[wasx]

The attitude towards unionisation on this site is sickening.

I live in a country with a very strong union movement and the only reason I'm able to sit here typing this message is because my parents and grandparents unionised rather than live off of slavery wages. That may mean nothing to Americans where it's every man for themselves, but don't think yourselves so lucky that you got to the position you're in without workers uniting with one another and ensuring they get a fair share against the greed of the few.

It might not have affected many of you with the silver spoon you have in your mouths but the only damn reason that kids still aren't working in sweat shops and you get to go home at 5pm is because of workers organising and having each other's backs when abuses and overreach occur, and a little bit of solidarity for each other is necessary when you see such flagrant abuses like this.

[shubhamjain]

> I live in a country with a very strong union movement and the only reason I'm able to sit here typing this message is because my parents and grandparents unionised rather than live off of slavery wages. That may mean nothing to Americans where it's every man for themselves, but don't think yourselves so lucky that you got to the position you're in without workers uniting with one another and ensuring they get a fair share against the greed of the few.

There is another side of this coin too. I just finished reading The Box, a book on the advent of containerization, and it's appalling how unions fiercely fought any sort of mechanization. A job that required only 1-2 longshoremen mandatorily needed many more because unions said so. Days, and sometimes weeks, were wasted on strikes when a consensus couldn't be reached. Jobs that weren't needed anymore were still forced to be kept because any labor-saving innovation was undesirable. In the end, it was more cost-effective to compulsorily retire the longshoremen with a guaranteed income than to fight them.

I don't deny that the unions serve a purpose but the exploitation of their dominance can surely set back innovation by years. I wouldn't want to part of an organization that mandates that I can't touch PHP code because I am a Frontend Engineer.

[gaius]

Unions in the UK and US are antagonistic to the point that they will gladly destroy a company or even an entire industry rather than give an inch (union bosses don’t care, they are very well looked after, strangely). But unions in France and Germany are far cleverer, they would never kill the goose that laid the golden eggs. That’s why Germany is strong in manufacturing AND has superb working conditions... and the UK has a service economy and zero-hours contracts

[conanbatt]

Smart unions everywhere do that, but because of that they also regularly sell the workers.

In argentina, unions are constitutionally protected. Union leaders are defacto politicians, as they cannot be arrested for many crimes without congress approval. What is unique about argentina is that unions are right-wing and shut the left-wing parties out. And the left parties (socialist, communist) always denounce that the unions are constantly selling off the workers.

Today, the strongest union leader is getting indicted because it used union's funds to sustain his own soccer club.

[mdekkers]

That’s why Germany is strong in manufacturing AND has superb working conditions... and the UK has a service economy and zero-hours contracts

Bravo, well said. Solid working conditions, meaningful employee input to company decision making processes, and excellent remuneration for all doesn't really impact the bottom line but significantly improves quality and productivity in most cases.

[gambiting]

In my experience Unions in Poland will sooner let the company close than give an inch, to a point where the government is bailing out private companies just so they wouldn't get a massive strike by the unions.

[TheCoelacanth]

Unions in the US and UK are antagonistic because businesses have been trying to destroy them for over a century. Many companies actually had striking workers murdered in an attempt to control unions.

German unions are less antagonistic because they are required by law to get representation on the boards of all companies with more than 500 employees.

[willbw]

And France has...?

[telchar]

High productivity, great worker protections, and high unemployment. Seems to be a mixed bag but the workers who have jobs wouldn't trade it.

[pm90]

France is a very interesting country. I would really like to know details about labor conditions there before making the default judgement that I used to when I was younger, that unionization and over-regulation had basically killed the French economy, causing the high levels of unemployment. They seem to have a system of protecting their workers, now if there was a way to also increase innovation/employment so more people could benefit from this system ...

[realusername]

At the moment it seems to be a choice in the developed world for high unemployment or high ratio of poor part-time workers , there's not enough work for everybody anyway so I'm not sure which one is the worst.

[conanbatt]

"The only way a union can effectively increase the wages of its workers is by reducing the amount of workers" - Milton Friedman

[gaius]

I like Friedman but this manifestly isn’t true: it’s about the ratio of capital (and management) to labour. Any profitable company can set this ratio to whatever they want.

[themistocle]

A decent way of life and some semblance of culture.

