U.S. Rules Apple Illegally Interrogated Staff and Confiscated Union Flyers
forbes.com
forbes.com
It looks to be a purely dogmatic ego trip where somehow blind loyalty is demanded even when it's not actually necessary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manageria...
It is a bit of an overused catch-all term though, but explains what you are describing.
It does make a negative difference for employers with potentially higher costs and lower flexibility over time.
I have listed two main negative differences it makes for employers. I am hard-pressed to find any positive differences for them... on the issues this touches it's pretty much a zero-sum game so if employees gain it means employers 'lose'.
If something is positive for both sides then I think the market will eventually adopt it on its own.
A happier employee is more productive and less likely to leave the company on the forst occasion or do anything hostile (stealing, selling company secrets).
This is not exactly news, it has been known for at least 150 years.
You do not contradict anything I have written nor provide any examples of how unions might be a positive for employers...
Again, if an happier, more productive employee benefits the company then the market will sort it out by itself (For instances tech companies have not needed unions to offer high pay and plenty of perks). That said, it's not an universal truth that a happier employee is a net gain.
You can scream THE MARKET until your throat is dry, but it doesn't mean that an unfettered capitalism is the best thing for the country as a whole. Everyone must be thriving, otherwise we're all failing together.
I don't think this argument in particular stands well against reality. The market is generally driven by players with concentrated power and it's very likely the interests of those players will align creating an even more one sided power imbalance. People's preferences are low entropy.
Things that are in the interest of individuals rarely "sort themselves out" without some intervention, usually from a regulatory body. And even that's less a democratic exercise than it is a lobbying one where concentrated donations are worth more than sparse individual contributions.
In the US there was a time when more people could own a house, car, and raise a family with just one family member's income. Now it's increasingly difficult to do it even with two incomes. People didn't decide to just work more and afford less. The market sorted itself to benefit those who already had more power and could influence.
I think it does. I mentioned the salaries and perks offered by tech companies. I could also mention Henry Ford.
If something benefits the company then they will do it, and if it works it will naturally spread.
> Things that are in the interest of individuals rarely "sort themselves out" without some intervention
I didn't write "in the interest of individuals", I wrote benefitting both sides, which means, crucially, also benefitting the company. But again, in many cases happier employees simply do not provide a net benefit to the company.
Back to the point: The claim that unions benefit both sides is naive and a fairy tale. Obviously unions do not benefit companies hence why they are opposing them as much as they are legally able to.
Short-term, the demands that trade unions make do indeed make workers more productive.
But long-term, the company owners (and here I of course mean actors who hold significant amount of concentrated shares, not your average stockholder) and top management may see this as only the first step down the road where they do not wish to go. By this line of thinking, if you allow unions to establish a foothold with those basic demands, they will use that as a beachhead to make further and further demands that favor labor interests over those of the capital, with the end goal being a worker-owned business (i.e. socialism) which excludes the people who currently own the capital entirely. Naturally, they do see it as a threat to themselves - it is very much intended to be! And so they are willing to forgo some things that would be more profitable short-term.
> You do not contradict anything I have written (...)
I mean, you directly contradict me in the previous paragraph about what the purpose of unions is, can we at least agree to disagree?
> (For instances tech companies have not needed unions to offer high pay and plenty of perks)
That's true, some companies do well without unions, but this does not make unions universally useless.
This is such a weird take. Why would employees do that? Employees benefit when the company benefits. If the company increases profits by 10%, that's 10% more that could potentially go to employee benefits, salaries, etc.
I want my employer to make as much profit as possible, because that guarantees my long-term employment and allows me to ask for a higher salary. If the company folds, the union folds, and everybody loses their jobs. Nobody wants that to happen.
Obviously employees want the company to do well, at the same time unions are there to extract as much as they can on behalf of their members. Both are true and not mutually exclusive.
In your example, if profits go up 10% unions might push of big salary increases, indeed.
if you work at a good company, maybe. If a company put profts back to the employees, we wouldn't need unions.
I think the interpretation of unions sucking companies dry is uncharitable. But many companies these past few decades have definitely shown they need someone to keep them in check.
This has left Delta very motivated to make sure their flight attendants are happy so that they won’t unionise.
The end result is better workers, happier customers, and more productive workplace. But this wouldn’t happen without the threat of unionising hanging over Delta’s head.
I personally think a good outcome in situations like Apple is having maybe half their stores union, half not - Apple would be very motivated to keep the non-union employees happy. Customers could end up seeing which stores work better. A competitive marketplace, if you will.
You know that when the big non unionized auto workers recebtly got raises? Right after the unionised ones fought for and got their own.
The union is the only thing that drives wages up. Non union shops, including your example of Delta flight staff, only get benefits because the unions are there. Without the other unions in that space, they would get nothing.
You know what would ensure Delta gets all the same benefits as the unionized staff around them? Joining the same union.
Due to millions of regulations already in place, the market is not really free, but very distorted. So even if the "free market" would always go for the best solution, current state is nonproof for anything.
Otherwise you might argue, that europe would be a proof, because unions here are strong.
So, yes, the market isn't really free, and never has been, when you don't selectively exclude some kinds of regulation from consideration.
In fact, I think that even seems like a very plausible hypothesis, given that treating your employees worse can have advantages (reduction in costs and headcount) and disadvantages (less motived and potentially productive employees, worse retention, difficulties attracting people) for the employer, so those two may roughly cancel out under a whole lot of different conditions.
So for the employer there may be no benefit (but also not really a downside) to treating employees better, but add to the mix this strong cultural idea in US business circles that unions are the worst and you get this taboo against unions and no market pressure to change that.
Obviously this is a quite horrific situation to be in because we get worse outcomes for employees and unchanged outcomes for employers. So no one benefits and most people have worse outcomes. Bad all around.
Note that I am not saying one side is inherently better than the other. I’m saying it’s a choice with consequences. It is essentially a question about what you value in life.
It might also be that Denmark is half the size of South Carolina (approximately). While the US is the whole size of the US.
That's probably not what you meant, but that's been my experience at every role so far. 5 weeks would be a dream for me.
We sadly gave up proper benefits/balance of life for higher income. Which of course hoodwinked us when economy tightened up. Some states have it slight better, but I haven't had a proper vacation since college. Unless you count being laid off with no notice.
