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Comment by superxpro12 | Hacker News Reader

Because its ultimately cheaper to suppress unions than it is to pay the workers the fair salary.

I'm generally pro-union and certainly fair wage, but it's important to keep in mind that unions will grow into their own power centers and have leadership with its own internal goals which are not aligned with either their working members nor the employers.

Always?

Always. Power begets power. Everything needs to be kept in check.

The only question is where the line is.

Why don't unions seem to have that problem in pretty much all of Europe then?

Because European unions doesn't have as much power over workers as American unions, since Europe as right to work. Right to work means you can just quit a bad union if you don't like it without having to change your job.

What does that have to do with "power begets power"

but it's important to keep in mind that without unions the corporation will grow into their own power centers and have leadership with its own internal goals which are not aligned with either their working members nor the employers

The discourse around unions is so weird.

A bunch of people form an organization so that they can work together to sell stuff.

When they're selling widgets, or other people's labor, we call those people "management" and we call their organization "business" and it's the standard way of doing things.

When they're selling their own labor, we call it a "union" and suddenly people have Opinions about whether they're really a good thing or not.

If Bob's Heavy Manufacturing Concern can collectively bargain with its customers when selling its Retro Encabulators, then Bob's employees should be able to collectively bargain with its customer i.e. Bob when selling their product i.e. their labor.

I think where it breaks down though is if a company manages to monopolize the market we all recognize this is bad. If a union tries to monopolize the labor supply to a company, most pro-union opinions celebrate this and argue the company should have to negotiate with the union to find a rate rather than being able to just shit-can everyone in the union and move on to the next guy.

Union itself I'd agree could function as basically a corporation of workers. That's not on face a bad thing, but the devil is in the details of what kind of violence (via law or otherwise) is used to try and use that to form a monopoly. Of course the companies are no better in this regard, they use the violence of the state to monopolize markets as well.

Aren't exclusive contracts pretty common in business? There's a big difference between monopolizing the supply to a single customer, which happens all the time, and monopolizing an entire market.

Yes if it's just a voluntary contract I see nothing sinister. If some employees form a union that's not sinister. If the company signs a contract with them that's not sinister. But if some employees want a union and that automatically means they've forced the other employees to join rather than allowing the other employees to pick to work outside the union, or automatically means the company is involuntarily bound to contract, that would be a bit sinister.

Involuntarily binding the company to the contract would be bad, I agree.

But what's wrong with forcing the other employees to join to keep their jobs? That is fundamentally a requirement on the company, that they only hire people in the union. And that's no different from any other sort of exclusive contract. If a restaurant has an exclusive contract with Coke, is it sinister to say that Pepsi employees can't supply them, and they have to join Coke if they want to do that?

I'm saying suppose some employees decide to form a union. And the company doesn't consent to sign an exclusive contract. As I understand it there are unions advocating that workers that didn't agree to a union still have to be bound to it anyway.

It's my understanding in some states in the US it's possible a worker will be forced to join a union if a certain number of other workers want a union, even if neither the worker nor the company hiring them consent to it. In about half of states under "right to work" though they do give employees the option to not join the union if they don't want to.

This happened to me when I was working a ~minimum wage job at a grocery store. At the time it was not a right to work state, and I was forced to join the UFCW. The union I was forced to join then made me pay dues, pushing me below minimum wage.

how much were your dues? and you were getting $7.25/hr?

I agree that would be bad. Is that what happens or is it that the employer agrees only to hire workers from the union and that's why you have to join? "Right to work" laws are about that situation; they prohibit agreements between the union and the employer that would require all employees to join the union. When you had to join the UFCW, was it merely because the UFCW existed at your store, or was it because the store agreed to only hire UFCW members?

The store didn't voluntarily agree but they were forced by the NLRA to accept a "good faith contract" negotiation that the store had no interest in having good faith with. This violence-enforced negotiation process did result in it becoming a union represented shop. So the union via the NLRA forced the workers to pay dues to the UFCW (technically you can decide not to join while still having to do all the things union workers do including paying the dues).

