Break up bad companies; replace bad union bosses
pluralistic.net
pluralistic.net
The counterbalance to a union and to management needs to be customers, but customers aren't able to vote no here. That's fundamentally undemocratic.
And you end up with terrible outcomes like collapsing literacy rates through the prevention of teaching phonics, which leads to parents opting out of public education entirely. There needs to be a feedback mechanism in unions for them to work.
Is our school system failing? No. Is our public infrastructure somehow inferior? No.
The U.S. is much less unionized and much worse off for it.
You need to be able to explain this better than “look at Austria”. Nearly everything about Austria is different than the US.
You have existing counterexamples in other countries who don't employ your suggested tweeks. It's a sign you should go back to the drawing board (and history books).
Ask the customers: Ok great. I can already see how well that would've worked in the past. Tobacco smokers are pissed off at the rioting slaves for slowing down shipments. Boo-hoo.
There's stats being thrown about that this Black Friday the number of people buying shit decreased even though the amount of shit bought was higher. Even if you ignore that point but can concede the growing wealth inequality is a thing (consumer class is shrinking but getting richer), you should be able to understand why giving more weight to the wealthier class should be thought about twice.
Looks like bad companies are what is left.
Sector-wide unions in general seem prone to anti-competitive practices (including, but not limited to extortion).
I believe it is not a false claim as much as incomplete. I suspect EU ports are more worker-friendly and safer.
The legislature can and has ordered them back to work without a contract. Check out how well that went for the railworkers' union. Biden ordered them back to work, and most of them still don't get the sick days they were striking for.
It's interesting that they are so critically important to the nation that they aren't allowed to strike, but not so critically important that they shouldn't be treated like shit.
It's fun to try to square that circle.
> In February 2023, CSX announced a deal to provide four days of paid sick leave annually, plus the option of converting three personal days into additional paid sick time with two unions.
Is it enough? No (they were striking for 15 days). Does it help until the ratchet can be pulled further for better working conditions? Yes. Next time they strike, they should ensure they're in a better position of power to obtain their desired outcome.
Union workers _are_ voters and citizens and the disenfranchised. There is almost nothing _more_ democratic than organised action.
If they cause inconvenience through that action, that is intended to be political pressure. If you dislike them because of those effects, that is removing their right to effectively collectively act and bargain.
Take a completely difference example: anti-logging. Logging protesters march through the streets, disrupting traffic and making people late for work. (Legal marches.) Or they sit up trees and chain themselves, preventing the trees from being cut. (Usually illegal.) Both these get significant attention.
Democracy is rife with examples like this.
How did the suffragettes get the vote? By protest.
Yet many other groups would have -- and have tried -- to prevent these protests and actions, just like the 'customers' cited in the comment I replied to. That's my point: to call being able to prevent that 'democratic' is outside the past century and a half of modern Western democratic history.
Disliking a group does not remove any of their rights.
Everyone has the right to dislike or disagree with another group. Nobody has to agree with you or support your different opinions. That's fundamental.
Interestingly and very recently (December 11th, 2025), the US House recently voted on a bill to restore collective bargaining rights for a majority of federal employees [2]. House lawmakers voted 231-195 to pass the Protect America’s Workforce Act [3]. The entire Democratic Caucus, along with 20 Republicans, voted in favor of the legislation.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45851620 (citations)
[2] https://federalnewsnetwork.com/congress/2025/12/house-passes...
[3] https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/2550
Same or different?
The point isn't that education (in general) can't happen during a strike or that you can't get groceries (in general) during the strike you mention. The point is that education union is a small minority controlling what education is available, regardless of what the public wants.
To make your analogy similar, I think you could compare to grocery workers refusing to allow meat to be sold in grocery stores because a large portion of them are vegans, regardless of what the general public wants.
In practice, I observed that police unions, for example, seem to be too effective at protecting their members’ interests at the expensive of the public’s. They seem more like a mafia.
If tech or game workers or whoever wants to unionize, fine with me.
Given that the police are already the group charged with enforcing the law, this has the effect of putting them above the law.
Systemically, police unions are completely different than other unions, public or private sector.
