Declining unions could be making working-class Americans less happy | Hacker News Reader

Declining unions could be making working-class Americans less happy

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10 pointsPaulHoule12 comments

I feel like American unions really don't help themselves much.

The way American unions operate they seem fit for less skilled jobs or very tracked jobs where there's a cookie cutter path for advancement and so on.

But beyond that American unions seem inflexible / a bad fit for quickly changing careers / dynamic jobs, and with my own experience, their own sort of bureaucratic hell.

Unions are their members, so it's up to the group to make it better. But things like guides(actors/writers/...) are unions too

That's not my experience at all.

The unions seem beholden to the folks running the union and a few influential members. If you tell them "hey having people poor to start their career seems like a bad idea" you will get squat.

And honestly the folks operating the union seem like people who shouldn't be in management, of anything ... it's one of the weird crippling aspects of US unions IMO.

Teachers union in the us is a great example, that's a bad job man ... union negotiations don't seem to make it better.

Yes, here in Ontario, Canada, the salary rate is quite low, but over time ramps to $60-80K. This tends to limit new enrollments at the low end via Teacher Colleges, but is so large at the top end that budgets are starved. As a kid in HS in the 50's the scale was a lot flatter. This has led to a lower presence of teacher staff in halls and stairwells (where we had a teacher in every hall segment and stairwell). Now the halls/stairwells are under supervised and this has tended towards many teacher free areas where it becomes 'Lord of the Flies' territory. I can see a growing role for AI in subject supervision on an individual basis to follow detailed student progress with explanatory input/repetition, as needed, perhaps with a dual screen setup where the teacher is able to monitor and have input above and beyond what the AI is capable of. My reason for this POV is teachers are spread thin and often are not aware of the people who might be lagging(and who often lose heart = drop out). I expect this idea has already begun to grow, and I hope AI pushback does not limit this concept.

The teachers in Ontario make more than that now, but the whole class size thing and closing neighbourhood schools/locking gates on schools outside hours is just bad for kids and neighbourhoods. Yet people elect those that underfund all the public services that most people use.

The members vote for that. 10:1 there are a lot of old members who didn't want to give up what they had and didn't think 2 steps ahead when they're the minority and lose their pension because they screwed over the younger workers.

I think the biggest issue with unions is they are not thinking of the big picture. Stuff like a government violates the unions rights and no one bats an eye(there was no general strike when Regan violated the air traffic controller rights) and that lets the unions be divided and conquered.

Ultimately, people are voting and choosing this.

The members vote in the same way I vote for the next president. I don't pick my choices, I just get two choices.

And "not a union" is not a choice.

In order to bring understanding to this discussion, we can separate unions into two types: vertical unions and horizontal unions.

Vertical unions are hierarchal. They have administrative staff that are not necessarily workers and they reproduce the characteristics of our electoral system in a smaller scale. This includes corrupt elected officials who have back deals with companies, etc.

The horizontal unions are non hierarchical. They are based on the practice of anarcho syndicalism. The union is just a collection of smaller unions, each has autonomy to make their own decisions. The delegates can be recalled at any time. All staff are workers and decisions are collectively being made.

For horizontal unions, the person you are responding to is correct. You and your colleagues are the ones that decide how it is going to run.

For vertical unions, you are correct. A few influential members have all the power.

You are both correct but just not talking about the same thing.

Do you have an example of a horizontal union in practice? Or is this one of those "You can't say X is bad because true X has never been tried!" situations?

I don't usually respond to snide comments but this one is very easy to disprove so I will make an exception.

There are a lot of them active all over the world.

CNT is a great example https://www.cnt.es

That MAY be what I'm referencing. US unions in my experience don't seem very horizontal and trend towards being very vertical.

"Unions are their members"

For reference this is a textbook example of an equivocation (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Equivocation). The statement has two meanings: the trivially true "A union is made up of its members" and the implicit claim "The behavior of the management of a union is what the majority of its members want".

The latter statement is a very bold claim (and does not survive even a tiny amount of empirical scrutiny for those familiar with unions in practice), so the commenter tries to launder it into the discussion by conflating it with the obviously-true trivial meaning.

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