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Comment by miltonlost | Hacker News Reader

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it's not anti union propaganda. The largest union in the United States is the public school teachers union. It has explicitly fought against merit based pay for decades. Other Unions like the electricians unions also sets up seniority base systems. You can proclaim that it's propaganda all you want, but what matters is whether or not it's actually true.

I agree that the union has no incentive to look after the benefits of the company, but that's exactly why unions are typically harmful to businesses.

you see "merit based pay", I see corporations incentivizing shitty boundaries

if you adjust for hours worked, unionized employees will make more

If one worker is willing to respond to alerts at 3 AM and another only works 9-5, then those two workers are providing different levels of value to the company assuming equal ability. Why shouldn't the worker that contributes more get rewarded?

This is why unionized workplaces are

> if you adjust for hours worked, unionized employees will make more

This is in large part because unions artificially restrict the workforce. A union job at the docks is great... if you can actually get a job. Plenty of unions practice institutionalized nepotism, with friends and family given priority in hiring. Take the LA port union for example:

https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/06/02/longshoreman-lottery-...

> This time around, about 80,000 put their names in for the drawing, and 25,000 were picked out and placed in sequential order. The first 2,300 on the list will be eligible for a part-time dockworker position that can lead to full-time employment, PMA officials have previously said.

> Negotiated between the ILWU and PMA, the controversial lottery process has been criticized over the years for being a two-tiered system that favors ILWU friends and family.

> Anyone can put their name in the drawing by sending in a postcard, but ILWU members get a specially marked postcard for their friends and family.

>The two are placed in separate barrels and drawn randomly from alternating piles. The two groups hired an outside party, Moorpark-based InterOptimis, to conduct the drawing behind closed doors, stoking distrust from those outside the process.

Institutionalized nepotism to restrict lucrative jobs to friend and family. That's what happens when unions control well paying jobs.

Union jobs that actually are accessible are things like public school teachers, electricians, plumbers. They pay okay, but nothing compared to to $150,000 median wage of a longshoremen.

> Why shouldn't the worker that contributes more get rewarded?

Expecting work at 3AM is inhumane. Incorporating it into the incentive structure enables a race to the bottom that jeopardizes sleep schedule which has numerous health consequences

Also let's consider a bunch of these workers are on a visa and can get deported at the whim of their employer

> Plenty of unions practice institutionalized nepotism, with friends and family given priority in hiring

I mean, are you saying that the corporations they're negotiating against don't do this also? It's a problem anywhere where there's money

Dismissing any form of dissent as purely the result of propaganda is not a good way to bring people to your side.

> In what world should a UNION of the workers care about the COMPANY? Maybe if the workers in the union partly owned the company.

For one, a meaningful amount of tech worker compensation comes in the form of company stock. For another, I would argue that anyone who wants to stay in their job long term should care about the company and it's long term health.

I'm not dismissing ANY form of dissent. I'm dismissing the "unions mostly cater to the mediocre employees" as propaganda which ignores the universal benefits a union gives to all employees, mediocre and superstar alike. Benefits that would either not be guaranteed without a negotiated contract or would be hard to have conceded on an individual basis.

> In what world should a UNION of the workers care about the COMPANY?

Some unions are more powerful than companies (think UAW). They're able to negotiate terms that are bad for the long-term health of the company, and not having backgrounds in running companies, union leaders might not be thinking about that.

All companies are more powerful than individual workers (think anywhere without a union). They're able to negotiate terms that are bad for the long-term health of the human workers, and not having backgrounds in caring about people and only money, CEOs might not be thinking about that.

Unions look out for workers. That's their priority. They should not cater to the business.

Unions look out for themselves once they get big enough, like any bureaucracy.

My point is that unions should (but don't always) think about long-term business health because if the business loses market share or fails, it's bad for workers. If negotiating power is balanced, this might not matter, but if the union has more power, it can negotiate terms the company can't afford.

My point is business should (but never do) think about their employees as humans and not just numbers on a spreadsheet.

So, rather than try to balance the individual worker against the company with a union on the off-chance the union becomes more "powerful" than the business, you'd keep the business (i.e., billionaires and capital) more powerful than the workers.

You: Unions? bad for workers. No union? also bad for workers. Whelp, can't do anything like other countries have done with stronger labor laws

This comes down to your valuing a "successful" business over humans, where "successful" means American exploitation of profits to owners, whereas some of those profits should go to the workers.

> My point is business should (but never do) think about their employees as humans and not just numbers on a spreadsheet

This has not been my experience. The businesses I've worked at have had great benefits and amenities for their employees. The one time I was laid off, they vested everyone's stock who hasn't yet got their cliff, gave us 3 months worth of pay, and paid for a year of healthcare.

I don't doubt your lived experiences with bad workplaces if that's been the case, but know they are not universal. Especially in fields where demand for employees is high, companies do need to care about their employees if they want to keep them.

I'm glad you had a good company do the right thing on their own. I would like to have those same enforcements universal so everyone can be as lucky as you were. This is what a society does.

> All companies are more powerful than individual workers

Nonsense. Maybe once a business reaches a certain level of power that becomes true, but as a small business owner, the individual workers who work for me have way more power than I do.

> Unions look out for workers. That's their priority. They should not cater to the business.

A worker union is just a collective of workers who have agreed to associate. It would be unusual for workers to look out for anything other than themselves (humans are selfish), but theoretically nothing says they can't cater to the business instead. It depends on what they want.

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