So yes the false premise here was it was just a voluntary contract, but it really wasn't since the law required them to act in good faith to come up with a contract with the union when they had no interest in doing so except for the violence of the state that forced them to. Otherwise they'd have just hired non-union workers.

I did explicitly ask them when I was hired that I absolutely did not want to join the union or pay the dues. The manager was happy to hear that because they didn't like the union either, he certainly would have hired me without requiring anything union related if not for the NLRA forcing the "good faith" negotiation blocking it.

unions don’t work unless everyone’s in them.

it’s a free country—individuals have freedom to just work at a non union shop.

You can't just decide you don't like the conclusion therefore the first principles have to be abandoned. If it's a free country the union workers at the shop are free to compete with the non-union workers at the shop. If they are really that much better value of workers it will end up being a 100% union shop due to the economic advantage for the company and workers. But they have no right to block me and my employer from working together without their "assistance."

Yes, but they expire in ways that unions don’t

Does anything prevent a company from negotiating a time-limited contract with a union, other than the company's ability to negotiate?

I don’t think it’s weird. Why should a union be a protected class that you cannot fire? If a company can find people to work cheaper than what the union offers why should they have to continue to employ union workers? Pros/Cons to everything. I generally sit into the stance that the free movement of labor is one of the things the US gets right.

They’re not a protected class that you can’t fire, unless the company signs a contract to that effect with the vendor selling them labor (the union)

Is that correct? I thought the NLRA was shaped in such a way that you cannot fire someone because they are in a union. You cannot refuse to hire known union supporters.

I liken to being similar to a protected class that you cannot discriminate against.

Edit: why would this get downvoted? If I am wrong about the NLRA I am happy to be corrected.

you can fire union members you can’t fire people for organizing.

To be clear you can fire union members but not because they are in a union, support a union or organizing to be in a union. Very similar to a protected class.

To be clear you can fire humans but not because they are humans, support humans or organizing to be humans. Very similar to a protected class.

As i see it, Unions are groups of employees where they have agreed to cooperate to get a better group outcome than they might be able to negotiate individually. It often caps the outcomes for the very very best, and raises the outcomes for the very very bottom. But across a wide swath they are earning more, or treated better, than they would be had they tried to do it alone. TBD if the union fees negate more or less than this gain.

IMO Cooperatives are a better model, it combines cooperative behavior with the dual risk/profit model of entrepreneurship.

They are democratically run. This is a problem workers can solve.

Corporations are democratically run?

no. The unions are. Workers pick their union leadership

What's the alternative (no unions) like?

Probably a UBI-like approach? At least insofar as it changes the power dynamic in the employer/employee relationship.

How about forcing businesses to be owned by their employees [1]? Instead of taxing the owning class and being paid UBI peanuts, you become the owning class and reap the rewards directly.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worker_cooperative

Certain markets are highly competitive for labor. A good example is software engineering. In those cases, because neither the corporation has a monopoly on their tech products nor does a union have a monopoly on labor the sector can be highly productive and everyone can get rich. In such a situation it seems pointless to have a union. Why would an employee want to be beholden to both his employer and his union? Unions, as well as giving their members some negotiating power, can also limit and burden their members in many ways.

Software engineers are gonna wish they’d unionized in the coming years.

Unions doesn't protect you in revolutionary times, so no. Detroits manufacturing sector was totally devastated even though they had extremely high unionization rates.

China? Doesn't strike me as a particularly good country to work in.

You're not pro-union if you still spout anti-union propaganda. You spent more words arguing against unions than you did for them. I'd say your first part of the sentence is probably more of a rhetorical trick than anything close to true

Instead of repeating vapid arguments from the past 30 years designed to disincline people from joining unions, maybe you could look outside of your own borders and realize that it's not an inherent property of unions. Inherent to the US and your extremely unhealthy relationship with work, maybe.