[gsnedders]

> There is another side of this coin too. I just finished reading The Box, a book on the advent of containerization, and it's appalling how unions fiercely fought any sort of mechanization. A job that required only 1-2 longshoremen mandatorily needed many more because unions said so. Days, and sometimes weeks, were wasted on strikes when a consensus couldn't be reached. Jobs that weren't needed anymore were still forced to be kept because any labor-saving innovation was undesirable. In the end, it was more cost-effective to compulsorily retire the longshoremen with a guaranteed income than to fight them.

To be fair, that's a failing with those unions, and in a sense part of the systemic problems with US unions; plenty of unions elsewhere saw automation as inevitable and got training for their members to find jobs in other areas.

[pm90]

> To be fair, that's a failing with those unions, and in a sense part of the systemic problems with US unions; plenty of unions elsewhere saw automation as inevitable and got training for their members to find jobs in other areas.

Do you think this is because the Unions are different, or perhaps maybe the people/culture are different?

[gsnedders]

> Do you think this is because the Unions are different, or perhaps maybe the people/culture are different?

What is a union if not a collective of its members? i.e., is there a difference between unions being different and people/culture being different?

[peoplewindow]

Which unions? I grew up in the UK and unions there were antagonistic in the same way. French farming unions regularly pull stunts like dumping cow shit on the roads:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2822120/French-farme...

The only country I've ever seen held up as an example of productive unionisation is Germany, and unions there don't seem to bear much resemblence to unions anywhere else. Possibly because of its unique history with respect to socialism.

[gsnedders]

> The only country I've ever seen held up as an example of productive unionisation is Germany, and unions there don't seem to bear much resemblence to unions anywhere else. Possibly because of its unique history with respect to socialism.

There's several other Germanic examples, including Sweden/Norway (and I'd be surprised if Denmark wasn't the same here) and Austria, and I believe Switzerland.

[ubernostrum]

What I think is interesting is the different standards applied by people like you -- and even whether you realize you're doing it!

Concentrated power in the hands of capital has had utterly devastating effects on millions if not billions of people. It has easily cost 7-digit numbers of lives. Yet in general, capitalism is taken for granted as a good, discussions of problems always get tons and tons of "yeah, but even if it did that bad thing here's a bunch of good that outweighs it", and at best people suggest only very moderate restraints as a remedy.

Putting even small amounts of power in the hands of labor... does not get that kind of pass. Instead, the focus is almost exclusively on harms, flipping the story to "I guess they did some good, but..." and then bringing up criticism after criticism, either implying or outright saying that unless labor unions manage to somehow be perfect angels at all times it won't be worth allowing them to exist.

What's even more ironic is that a labor union is just a legal form that pools a resource, for the benefit of those who provide that resource, in ways that wield more power than any of them could individually. The only difference between a labor union and a for-profit corporation is the resource being pooled.

[Barraketh]

Actually I think that you're just looking at the situation from a different angle than many of us. The reason I have some distrust of unions is that they sometimes seem to promote inefficiency as a policy. The distribution of money problem is actually orthogonal to the problem of "how do you do task X most efficiently". If a machine can do the work of 10 men, then to have those 10 men doing the work of the machine is literally wasting their lives.

I wish that unions pursued more contracts of the form "we get X percent of revenue/profits" and then distributed those profits amongst their membership the way they saw fit. This way decreasing the amount of work per person does not decrease the amount of money per person and business and union interests are aligned. I'm sure there are practical reasons why that's difficult though.

[guelo]

I can think of a thousand examples of capitalists pursuing inefficiency as a policy. First thing that came to mind is when food companies change packaging to hide the fact that they reduced the amount being sold.

[ubernostrum]

No, I really think there is a double standard for corporations versus unions.

Witness the complaint about unions pushing back on automation -- yet how many companies and corporate cartels have attempted to quash, or even outlaw, new technology they saw as a threat to their revenue streams? Why do we not simply say that we live in a greed-driven system, and this is the consequence, and try to address the root of it? Instead we get endless "well unions do some bad things" comments, imposing a far higher standard of perfection than we'd ever apply to a corporation.

[GuiA]

How is this "the other side of the coin"? This story makes it sound like the union did its job (= protecting the interests of individual workers over the interests of the company) exactly as intended, and technological progress went on forward unimpeded, as we can attest to today.