Then you have loopholes as usual. Layoffs in some states SHOULD be noticed in advance, but only if it's something like > X people laid off. So why not instead make rounds of layoffs over the months? Great for morale!
Now in that scenario the worker has no power at all, even though it actually is as we all know today, a proven benefit to have resonable working hours for the company.
So if you have a union and all the workers can collectively go “we need to talk about work hours or we strike” you force through the policy that is ultimately beneficial to the company, even though management hates the idea of there being 6hours more per day that their wage slaves are not at the work benches.
Why would workers argue for fewer hours if it doesn’t end up costing the company net profits? Because they are humans, not machines, and not everything in this world boils down to pure profit driven motives.
Beyond that, you ask 'Why would workers argue for fewer hours if it doesn't end up costing the company net profits? The workers don't care about net profits, at least at the expense of their own time. Time is money, and if the company has more of your time, you have less...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-the-40-hour-workw...
And much lower productivity. Even by recent metrics we know the modern work is twice as efficient, but apparently the average hours per week worked is around 55-60 hours.
That's part of the point. It in fact has quickly dimishing returns to work more than X hours, and past that there probably is some physical breakdown point wher ea worker loses productivety in the mid-long term (e.g. working 120 hours for 2 weeks, then sick for a month. Congrats, you lost 80 hours of productiviy + whatever middling returns happened) but companies won't budge without collective action.
that's not true. In fact, the polar opposite is true - every decision is in service to profit and the bottom line. It is only laws that prevent slavery. It is only laws that prevent over-work or exploitation.
I would say that it is better to have regulation over unions. Unions may or may not act in the interest of the employee - it's a hit or miss depending on the actual union in question. But as a citizen, you have some semblence of a vote on the gov't, and at least everybody gets the same gov't.
It’s not an either/or, there’s unions and there is labor law, and labor law is in large part written to codify the trade offs in incentives between workers and companies. Are you really trying to argue that workers should have no say in the laws written to govern them?
The worker holds all the power, so long as another worker isn't an asshole ready to screw over his fellow man. What's the company going to do if the worker balks? Hire nobody? Not going to happen.
Which is what a union ultimately serves: Establishing a brotherhood where the workers agree to not be assholes towards each other, to not screw each other over, so that when a worker decides the terms are un-agreeable another worker isn't waiting to pounce to take his position. This retains a worker's power.
But if workers had common decency to begin with...
These days, yes. They get rid of Bob and make Andy do his and Bob's work (with no extra pay, of course), promising to replace Bob over the next 6 months while the company actually has a hiring freeze.
I wish more "assholes" would realize this before trying to turn against their peers.
What on earth do you mean? If a job gets posted do you ask them “did the last person get fired? If so I don’t want this job” to have “common decency”?
>> despite the data showing little negative impact of unionization to overall productivity nor company survival. *
Employees should bother to improve their own lives, not to decrease productivity or affect company survival.
* Emphasis mine.
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/re...
When we say "the police union isn't a labor union", we're people rejecting them from the classification even though they use the word because we don't think they fit in with our values. That's because we have labor (movement) values. You could also talk about any group of employees getting together and acting towards a common goal and call that a union, or a labor union, that wouldn't mean that everyone else automatically means the same thing. In this case, the poster didn't mean that.
Ok fair enough. In english there is a distinction between just "Union" and "labor union". And under this distinction, a police union would not be a labor union. Language is important.
Moving beyond language though, I can't see where the distinction is important e.g. legally or ethically - which is perhaps why the distinction has disappeared or never existed in some other languages.
It's curious - perhaps related - that in English the difference between "salary" and "wages" also remains and is even relevant in some parts of the market.
It exists fundamentally in order to be able to collectively negotiate around the amount of that value extracted and attempt to retain more for those who create it. That in doing so it also establishes workers' rights, policies around treatment etc is a nice to have.
The police, as an extension of state power much like the army, are generally understood to be broadly on the "side" of capital (in capitalist states). They are not value-creating, and their "unions" have nothing to negotiate for a share of. This is why you'll more often see them represented as "associations" or "federations", much like civil service, nursing or fire service staff bodies. Their goal is simply to argue for better terms and conditions for their members.
Does the distinction practically matter? In many cases, no. When the interests of capital or the state are at stake, yes: police officers will break up labor union strikes, even when those officers are members of a federation. They are fundamentally not part of the same movement.
This is a useful distinction, and I'm mildly surprised it doesn't show up in your native language. A salary is fixed compensation for full-time labor: the employee is expected to work during (usually) business hours, in exchange for a contractually-agreed amount of money.
Wages are hourly: the employee works when scheduled, and is paid an agreed amount for each hour they work.
Not saying I disagree or agree with their point, but that this rhetorical method of argument by definition doesn't match reality.
Some restrictions on strikes usually covers lots of different jobs (e.g. nurses).
But regardless, even if they are struggling to pay rent or save for their child's college, they are singularly compensated by the one thing almost as valuable as money in our world: bare authority.
But its a bitter reward! Spiritually unhealthy. Forever opposed to everyone around them, specifically trained to think as such. Which is why, imo, we see huge numbers of them suffering from PTSD, committing suicide, engaging in domestic violence...
Note that solidarity is an important principle in the labor movement. So the fact that police the police might act as "labor" in their personal negotiations with management isn't considered to make them part of "labor" in the general sense; because they don't show solidarity with other unions.
Think of it in terms of regular warfare. Just because two nations separately fight the same country in different wars doesn't make them allies. They are only allies if they support each other in wars against that other country.
I don’t have a fully formed opinion, but I think there is something wrong with unions for government functions. Unions are good because they allow a large number of weak stakeholders to band together to negotiate with a powerful business.
But governments aren’t businesses and don’t have the ruthless profit motive companies do, so I think government unions have too much bargaining power against the very diffuse stakeholders of a government. Police unions especially seem to exist more to avoid accountability than to further wages and working conditions.
I guess I would say that “labor” in the union context is in contrast to “shareholder”, and governments and their employees just don’t work that way.
I hate to be so blunt on this site, but what is the flippin point of these sort of definitional and semantic arguments? What are you trying to gain, other than muddying the waters of conversations. I legitimately don't see how any position, yours or otherwise, benefits from this rhetorical approach.
How does enhanced clarity muddy the waters? Police are not labor, not practically or legally. Likewise, a CEO is not labor either, even though the CEO is apt to be an employee who shows up to work just like anyone else. Having a job that you go to work at is not what defines labor in this context. Considering all people who do work to be the same is what muddies the waters here.
