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Comment by an_cap | Hacker News Reader

FWIW, the union (CWA) via its Seattle affiliate tried to get OPT banned, a visa status that many readers of HN benefited from - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/2.... I encourage HN readers to better understand the relationship between unions and immigration before deciding whether they are in favor of joining/supporting unions.

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Let's try to be honest when we discuss this kind of thing; Unions are like people. They have unique agendas, unique executive decisionmaking trends, and affect their members differently.

No single union is 1:1 alike.

When I had a family member get a job as a local grocery store bagger, then job stipulated he HAD to join the union and give his dues out of paycheck within 1 month or he would be fired from his job.

He quit. He was a 15yrold teenager just trying ro have an after school job and he got squeezed.

Unions are not good. Unions are not bad. Unions are.

I am eager to see how this specific union engages with the game development industry.

Being forced to join the union to have a job there is little different from being forced to become an employee of the company in order to work in the store. It's extremely common to have a requirement to become part of some organization in order to work in a place, it's just that this organization is usually a for-profit business, and typically you only have to join one.

People think very weirdly about unions. If you strip away all the fluff, a union is ultimately a business that sells labor, typically with a setup where the buyer(s) of that labor pay the labor directly, and then the labor pays the supplier, rather than having the money flow through the supplier first. The direction of money flow is unusual, but makes no practical difference.

All you're describing is an exclusive arrangement between a supplier and a business that buys from them. If it was a contracting agency instead of a union, and your family member was told that the only way to work in the store was to go through the agency, you wouldn't bat an eye. But call it a "union" and suddenly "he got squeezed."

Try explaining that to the 15 year old who worked after school each day and after two weeks received a paycheck for $3.

Let’s not judge the world based on how a 15 year old would react to it. Mine just had a minor meltdown over bringing salsa to a potluck.

I generally agree with this take. Some specific unions, especially in the US, seem unnecessarily adversarial to employers, but others are known primarily for upholding professional and safety standards (I'm thinking of electricians we contracted with at a previous job).

How was my comment dishonest?

Similarly, I encourage HN readers to better understand the relationship between unions and immigration before deciding whether they are in favor of immigration.

I think you can have a nuanced view on immigration.

I'm fairly pro-immigration but I think the current immigration system in the US is highly exploitive to just about everyone. H1B, in particular, is pretty much entirely a system of putting immigrants in a bad situation that makes it hard for them to challenge their employers.

So much of the US immigration system is built on undercutting wages for native workers.

IMO, more than anything immigrants need a lot more protections particularly from deportation. If we want to punish someone for using undocumented immigrants it shouldn't be the immigrant, it should be the business owner that employed them. But also, if someone has been here for 10 years without causing problems there should be a fast path to citizenship.

I've know a family of undocumented workers that have been in the US for the last 30+ years. They don't have citizenship because it's too expensive and to complex for them to get through. Yet there they've been working on cattle farms, babysitting, paying taxes, and teaching me a bit of Spanish.

Unions are almost fundamentally against the practice of undercutting them with cheaper labour.

I think unions are great but they are deeply flawed, like any human organization, but for my family they really worked and both my parents had good jobs in unions. My dad's union both saved him from being fired and also tried to get him fired themselves (he pissed off an up and coming union leader who then proceeded to lie about him). They always seemed like an important counterweight more than actually a great organization (and you actually have a vote, unlike most companies).

Of course they did. Unions are always going to be against immigrant labor.

I think it’s a little more nuanced than that. They are against things that would lessen the collective bargaining power of those in their union. This is the whole point of unions, to collectively bargain.

If those immigrants were forced to join the union upon entering the U.S. and entering that sector of work, I don’t see the union having a problem with that. The issue is that would lead to those immigrants and all other members of the union being paid more, which is a no-no for the billionaire class.

So they’re not anti-immigrant. They’re against billionaires abusing immigration to pay people less.

That's not true. The MLBPA (baseball players) is definitely not anti-immigrant.

That would make sense considering how abused OPT is. It very fundamentally decreases the unions leverage.

