Hacker News Reader

Comment by chrismcb | Hacker News Reader

It shouldn't be. Of course I think sometimes it has to be. But it is supposed to represent the employees in a collective bargaining agreement. That is it. You could argue they should be involved with some politics around labor laws.

View on HN

This is all literally politics.

The reason you'd need to form a collective bargaining agreement comes down to politics surrounding labor laws. Hell, your ability to form unions in the first place comes down to rights granted to you by the government.

Can you see that spending money on charities vs spending that money on collective bargaining could be both under the category of "politics" but not equivalent in their form of "political action"?

The point is that if you talk about unionization, you're talking about politics, because unions don't exist in countries where the politicians made them illegal.

Sure, but this conversation was about a union that already exists, so that hurdle has been cleared. There are still politics, but now they are different, they are the politics of "please spend the money I give you on X not Y."

I wouldn't call running a vegetable shop "politics", even though politics clearly affects the environment you operate in (tax rates, bylaws, heck some weird dystopian place could ban vegetable shops entirely!).

Of course running a vegetable shop is political. Politics is the question of who gets what. There have been countless societies across history, and still exist many, where the political formations meant the very concepts of “shop”, “business”, or even “employment” per se were foreign.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com