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Comment by tobyjsullivan | Hacker News Reader

I struggle to imagine a scenario where employees would unionize despite already feeling like they are treated fairly.

The union/employer relationship is inherently hostile. The whole idea is that unionized employees can threaten production/profits as negotiation leverage.

Choosing that path means the employees have already given up on cooperation based on goodwill. It must take a very sour relationship to reach that point.

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This is wrong. This is like saying that the whole relationship of employer/employee is inherently hostile because the employer can threaten wages/livelihood as negotiation leverage. Unions are kind of like HR that serves the employees

Unions almost never negotiate in the long-term interest of a business, they're collectively overly-short-term-focused cash/productivity drags on a business. If unions were truly long-term focused they'd be negotiating things like employee equity, but you almost never see that. Ceteris paribus non union shops are more long-term focused and trend towards better long-term outcomes.

> Ceteris paribus non union shops are more long-term focused and trend towards better long-term outcomes.

Do you have any source for this? It seems hard to believe but I haven't been able to find any studies yet. The best I've found so far says unionization has no impact on business survival: https://www.princeton.edu/~davidlee/wp/unionbf.pdf.

I'm also skeptical that you could really study this effectively, since non-unionized employees tend to benefit when unions are formed elsewhere in their industry. You'd need to compare a group of companies that unionized against a group of similar companies in the same time and place that didn't unionize and also were completely unaffected by the mass unionization of the first population.

That’s a lot of hand waving around an assertion conspicuously missing any supporting logic or data. Do you have any citations? Say, for example, a study comparing the actions of unions versus senior management over time? It’s not hard to find examples of unions accepting cuts to help the future of a business during a bad economic downturn, or executives focused on juicing the share price before they sell, so I think something rigorous would be better than trading vague generalities.

Sure, here's a 40 year survey paper published in a top three economics journal which supports this with data: https://www.princeton.edu/~davidlee/wp/Longrununion.pdf

Also I'm not sure what "supporting logic" is, I presented my logic and you can disagree with it if you want (usually using different logic, which you haven't presented), but there's no such thing as "supporting logic".

That’s paywalled but the abstract is talking about stock market pricing, not the health of the company. Lower equity would make intuitive sense if workers have better compensation, but that doesn’t mean the business is less competitive or likely to survive.

Changed to link the actual PDF of the study.

I don't think you understand what the price of a stock means ...

> I don't think you understand what the price of a stock means ...

Well, the context here was your assertion that unions don’t act in the “long-term interest of a business”. Now, most people understand that share prices are bets on the future value, but also that it’s not a direct relationship because there’s an inherent tension between long-term and short-term interests. That plays out in questions about how much or whether to pay dividends (which has seen a big multigenerational shift in investor preferences), and whether a move which raises share prices is a long-term detriment.

We’ve seen a lot of the latter discussed here lately with tech companies doing broad layoffs to satisfy activist investors, despite research suggesting that companies making unforced layoffs tend to underperform over the long term.

> The union/employer relationship is inherently hostile.

Definitely not how it works in Europe. Unions make it easier for companies to have predictable relationships with their workers, and sector-wide unions mean that a company doesn't have to worry about a labor agreement putting it at a competitive disadvantage.

Right, Unions work differently in different countries. Unions in the US spread the management is always evil message, and treats all negations as a hostile encounter. As a result many of us in the US have a bad impression of unions. However in Europe they tend to be less hostile and so make more sense both for the company and the workers. Different contexts mean different results from what looks like the same thing.

The relationship you're describing is balanced, as opposed to non-unionized employment, where management can threaten employment and healthcare as negotiation leverage and employees can't threaten anything.

One more reason health care should not be employer subsidized. You want insurance (and you should), go buy it: same as you get car and house/apartment insurance.

I agree that healthcare should not be employer subsidized, but I don't think there is any country in the world where you just go out and buy it like car insurance. Almost everywhere in the world it is a baseline government service, and in some rare cases it is a private service but heavily subsidized by the government when necessary. If I could replace the US system with something I would choose one of those options.

You can just go out an buy health insurance in the US, but it is typically a horrible deal. If you have a job odds are your company is putting in thousands of dollars if you go with their plan, get any other plan and you lose all the money. Self employed people do this all the time (generally via the exchanges), as do people who don't work enough hours to get employer health care (the later often get low income subsidies not available to most people).

Yeah, me and my partner were both freelancing for a time, and shopping for health insurance was terrible. Health insurance wasn't the only reason I shifted from freelance to employee work, but it was definitely a very large reason. Now my whole family is covered under my employer's health insurance (and my partner still freelances).

It is wacky that my ability to see a doctor is depends on my job. Losing my job and experiencing a medical emergency is a scarier proposition than losing a month or two of pay for me, tbh.

The union/management relationship is maybe inherently adversarial in the sense that they represent different interests, but this doesn’t need to be hostile. The idea is that the unionized employees have the ability to threaten collective action, if they need to.

Maybe neither side is planning on doing anything hostile, and they are all happy to have things clearly defined.

You struggle to imagine anyone understanding current fair treatment does not guarantee future fair treatment?

Unions also mistreat their members at times. That isn't to say unions are bad, but they are not a perfect answer and you need to watch the union.

No one said unions are perfect or work without participation.

Unions and there members often act like that, though they don't say it.

It is hard for me to imagine a situation where I feel like I am being treated well at a company and then decide that I want to add another level of bureaucracy and additional fees by joining a union.

Edit: to add, I am not at all opposed to unions. They provide a valuable service in many industries.

Is it hard to imagine collective bargaining improving pay and working conditions above minimum satisfaction? Is it hard to imagine anyone purchasing any type of insurance?

It is hard to imagine those things if I feel like I'm being treated very well already, including above market pay, excellent working conditions, and 100% of insurance premiums being covered by the company.

I can absolutely see the benefits of a union if I felt I was being paid below my worth, if I was dealing with poor work conditions, or had no company provided insurance.

Which is the point of this conversation, when things are bad, you REALLY want a union. When things are good, it's hard to see the value of a union.

That’s a very US centric view. It’s quite common to join unions in most European countries. It does not indicate mistreatment at all. In the US, unionisation happens when all else has failed.

And in Europe, being able to unionize is considered a human right, meaning companies aren't legally allowed to try to oppose it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Convention_on_Human_R...

> The union/employer relationship is inherently hostile. The whole idea is that unionized employees can threaten production/profits as negotiation leverage.

The boss/employer relationship is inherently hostile. The whole idea is that bosses can threaten employment/wages as negotiation leverage.

I'd bet a lot of money that it's around a new on-call requirement with no pay increase that no one will put their name on promoting but managers are seeing appear on their all-manager meeting agenda.

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