"Unions" are a broad category of human organization, like "business." It makes little sense to favor or oppose "business" in general, and similarly for "unions." I encourage everyone to better understand the specific organizations they support or oppose, unions or otherwise.

I encourage HN readers to read your username before replying to this comment. And also to consider why self-identifying capitalists like yourself might want a large cheap labor pool of people who can be deported if they complain about their working conditions.

For what it’s worth, I think it should be very easy to become an American citizen. I think these companies benefit from that not being the case. They’d call ICE on native-born citizens for trying to unionize if they could.

The an_cap position on immigration is open borders which is the opposite of "people who can be deported if they complain about their working conditions". Feel free to check the comment history.

Take it up with your fellow “caps” then, they’re the ones that support expanding this category of workers that have fewer political rights. The labor unions clearly only about immigration issues insofar as it relates to trying to weaken labor laws.

Can you point me to a capitalist who wants to expand the category of workers without the right to switch jobs?

Sure, anyone who tries to get you to sign one of these: https://www.npr.org/2018/07/10/627682297/regulators-investig...

Nice motte and bailey there between "people who can be deported if they complain about their working conditions" and non-compete clauses.

You were the one who changed subject to be about “switching jobs”, presumably because that issue has less to do why companies want to hire non-citizens in the US. Up until that point we were talking about employees advocating for rights at their current jobs, which is the main thing undocumented workers or people on work visas have to worry about. You were clearly trying to go for the “just change jobs if you don’t like your employer” thing, which is why you changed the subject (and then accused me of doing that, for some weird reason).

Anyway, two for the price of one, since you’re demanding it: https://www.adhrb.org/2025/02/discrimination-against-migrant...

Yes, unions can be protectionist about their work force, but there are international worker unions; maybe this is a European thing.

An econ 101 observation: unions contribute to structural unemployment: Keeping wages above market-clearing levels, and by preventing wage adjustment.

Through collective bargaining, unions can negotiate wages that are higher than what the market would naturally set. This can lead to the cost of labor being too high for some employers, resulting in fewer jobs. Similarly, unions can prevent wages from adjusting to market conditions.

So for the common good, individuals may go without a job.

The econ 101 observation feels like it falls apart under light scrutiny. The market sets a rate, but which rate is more "natural?" When individuals negotiate directly with employers, they tend to be at a disadvantage. An individual has less knowledge and bargaining power than an employer in almost all cases; so can we call the rate set by these negotiations to be the "natural" rate? Conversely, when bargaining collectively, employees are able to pool knowledge and resources to bargain more effectively, and they have more leverage as a group which allows them to negotiate on a more even field to the employer. I would consider this outcome to be more "natural," and would argue that it is not that collective bargaining results in higher wages than the market would set but that individual bargaining results in wages that are artificially lower than those of the market clearing rate.

> An econ 101 observation

Econ 101 observations are utterly useless without the specific context in which they're made. This is like talking about spherical cows in a vacuum in the context of aerodynamics.

In the specific case of unions, they always forget to mention that a higher proportion of a company's income going to salaries generally means increased consumer spending for workers, which spurs other kinds of industry and services that may mean a net benefit for the global economy.

Of course second and third-order effects are not really talked about in Econ 101.

> second and third-order effects are not really talked about in Econ 101.

Exactly, the purpose is to teach concepts, not the whole picture.

The problem is that second and third order effects _are_ the concepts in many cases.

For markets to operate well, prices must be easily accessible by both buyers and sellers. Since corporations do their utmost to ensure that workers don't discover wages and salaries of their peers, corporations suppress wages. So, corporations are bad for the common good.

Unions are part of the market like anything else. If wages are higher, they aren't above market-clearing levels, those are the new market-clearing levels. If workers form a union and bargain collectively, that is what the market naturally set.

Do you apply the same argument for employers? Companies contribute to low wages. By collectively bargaining with employees (e.g. hiring at the local grocery store is centralized, you can't go around to all the individual managers and start a bidding war) they can negotiate wages that are lower than what the market would naturally set.

And I bet COSTCO membership-based, warehouse-club model is a bad thing too, since they are able to negotiate prices lower that what the market would naturally set?

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