Sure, some executives would have rather not paid for the retirement of the longshoremen. Without unions, they would have fired all of the longshoremen in one fell swoop, and made a few millions more in the short term (for the exact same results in the long term). But what happens to the longshoremen in that universe? Do they tend to commit suicide more than the average? Develop an opioid addiction? etc.

I don't think a fair society is one where it is acceptable to fuck over an entire subsegment of the population for the profit of "investors", "the market", "technological progress", or whatever you want to call it.

[danmaz74]

In other words, both unions and capital owners will abuse their power if they have too much of it...

[themistocle]

Who is automation for? What end does the technology serve? If the economy doesn’t serve humanity then to hell with it. Offer people decent lives, or at least don’t act surprised when the luddites come to smash your precious “labor-saving”.

[austenallred]

> Who is automation for?

All of us.

I, for one, am glad that I'm not sending this message via pigeon by the light of a candle, because I wouldn't be sending it - I'd probably be spending my days plowing some field somewhere were it not for "job killing" technological innovation.

50% of the United States used to be farmers, now it's 2%. We sure as hell don't have 48% unemployment, and I'd guess that nearly every American has it better now than they would have in the same social strata then.

Tesla saw the promise of electricity and automation as a magical force that would free men from toiling away doing things they actually needn't do. And I think he was largely right! Think of where we would be if Tesla, Edison and Westinghouse refused to work on electricity, lightbulbs, and electric motors because it would put the people that stoke fires for a living out of a job.

What happened when tractors came and took all of the farming jobs away? Food became much less expensive, and we all ended up doing different things - the vast majority of which are much better than farming. And the luddites would have smashed the tractors?! What a counterproductive way to try and help people.

It's not always beautiful in the short-run, but the economy cures itself relatively quickly, and the people that fill the gaps are handsomely rewarded. To fight innovation for the sake of jobs, so far as I can tell, is almost always short-sighted.

[themistocle]

> What happened when tractors came and took all of the farming jobs away?

Have you heard of “The Grapes of Wrath”?

No one is talking about fighting “innovation” for the sake of jobs. I questioned to point to the central conflict of who benefits from all of this. The old socialists were the most technologically hopeful, because they believed new technologies would spare workers from drudgery. Yet if you look at the vast interior of the United States, almost every community is worse off now than it was 25 years ago. Old, bad jobs at least gave people dignity and a sense of place.

Your naïve faith in high school economics fails to address a key question of our times: as technology races ahead of social ability to adapt and integrate it, how will people manage? Leave behind Ayn Rand and look to history: this same crisis has played out in the 1st century BCE in Rome and the 18th century in France just to name two famous examples. Depriving common people a decent living leads to disaster.

People need to make a living. Immigration alone has provoked widespread resentment. When self-driving cars and the like displace more workers at an unprecedented pace the outcome will be violent. Rhetoric and greed will not stem the high tides of blood.

[austenallred]

> Your naïve faith in high school economics fails to address a key question of our times: as technology races ahead of social ability to adapt and integrate it, how will people manage? Leave behind Ayn Rand and look to history.

We don’t need to look to Rome for that. It’s happened a dozen times in the United States. This isn’t a new scenario. Though it certainly is simple to call anything that disagrees with your understanding of the world “high school economics.”

And you can quit it with the Ayn Rand strawman. Just because someone is discussing economics doesn’t mean they’re Randian any more than it makes you a Marxist.

[pm90]

> We don’t need to look to Rome for that. It’s happened a dozen times in the United States. This isn’t a new scenario.

I think you're being too optimistic. The only time I can think of where the US made the switch successfully was when creating entirely new job sectors. e.g. from Agriculture to Industry meant there were similar numbers of jobs in Industry, and then to the Services. But Automation seems to be a dead end: one worker is so productive he/she can manage an entire fleet of autonomous trucks (e.g.)! So there will most certainly be a lot of people losing their jobs and the kind of jobs opening up for them... don't seem to be many.

[themistocle]

What I referred to as high school economics are sentimental rhetoric like:

> Who is automation for? All of us

Your arguments have largely been innocent either by design or accident from the terrifying reality of daily life under our glorious economic system. I meant no personal insult to you of course. Your words reflect a broader notion that questions like automation are problems to be solved – a fine mindset from a technical perspective. But these are not just technical questions, they are grave conflicts where millions of lives hang in the balance. Slate Star Codex has a better exposition of this difference[0].

