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Comment by CamperBob2 | Hacker News Reader

If we're not irreplaceable then ganging up on our employers is a way for us to reclaim some of the leverage

Let's say I have a company with an R&D budget of $1 billion. $100 million goes into robotics and AI, $900 million goes into core business interests. You form a union and demand all kinds of ridiculous accommodations that you could never have reasonably asked for on your own.

What will happen when budgeting for the next fiscal year? Replacing you is a core business interest now, and so is avoiding the need to hire your replacement. The R&D budget will be adjusted accordingly.

If you want "leverage," the best way to achieve that is to make yourself more valuable, not less.

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> If you want "leverage," the best way to achieve that is to make yourself more valuable, not less.

This is really irrespective of union membership. Sometimes people have this odd view of unions as "Now you're basically consigning yourself to 'lowest common denominator' employee", but that need not be the case. There are many unions that have vastly different pay scales and include "stars" (think actors' unions, sports players' unions, etc.) Even Tom Cruise joined the negotiations as a SAG member, and my guess is he's got plenty of leverage all by himself: https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2023/07/tom-cruise-repo...

One thing the Hollywood people have in common with each other, but not with us, is that they move from one employer to the next frequently as a matter of course. Those employers explicitly do NOT want to carry them on their books when they don't have specific jobs for them to perform.

Unionization makes a lot more sense in those cases. If I need a ship unloaded, I call up some dockworkers. If I need some heavy boxes moved, I call up some Teamsters. If I need someone to look good on a screen, I call up Tom Cruise or Jennifer Lawrence. If I need someone to feed the actors, I call the craft union. Etc. Like the old joke about hookers, I don't pay these people to come to work, I pay them to go away.

None of that is comparable to what I do, or (probably) to what you do. Your employer can only become less competitive if you join a separate outside organization that acts as a middleman for your labor. That's not the case in other industries.

That's certainly not the case with all unions like that, e.g. sport players' unions, where a player works for a team for a couple of years, then may go to another team, or (an area where I'm familiar) AGMA, the American Guild of Musical Artists, where many union members are employed by the same dance or opera company for years, sometimes their entire career.

(Shrug) Sports figures are just a case of apples and pears, rather than apples and oranges.

> demand all kinds of ridiculous accommodations that you could never have reasonably asked for on your own

The union oughtn't seek "ridiculous" accommodations then. It should seek at least reasonable ones, and possible aspirational ones, and negotiate it out from there. The problem we're seeing now is that even demands that most would find reasonable are cast as ridiculous by management. And if a union has trouble getting employers to listen, there's no hope that someone on their own can.

I've personally lost faith that a typical employer is capable of recognizing the value of an individual employee. So many of the recent layoffs have not accounted for individual performance or criticality to the business (Twitter's being a good example). So my own value isn't as strong of a bargaining chip.

So many of the recent layoffs have not accounted for individual performance or criticality to the business

And you think a union will?

Unions make more sense when the workers actually are interchangeable. Are you?

It doesn't matter, if my employer would treat me as interchangeable anyway.

And even interchangeable employees deserve reasonable accommodations. I do think a union can highlight those needs more effectively than individuals (especially for interchangeable ones, to your point).

> If you want "leverage," the best way to achieve that is to make yourself more valuable, not less.

In today's world, making yourself valuable gives you a pat on the back, maybe a pizza party and a $25 Chipotle gift card if your employer is generous.

CEOs are sitting on massive piles of money while telling workers that their greed is bad for the economy.

Presumably the union should calibrate its demands to the point where the cost to the employer is lower than the cost of replacing the workers but higher than what they get without the union.

Surely there is some room there. If the cost of labor were already equal to the cost of replacing the labor, then the employer might as well just replace them now. So it must be lower by some amount. The point of a union (it seems to me) is to capture a larger portion of that surplus, but leave the employer with enough that the arrangement is still worthwhile.

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