Both the police and CEOs are incentivized to protect the interest of capitalists. That is a primary duty of their job. Labor, on the other hand, challenges the interests of capitalists.
> It seems very clear that they are more the latter (labor) than the former (admin).
Clear in what way? Where there are people there are people problems. Indeed, police often have associations to help with people problems, hell even the capitalists sometimes have unions (e.g. farmers), but these are not labor unions. If this is what you are talking about, there is nothing clear about it – it is all quite arbitrary who gets to associate and who doesn't, but is also beyond the topic at hand.
I am not sure how you can disagree with the state of the world. Said state may be relayed with error, perhaps, but recognizing an error in transmission isn't disagreement. Besides, if I had a position, it would be in bad faith to share it anyway.
Why would it be bad faith to share your position? Also
Don't expect a wolf in sheeps' clothing to baa.
America didn't lose enough men to qualify for the "collectivism" unlock.
Those behaviors you describe have clearly shifted somewhat in the last years for very specific reasons that the system has determined that, e.g., “DEI” is more profitable and also cedes more power and control to the top, so they’ve been working hard to put in place the more profitable and beneficial structure, and the minor nobility we call executives, have been quick to implement the King’s wishes, as they’ve come down from the Dukes and the Earls, among slick presentations and videos with upbeat audio from professional propagandists called PR firms.
This is not accurate at all and really has very little place in rational discussion.
> didn't get there without lots of compulsive control-seeking, dominance-asserting, etc. behavior patterns
Some executives in some company cultures are like this. Most companies I've worked at or collaborated with did not put up with this behavior at all.
I wouldn't phrase it that way at all, but it has been a studied phenomenon that C-level positions have disproportionately more individuals with psychopathic tendencies.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240508223718/https://fortune.c...
That is not the same thing as the stereotype "alpha male".
Like from this article..."The board cannot impose fines or direct punishments against Apple for its violations".
A well-managed business tries to focus on profitability as opposed to, say, picking up horseback riding as a hobby. But the way profits are pursued is absolutely irrational and chaotic. Does anyone believe otherwise?
Media companies have an oversized impact on what the people of the country think and discuss
Unionization changes the fundamental facts of ownership. The owner no longer do as they please, they must consult the representatives of their labor force.
That is a fundamental shift in how the business operates and the rights that the owners enjoy
The next morning the union rep met with me to deliver a letter from HR to sign saying I resigned - that was all that was in it. The union rep and mgmt knew about the 'your religious problem' verbal warning I got from that meeting with a manager - the other person at that meeting was writing something down and didn't hear it and when I asked the manager what he meant by that and he clammed up. Smart move really.
So if anything the after work relationship with the union reps who could still act on my behalf helped out. Other people there were not comfortable to interact with me on anything work related at that point. Notable is that I'm not religious in any way, but was insistent that documenting work was a necessity. That was while working for a state university.
I don't remember which lecture was it though :-/
Here's the YT Link for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNeyViG2ar68j...
More seriously: Any analysis which ignores globalization and skirting of environmental and labor laws by importing from China is an incomplete/dishonest analysis.
Wage stagnation also correlates to importing from China.
https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/the-impact-of-u...
You probably won't see this analysis from Yale. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/09/congress-targets-ha...
>The board cannot impose fines or direct punishments against Apple for its violations.
Which makes me wonder why they spent two years working on this investigation.
It’s like a GAL report for a family law case; independent investigator provides a report which the court will then use to inform it’s decision.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Board...
They can now try Apple in an administrative court, with an 'administrative judge' selected by the agency, then get a (normal) Article 3 court to rubber-stamp their 'order'.
edit: further investigation has indicated that it's immigration law which deviates from usual practice of administrative law, which would potentially expect an automatic stay in a context like this.
> The decision of the Administrative Law Judge may be reviewed by the five member boardUnions are very powerful, but they also take stakes in the corporations. I'm pretty sure that union reps often sit on corporate boards.
Japan has a long culture of employee relations, but they also work their asses off. I don't think Japanese unions would cover slackers, which is a popular view of US unions.
Anyone that has ever participated in a trade show at the Javits Center, has seen unions do serious damage to their own cause.
Plenty of stories of presenters being disallowed from plugging in their own equipment without a union employee there to assist and other things like that.
They put her purse onto the center of the cart, and escorted her to the booth. Then, they got upset she only tipped one guy $5.
I know these are "one-off" stories (and she probably gave attitude), but there's so many of these anecdotes, that it causes huge damage.
Your understanding of the world isn't workable when you think tens of thousands of people are acting as unhinged mass murderers and society just accepts it.
He did get paid very well, got good overtime for those long hours, and safety came first. The benefits of a union.
It may be better to say “Unions cover workers whom management accuses of being slackers.” In my experience, the worst “slackers” are often in management (my view on this is from when I was in management myself).
The apprenticeship system is just as difficult and time-consuming as college (maybe more so).
The issues with unions often revolve around corruption, but there seems to be corruption in almost any human endeavor.
popular =/= accurate. But yes, the most criticized aspect of unions (at least from a liberal lens) comes from its ability to rally around every worker in the union, regardless of individual productivity.
But historically, unions in the US neeeded those protections because it's way too easy to fire a US employee for anything that's not illegal. Japan doesn't make termination any easier, it's just incoporated at the government level instead of corporate. To compensate, Japanese "slackers" just get good severance packages as an incentive to get out, or even move them as far out of the picture as possible.
That’s being given a job, where all you do, is stare out of a window, all day.
It’s the worst thing that can happen to a Japanese employee. A lot of Americans might consider it a “dream job.”
They're also super secretive. None of my friends can tell me what they work on. Awhile back it was hinted that they were working on a search engine with K8s as the backend but it's been 2-3 years since I inferred that and there's been nothing. Everyone I know there is/was a k8s contributor.
I used to work for a super secret company making cool stuff and it was so lame that I couldn't talk about any of it.
The ACLU is currently going through a court case involving the NLRB. The ACLU is fighting with the novel argument that the Biden administration replacement was done unlawfully, therefore every action of the NLRB since then is illegal.
I'm sure a potential future Trump administration will try as hard as possible to destroy labor and the NLRB.
https://www.nlrbedge.com/p/the-aclu-is-attacking-free-speech
https://prospect.org/podcasts/2024-03-18-aclu-nlrb-lawsuit-l...
https://dailycaller.com/2024/03/12/aclu-worked-undermine-bid...