> Think of where we would be if Tesla, Edison and Westinghouse refused to work on electricity, lightbulbs, and electric motors because it would put the people that stoke fires for a living out of a job.

This is nearly identical to the plot from Ayn Rand's book "Anthem"[1].

[0]: http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/24/conflict-vs-mistake/ [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthem_(novella)

> The next day he presents his work to the World Council of Scholars. Horrified that he has done unauthorized research, they assail him as a "wretch" and a "gutter cleaner" and say he must be punished. They want to destroy his discovery so it will not disrupt the plans of the World Council and the Department of Candles.

[eecc]

The Luddites smashed machinery because the ownership was using it to drop their cottage industries off the map without a moments notice. No negotiations, no winding down, retooling, retraining or nothing, just pack your shit and go starve out of sight. Can’t see how that wouldn’t happen again

[dredmorbius]

Political economy, considered as a branch of the science of a statesman or legislator, proposes two distinct objects: first, to provide a plentiful revenue or subsistence for the people, or more properly to enable them to provide such a revenue or subsistence for themselves; and secondly, to supply the state or commonwealth with a revenue sufficient for the public services. It proposes to enrich both the people and the sovereign.

-- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, introduction to Book IV.

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/...

[chrischen]

Depends if you work to live or if you live to work.

If the latter then fake busy work is good for society, regardless of why it’s being done.

[djrobstep]

Why should anybody support "innovation" in a system that subjects you to brutal poverty when you lose your job?

"I might lose my job and watch my children starve, but at least my bosses will be making more money and I might get marginally cheaper consumer goods in a few years time?"

[ageofwant]

Who owns the 'innovation', and who benefits from that ownership? Did the advent of containerization mean the longshoremen could now only work 2 days a week and explore the fine arts with the 3 days they now gained ?

[acct1771]

No, 3/5 of them simply became milkmen. Wait.

[debt]

There needs to be a balance. They do become powerful but also are major forces for raising the standard living overall.

[wolco]

If you are a frontend engineer perhaps you should leave the php code to the backend developers who understand it. If you are a full stack living in a frontend world that's different. A union could help enforce that. Now your company is forced to hire a backend developer or relabel you full stack with addional pay.

There is a reason why developers need to leave a place ever few years.

[baron816]

1) Unions in America don’t have the same culture as unions wherever you are. There isn’t the same amount of trust here, and that means each side is just trying to take as much as they can, even if that eventually leads to each other’s destruction.

2) Do you not see the flaw in the logic of “something worked before, so we should keep doing it regardless of changing circumstances.”

3) American tech workers make much more than tech workers everywhere else (except Switzerland I think). Most companies know its better to give us great benefits and perks, give us autonomy and control over our work, not overwork us, etc. some startups are run by people who don’t know what they’re doing. Employees there should leave if they can.

[djsumdog]

The amount of money a tech worker makes shouldn't really factor in. A personal example: Non-competes are banned in California. They're banned in Illinois .. if you make $13/hr or less. Why does your income change your rights?

I've never signed a non-compete and refuse to. In the past most companies that had them would just take them out. "Oh they're not enforceable anyway, so if it makes you uncomfortable we'll remove it for you." I still sign NDAs, waver of patent rights, waver of copyright, anti-poaching, agree to all IP transfers, etc. etc. I just refuse to sign things that say "For 6 months after your employment with x .. you have to ask us if you can work for y" (I've never even worked for a direct competitor of a previous company).

Lately it's been getting more and more difficult to fight for this right. It's getting to the point where I've considered moving back to California just because I know this right is protected by law.

Tech workers don't have unions. We don't collectively bargain. But a lot of us also don't fully read contracts and hold to certain labor standards.

And as a side note, if we had unions and they drove down wages a bit so everyone gets paid more fairly, wouldn't that help a lot in cities were rising wages drive a wedge into income inequality? People in Seattle and The Valley who run restaurants and Starbucks have to live pretty far away and commute 1 ~ 2 hours on a train/bus/car to be able to afford to live in cities where only a few decades ago, they could live and work easily within less than an hour bus commute.

If unions could drive wages more equal (even if they'd go down a bit with everyone getting paid more equal), wouldn't that be beneficial? Wouldn't it be nice if everyone's wage wasn't a secret? If you're a Junior or Senior or SA-I or SA-II, everyone with that tile gets paid the same so everyone knows what everyone makes and you make that same amount no matter if you're black, white, male, female or other?

