies, burglaries and motor vehicle thefts combined"

Privileged Americans will do anything to steal labour and instead make the hard working people seem like the criminal. But the managers who steal money are completely safe and never accused by the privileged.

Only one of the reasons why unions are essential in US.

Depends on the field, in institutions it can be extremely hard to get fired.

> It's good for society, the individual, and the employer when people have room to grow/work harder/contribute more and be rewarded for it.

Rewards are distributed based off of seniority. If you do more than what’s “expected”, there’s no guarantee it will lead to promotion. It’s more likely that you’ll just be given more work

I agree with you when you say that hard work is good for people, but doing this for your employer (as opposed to for FOSS or personal learning) will just screw you over in the long run

There's no "guarantee" but there's an increased probability, coupled with a good employee's ability to move to an employer that values someone like them.

In the union mindset, there's no chance to do better - it's all been traded away for the chance to do "no worse than" which by definition benefits the less good/productive and hurts the best people.

> There's no "guarantee" but there's an increased probability

This is part of the problem. If you work hard but don’t benefit, you’ve essentially fucked yourself because then you’ll get assigned more, you’ll be stuck carrying a bunch of people. Even if you factor in comp increases, how do you know there’s a net benefit to working hard? (specifically for your employer, on your own time is a different story)

It isn’t blind “probability”, it essentially turns into this little psychological game where management dangles promotions in front of people to manipulate them into doing more than is needed

> coupled with a good employee's ability to move to an employer that values someone like them.

Hasn’t aged well in the current job market

// then you’ll get assigned more, you’ll be stuck carrying a bunch of people.

Ok so on a personal level, if this happened to me, my sequence of response would be (1) talk to my management to fix the situation (2) failing that, look for another place to work (3) failing that, dial down my level of engagement.

Right now, #3 is the worst case. With a union, #3 is the default case since the system is designed to prevent you from being rewarded.

> Absolutely no pay increase or decrease for working harder or being better than average.

To a certain extent, this is an explicit goal of unions. Where "working harder" means things like "unpaid overtime" and "taking shortcuts that risk your safety" we consider that a good thing.

Where "working harder" means "actually doing your job" we consider that a bad thing. Of course working 16 hours a day used to mean "actually doing your job" so there's considerable grey area here.

> a) Years at job = pay. Absolutely no pay increase or decrease for working harder or being better than average.

It’s already like this

> b) You are near impossible to fire unless you do something really dumb (caught watching porn at work multiple times, punch someone). You can be far below average and kinda sorta do your factory job and keep it for life.

Good, the bullshit takes less time and leaves more time for foss or family life or whatever else

You know that Jennifer Lawrence and Lebron James are union workers right?

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