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Comment by mytailorisrich | Hacker News Reader

The purpose of unions is to extract as much as possible from the employer on the behalf of its members, or at least to extract more than the employer would otherwise have given.

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.

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> if an happier, more productive employee benefits the company then the market will sort it out by itself

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 don't think this argument in particular stands well against reality

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.

There's also a question of short-term vs long-term benefits to be considered.

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.

> The purpose of unions is to extract as much as possible from the employer on the behalf of its members [...]

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.

>If the company increases profits by 10%, that's 10% more that could potentially go to employee benefits, salaries, etc.

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.

I don't understand your interpretation of what I wrote... I did not write nor imply that unions are there to squeeze companies until they fold.

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.

> The purpose of unions is to extract as much as possible from the employer on the behalf of its members, or at least to extract more than the employer would otherwise have given.

> 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.

You're saying "the market" like it's some magic word that makes everything fair. The market for employment is not fair. Companies hold most of the power in America today, for most jobs. Highly paid white collar workers may hold a slight edge, sometimes, but it's not common. One of the ways that workers can balance the power that a company has over them, is to unionize so that as a group all of the workers can affect the company's decisions. This is good for the market, because it equalizes power and allows for the synthesis of good efficiency through fair price discovery for labor and good worker conditions through the equality of power that they hold in a union.

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.

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