[Eridrus]

Housing is largely a positional good, so for that Starbucks employee to live close by, someone else has to commute. Building more housing makes it less accute, but there will always be people willing to deal with long commutes, so that is the behaviour you see. I mean, I work at a company that pays very well in NYC and I have co-workers with 1hr+ commutes because they traded off commute time for a nicer home.

[taurath]

First mover problem - nobody wants to take a pay cut when the carrot of homeownership is close but still so out of reach.

[marricks]

I think your point 1) is just a fantastic illustration of how effective companies have been at villianizing and attacking unions.

For example, Walmart could stomach some unionized workers, but they straight up close down stores in retaliation, and I bet it's not just Walmart.

Those stories then get played as "unions destroy jobs" when it's really companies are so beholden to stock holders they wont let workers get any standing to bargain.

That's just one example, union busting and breaking is a business at this point and companies pay for advice and strategies.

I get you're probably not trying to seem biased, but it just shows how deeply the US culture has turned against what seems like such a reasonable thing, workers being able to lobby together for fair treatment. Otherwise it's really just letting companies set the rules and workers being forced to play by them.

[unethical_ban]

>2) Do you not see the flaw in the logic of “something worked before, so we should keep doing it regardless of changing circumstances.”

Do you not see the flaw in the logic "Something is imperfect, therefore discard it"?

I work at one of the most rewarding (financially) Information Security employers in the country, I believe, and I enjoy most parts of my job. Does that mean I should not be allowed to coordinate with my coworkers on fair pay and overtime conditions? At what point should I "suck it up" and who gets to say?

[baron816]

>Does that mean I should not be allowed to coordinate with my coworkers

Companies aren’t allowed to coordinate together to get what they consider to be “fair” prices. I think it’s crazy that you actually are, because it’s everyone else that loses out because of your collusion.

[coliveira]

A company already coordinates the salary of all their workers. It is only fair that workers also be allowed to look out for their collective interests.

[unethical_ban]

See my response to stickfigure. The relationship is not balanced.

[stickfigure]

You're somebody I pay for a job done. You could leave me at any time if somebody else offers you more money, and, statistically, you're probably going to in about 2 years. You don't even have to give me 2 week's notice; that's just a courtesy.

Employment is a voluntary relationship between two people. Sounds like you're trying to make it voluntary for you but not me.

[unethical_ban]

Just like we have a progressive tax structure, I believe most regulations regarding corporate obligations should be progressive.

Your decision to callously let one employee go, when your pre-tax income is $1,000,000,000, is negligible. The impact to that person is the security of their family and future.

Maybe if your PTI is $100,000, and you're a local startup or a bar, or a small MSP, it's more reasonable that you need flexibility in staffing and can't support any "slack" in employee output.

But yes, it is absolutely asymmetrical, to the benefit of the party that has the power to withstand ending the relationship more. Which one is that?

[conanbatt]

> Your decision to callously let one employee go, when your pre-tax income is $1,000,000,000, is negligible. The impact to that person is the security of their family and future.

This is such a spurious comparison. First, it compares the workers wealth to the employer's wealth in an attempt to make a redistributive argument.

Making it hard to fire people is not the way to tax the wealthy to help the less wealthy. There are much better measures for that.

The second is that it conflates what you think is right as a narrator of the argument but with other people's money. It's always so easy to make other people pay for things you believe in!

[cortesoft]

You know, I agree with you to an extent, and for certain people who work certain jobs, I think this logic makes sense. If you are a person with the skills in a field that is highly competitive, you can probably get a new job as soon as you decide to leave the previous one.

But for most people, this is not true; it might take anywhere from months to years to find a new job. Now, you can easily argue that this is the same for employers, and I would agree that you are correct; it can take months to years for an employer to find someone capable of doing a job.

So, it might logically seem like both parties are making an even trade, with equal risk for both. Either side can walk away from the deal at any time, and both sides have the risk of taking a while to find a replacement for the other.

However, if you think about it more, you see why the employer has a huge advantage over the employee, and why I think it is a bit simplistic to just say 'both sides enter and leave the agreement voluntarily, so we don't need any protections for anyone'

When a person loses their job, they are losing 100% of their earning power. That has a HUGE effect on the quality of life for that person. On the other hand, a company is only losing 1/n of their productive capacity. Even if you assume the person is worth 10 other people, any decently sized company is going to be able to absorb the loss pretty easily.

