It looks to be a purely dogmatic ego trip where somehow blind loyalty is demanded even when it's not actually necessary.
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.
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/re...
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...
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.
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.
Like from this article..."The board cannot impose fines or direct punishments against Apple for its violations".
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".
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.