Hacker News Reader

Thanks for sharing. Very interesting to hear someone else with a similar experience.

> Unions devolving to simply protect the lowest common denominator is a problem.

I've always wondered if this is because the ones most incentivized to stay are the ones that eventually make it into upper leadership. It always seemed to me like the decisions being made at that level were intended to protect those same people. For example, rather than seeing poor-performing members as a risk to the union, the answer was to just lobby legally secured work so that companies had no choice but to hire its members. Which is quite the game, because I'm sure at face value it sounds great (companies can't ignore unions), but the hidden reality seemed to be that it just ensured these people always had a job.

Honest question -- what should happen to poor performing people? They should have less money, less food, be homeless or what? Should they be more stressed and as a result somehow perform better?

On one hand I don't like to deal with results of bad craftsmanship, on the other hand I don't desire of the suffering of others.

The thing is real, but so are the people.

Not a snark or a gotcha, I'm a union member and recognise this thing at work.

There should be disincentives for poor performance, options to improve performance (training, counseling, etc.) and incentives for good performance (better raises, perks, etc.) to incentivize good employees.

> Honest question -- what should happen to poor performing people?

The union should help them find roles they can be successful in. It should offer them more specialized training, mentorship programs, and other ways to help build up their skills. If they refuse to take any of these seriously, they should be fired. To me, that's the difference between poor performing and intentional laziness.

How is any of that the responsibility of organised labour?

We used to expect training, mentorship, skill-building and effective job placement from employers.

If anything, unions should be lobbying employers to provide those things to poor performers.

> what should happen to poor performing people?

In my experience most poor performers just arent putting the effort in. They should be made to understand that low effort compared to peers will lead to less money, yes. If theyre genuinely unable to perform the duties they should do something else/

Genuinely poor performers are so toxic. They might not recognize their poor performance and suck up infinite amounts of support for no improvement. They might be ultra-aware of their game and manipulate the institution in mind-boggling ways to protect their graft. You have to get these folks out ASAP.

Of course, they could also be unrealized potential just waiting for someone to believe in them and mentor them to greatness. If you drop them too quickly you miss out on wonderful, loyal, capable people.

The trick is being able to tell the difference quickly, make the best choice you can, and move on.

>But US unions seem to exist nearly exclusively to protect people who don’t want to work.

They don't exist for that reason, but their inevitable ground state is that.

The fundamental and intractable problem with any form of socialization is that it naturally attracts free riders. The idea doesn't have a balanced equilibrium, so it's either logistically/bureaucratically heavy or always being pulled towards collapse.

Everyone who starts these systems has pure intentions, and the initial members tend to be dedicated too. But over time it will either naturally decay, or turn into the thing it was trying to fight.

A healthy organisation can reflect on this tendency and purge some free riders to preserve itself. The fact that it doesn't, to me personally, just means it's not under external pressure.

If there is one thing free riders are generally skilled at, it's hiding the fact they are free riding. There is then an internal decay where as others learn the tricks, they realize that they can start coasting too, and they should, because why would you do extra work if you don't have to.

To defeat this you need intense oversight, but then you yourself become the man with an iron fist.

This is a super common theme whenever you dig into anything socialized. It works great when everyone understands the system and is dedicated to the work, the mission. But as soon as a single atom of "I can get away with not doing my full part" seeps in, it's like a seed crystal that eventually collapses the whole system.

It's the prisoner's dilemma. I believe any self-preservation optimized intelligence is going to suffer from these problems until those behaviors are countered in interaction by design (e.g. process, societal/cultural pressures, etc.) or removed from the baseline (i.e. evolved out.)

Our desires make us our own worst enemies, and until we acknowledge and openly plan to counter these tendencies, any social structure at some scale is going to fail to them. Unfortunately, the problems we face as a species are increasingly at larger and larger scales.

I'm not sure if we can remain what we would recognize as "human," and solve for this without surrendering some level of executive function to an entity not afflicted by it. Government and regulation are already expressions of this, while retaining our intrinsic nature, but history has demonstrated this is inherently unstable.

Human societies already have solutions to this problem. There's a proposed explanation for why strict religious groups (like the Amish) survive so well: costly signaling. There are benefits to remaining in the community, so you have to demonstrate adherence to the group by constant, expensive signaling to keep receiving them.

In a union context, that could be anything from dues, to volunteering for shitty work, to community service obligations. Unions don't really exercise the power to expel members though, because it reduces their own leverage.

What definition of organizational health demonstrates this? Certainly none of the long-lived and powerful US unions have this property. Observationally, it seems that the strongest US unions also exercise their power to protect all within their fold. The worst offenders fail to be protected by the union, but in general, they are not purged. And US unions are quite powerful. The leaders wear Rolexes.