Meanwhile the word "socialist" already freaks so many voters out in the US, that frankly I do not see an easy way out for you guys.
> "union problems"
Glad you put it in quotes, as unions are solutions for oppressed workers. Though unions you got weekends, holidays, end of child labour, minimum wage, paid sick leave and more.
Yes. The solution you provide might seem to on the surface, but it doesn't in reality. Let me give you an existing exemple, and one that people associate with strong workers right and yet the relation between workforce and employers is horrible : my country of France.
France made a capital mistake compared to our other european neighbors, by making an inverted order of agreement. Countries where it works (like nordics, etc ...) have a flow of importance like this :
1 Union collective agreement
2 Country's law
3 Company local agreement
Meaning the defining rules are made through the union, some are set by the country (but they're not overriding union agreement), and local companies can make their own internal agreement but they can't override the law nor the union agreement (so eg you can give extra holiday, but you can't take out a national holiday or a union negotiated holiday).
France being centralised as it is, and believing in the messiah governement above adult talking with rules; decided to invert this with the following scheme :
1 Country's law
2 Union collective agreement
3 Company local agreement
On the surface, it seems like it makes sense or is even better. In reality, here is what happens : if you are a worker and want a change, or there is a strike and you're the employer negotiating, or ... The end game is not the other side. It's the governement. This doesn't promote discussion between both side of the work share, it makes it useless.
So you have the joke about employer's association regretting that the governement make news laws and rules every time there is a major strike instead of negotiations, and the employee's union regretting that when a strike is stalling the situation employers go to the governement instead of negotiating harder ... You get the governement having to "invite both side to the table" in front of them at every major strike. Because ultimately, our system makes the governement the daddy when workers and employers are the kid.
And what's really insane is that both side hate this and criticize it, yet when Macron made a push to change it both side where also against it because they saw it as destroying their position : employees union pretended it would allow employers to do whatever since they have more power, employers pretended it would put them in a kidnapped situation every strike.
Meanwhile you go on the french subreddit or any other center to left place, you will regularly see things like union agreement that have minimal salaries in them BELOW the french legal salaries, acting like this is horrible, while in reality it's like that because nobody cares about that because it doesn't matter because the minimal is the country's one.
I love my country's approach to people rights and society's rules, but this is one where we're really wrong, except it gives everyone a taste of power (gov like to be in power; employees like that they can call daddy to "screw the evil employer", employers like that they can circumvent their peole to go straight to daddy to "skip those lazy workers").
I don't know if proper union in charge is the best solution. All I know is every place doing better than us at that have strong union and a governement that doesn't try to do their job for them.
> The problem with government (or too-large unions) is that different jobs have different employment concerns. It's hard to legislate in a way that covers all cases from seasonal farm work to IT office jobs to airline pilots. A union gives you more fine-grained representation to address the problems specific to your profession and workplace.
In Sweden government labor protection rules are somewhat low (there is not a minimum wage for example), but unions have a lot of power and a good chunk of workers are unionised. The job of the gov is to guarantee a basic minimum of labor regulations and unions do the rest.
They need to always include the influence of industrial complexes and an uneven playing field with international competition, nations not having same cost structures because not having alignment on services and quality of life minimums for its population - so those who don't take care of their population as well get a competition advantage on pricing.
Fascism also needs to come into play, for example, when countries give certain companies $10s of billions of the taxpayers' money to "compete" for those factories being local instead of built somewhere else, but the serious risk is fascism is authoritarian politicians partnering with industrial complexes, so long as the companies receiving the money are willing to toe the tyrannical line.
State police == police who work for the state
Private police == police who work for a private entity
Corporate police == police who work for the corporation (against the employee 99% of the time)
I've worked in places where there was union labor for building management. You literally weren't allowed to unplug your computer and move it yourself. You had to file a ticket and have somebody come and do it for you and bill handsomely to do it. What's not to love from an employer perspective?
HR usually doesn't do stupid shit like that because it reduces employer KPIs so even if they do that for some time it gets killed quickly. unions have different KPIs to optimise for and if they're pathological and/or parasitic, you get dumb shit like the above.
an union which is not a parasite is absolutely possible in the same way a non-exploiting employer is also possible.
I can't imagine it makes starting a new small business any easier when you're required to pay employees $20/hr. Think about how many startups are designed from the ground up for corporate acquisition, almost like a fire-and-forget model never intended to scale.
I'd like to think unions and labor reformers consider such things, but to be honest it's probably tertiary at best.
Where else would you put the minimum if not "scraping by?" If businesses literally can't afford it then maybe government should step in and pay the difference.
Oh no! Anyway…
Most activists are demanding higher wages from bigger employers.
> I can't imagine it makes starting a new small business any easier when you're required to pay employees $20/hr.
Why should workers suffer because some techbro wants to get rich from the Nth AI chatbot he shits out using VC money?
If your competitors can sell for lower costs than you due to the cost of living is not as high (likely the quality of life is not as high either) - because they don't take care of the population as much, don't have safeguards in place, etc), and 2) therefore the margins to be lower - and so if not competing with pricing from the uneven playing field - then the whole company may go under, or worse be taken over by states or companies essentially owned/controlled by totalitarian states?
If you extrapolate out that then means more and more power-money-control flows towards bad actors, propagating, compounding, and accelerating their takeover of potentially everything globally - so while in the short-term unions may maintain a certain quality of life, until totalitarians centrally control the means of production - and then everyone becomes slave labor, the ones who last will be those conditioned to comply and/or think whatever controlled-relatively low quality of life is normal and the only thing possible.
Also, the solution is the relatively free market to your conundrum, right? If it's "so easy" then the people who want to unionize for a certain maintained standard can then find investment and start their own company - and then they too can face the economic pressures of international competition on an uneven playing field, and they'll see how well they can fair too; and then cool if they can outcompete everyone and maintain their desired quality of work-life, but in their effort to aim for their goals they're far more likely to get a rude awakening of competitive market forces.