It's not 30 years old though, the longshore union leader a few years ago literally went on live national TV with a fucking rolex and gold chain screaming how broke he was and that (in his own words) his message to America is "I will cripple you" if people trying to import things like medicines, foodstuffs, and everything else into American ports don't pay more union money to their monopolized union instead of investing in automation and modernizing our ports.

---- re: due to throttling ------

>"I will cripple you" must have referred to the bosses, not the entire country including his people.

No he literally threatened normal people like construction workers and car salesman that he would ensure they were laid off, he was using "cripple" to refer to normal Americans and everyone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DZQ-80PRbA

>Idk why it matters that he had a gold chain. Are people without tech jobs not allowed to have money?

If you're begging for charity in the form of trying to block automation and upgrading of ports, while arguing you need your union monopoly because you are broke, then yes it's relevant that the way you choose to present yourself on live TV is all blinged out. If you can get a gold chain without threatening others in one hand and begging with your hand out in the other then go for it. Don't cry though if people notice your bling bling and cry fowl that people actually noticed the way you went out of your way to present yourself to the world.

"I will cripple you" must have referred to the bosses, not the entire country including his people. Idk why it matters that he had a gold chain. Are people without tech jobs not allowed to have money?

Yeah this brief out of context video is obvious proof that unions are the #1 problem in society. A prole with a Rolex?!? If we allow dockworkers to wear Rolexes then the entire social order will break down! What happened to the America I grew up with when only a vampire CEO could afford a Rolex? Oh the humanity..

This guy is a "vampire CEO." He isn't a dockworker, lmao, those are the people he is parasitic off of. He's a union boss lording over the dockworkers threatening to pull them off the job, basically the CEO of the union. That's the hilarious part. He's effectively a union CEO throwing a tantrum asking America not to upgrade the technology of their ports so he can become even richer. He goes out of his way to make clear he's not in it for the benefit of the workers, he brags about threatening to put construction workers out of the job so this top 1% union boss can become even more of a fat cat. There is nothing out of context, you can watch the entire thing if you like, he is straight up threatening to cripple the entire USA.

I don't give a shit a CEO or a dock worker has a rolex and a gold chain. I do care that they bling them out on TV while with their hand out for charity in the form of asking for Luddism. Probably not a smart move for that person pretending to be a broke charity case while also coming out with threats against everyone's livelihood.

It's the same in Romania. Union leaders are rich.

Then how about Romania, a former communist country? Let me tell how things run since 1990 when we supposedly switched to capitalism and democracy. I've heard that labor laws changed a bit around 2010, but I don't know exactly how.

The leaders of the union were part of the board, they were running the show along with the real managers. They were also practically impossible to fire. Negotiations with them were a drag. All they know is sucking the blood, err, money out of the company, nothing else. They don't care if it's not profitable and company goes bankrupt (and the government has to save it because it's owned by the state). And of course the leaders get their fair, err, fat share. The workers have lousy or good salaries, but the leaders are rich. They also worked on union staff on company time/money and I think they also had their dedicated space.

Thankfully not everyone drunk the union kool aid. I had a teacher who to my surprise wasn't a union member and couldn't care less about their shit and strikes.

I almost forgot about a law that's still in place that forces every company with more than 50 employees to have some sort of union. It has to organize elections so that the employees can elect a representative. Like wtf, managers have a business to run, not some boys' club or whatever. No one is stopping employees from sending someone to talk to the manager.

I wonder if that's actually true - unionbusting is mostly an emotional issue for leaders and owners so I wonder if there's any calculation involved.

I've seen corporate HR got to insane (illegal) lengths to "stick it" to people trying to unionize - to the point of being severely fined.

So I wonder if anyone actually calculated financials here.

there’s also a dam breaking effect. if unionization starts kicking off again, that can be contagious. so companies are incentivized to “nip it in the bud”

It's cheaper to try and block other workers from getting a union card in your union to limit supply than trying to up your skills, as well.

If you think unions fight exclusively for “a fair salary” you are not engaging with reality.

Better a corrupt union than no union at all. The Gilded Age was not a pleasant time for workers.

1.5bn is a drop in the bucket.

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