For example, the pensions for public sector in Illinois are crazy generous. People can retire at 55 or 60 (with enough years of service), and get 85% of their final salary, untaxed in perpetuity. I want them to be fairly compensated but those pensions go far beyond that and dominate the state budget. The pensions are funded by taxes, paid by everyone, including lots of ordinary people working much less well paying jobs.
How did they arrange this? Politics. It’s not like with a company where there really is a level of compensation that the company cannot afford and the company just can’t go higher than that. The politicians couldn’t give a shit if they put the state in debt for many generations to come. That’s a future Illinois problem and they’ll be long retired. They want those union votes now and so they say “sure, whatever you want.”
I have no qualms about private sector unions which don’t have these issues.
None of these other public sector unions are for people who already get massive deference by the legal system.
None of these other public sector unions actively and regularly protect their members when they murder people.
You may see similar dynamics, but that's because you're ignoring the abuses the police commit on a regular basis, fully supported by their unions.
Other public sector employees getting generous pension packages are not remotely like what police unions do. Indeed, they are very much like what many people could expect from retirement in the latter part of the 20th century. Before we decided that everyone's old age should be at the mercy of Wall Street.
It takes two to tango. If they're striking it's because they are not bending and management is not bending either. Why are management always off the hook when a walkout happens? Only the union gets the blame. They both failed to come to agreement.
I haven't seen this as a general rule. Most news outlets publish headlines about "failed to reach an agreement". If you go to news outlets and sites with a political lean it's predictable which side will be blamed. Visit Fox News and it's all about the union being bad. Visit Reddit and everyone is angry at management.
I do not make a habit of reading any conservative-leaning outlets.
This is the ideal time for labor to exert power at this part of the demographics cycle [1], as surplus labor will only decline into the future as labor shortages [2] from the rapid fertility rate decline [3] become structural and irreversible.
[1] https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~jesusfv/Slides_London.pdf
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Hyperbole like this is hard to take seriously. Nobody is a "slave" when they apply for and accept a job offer where they're paid wages and can leave for another job at any time.
https://www.google.com/search?q=low+hire+low+fire
This idea that "you can just leave for another job at anytime" is fiction in the context of the US and the current position in the credit and macro cycle. Is it a job with the same wages and security? Is it within commuting distance? How long and how many interviews does it take to get "another job"? The Fed is cutting rates to preserve the labor market [1], that does not strike me as a "healthy economy" with the opportunity you believe exists to switch jobs. Let the JOLTS report be your guide in this regard [2].
You do not have to take what I write seriously, it is immaterial to the situation. I'm confident demographics will do the work necessary to constrain the labor supply for workers to improve their power position. ~400k US workers leave the labor force every month, through retirement or death. There are not enough younger workers to replace them, and immigration will be constrained for at least another three years under this administration [3] [4]. Deaths outnumber births in twenty one states as of this comment. Young workers simply need to work on unionizing and organizing as old workers age out of the working age population. Support for unions in the US is at record highs [5].
[1] Federal Reserve issues FOMC statement - https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/mone... - December 10th, 2025
[2] https://x.com/lisaabramowicz1/status/1998409877274726422 ("The quits rate in October's JOLTS report came in at 1.8%, the lowest since May 2020. While the number of job openings increased, it seems that workers don't have much confidence to leave behind steady employment." -- Lisa Abramowicz, Bloomberg Surveillance) - December 9th, 2025
[3] CBO Slashes Immigration Estimates as a Result of Trump Policies - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-09-10/us-will-n... | https://archive.today/RnFBo - September 10th, 2025
[4] Texas Firms Hit by Immigration Crackdown Add Hours, Raise Wages - https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-28/texas-fir... | https://archive.today/Z3lvp - July 28th, 2025
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45851620 (citations)
(think in systems, citations for assertions as always)
How Can The Labor Market Be So Weak When The Wage Bill Is Growing Rapidly? - https://www.haver.com/articles/how-can-the-labor-market-be-s... - December 17th, 2025
> For all the talk of a weakening labor market, the wage bill for private nonfarm employees (private nonfarm employees times their average weekly earnings) has risen at annualized rates of 5.85% and 5.91% in October and November, respectively, compared to the median increase of 5.75% in the eleven moths of 2025. If these data are valid, it would seem that labor market earnings are growing relatively fast, especially in light of all the talk of a weak labor market. Why would employers be increasing the labor wage bill so rapidly if labor demand were weak? Perhaps because the labor supply is shrinking.
