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Comment by shric | Hacker News Reader

> Unions are the only legal way for workers to improve their situation around compensation and working conditions.

How about going to work somewhere with better compensation and working conditions?

Individual exit is a short-term solution to a systemic problem. Unions raise the floor, and you have no power otherwise. “Be lucky” is not a strategy that scales.

If workers could easily find jobs where employers aren’t maxing extraction at the lowest cost possible, your proposal might be realistic. In this timeline, it is a suboptimal proposal.

> Today, the US Treasury Department released a first-of-its-kind report on labor unions, highlighting the evidence that unions serve to strengthen the middle class and grow the economy at large. Over the last half century, middle-class households have experienced stagnating wages, rising income volatility, and reduced intergenerational mobility, even as the economy as a whole has prospered. Unions can improve the well-being of middle-class workers in ways that directly combat these negative trends. Pro-union policy can make a real difference to middle-class households by raising their incomes, improving their work environments, and boosting their job satisfaction. In doing so, unions can help to make the economy more equitable and robust.

https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/labor-unions...

https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Labor-Unions-And-...

(“if you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together”)

You said “Unions are the *only legal way* for workers to improve their situation around compensation and working conditions.” (Emphasis mine)

My reply was not to say unions were bad or ineffective at accomplishing the goal, it was simply refuting your blanket statement.

In case you haven't noticed, the era of sw devs being able to leave and find better conditions/pay anytime they want is gone. But even in the good old ZIRP days, leaving for better pay is not an action that can be taken collectively. OP said "workers" not "worker": if you want to improve conditions at a given company, collective bargaining is all you have.

I don't think that blanket statement is false if you interpret "workers" as "workers as a whole" (as I did when I first read it). Certainly an individual worker can quit and (try to) find a better-paying/better-hours job, but as GP notes, that method does not scale very far.

> How about going to work somewhere with better compensation and working conditions?

Generally the reason there is a company that has better working conditions and compensation to go to is because of their union… so…

or because they're trying to attract talent?

That works when labor is higher enough in demand for that to be possible, and in practice management is most likely to try to get away with lower compensation and poor working conditions.

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