Now, I am not saying that we need super strict worker protections, but I don't think we can just wave away the concerns about the power imbalance between workers and employers.

Personally, I think good unemployment benefits is probably the best mitigation that maintains everyone's freedom while still mitigating the power imbalance somewhat.

[Eridrus]

Personally, I am massively in favor of providing things like unemployment benefits through the state, rather than unions.

[acct1771]

From another perspective, it sounds like you're trying to stop other workers from telling you to get bent if you treat their colleagues improperly! :)

[darpa_escapee]

You're aware that firms voluntarily sign contracts with unions, correct?

You are also misrepresenting the power imbalance a single worker who needs to eat has against a multibillion dollar company or industry.

Unions try to correct the power imbalance between labor and capital.

Edit: was beaten by a more elegant response 15min ago.

[coliveira]

Most of the so-called abuses of unions happen only because employers don't want to negotiate fair conditions. They prefer to drive conditions to a dead-end instead of working with union leaders to promote shared interests. This way, they can demonize unions and increase their power over workers.

[conanbatt]

That's usually not true. The strongest unions happen to be in the strongest jobs. This happens so because the strongest unions need to have the biggest funds, and the biggest funds come from the better paid workers.

Cause and effect mix the other way around in public opinion. This is why the weakest and most populous workers actually dont have strong unions, because there's not enough money to build one.

[rbobby]

> not overwork us,

This stuck out to me. More than a few companies require developers to put in a lot of unpaid overtime in order to finish a project close to the original schedule. There's even a lovely name for it.... crunch time. It is endemic in the game industry, and pretty common in regular IT organizations.

And don't a lot of startups, especially in the very early founding days, expect devs to put in long hours without additional compensation?

And I worry that this has knock on effects such that some folks are locked out of employment opportunities. Got a young family or starting a family? No need to apply. Older and wiser and not willing to trade quality of life so the company can meet a busted schedule? No need to apply.

At its core, unpaid overtime, is caused by management mistakes (unrealistic project schedule). And not often enough will managers face up to the consequences of their mistakes.

[sidlls]

Ever read or read about "Atlas Shrugged"? There's a strong strain of "I'm John Galt" in software development. "Everyone" thinks they're smarter, better negotiators, etc. and that a union would only hold them back.

[prepend]

I think this is in part because software is such a 100x type of profession. There are lots and lots of single person software companies. And there are startups doing with a handful of excellent programmers more than giant corporations.

Since the work isn’t rote and the talent is super creative, this means it’s frequently better for the individual to not need a union.

I’m sure there are other professions, but I’ve seen more copies of Atlas Shrugged on programmer bookshelves than other professions.

[ryanobjc]

ironically many programmers ARE doing fairly rote jobs. And getting paid more than ever for it!

[prepend]

That’s true, but I think the rote programmers are making much less than the awesome folks. I’ve done a bit of hiring and it’s pretty common to have 50-75k salary bands for positions based on performance. That’s a huge swing. You the different between being a cog at AT&T or something making $75k and a profit center developer could be 150-200.

This isn’t even accounting for all the entry positions at $40k and all the google stories of $500k after stock.

I’m always surprised that BLS shows the average national salary to be like $80k.

[sidlls]

This is a pretty HN-bubble view of the software industry. I'm not surprised at all at a low (compared to SV wages) salary. The Bay Area (and similar metro areas) is an extreme anomaly in terms of developer compensation.

[ShabbosGoy]

> That’s true, but I think the rote programmers are making much less than the awesome folks.

What do you define as rote programming? The interview process seems pretty rote to me. Literally the same questions recycled over and over again.

[sjg007]

I call this phenomenon “adolescent” libertarianism.

[matte_black]

In most cases, they’re not wrong...

[sidlls]

They're not wrong in the sense that they're not even wrong (similar to https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Not_even_wrong, except in this context).

[mc32]

The problem with our unions is that they have not modernized, often the union is more interested in the union itself than the worker. Some are known for graft ad corruption, and they also on occasion tell their membership how to vote politically.

If they want people to sympathize with them they have to modernize and address modern issues. They can't live off their 1920s laurels.

[wasx]

A union, the act of unionisation is inherently political, of course they'll say vote for "x". You have different interests to your boss and your boss has different interests to you, of course you will vote and engage politically differently.

