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Comment by the_other | Hacker News Reader

In the UK we have large unions that represent the individuals regardless where they work. I’ve not heard of company-specific unions here, although I’ve not looked for them either. Presumably companies must still recognise the unions.

Is it more common in the US to have company-specific unions? Are the large “independent” unions present at all?

I would assume that being larger and independent of an employer would make them more useful to their members.

Watching, casually, the news of Bandcamp’s and Moog’s unions over the last year, I couldn’t shake the feeling they wouldn’t work out as they’d be too small and likely their leadership inexperienced.

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They weren't a company-specific union but a branch of OPEIU which looks like a general union for what letting agents call "professionals". To translate what I think was happening into British parlance: they were trying to negotiate employer recognition plus a collective bargaining arrangement.

I don't know if their leadership was good or not but American trades unionism is pretty different to ours. Employees typically don't have a huge amount of legal rights and so getting your workplace unionised is much more of a battle than here. On the other hand, America has de facto closed shops which are illegal pretty much everywhere in Europe.

I've worked for a company in the UK which had a "staff association", which was orthogonal to any part of the business (i.e., no conflicting interests) and as such operated as a de facto union -- in the employee assistance and collective bargaining senses -- for the company's employees. While it was recognised by HR, ultimately its functions were incorporated by HR into the company as a matter of policy and the independent association was disbanded, amongst much consternation from the loss of true impartiality.

In Austria, companies can have a Betriebsrat, the... company-council, I suppose. It's made up of employees and they have some legal powers like delaying someone getting fired, they should provide legal health and generally support employees in any kind of "altercation" with the employer/manager side etc.

It's not mandatory and not all companies have it. I once joked, at my first job: "We should create a Betriebsrat!", my boss took me to his office and explained to me for an hour how horrible those are for a company. Companies are absolutely not allowed to prevent employees from forming one and he was incredibly afraid of having one in his company...

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