Hacker News Reader

Comment by cjk2 | Hacker News Reader

I'm anti-union AND pro labour regulation. Your government should be targeting wealth inequality with legislation and public services on all of these issues. The union tends to become another opaque organisation with a power hierarchy of its own and layers of internal politics and power struggles. The unions rarely if ever push for legislation change either because it would risk their existence.

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.

View on HN

"The corporations should live in fear of the government, not an independent union."

I think that membership funded union would be much likely to protect worker rights than tax funded government.

But the union has little to no legislative power, only relying on lobbying and private legal cases, at which point you end up competing with non-union entities who have a lot more money.

A general strike has a lot of power. Which is why they are banned in many countries.

It's not not always been the case that the unions were the weaker non-state actor, in fact they used to rival political parties and business cartels in their ablity to lobby/negotiate.

And in some countries that power havent completely faded away.

The interests of the people working inside a union might align with the interests of the workers they represent but as in any other organization they are focused on their own job and careers. The people at the bottom are probably more idealistic. When I hear about strikes in my country and their purpoted goals and the way they are made, most of the time I feel like their goal is to advance the careers of somebody in the union and not to get something for the workers. Furthermore most unions have clear links with some political parties, from left to right. They are part of the overall political play to the next elections.

Even the interests of the older members of the union diverge from the younger members (not unlike a country). Pretty much every defined benefit pension plan has “tiers” of benefits, where the older members voted themselves higher benefits in exchange for younger members getting less.

You're scared of monolithic unions, so give all power to government? Unless workers own the company, unions are needed to give voice to power.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com