Could you explain specifically what you mean by "modernise"? Or how they are not addressing modern issues? I could point to hundreds of examples in Australia of very successful industrial action that addresses "modern" issues, so you'll really need to be more specific.

[mc32]

Modernize:

1. Base promotions on skill, not seniority.

2. Address problem members properly -fire transgressors.

3. Allow cross-industry move (people change jobs)

4. Eliminate corruption

5. Think of workers + company (not union for the sake of the union, etc)

6. Don't politicize (cozy up to one candidate or another) fight for beliefs not political parties.

7. Don't promote luddism.

8. Don't get in the way of work (only union members from local 783 can turn that screw and we won't have one in the shop till Monday next week)

9. (almost forgot) Stem outsourcing.

[rileymat2]

> Base promotions on skill, not seniority.

I have always been curious about the long term efficacy of that policy. At its face, it seems good, but I wonder if it disincentivizes expirenced people from training promising young talent.

[ageofwant]

You can apply every one of those to companies as well. If companies 'modernise' the need for unions will go away.

[mc32]

A few, but not most. I guess the presumption is we need unions otherwise the whole discussion is moot.

[dizzystar]

Well, you'll get US-centric answers.

The longshoremen union is a great example of a union that stops technology.

The auto workers and steel workers unions didn't help the Midwest stay afloat either.

[rtpg]

you think the auto worker unions killed the midwest?

The industry is still afloat despite foreign car companies eating US car company's lunch (because of poor quality on the US side, and that's not on the linepeople), and many people in those industries are getting proper paychecks.

The only difference I see in a non-unionized auto industry is even lower wages and less time off. Unions didn't cause bad car design.

[skybrian]

I don't know about that. It's pretty old history now, but you might want to learn about what happened at NUMMI versus most other American manufacturing plants at the time (early 80's). Plenty of blame to go around, with management, union rules, and workers, but there are vivid tales of workers doing things resulted in very bad quality. [1]

Today, it seems pretty clear that police unions in some cities are a big blocker when it comes to meaningful reforms.

Which is not to say I'm anti-union, but there are some cautionary tales. It's mixed. Scorched-earth tactics (on either side) are not the answer.

[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015

[kevingadd]

No possible effort by a steel workers union is going to stop globalization from hollowing out US manufacturing. That's a problem that has to be tackled at a higher level.

[mc32]

In that particular case, I think you're right.

Old technology meant steel coming out of PA was expensive. Steel should have presented a united front (labor and employers) demanding Carter and Reagan address dumping and drive for modernization --even if that meant fewer workers in the future --but at least the industry would remain.

After US announced 30% tariffs on imported solar panels, a Chinese company said they'd build a factory in the US [1].

We should demand fair reciprocal trade. None of this WTO, promises we put up with.

[1]http://money.cnn.com/2018/01/30/news/economy/jinko-solar-us-...

[kevingadd]

The panel tariffs are a problem because it's possible the negative impact on non-manufacturing (solar installations, etc) will cancel out the benefits from the tariffs :( But yes, there are definitely things the government could have done to protect local manufacturing. I'm still not sure the steel industry could've been saved. At this point I think the real failure is that the government didn't do enough to help people trapped in dying rust belt cities. Unions can't bear the blame for that.

[coliveira]

Not saying that unions are perfect, but the US auto industry problems are much deeper than unions. These unions are just navigating on a difficult situation that was not caused by workers. Viewing them as the cause for the troubles of the auto and steel industry is just stupid, plainly coming from anti-labor mindset.

[closeparen]

> You have different interests to your boss and your boss has different interests to you, of course you will vote and engage politically differently.

Nope. At my employer, anyway, engineers and the managers they report to are pretty similarly compensated and pretty similarly motivated to achieve the team's goals. Somewhere between Manager II and Senior Director you start to be meaningfully distinct from the engineers, but "your boss" as a software engineer is a (sometimes, not always) slightly more senior version of you who made a lateral move to management which you may or may not be planning soon.

[ubernostrum]

The problem with our corporations is that they have not modernized, often the corporation is more interested in the corporation itself than the profit. Some are known for graft and corruption, and they also on occasion tell their employees how to vote politically.

If they want people to sympathize with them they have to modernize and address modern issues. They can't live off their 1950s laurels.