There's a reason there's a naturally formed hierarchy of competence, and highly competent people gravitate towards voluntarily wanting to be led and employed by the most highly competent people they can identify - who helps drive and support their passion by having a foundational trust or belief the company being led by whatever organizational structure (especially including founder(s)) has allowed them to reach their current state of success; and then an ideological mob of workers who apply pressure for improvements, where the business will want to keep good employees happy - presumably they'll be more reasonable than not in work load, work conditions, etc, in part as keeping trained employees is far cheaper and more efficient than hiring new - if they can match the requirements the company has set for the system, if the system appears to be functional-fluid and efficient for the majority - the majority ideally highly competent-healthy individuals who are gauged as accurately as possible to being happy enough with their income and conditions, then that is arguably the best way to orient and determine course corrections if/when necessary.
And then we haven't even begun the conversation of when Tesla Bot et al will be able to replace more and more tasks - to begin the discussion of how then how do we safeguard against tyrants from capturing and deploying these systems against humanity and creating a Terminator-like future?
It seems Elon has thought-extrapolated this far out, and why he's concerned with AI - and why he also believes UBI is likely inevitable; UBI which can be weaponized by bad actors as well, e.g. if you have everyone getting enough money to survive then boredom and cults will be easy to form, who can then be weaponized against the very system they now depend on; why education and understanding the fundamental mechanics and policy that allows for whatever thriving society we design and follow next, tapping into the abundance of the universe as soon as possible - and forming Heaven on Earth, thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.
At some point, the democratic process elected Congress and the laws passed therein, and businesses exist at the pleasure of the people and their elected representatives, not the other way around. A business that doesn’t want to unionise is free to close up shop and go out of business. They are not free to simply ignore lawful unionisation activity.
It seems more and more that the US is waiting for the general public to commit egregious acts and then will crack down and that this is the ONLY function of the US government at all levels.
Even when an entity is cornered for wrong-doing, it'll be a fine, paid with other people's money, that amounts to a pittance compared to the profits gained from their malfeasance, all while "admitting no wrong-doing".
The C-suite that made the call, set the culture, and determined budgets suffers zero penalties in a majority of the cases, so there is literally no incentive to comply.
We can thank congressional bribery for that.
As one noted politician famously said: "Corporations are people". The issue is that soo much of US jurisprudence has granted corporate entities all the rights of personhood. The only thing they cannot yet do is vote, but that too will come. They are certainly today allowed to vote with their wallets by financially supporting candidates.
Part of this issue is in turn tied to how so many powerful people in the US cloak themselves in corporate status. Taylor Swift exists are a person, but all her money flows through her corporation. Trump exists as a person, but all his property is held by his corporations. Some of this is a game to avoid taxation but it is also used to shield people from liabilities. So such powerful people take any attack on corporate personhood very personally.
An obvious solution would be to revoke limited liability for a corporation, converting it into a general partnership… shareholders could either abandon or sell their shares, and ones who remain would assume both liability and control over the corporation. (Imagine something like this at Boeing.)
Limited liability is a privilege, not a right, bestowed by state governments.
Courts can, and do, pierce the corporate veil, either criminally prosecuting responsible parties or holding them to full liability for corporate action. Corporate personhood is a useful fiction, but it's just that, a legal fiction.
So there is literally no consequence to Apple, or any other company from doing these actions, meaning there is no law to be above. If the IRS could do only make public statements that people didn't pay income taxes without any repercussions otherwise, no one pay their taxes ever.
If CxOs and Board could be held accountable and fined say 10% of annual compensation, maybe they would be less inclined to allow these actions to occur.
In the aggregate, they absolutely are. Capital, not democracy, elects US politicians. Those politicians create, enact, and enforce the laws.
not in late-stage capitalism they don't
But this union stuff pisses me off to no end. Apple has high margins and is generally ahead of competitors in things like sustainability and supplier responsibility (yes yes not perfect, I just said ahead).
It would be 100% in line with the company’s ethos to embrace unions. Not necessarily to encourage, but certainly to treat them as an important part of the economy and a good check/balance to ensure the benefits of customer loyalty and high margins are shared with those who make it happen.
Just like renewables or supply chain audits, this wouldn’t have huge impacts on profits but it would make the world better. Serious misstep by Apple that pisses me off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
Put another way, and before you downvote me to oblivion, what are the most innovative tech companies that have unions?
Who cares? That's a stupid question, we can't possibly know and either way we can't change the past. What we CAN do is change how things are now and implement a union with Apple as it is today. Why postulate about the upbringing of the company and how things could have been different ideologically when that's not what the discussion is about? People just want job security, protection from abuse by their employer, and reasonably consistent raises to at least match inflation.
But putting aside the tech jihad for a moment, I'm curious:
> It would be 100% in line with the company’s ethos to embrace unions
What gives you that impression? I admit I'm a hater of all big tech, but I think an objective view of Apple shows that they're a brutally self-interested megacorp. Even if you believe all their marketing about how they are consumer focused, that wouldn't logically extend to them treating their employees well. It's not in their interests to do so (at least in this case), and Apple is basically immune to bad press so it's not like it'd affect their image.
IMO Apple is ahead of the industry in supply chain ethics. They investigate their supply chain and produce reports[1] that are PR, sure, but also pretty transparent. Apple hired independent companies to interview employees of suppliers and a pretty decent scale. It's really worth reading the report, even if it's likely to confirm biases. I'm not aware of similar efforts from other consumer electronics manufacturers. Things like:
> Each year, the independent, third-party auditing firms we work with to conduct supplier assessments interview tens of thousands of supplier employees in their local languages — and without their managers or cameras present — to determine whether their experiences on the job align with our observations during assessments. Interview participation is completely voluntary, and we keep responses confidential. In 2023, we interviewed over 65,000 people as part of supplier assessments.
You can wave it away as all a big PR campaign, and I'm mostly onboard with the myth of altruism point of view, but I'm not saying that Apple "should" support unions out of altruism, but rather because it aligns with their other activities, regardless of whether those are altruistic or cynical psyops or whatever.
1. https://www.supplychainreports.apple/files/doc_downloads/202...
I have a similar problem with M$, businesses use Teams, so I pay for it.
These companies are beyond our abilities to 'not use them'. Although Apple is one of the few companies I don't seem to have almost any products. There always was a better alternative when I needed it.
The fact that corporations and billionaires are so anti-union and engage in regular conduct like this demonstrates that unions are pro-worker and ideal for the balance needed in the US and across the globe.
