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Comment by LMYahooTFY | Hacker News Reader

Having been a member of the Teamsters union, I completely agree.

It seems likely the vast majority of HN has never been a member of a union themselves given the audience, so the obsession feels like a savior complex IMO.

Yeah, unions accomplished a lot of good things many decades ago. But if you think they haven't morphed over those decades and are still automatically a net positive for all workers, I could probably sell you a bridge.

For my experience at Teamsters, there was zero incentive for employees to actually perform. Everything was done by senority across the board, and you're literally just aging and waiting your turn.

The insurance was good, the wages were average, and the incentive to do better was non-existent. And yes, firing people unless they did something egregious was much, much harder.

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I just don't buy the narrative that if you don't threaten employee's and "whip them into shape" that then there's no incentive to do good. I refuse to believe that not firing people is, somehow, causing them to coast.

Pretty much everyone I know who works hard does so in spite of their circumstances. Not because of them.

Of the engineers I've worked with, the cooks I've worked with, the waiters I've worked with... the hard working ones don't win. They get taken advantage of and run into the ground. They perform, and perform more, and more, and that exclusively works against them.

And, as you go up the ladder, you can very clearly see the hard work and competence thin out more and more. The people who are successful aren't smart, or hard working, they're just good at maintaining a status quo.

These are not unionized places. So, maybe it's a capitalism thing.

> I just don't buy the narrative that if you don't threaten employee's and "whip them into shape" that then there's no incentive to do good. I refuse to believe that not firing people is, somehow, causing them to coast.

It's exactly what I saw, so take that for what you will. Similarly, I've also worked with white collar engineers in corporate environments, and have experienced the opposite as you go up the ladder. These are generalizations, but I am arguing that certain principles of how unions function in blue collar labor jobs have predictable results.

I think "threatening employees" is a beyond cynical way of describing low performance consequences.

If you can't understand how someone being virtually un-fireable due to performance results in coasting I'm really not sure how to discuss this.

I don't want to presume too much here, but if your reference point is only working with white collar engineers, it's hard to explain how different working in a unionized blue collar environment can be.

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