This seems logical. A labor union carries power commensurate with the number of members in it. It is more important for members that they be protected than that they be held to a high standard. If the latter is done, it is in service to the former. That is entirely the purpose of the union after all. No one forms a union so that others can hold them to a high standard of performance.

This doesn’t seem to be a universal rule at all, but smells more of a boogeyman promulgated within US society.

The nordics are anywhere from 50% - 90% of all labor unionized and they absolutely destroy the US on every standard of living metric.

It seems to me a case that echoes “better to let 99 guilty men go free than to execute an innocent man”. Of course, in this case, the ratios are actually reversed. Should we execute 99 innocent men to make sure that 1 guilty guy gets punished?

There will be some free riders, just like there will be some welfare queens, just like there will be some voter fraud.

That said, these cases represent a vanishingly small minority of the whole, and the cure is far worse than the disease.

>It seems to me a case that echoes “better to let 9 guilty men go free than to execute an innocent man”. Of course, in this case, the ratios are actually reversed. Should we execute 9 innocent men to make sure that 1 guilty guy gets punished?

We don't have to do an echo. We can just do it as it is.

9 men hunt and 1 man eats free, so the 9 men are carrying the weight of the 1.

This system is inherently unstable and unsustainable. Maybe you can mitigate it (nordic style) by keeping a small population and drilling into people's heads from birth that "you take turns being the 1, and the 1 needs to be eager to get back to the hunt or shame will be had", but even then that is a not an inherently stable system, but one propped up by trust.

> 9 men hunt and 1 man eats free, so the 9 men are carrying the weight of the 1.

Updated the quote to the historically accurate 99 vs 1.

> This system is inherently unstable and unsustainable.

The countries cited are extremely stable. Arguably far more stable than the US.

That said, we can bring in the rest of Western Europe if 5 countries aren't enough of an example. They have union participation rates between 10% and 50%, median around 20%. The thing is, they have much larger proportions of their workforces covered by collective bargaining agreements - France for example is at 10% union participation yet 98% of labor covered by bargaining agreements.

Western Europe and the Nordics combined = ~400 million people, bigger population than the US, and far more diverse, so the common refrain of "small homogenous population" doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Of course, all societies so far have eventually been unstable.

We can just choose whether our unstable society will be a vindictive one that prioritizes punishing wrongdoers over the wellbeing of the whole, or a pragmatic and (as a nice bonus) compassionate one which prioritizes the wellbeing of the whole over a puritanical urge to purge the unworthy.

Europe is in a borderline catastrophic economic situation. I wouldn't use them as an example, because it ultimately just illustrates my point more. Lots of people are aware of Europes excellent quaility of life, far far fewer (but thankfully including Euro leaders) are aware of the existential financial situation and forecasts.

Europe was supposed to have a vibrant tech scene and a globally competitive technology stack (go back 40 years). But it doesn't. It also doesn't really have a growing economy. Or much ability to defend itself. Or much ability to power itself. Or much ability to finance itself.

Europe has a very impressive social systems, absolutely, but it's important to recognize the incongruity between what these countries promise, what they will need, and what money they actually make.

EU debt to GDP is ~80% avg across member states, US is ~123%.

US CPI 3.8% as of April, EU HICP 3.2% as of April.

IMF projects 2.3% growth US vs 1.1% growth EU in 2026.

Not sure I would say the EU is in a borderline catastrophic economic situation and the US is not?

If both are in catastrophic situations (it seems one could fairly make that assessment in either case), then again we’re back to “all societies are unstable, would we like to be pragmatic and compassionate during our brief moment of stability or vindictive and self destructive?”

>9 men hunt and 1 man eats free, so the 9 men are carrying the weight of the 1.

You just described every non-union tech company I've worked at but maybe ratio reversed. Full of lazy entitled takers, not a shop steward in sight.

If unions are inherently unstable and unsustainable, so is capitalism as a whole.

Correct analogue would be: 9 man hunt, 1 doesn’t, and most of the hunt’s proceeds go to 11th man who eats for free:

> but smells more of a boogeyman promulgated within US society.

Particularly the ultra-capitalist part of US society.

Do unions attract some percentage of people who want to abuse them to do less work for more pay? Sure, humans are flawed. But unfettered capitalism also attracts some percentage of people who will greedily exploit the labor of others to enrich themselves.

Both extremes are why we should have rules and regulations as a society to curb the worst excesses, because we can't trust all humans to do the right thing in any system.

That aside, I'd also argue that while both are unfair the actual practical outcome of some people being a bit lazy in a union has a far less disastrous impact on society as a whole than the people who greedily exploit on the other end.