Balance is key between workers and owners. Without it we are left with growing wealth inequality such as…
- ridiculous housing prices
- stagnant wages
- poor public school education
- no retirement benefits
- expensive public universities
You underestimate the appeal of libertarian propaganda to software engineers. It's got the oversimple but neat models we can't resist, plus our relatively advantaged economic position allows allows us to easily confuse ourselves for capitalists.
I’m not against unions per se, particularly for positions which are not as lavishly compensated as a typical white collar FAANG employee. I’m merely pointing out that you need to pick better examples. Otherwise you just undermine your own argument.
They are quite common in the UK.
Only if allowed to do so - but yes, landlord are leeches who do nothing and in return soak up every penny of income they can from their tenants.
However, isn't the typical market-capitalist argument to this, "if they could be making more money now, they would?" Don't "markets" set the price of real estate?
Markets don't, but it's really funny to me when people argue against good things, such as increasing minimum wage, with absurdities, like somehow a minimum wage increase is simply a subsidy for landlords.
Employees have more money thanks to unions -> those deriving income from capital have less money -> narrower distribution of wealth -> goods (including housing) which both classes pursue are more affordable to the working class. QED.
Now, save recently, the cost to rent money for real estate was in steady decline. That means even a constant income could afford to rent an increasing amount of money. As a result, the price of housing was able to rise disproportionally to income, but proportionally to rent.
You have that completely backward. Virtually all bad teachers start out hopeful and excited to teach kids, that's why they become teachers in the first place. They are then worn and beaten down by bad schools. Bad schools are mostly caused by bad students, who are disrespectful, disruptive, get into fights, etc. Bad students are mostly caused by bad parenting. If they aren't raised to respect adults, education, authority and their peers, then there is little that teachers can do about it. The reason "bad schools" have trouble keeping enough teachers despite high levels of state and federal funding is because the students burn through the teachers quickly. The teachers who hang on for a long time at those schools are often ones that develop coping strategies like not giving a shit, finding pleasure in yelling at kids, etc.
In Switzerland, all the large unions (railroad workers, public service workers, ect.) have so much money and so much access to cheap credit, they can (and frequently did in the past) start housing co-ops for their members.
This results in large developments in the middle of the most expensive cities, where only union members have a chance to rent. And even those have year-long waiting list on every new development.
Since the housing co-op is non-profit and pays rock bottom interest rates on its loans, rent is frequently around half the fair market rate.
That war chest, in combination with it being unthinkable that a big union goes bankrupt, and the fact that they are building real estate, pretty much means they can borrow more money dirt cheap.
Otherwise, those apartments are completely normal and indistinguishable from any other development in a central urban neighbourhood.
And yes, union jobs pay decent salary in Europe. Probably one of the easiest/safest ways to a middle class life, especially without going to college.
It's impossible to fire bad teachers (it really isn't, btw, at least not in Texas) because there are no teachers because teachers wages are pathologically low because every education department in the country is underfunded.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
Everyone else brings down the average, and it has nothing to do with teachers or how good they are.
Teachers in my county are assigned to schools randomly, and yet some schools score 9/10 and others score literally 1/10 and 2/10 on great schools for academic performance. Funding between schools is the same. Teachers assigned are from the same pool.
It’s not the money. It’s not the teachers.
Anyone who talks about “education in the USA” without addressing the giant disparity in academic performance that begins in kindergarten for black and Hispanic students is ignoring the single largest factor on student outcomes.
It would be nice if socioeconomic factors were the whole answer here. But that does not appear to be the case. Even Hispanic and Black students adopted by White families do not score much higher than peers of their ethnic group. This is a dark rabbit hole that you may not want to go down.
*Legal immigrants are self selected for higher ability.
Are you referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Transracial_Adoption... ? Are there other studies I'm not aware of? Because that study doesn't really conclusively demonstrate the point we're discussing in this thread re: race correlating with intelligence because of genetic factors of a race itself. In fact many interpretations of the study point to socio-economic factors as the root cause of different test results (e.g. it's hard being a different race than your parents, or suddenly finding yourself growing up in wildly different socioeconomic conditions than the ones you were born and raised into ). Also worth pointing out that black children adopted into white families had higher test scores than the mean for white children nationwide.
Yes there are other studies. Critically analyzed they all point in the same direction, including this one.
In Sweden it's around 41550 SEK per month, which implies 498 000 SEK per year, which including the tax would be 647 400 SEK per year, i.e. 59 000 USD.
But Sweden has a per capita GDP of 56000 USD whereas the per capita GDP of New York State is 104343. It's not going to be incredibly competitive.
So tax is in. I need to compare the same kinds of things. The American numbers are also pre-tax.
Here in Sweden though, the fully pre-tax numbers are rarely reported. Rather, what is reported is the wage minus a 1-1/1.3 tax, so I have to reverse that tax by multiplying by 1.3.
1. Above average talent in any subject field do not join the talent pool for teachers in the USA. Industry pays better and has better working conditions (both real and perceived). This is going to be a major cultural hurdle but the USA needs to break away from the idea that teaching is lesser work. This will create more political will to boost teacher funding.
2. Free Market Economics. You heard me. Teachers in the USA have the unique "opportunity" of having to find and interview for positions. Two problems: First, you end up with talent pooling unevenly. Next, you have teachers stagnating at one school for decades. Solution: central deployment. Teachers are hired by districts, and then the district rotates teachers through all schools in the district over the course of their career. Seniority grants some preference ranking, and longer rotation periods.
This also counters a third problem: Teachers finding themselves out of a job, or facing job prospects so dire that they just leave the field altogether. There is a level of security, and those who wish to proceed to administration are given opportunities towards the ends of their careers.
3. Administration as a separate career track. Administrative bloat is becoming a real problem, and both the higher pay associated + the opportunity to laterally move into the track via "further education" is a root cause. This makes them a separate class with competing interests, and incentives will only lead to more bloat as well as siphon away talented teachers who get burned out by teaching (mostly due to the abysmal pay). My time in Japan gave me perspective on a perhaps better way:
a) School based administration (principals and vice principals) is a role only obtainable at the end of your career, on a fixed timeline. If you decided to put yourself on that track, you will most likely be in the last 6 years of your career, and your last 3 years as principal will end in retirement. This both prevents admin bloat and class distinction, while allowing skilled, senior teachers to provide guidance and pass along wisdom.\
b) School District administration -- that is all the bureaucratic management of schools -- is a completely separate career track of professional, general bureaucrats who are assigned to school administration as part of a career rotation inside their career at government.
