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Comment by kryogen1c | Hacker News Reader

>> people are bad at their jobs so I fire them

> need for unions

What in the world? This is the exact opposite use case for unions.

Unions help protect workers from single, dominant/ monopolistic employers where workers have no other options and can get taken advantage of. The construction industry is nearly the polar opposite, where there is almost no barrier for entry and the employment space is very competitive, including the ability to start your own business.

Construction unions would be an absolute nightmare.

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Construction unions do great across European countries.

Any company that can take advantage of workers will do it, no need for "dominant/ monopolistic".

There is a reason why security measures that put the workers life at risk are almost nonexistent on countries where unions hardly have a presence.

No helmets, no eye protection, no masks when dealing with chemicals, bending metal bars with bare hands, no protection shoes, hopping into a ladder alone,....

Some examples of what I have seen in practice.

>Construction unions do great across European countries.

Do not know about your country - but over here the construction sites are full of people who couldn't even write the word union (mostly Asian countries like Philippines, Nepal, etc.)

Germany, and yes if I go to southern countries, Portugal my home country, alongside the other ones, there is a certain flexibility between the law, unions, and what actually happens at the construction site, unless someone does a complaint to the respective goverment authority responsible for checking worker conditions.

I can also add that Scadinavian countries, and UK tend to be similar to Germany.

Naturally all of them have black sheeps that ignore good work conditions if they can manage to, that is why work inspections are also a thing.

I mean what happens is skilled workers from poorer countries (Croatia in my case) move to richer EU countries, then we have nobody to perform construction - and now we have issued work Visas for 5% of the population basically. And you see newspaper stories of these people basically being treated like slave labor (crammed in small apartments, completely dependent on the visa provider, often abused). Just a few days ago there was another story about an immigrant worker being raped by her employer - also an immigrant that was just done serving his previous rape sentence. And plenty of stories of these people not being paid for months, documents being held, etc.

The unions have no standing because theres nobody left to be a part of the union - most people already left for Germany/Switzerland/etc. So Germany is just riding on the EU migration for now - but considering population dynamics - that's a short wave.

I wish NYC could suck out cheaper construction labour from the likes of Missisippi, maybe Second Avenue Subway could actually be built on time and on budget in that case. Right now, expensive local labour has the city by the balls

> Any company that can take advantage of workers will do it, no need for "dominant/ monopolistic".

What a nonsense thing to say. This is not an opinion most people, and certainly not most economists, would agree with. It's a foundational pillar of regulated free markets.

Moreover in this instance, construction companies are not some sprawling international megacorps, they're locally oowned and operated.

A pillar of free-market models, sure. But economics is built on a stack of spherical-cow assumptions that don’t really hold up in the real world.

Of course an employee theoretically has total freedom to leave an abusive employer and go somewhere else. But do they have time to search for jobs while working full-time? What if their employer makes them work mandatory overtime? If they don’t have time to search while working, can they afford to be unemployed for a few months? What if their employer threatens them or discourages other employers in the area from hiring them?

It would be great if competition made unions unnecessary, but it doesn’t.

> Construction unions would be an absolute nightmare.

They seem to work fine.

https://nabtu.org/

https://www.liuna.org/

https://www.carpenters.org/

https://ibew.org/

> What in the world? This is the exact opposite use case for unions.

Trade unions tend to have a large focus on training and skill building. Yes they make firing people harder but the flip side of unions can be increasing the average quality such that firing due to quality or skill is less often necessary.

If I have need 10 people and I have a choice between two looks. Pool A is harder to fire and costs more but has a 95% competence rate. Pool B is easy to fire and costs less but has a 70% competence rate.

Setting any contractual rules aside I’m going g to find myself firing from pool B more often, and it is easy to attribute all of that to the rules that make A harder to fire. They are easier to fire (component of variance), they are more likely to be bad (component 2), and because they are easier to fire in going to be more likely to fire than coach for quality (component 3).

as a home owner, i don't want any barrier to demanding someone never step foot in my house again.

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