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Comment by grecy | Hacker News Reader

Because unionized workers consistently have higher pay, better benefits and more rights.

Next time you see the headline about some company laying off thousands of people while simultaneously making record profits and paying their CEO some number of hundreds of millions of dollars per year, ask yourself why that never seems to happen to unionized workers.

Next time you see the headline about the "working poor" that have multiple jobs and still can't make ends meet, ask yourself why that never seems to happen to unionized workers.

Next time you see the headline about people going years without so much of a cost of living increase to their wages, ask yourself why that never seems to happen to unionized workers.

(I could go on)

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Adding a union might net workers who join it higher pay in the short term, but who's to say that they aren't missing out on significant wage increases in the long term? You'll never see that counterfactual, and as a union gains momentum, it becomes increasingly unlikely we'll ever know how the workers might have performed without the union.

Interesting apprach, This makes sense and I wonder why people aren't talking more about it. I have a suspiction that companies would be paying people way more money if it wasn't for the pesky unions. This is also the reason why companies fight tooth-and-nail against unions. They do it out of kindness for the workers, so they are able to pay the workers more in the long run. People need to talk more about this, it's called corporate kindheartedness.

> but who's to say

Economic theory, strategic behavior, and repeated observations through history (leading to the genesis if unions).

Worked great for Detroit!

Like rent control, unions often protect existing workers at the expense of everyone else.

And that protection can extend into retaining bad workers, punishing highly productive workers.

Not that all unions are a net negative but many are.

It's vastly easier to find a bad employer than it is to find a bad union when it comes to employee benefits and wages.

The very fact there are way more employers than unions? That makes it obvious.

Workers need protection from everyone else; corporations and consumers would take everything if left unregulated. Like an expanding gas, you must build a box to constrain.

But you also hear of the people who work their butt off and can’t get promoted because union rules say promotions happen on tenure not tenure.

And of unions where the ceo and union president are golf buddies and they negotiate oh so very hard to get raises that don’t even match inflation.

There’s good and bad in both worlds. Ultimately the best defense you can have as a worker is to have in-demand skills and to think of employment as a business contract.

A union is like a lawyer. There are good and bad ones, and you may have to pay attention and hold their feet to the fire. But you're usually still a lot better off having one in your corner than trying to handle it yourself.

You can fire your lawyer. "Quit your job" isn't exactly the equivalent.

You can vote out your union representatives.

Are you unaware that people who "work their butt off" usually end up being promoted to non-union positions? My dad was union until he was promoted to manager. Then he stopped being union. So was my uncle. So was my brother in law. It happens all the time. And the best part is that the management position they get usually ends up being directly influenced by the union wages and benefits, because why would you just take on extra responsibility for no extra pay?

No problem, the manufacturing will move to Mexico.

Exactly. It’s a medium timeline win. They won’t move prod there overnight, but eventually they will shift prod there and then it will become another brownfield company town like they have in the rust belt.

Then the workers should enjoy the medium timeline win.

So politicians should put tariffs on cars from mexico to make it more expensive.

I see a lot of good and bad in unions. From a policy POV, I prefer a wealth tax that redistributes to regular people (workers), either as a UBI or tax break or social safety net. That wealth tax needs be global, similar in implementation to the global minimum corporate tax, to prevent capital flight.

This tax achieves a similar outcome to unions, it makes the lives of regular workers better by reducing the number of hours they need to work and giving them options, which implicitly changes the bargaining power. But on net it has much less downsides than unions. And it's more future proof when AI starts making people unemployed, whether that happens now or in 20 years.

So people should just accept that they get poorer every year and then the plant still moves abroad when the tax incentives stop?

The fairy tale of "unions are bad" is only good for the rich who get paid either way, just more without unions.

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