And thus begins a virtuous, positive feedback loop of good teachers rotating around a school district reinforcing good teaching, and then ultimately being rewarded by becoming the ultimate teacher. At the same time, administrative entrenchment is avoided because administration is an assigned, rotating task.
The funny thing is that public employment (in the US) is where unions have the least impact on firing difficulty, because employees have a property interest in their employment which means government — even as their employer — cannot deprive them of it without due process under the 5th (for the federal) or 14th (for states and subdivisions) amendments even if they are not unionized.
Also, the line you push about teachers is pushed by privatizers (and sometimes administrators as an excuse for their own failures), often supported by one or two anecdotes, so often as to have become an article of faith ib sone circles, but there is no systematic evidence for it.
I was in a union, Teamsters in fact. It protected crappy workers, prevented any change to work processes that might save time and put a low ceiling on high performing workers.
Not all unions are like that, but they certainly aren’t panaceas to all workers ills (in fact, sometimes they are the cause of new ones).
I never experienced anything like the about “rubber rooms” in NYC (they may exist in NYC, IDK - but the suggestion that they are “business as usual” in school districts across the country is a fantastical lie). If admin wanted a teacher gone, they simply put them on the education version of a PIP, collected evidence of poor performance, and let that person go at a non-disruptive time.
The corporations should live in fear of the government, not an independent union.
Also my father was a union member for many years but was ousted after suggesting that full time management were wasting members' money on expenses. This turned into a 2 year long shit show where he was pretty much forced out of the job he had for being a non union scab. As much as being told he was a lesser human.
I think that membership funded union would be much likely to protect worker rights than tax funded government.
And in some countries that power havent completely faded away.
They often demonstrate ideals that go counter to their own interests while simping for daddy ceo’s boot and money.
"Simp". Dude, this isn't Twitter. Grow up or leave.
I think there are a lot of things that demonstrate that unions are pro-worker and ideal for the balance needed in the US and across the globe, but that isn't one of them.
Corporations & billionaires are so anti-union because they perceive unions as reducing their profits, which is not necessarily the same thing as them being pro-worker or ideal.
You'll find that, outside of the defense industry, corporations & billionaires generally don't like wars, for exactly the same reason; that doesn't really suggest anything good about wars.
No, that's incorrect. The corporations could also be anti-nuclear war, this would not make it good for workers.
A better example is to look at countries with functional unions and functional capitalism, like the Netherlands, Denmark and others.
The quality of life won by union conflicts with capital owners is a measurable fact.
Unions can be implemented and be useless for the workers (an example for the most part is Greece), or maybe too demanding like France. It's up to the participants of the union to shape it as a net contributor to society. The point is that each individual member has a significant say in how a union operates, meanwhile in corporations, even middle management can be completely powerless.
Unions make corporations extremely sluggish when they need to react quickly to sudden market shocks or changes of direction of companies, be it positive or negative (yes, includes firing people for which there is suddenly no work anymore). There are corporations that have them heavily and they are not the top of the cream when it comes to progress, agility nor salary pay.
The money is the key issue here - people want extra safety/bargaining net as long as their ultra massive FAANG-like salaries are not touched. How many would agree with say 20% cut while working exactly the same, but being unionized? That's maybe how much that additional burden is to the owners/managers. I suspect not that many but maybe I an wrong.
In the UK it’s been the EU, which we left so they moved on to immigrants. That was too hard to fix so they’ve recently decided to pick on the sick.
I had the displeasure of working with union labor in the US, they would come in at 7 (who does that) and leave at 4 on the dot. Then worked with non-union labor: cheaper, worked as much as possible per day, got the job done faster. Money-wise it was less than union labor.
Now tell me how is good for me, as a company that needs stuff done, to use union workers?
For the company, it's very good, because unionization, or better yet, being a co-op, means your company will be more likely to be profitable in the long term.
But you are correct that in these situations, your employees are more difficult to exploit for longer hours, harsher conditions, and worse pay. So yes, if you're trying to be a major shareholder-owner, unions may hurt your individual bottom line, even if they benefit the corporation as a whole.
Because in a race to the bottom, even the winner ends up in shit. The reason America is turning to crap now is because everyone is just out for themselves, and that's mostly folks like you who just want to get stuff done cheaply. Unions may not be the answer for your company, but please at least treat your workers like they matter, and pay them better than you think you should, because they are your company, they are America, and the rampant evisceration of the middle/working/blue collar class by the greedy corpos will destroy us all before anything else.
I truly don't understand how businesspeople cannot understand that humans are your most important resource. You run roughshod over them for a bit more profit. It's perplexing!
- I hired a company to do some construction work and in that particular location, due to how the contracts were set, I could only get union work. Expensive and no over time.
- In another location which did not had this kind of restriction, I hired another company that was not unionized: they worked longer hours and as a result finished faster. Also their hourly rates were lower.
Point being, in a non-union market you can do a lot more faster.
And to get to the financial issue, all hours were paid, so just in case it is not clear, there was never a question of not wanting to pay overtime. The question was why I should pay ~20-25% more for the same work?
In any case, your few experiences could be caused by a lot of stuff, perhaps not even the union! I don't know, without more research. Your particular story is from your perspective only, and doesn't even delve into any other reasons this could have happened, like local noise ordnances or something.
This is my point: you don't care about the human cost of your entrepreneurial enterprises, and that is in my opinion the reason that America seems to be infighting and "going downhill" as they say. Greed, an uncaring attitude about others, and narcissistic "me me me" behavior is the problem, not a few workers trying to get a bigger cut. Unions aren't the enemy, those who would attempt to take advantage of workers are. America is only strong if we're all strong, not just a few tenths of a percent at the top.
I am not replying any more to this thread, all I have to say was said here.
And it is not my problem with how much someone if paid, really. I put out a request for work, companies bid, the cheapest one overall wins. That's how the free market works.
And sure, believe whatever you want, but getting the best deal possible is not going to be the end of the US :)
The only reason unions exist is so they can extort business owners into paying more than the market is willing to pay for that unit of work. And the fact that as a business owner you can't easily fire a unionized employee is the worst thing possible.
You can downvote me to oblivion, but unions are cancer and they need to be abolished.
The only reason to be offended by it specifically when people do it collectively rather than individually is because in the former case they actually have enough bargaining power vs their employer to get a better price for their labor. That is, because the market is "too free" to produce the desired (low) price of labor.
