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Comment by Grombobulous | Hacker News Reader

I think all employees should work for a union. My local art museum has a union. My local school system has a union. The non-profit university I graduated from has a union. Why shouldn't WMF have a union?

I really don't understand the bitterness toward them. If you look at their data, their donations are growing faster than their expenses.

The people who donate to Wikipedia/WMF want more money to go into the organization. That's the whole point of the donation. What else do you want them to do with the money exactly?

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I can't think of a single unionized organization that is run as well as or better than union-free organizations. Unionized companies all seem to be crippled by bureaucracy and unable to improve performance and output.

The daycare my parent friends go to can’t retain a teacher for longer than a year or two. I hear stories all the time about the disruption and emotional distress abruptly losing a teacher with a 1-2 weeks notice causes.

The PreK teacher at the local public school has been there over 10 years at the same school and has a masters degree. Union, of course.

I’m sure the public school system is more expensive overall. You get what you pay for.

Professional sports is probably a good counter example. Major League Baseball, for example, treats the players better than any other baseball league around the world and most of the gains were achieved through collective bargaining.

Or how about Hollywood writers? The Writers Guild of America writers are responsible for most of the most successful movies and TV of the past decade or two (maybe longer). WGA writers are treated better than just about any other screenwriters around the world.

Kaiser Permanente, Fire Sprinkler Pipe Fitters, HVAC Tin Knockers many others…

My experience is that unions very often make things stupider and less efficient.

I've been forced to give to two of them that were basically just political cosplay by children (well really the $ was taken without consent before it was even in my hands, so it was stolen)

And I've had the displeasure of working in a factory environment that was unionized. Perhaps there was a time when this made sense, but I think those instances are rare now.

See e.g. https://www.voanews.com/a/dockworkers-join-other-unions-in-t...

Dockworkers deliberately making everything worse because they want to keep their employment exactly as it has been.

I would submit the idea that a lot of union reforms that have been made to laws in the US have been specifically designed to make unions less attractive and less incentivized toward positive outcomes.

Sounds plausible!

Which laws? And why?

Here's a big paper on the subject: https://files.epi.org/pdf/215908.pdf

I'm not sure it touches on the exact concept I said, though. I've read about it somewhere else that I can't find right now.

Thanks for the reference. I am interested in your specific perspective as opposed to someone else's (much less else the received opinions from The Experts).

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