Are you saying that "aliasxneo", thread starter who worked as "controls technician" is an "ultra-capitalist"?

I love the idea of unions, but it's hard to take its advocates seriously when they just dismiss anyone they disagree with. You can't blame everything on the ultra-rich when the regular workers also report negative stories.

The irony in this is that the image of exploited labor is always minimum wage workers, or dead end job workers, generally the lowest rungs of the labor ladder.

However the reality is that the most economically exploited labor is generally the educated white class workers who ostensibly live pretty comfortable lives. These people are the cash cows getting the smallest cut of of their output.

What this reveals is that the inoculation against anti-capitalist rhetoric (giving people the simple comfortable upper-middle class life they dream of) is in fact the very thing that is most exploitative in a capitalist society.

Unions are supposed to defend the value of labour. I think in a fair society where losing your blue collar job didn't mean dog food for dinner the balance of responsibility and squeamishness could shift away from employers and unions in terms of keeping food in people's bellies after they get fired. Then unions and businesses can actually have somewhat aligned goals, which is better for everyone, really.

In order to protect the long term value of a profession or some other labour corps, you can't skip efficiency and defend poor work ethic. I think to a degree the medical profession exemplifies this with professional bodies regulating conduct and standard of care/work. Part of this is the generally earnest approach to the scrutiny, but I believe part is the lack of immediate grave concern to anyone ‘on the stand,’ who can be presumed to earn comfortably, upon losing their job.

> I fully believe labor needs as much leverage against capital as possible for the scales to be balanced at all

Competition is required, rather than unionization. If an industry is dominated by monopolies, not only do customers suffer, workers do too. Unions don't really fix the problem - only make certain groups win over others.

For once, the union is one of the rare in-groups that are very easy to join and actually benefit their members

The problem is that they tend to benefit their members in a zero sum way. For example the LIRR wants a double digit raise not in exchange for hitting targets on on-time arrivals or some other metric. They want it or they strike and hold the community hostage. It bothers me that there's no value exchange it's just take take take, and ultimately at my expense.

Worse, public sector unions are ultimately at my expense in a way that I can't even fix by not buying the product, since they're taking it from my taxes.

Double digit raise in this economy and for the economic strata that does this work and is more exposed to prices more than some others, double digit sounds reasonable. The union just wants their members to not be piss poor. Is this bad?

They earn $220k a year for jobs that aren't worth that. Income equals expenditure; they are one and the same. So the $220k comes from someone else, and those people aren't getting value for money, they're being robbed and stolen from by a greedy union that doesn't know when to stop biting the hand that feeds. It's pretty disgusting.

>that are very easy to join

That's the case for most service-sector unions, but a lot (certainly not all) of builder's unions seem to meter the amount of people that are allowed to join, making it prohibitively difficult to actually get into the union.

Now that sounds like a guild and illegal as fuck, but what do I know

> But US unions seem to exist nearly exclusively to protect people who don’t want to work.

It's a similar dynamic here in Australia, but it seems not in Germany and Japan.

I think the difference is that in the USA and Australia the unions are organised on a craft or occupational basis. You see this in the sorts of laws they want passed - they are invariably after laws that only union members can do a certain job. It isn't always so direct. Doctors for example insist on certain qualifications, which seems fine and necessary at first glance, but then the doctors' associations somehow manage to gate the institutions that can issue the qualifications. It's interesting how doctors have no trouble with that, but computer engineers can't bring themselves to do it.

Anyway, the outcome of "guild based unions" ends up being what others here noted. Instead of everyone in the same firm cooperating to get work done, they are all fighting to preserve their patch. In Germany and Japan, unions look to be organised around large companies. If the company goes broke the union disappears with them, so the company's incentives and the union's are more aligned. So much so the union reps are given seats on the board, and are expected to make a contribution. The unions are still focused on ensuring the distribution of profits goes more towards the employees than the shareholders of course, but nonetheless the outcome seems to be far less dysfunctional than the USA and Australian systems.

Honestly I think the problem is that unions are also acting as guilds.

Which is to say, as a union, they make deals with companies and the government and fight for regulations requiring union labor, but then they turn around and act as a guild by restricting who can join and get trained and become union labor, keeping wages high with an artificial labor shortage.

So you end up with a situation where you're only allowed to hire union elevator technicians, but also there aren't any union elevator technicians. They get high wages and all the work they want, and everyone else gets broken elevators.

I am sorry but that is utter nonsense. Unions exist to bargain collectively to protect workers from exploitations, full stop. You will find more people who don’t want to work in the C-suite than anywhere else.