You know, if companies agree to never sell something under a certain price point it is called a cartel and it is illegal. But when workers do the same thing it's legal. Where's the fairness in that?
Of course, in the ideal world, all companies would be worker-owned co-ops, and then unions would be unnecessary.
To answer your question human beings who want work life balance and want to do things with friends and family in the afternoon. Or do you believe that a work day should ONLY be for work?
Workers unions were created by and for factory workers, miners, etc. People who had zero leverage individually.
In addition, we might be a more individualistic and competive crowd who think they are better than average and thus better off bargaining for themselves.
This is interesting to say considering the record amounts of layoffs we've had across the tech sector of these "high leverage individuals" in the thousands the last few quarters.
In a historical perspective I really mean being squeezed to the limit with no possibility of complaining or of "just moving somewhere else".
The American implementation of unions, on the other hand, is not great. While in the US, I've run into rules like not being allowed to plug something in because only union electricians are allowed to do that, and that's just one example among many. Police unions and teacher's unions are mostly known for making bad employees unfirable outside of egregious circumstances, and teacher's unions in particular don't seem to have improved pay or working conditions much.
I have no idea where the difference comes from, but for people who have only seen and interacted with the American system, I don't blame them for not liking unions
I.e. sympathy strikes are illegal in the US, so the only real power left to unions is jealously guarding the petty pearls available to them.
The difference in pay between unionized and nonunionized teachers is big enough that I wonder where you got such an idea.
I obviously don't know anything about the particular union you're talking about. But rules like this are often written to close a loophole. For example, the union negotiates higher wages for their electricians. After the deal is signed, the company hires more office secretaries, reassigns to them most tasks that used to be done by electricians, and fires a bunch of electricians because there's "not enough work."
HN is full of the aspirational haut bourgeois, of course they want the proletariat maximally exploitable.
They come up with rationale because its part of their identity.
Consider how Tesla looks like Elon Musk and has a bad reputation. We need to defend Apple or Apple will start to look cheap like Elon Musk.
(That or its astroturfing, which we aren't allowed to talk about here, but isnt exactly unheard of in unionbusting, time to get deleted for talking about astrotrufing and history)
The only time a union definitely makes sense to an existing workforce is if they can suppress labor supply by implementing onerous barriers to entry into the profession, like lawyers, doctors and pilots have.
They can be a force of good for enforcing labor laws. But law enforcement is certainly not a job that should be left to private organisations, that really should be the role of the government. But even then, if you’re earning an SV salary, you absolutely don’t need a union’s help to settle your civil disputes.
If you're talented and skilled then collective bargaining hurts your position because now every low rung and non-productive is along for the ride with your bargaining.
> Balance is key between workers and owners. Without it we are left with growing wealth inequality such as…
Inequality is inevitable and its only going to get a lot lot worse, in 20 years time you'll dream for house prices as they are today. The only way out is in your own hands and collective bargaining will just mean existing in a slightly better low with the people a fraction of your skills and drive, any small union win will be inflated to nothing in single digit years but if you bargain on your own there is no real limit if you can back up what you're asking for.
> - ridiculous housing prices
> - stagnant wages
> - poor public school education
> - no retirement benefits
> - expensive public universities
Outside of "no retirement benefits," none of these have anything to do with unions, and HN-goers probably would prefer self-funded retire anyways so they can FIRE. Notably, ridiculous housing prices are mostly the result of grassroots NIMBYs, and capital tends to be on the side of build whatever you want. However, when they're operating in a NIMBY environment, they adapt and buy up the existing supply.
If you live in a country where corporations are subject to the rule of law, sure.
Should the executive branch agency make decisions by fiat, without due process? The use of due process doesn't make them a judiciary; it's just a more fair way to make decisions within their purview.
Should we move every such judgment out of the executive branch's hands? First, they have to be able to make some decisions.
But the heart of this issue is, as is well known: There aren't nearly enough capacity in the judicial branch to handle all that work. It's a trick to prevent lawful and needed regulation from happening by severely cutting their capacity.
Unnecessarily hostile opening, but full separation of powers as written in the Constitution.
> Should the executive branch agency make decisions by fiat, without due process?
It should not be adjudicating any kind of legal controversy. That is not the role of the executive branch.
> The use of due process doesn't make them a judiciary; it's just a more fair way to make decisions within their purview.
It's very often worse. Executive agencies often have legislative functions, i.e. APA rulemaking, as well judicial functions, e.g. in this matter. The SEC is another one, (see SEC vs Jarkesy currently before SCOTUS).
> Should we move every such judgment out of the executive branch's hands?
Yes.
> But the heart of this issue is, as is well known: There aren't nearly enough capacity in the judicial branch to handle all that work. It's a trick to prevent lawful and needed regulation from happening by severely cutting their capacity.
Total BS.
What's your alternative? That they should just sue every company every year so that a judge can decide if that company is doing illegal union busting activities?
Instead, congress has designated some rule making authority to a group of experts, this group of experts is an executive body doing executive work, so it's normally under the executive branch. This body makes rules that have to follow any laws set down by congress, which is one check, and the courts can settle disputes between someone who has to follow the rules and the rule making body, or congress and the rule making body, etc. which is another check. The rule making body makes the initial determination on whether it's rules have been followed not because they're taking on some function of the judicial, but because they're the experts who know what their own rules mean. If they get it wrong, willfully abuse that power, etc. the judicial is still there. It's separation of powers all the way down. If you removed them from the executive and put them in the judicial you'd be giving some judge rule making authority and the ability to interpret those rules later. The whole point is to separate that between two branches of government.
Which they aren't doing. They're deciding whether to take Apple to court. If you don't think the executive branch should do that, do you believe the AG's office & the FBI should operate under the judicial branch?
> It's very often worse. Executive agencies often have legislative functions, i.e. APA rulemaking, as well judicial functions, e.g. in this matter. The SEC is another one, (see SEC vs Jarkesy currently before SCOTUS).
Not all rules are laws. Not all judgements are legal judgments. The executive branch is absolutely responsible for making principled decisions, which means rules & judgement. The irony of citing a case where the SEC is before SCOTUS as an example of there not being a separation of powers is... amusing.
Then appoint more Article 3 judges. It could even be the same people who are now "administrative judges"—but take them out of the executive branch hierarchy, and give them the independence that the constitution requires judges to have.