[brandonmenc]

My mother was in IBEW for ~40 years, and went on strike a couple of times. Grandfather was a union organizer. I was in IBEW very briefly as a teenager working for GTE.

My father went from being a union steward to having grievances filed against him as a member of management during his ~40 years at GE.

I've seen both sides.

imo, unions are best suited for workers who have no leverage: at jobs where the worker is an interchangeable part, or is unspecialized, or where the labor market is flooded, or when they want to minimize changing employers - software development is none of the above.

Personally, I think software developers should be paid 2-4x what they are now - I say that as a developer, and as an employer who cut their checks at a company I helped start. Their value-add is just way higher than the current pay rate reflects.

How to achieve that? Maybe a professional organization is needed - similar to doctors - but a union and all its trappings? Meh.

[tomlock]

I find it so weird that so many software developers think they're being paid fairly in the face of Google having massive reserves of cash just lying around.

[whataretensors]

Additionally there is lots of software written 5-10 years ago making tons of money today where the original authors get none of it.

[ryanwaggoner]

There’s probably an order of magnitude more software that was written 5-10 years ago that lost money but the software devs were still paid for.

[whataretensors]

Yes but the loss is linear while the gains are often exponents. I bet the integral of each would make the 'lost money' nearly insignificant.

[ryanwaggoner]

Well, yeah. Otherwise there’d be little incentive to risk that money. And you wouldn’t call those losses insignificant if it was your money :)

[rtpg]

not to mention all the anti-poaching stuff that was revealed.

Why would they need to have those agreements if people were being paid a fair price?

[skybrian]

When you realize you can retire early, it's quite easy to forgive them. Not realizing you're very fortunate would make you kind of a jerk, no?

[tomlock]

So if you can retire early, complaining about your employer makes you a jerk?

[skybrian]

No, just complaining about being underpaid when anyone looking at things objectively would say you're well off and have been treated well.

[tomlock]

Why do you feel like you can correctly discern what the objective view is?

[closeparen]

>Google having massive reserves of cash just lying around.

What does that have to do with anything?

[tomlock]

Clearly, employees generated that money and don't have it.

[alphonsegaston]

In the face of all of the companies that illegally colluded to suppress developer wages sitting on massive reserves of cash...

It’s the same thing as poor whites clinging to racism because they think it elevates their class position. False consciousness abounds.

[conanbatt]

Doctors in the US are unionized, for the economical sense of the word, and it is one of the reasons of high cost of health care and under-supply.

Software and the internet, thankfully, is generally libertarian because thats how the internet generally behaves. Otherwise, the U.S. would bar foreigners from practicing software engineering, and limit the amount of people that can have a software license.

[chimeracoder]

> Doctors in the US are unionized, for the economical sense of the word,

No they are not, for any sense of the word.

> and it is one of the reasons of high cost of health care and under-supply.

No, they are not. Aside from the fact that doctors collectively have about zero control over the total supply, physician earnings account for about 7% of healthcare expenditures. That's a drop in the bucket, even if you reduced that to zero.

> Otherwise, the U.S. would bar foreigners from practicing software engineering, and limit the amount of people that can have a software license.

This much is completely true, and you can look to the incredibly long and xenophobic history of labor unions for evidence of that.

[ShabbosGoy]

> Personally, I think software developers should be paid 2-4x what they are now - I say that as a developer, and as an employer who cut their checks at a company I helped start. Their value-add is just way higher than the current pay rate reflects.

It’s an issue with the tool startups use to run their businesses: either C or S corps.

What if a startup used a DAO instead of a corporation? I’d suspect you’d see the rate paid out by the smart contract would be proportional to an engineer’s contribution.

Measuring the engineer’s contribution is non-obvious though; it’s not a simple metric like LoC, bug reports closed, feature requests completed, etc.

[dredmorbius]

Guilds

[packetized]

I have a parent that was wholly failed by the CWA after 24 years of service at C&W, South Central Bell, and BellSouth. I’m glad that you have an anecdote to share, but please don’t think they’re the norm.

[wasx]

This is the second time CWA has been used as an argument against all unions in this comments section. Perhaps CWA is just a piss poor union?

[ihuman]

It seems pretty appropriate to use CWA's past as an argument against CWA, since the article is about CWA.

[wasx]

Well they haven't actually used their past actions, they've just said that they've been "failed". