Hacker News Reader

Comment by argomo | Hacker News Reader

It's extremely easy to perform union with without realizing it. I was working a software deployment at a plant site where we had uncomfortable chairs, so we brought in chairs from the conference room next door. That turned out to be a union job, so we had to return the chairs and suffer until some union folks could do the same thing.

And I've heard similar stories from other people, including one where union employees intentionally placed debris to obstruct a non-union worker with a cart; they lay in wait until she came along and picked up the barrier, then got her written up for it.

While I support unions generally, I'm convinced that sour experiences of this variety have worked against them politically.

View on HN

A friend’s company ended up changing their entire business because of this problem. They were providing services as a contractor but kept running into problems with their client’s union workers, who felt like no one should be able to do certain things that seemed very trivial and not specialized (like tightening a bolt or whatever). This work was officially approved but the union workers responded to it in hostile ways - like taking a long time to do their part of the jobs or doing other odd things like making people wait for hours on the floor before anyone showed up.

The company gave up and decided to just sell their product without any services - like having the customer do all the work themselves. It was very inefficient because they had to train their customer’s workers and put together huge amounts of documentation and there were a lot of issues making it work. But the company was able to charge for all of that and basically ended up having the same profit margin anyways. In the end the only person paying the cost was the customer, since they had to deal with work getting done more slowly due to the overhead of training people and a lot of (billed) back-and-forth communication.

I worked at a software company for shipping terminals. One release, we changed the color of a snowflake icon for better colorblind accessibility. The union said it was brand new software and the terminal had to do an emergency shutdown for a week to retrain.

On the same software who's only difference was that it had a different icon color.

Rippling moved into an old Spotify office in NYC and they were required to use union labor to remove the old signage. They decided to leave the signage up rather than pay the union tax.

When they give lavish amounts of money to executives or VCs do you also call that a tax?

Nope. I was using tax in the sense of "mandatory cost enforced by the government" even though in this case the revenue goes to private entities.

Is there any cost not enforced by the government?

What stops me from killing and eating my local venture capitalists for their protein content?

For you in particular, likely some moral precepts? or are you arguing that the deterrent effect of government punishment is the only thing stopping you? I don't really understand the line of argument.

When we give money to private citizens it's not a tax. When we give money to the government, it often is.

So paying a union person isn't a tax, any more than paying anyone else. Everything is government mandated or regulated. Is paying interest to Chase Bank a tax? They're federally chartered, and I can't set up my own bank, I'm forced to use a regulated entity.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com