This may be true for you. If it is, congratulations.
It is not true for many.
They can't leave a job at any time if the job is working them at hours that prevent them from interviewing anywhere else.
They can't leave a job for a better job when employers are colluding - either directly or indirectly with things like credit checks for jobs not involving handling finances.
Is that even a true thing?
I'm asking because in my country (France) this has been a talking point of the conservative party for the past 2 decades and it's also 100% a urban legend. So I wonder if they just imported a (real) US educational controversy or if it's a urban legend there as well and they just imported the bullshit.
It is not particularly something that was pushed by teacher unions.
The "three cueing model" was being pushed for some time as being more effective due to widely-promoted misunderstanding and misinformation by one guy whose name I'm afraid I've forgotten (I was reading about this a few months ago, and don't have the references to hand). It correctly recognizes that highly adept readers do not mentally sound out every word, but rather recognize known words very quickly from a few individual aspects of the word. However, this skill absolutely 100% requires having first learned the fundamentals of reading through phonics, and its proponents thought they could skip that step.
Also, the PDF I quoted is from 2002, 10 years after California had legislated in favor of phonics in 1992 (which had never stopped to be used no matter what the urban legend says).
The change I'm talking about happened in the mid-to-late 2000s. Nothing from the periods you cite are relevant.
Here's one of the articles that's been written about the three-cueing model: https://www.apmreports.org/episode/2019/08/22/whats-wrong-ho...
If you want more, you have the search terms.
> Goodman's three-cueing idea formed the theoretical basis of an approach known as "whole language" that by the late 1980s had taken hold throughout America.
Why? Because it will translate to better pay and benefits for everyone else.
What is your evidence that teachers’ unions are causing these issues and not state/federal education policy? Do teachers’ unions have a big role in developing curriculums or setting educational policy? It seems like state legislatures and superintendents have more to do with that.
If you want evidence, look to the Teachers' Unions own efforts to oppose phonics education: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/why-some-teachers-u...
This does not read like an "effort to oppose phonics education". In fact, I did not see one mention of one single teacher who is opposed to phonics.
The complaints are about implementation timelines, continuing education requirements, potential over-stepping of policy-makers re: teacher autonomy in the classroom, etc.
>“To the extent that these laws remove teacher choice from certain decisions about curriculum and pedagogy and instructional style, it’s not at all a surprise that you’d see unions be in opposition to those, even if they support the arguments behind the science of reading,” said Melissa Arnold Lyon, an assistant professor of public policy at the University at Albany.
>"“That’s establishing a precedent that is really dangerous and really could open up schools and teachers to all kinds of litigation, and all kinds of conflict and problems,” said Scott DiMauro, the president of the Ohio Education Association. “You’ve got to always be cautious about micromanaging decisions that ought to be made at the local level.”"
>“That raises a lot of academic freedom questions for us, that raises a lot of questions about being able to differentiate based on student need,” said Justin Killian, an education issues specialist at Education Minnesota."
>District leaders need time to create new instructional plans, money for new curriculum materials, and systems in place for coaching and supporting teachers—provisions these laws don’t always include, Woulfin said.
You are confusing "against the legislation as it is written" with "against teaching phonics".
But instead of acknowledging that they had been setting up children for failure and taking immediate action to improve things, they are dragging feet and complaining about "district leaders needing time to make instructional plans". As if their school and district are unique snowflakes, and nobody else in the country had published good enough plans already.
My point is that these aren't "We are against teaching phonics" complaints, like the parent poster asserted.
I don't agree with the rest of your comment really, either, but it doesn't have much to do with the conversation.
Did the teachers unions also cause you to make this leap in logic?
What do you even mean by this? Customers want everything as cheap as possible as fast as possible, and to hell with the employees. Go watch a supermarket checkout section for an hour if you don't believe that.
Customers are not a valid check on labor-capital relations.
> They are able to hold the public hostage by preventing automation at ports, stopping teaching (often doubling as daycare for children), or withholding public safety.
> The counterbalance to a union and to management needs to be customers, but customers aren't able to vote no here.
https://ncbaclusa.coop/resources/co-op-sectors/consumer-co-o...
I say this as an out socialist, member of the DSA, and strong advocate for unions: No it's not. I love Shawn Fain to death, I am a huge fan of his work and strategies, but the idea that an American General Strike is two years away? Most americans won't join a union despite having extremely positive opinions of unions.
I'm not trying to argue that Unions are exact right answer (perhaps something like worker's councils would be better) but the underlying issue is that collective action in the United States has been effectively demonized for a very long time (going back to blaming unions for our uncompetitive cars vs. Japan).
Nearly every pro-union discussion I see online or even politician speaking to a crowd feels like they're in full-on preaching to the choir mode, where they don't even consider how to address anyone skeptical of unionization. It's always presented as the obvious choice. Any skepticism or critical questions are dismissed as the result of consuming propaganda (like the comment above).
If the hardcore pro-union people want to get anywhere, they need to stop treating anyone with critical questions or skepticism as being misinformed or the victim of propaganda.
Speakers like Pete Buttigieg are a good model for addressing mixed audiences without alienating the other side right off the bat. Not everyone is going to agree with him, but he does a much better job of speaking to a mixed audience as a group of people with differing opinions than most.
The union issue vs. Japan is a perfect example because you only need to sit in the cars both countries were making at the time to understand why we were uncompetitive.
It does actually happen quite often, but then the good company predictably goes bad once its dominant, which may or may not be premeditated.
Indeed, often the only way the good company can afford to be good is the prospect of eventually being able to be bad, worse even, to pay back that speculative investment. And on-and-on we go.
Don't forget the other fun variant: Bad company sees the rise of Good company, offers the founders F-U money, then puts all of Good Co.'s products into maintenance-mode post-acquisition to prevent them from competing with Bad Co.
Maybe it used to.
Nowadays, it's very, very hard for anyone not already born to generational wealth to have enough financial security to start their own competitor to any of the bad companies that are actually causing the problems.
And those bad companies—by far the worst ones, the ones that most need some competition to make them honest again—are also the ones best able to destroy any competitor, because so much of what makes them bad is their titanic size.
"Customers" are barely holding on in a very precarious position
Egregious examples include union advocacy for various kinds of licensure or "fossilizing" regulations (i.e., "we must keep doing things in this way we've been doing them to preserve the jobs of the people who do them that way"). These just raise barriers for other workers, increase competition for coveted union jobs, and increase the separation between "good" (aka union) jobs and the rest.
The old-school unions a la the Wobblies were more focused on improving the lot of all workers, everywhere. Many of the labor reforms that were passed in the early 20th century (like minimum wage) followed this model: everyone gets the minimum wage, everyone gets worker safety guarantees, everyone gets the benefits of the labor policies. But nowadays I don't see so much of that from unions or labor activism in general. To a large extent I see the reverse: advocating for special minimum-wage carveouts (e.g., for hotel workers or fast-food workers); advocacy for special work-condition requirements; and yes, things like two-tier systems where benefits or pensions are differentially allocated based on characteristics internal to the union/job.
I hate fat cat capitalism and large corporations more than almost anyone I know, but many unions (especially public employee unions) have lost a lot of my trust because of these things. The sad reality seems to be that many unions, just like the corporate bosses, are just in it for themselves. Being in it for everyone in the union is better than being in it for just the union bosses, but it's still not good enough as long as they're not in it for everyone who isn't super wealthy. If unions want to attract people they need to forcefully advocate not just for better stuff right now for these few people (union members), but for a wholesale societal overhaul to upend the entire economic system that makes such small-scale negotiation necessary.
It's also possible to belong to a union that's bad for customers as well, as they entrench the status quo or raise prices by blocking automation.
Or to ones that donate against your politics[0], which seems particularly galling.
[0] https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/teachers-unions-pour...
Is it that galling they supported the party more likely to give teachers a favorable outcome?
The idea unions shouldn't be political when some politicians want to destroy unions is silly.
If the billionaires can donate to support politicians that serve their interests more than others why not workers?
If you're disjointed enough to belong to a union, benefit from a union, and yet hold political views that want to eliminate unions, then it really shouldn't come as some shock that your union is supporting politicians you don't.
The teaching profession also has a tendency (far from a universal rule) to select for people with higher compassion and empathy, which has been outright called a "sin" by the right wing.
So yeah, if you're mad at teachers' unions for supporting left-wing political causes & politicians, you're, uh, kinda barking up the wrong tree. Or upset at water for being wet. Or something.
Teaching has been demolished over the last 30 years under left-wing teaching practices. This isn't even close.
> So yeah, if you're mad at teachers' unions for supporting left-wing political causes & politicians, you're, uh, kinda barking up the wrong tree.
I'm not, and didn't say that, which probably means you were taught by someone from the US teachng profession in the last 30 years. I'm saying people shouldn't be forced to support political causes they don't believe in.
The biggest change in teaching in the past 30 years was No Child Left Behind, and...I don't know how to tell you this, but that was not under a left-wing administration.
> which probably means you were taught by someone from the US teachng profession in the last 30 years
Nope.
> I'm saying people shouldn't be forced to support political causes they don't believe in.
And you're not! No one is forcing you to support the causes the union supports. (Even if some of your dues might go toward supporting them.)
Just like no one is forcing me to support the causes our current President supports. (Even if some of my taxes go to supporting them.)
Those things are covered by law enforcement already. Unions didn't invent thou shalt not kill.
The government enshrining protections for collective bargaining was a compromise to end such violence. Today, if a workplace is violently suppressing your right to collectively negotiate your working conditions, you can sue them, as opposed to having to kick off the largest insurrection in the United States since the civil war. This is good for everybody.
Specifically, the events I was referring to were
"Throwing dynamite at the cops" - The Haymarket Massacre, where when the cops were called to break up a rally for the 8 hour workday, workers threw dynamite at them. The resulting fight and subsequent executions left 8 dead workers, and 7 dead pigs from the Chicago Police Department.
"Blowing up bridges" - International Association of Bridge and Structural Iron Workers's bombing campaign of non-union projects, which ultimately escalated to the an anti-union rag The Los Angeles Times getting bombed (21 dead propagandeers).
"Kneecapping scabs" - Not a specific event, just a thing that happened, or was threatened with happening, across the country
"Dragging the foreman out of their house and shooting them" - The Coal Wars, fought in West Virginia ultimately escalating to the famous Battle of Blair Mountain (~150 deaths between the miners, the the Baldwin-Felts Detective Agency, and a couple US army grunts)
That being said, though, I do encourage unionization in general. But you have to be aware of which union you'd be entering into a relationship with as well.
OSHA and the US’s high litigation costs make most work places fairly safe.
The unions have been failing for advocating for unrealistic benefit packages where most workers would rather have the salary.
The unions have also been destroying companies by imposing restrictions that limit operational flexibility like arguing against automation, specifying minimum operational hours for a factory etc.
They should adjust unions so they are only arguing for increased total wages and not all these other things that are incredibly destructive.
They'd be even more able to do that if they were actual corporations, owned by all the workers, selling organized labor as a service. Then they would only have to negotiate the prices of the services they sold, instead of having to negotiate all kinds of other things. The workers themselves, as owners of the corporation, would be determining things like benefit packages, retirement, how to bring new workers in, etc., etc.
One would need to be careful to stop such a company from fully monopolising the profession though. Otherwise we go back to medieval guilds, which were good at guaranteeing product quality standards, but heavily suppressed innovation and were quite extortionate towards new workers. I suppose unions are also like this to a degree, but making them actual profit seeking companies may be dangerous.
Antitrust law should take care of that. Indeed, making the unions into actual worker-owned corporations would help in that respect, as there is no counterpart to antitrust law for unions that I'm aware of.
As a result, it is only really enforced when the political winds are aligned, and selectively towards those it is aligned against.
That's true--in fact early "big name" enforcements hurt consumers, by breaking up Standard Oil and Alcoa Aluminum, whose "antitrust violation" was selling products more cheaply and in greater quantities than their competitors. As a result of the breakups, prices went up and supplies went down.
> It's not easy to clearly delineate a market and prove the dominance of a company
That's true as well, particularly for labor, because the market for "labor" is more fungible than most; people can retrain and learn new skills, so, for example, it's not clear that "all auto workers in the US" is a "market" that shouldn't be dominated by one company, since workers have the option of switching industries. Whereas, you can't retrain a product to do something different--your car can't be taught to do your laundry, for example.
What the above tells me is that it's not very clear when one company dominating a market (or market segment, or whatever) is actually a problem that needs to be addressed. So I don't see this as a reason why "unions becoming actual corporations" shouldn't be tried.
This is nonsense. Breaking up the monopoly and the price fixing led to lower prices through the system. Oil barrel prices were far from the only thing controlled by the standard oil monopoly.
Not in the cases I gave.
> Oil barrel prices
Not sure what you mean by this. If you mean crude oil, Standard Oil was not a seller of crude oil; it was a buyer. It bought crude oil and refined it into various products that it sold. The prices of those refined products went up after the breakup.
I think a worker-owned for-profit union might quickly start hiring other kinds of workers and become a regular worker-owned company, because often selling actual end products and services is more profitable than selling one flavour of labour.
Are you arguing that the workers being significant shareholders of companies is a better alternative to unions? Or that there should be a special kind of corporation that is a for-profit union and has some restrictions of who they can accept and what they can offer?
It's an intriguing twist on communism: instead of abolishing private property and having "the people" (the authoritarian government) own everything, you keep private ownership and free-markets, but you restrict company ownership to the active employees, instead of capital investors and/or initial founders.
I'm not making any value judgement here, again I'm just musing.
Once the companies start branching out to sell other things besides the service of organized labor, they're no longer just an alternative to unions. In what follows, I'm only talking about the aspect of selling organized labor as a service.
I do believe that workers owning companies that sell the service of organized labor is better for the workers than unions as they exist now in the sense that it would do better at improving the workers' bargaining position with the management of the companies that union workers now work for. But it also exposes the workers to business risks that unions as they are now don't have to face--the companies do. That's an unavoidable tradeoff--if you want more of the upside, you have to be willing to take more of the risk. I think that one of the main obstacles to unions as they are now properly representing workers' interests is their refusal to face that fact. Making the unions into worker-owned corporations would force the workers to face the tradeoff directly and decide which way they want to make it--take the increased risk and get more upside (by becoming owners of the worker-owned company selling organized labor as a service), or give up some upside to avoid the risk (by remaining as traditional employees of the companies they work for now).
> you restrict company ownership to the active employees
I'm not advocating this, at least not as a matter of law. A worker-owned corporation could certainly make it part of its charter that you have to be a worker in the relevant industry or with an appropriate set of skills in order to own a share of the company. In that sense the company would have no employees--every worker-owner's income would be dividends based on share ownership. But other companies would still be free not to do this--to have a more traditional ownership structure in which employees don't usually own any shares.
This is a terrible metric to use as a single guide, especially when it is also (in the case of mergers & acquisitions) focused solely on the immediate aftermath of the merger.
Lina Khan was starting to push a shift back away from this deliberate giveaway to corporate interests, but then Trump was elected again, and any hope of that went out the window.
I don't understand this. High litigation costs give an unfair advantage to those with capital to spare. It makes it harder for harmed workers to sue and have the stamina to succeed. An important role of unions is actually to pool worker capital to level that playing field.
Do you mean that the amounts that companies need to pay when they loose are high enough to disincentivize taking those risks? I'm not sure that's true, it may be to a degree.
I don’t think that work in the US in general is unsafe and things like OSHA and insurance really manage safety well. It doesn’t seem like unionized industries are any more less safe than non unionized industries.
I think most workers actually want wage growth. Things like hollywood writers banning ai or auto workers preventing plant closures just don’t make sense.
Note that I don't just mean the math of $10k > $3k, because I know some people think that they can save money by just not having health coverage. This is also being bad at math: specifically, statistics. You won't win, especially since you need regular checkups to make sure you aren't starting to develop something that's cheap to nip in the bud, but massively expensive to treat later.
* No actual numbers were harmed in the making of this post. If you think these specific numbers are unrealistic, feel free to substitute other actual values, but the rough ratios should still be in the right ballpark.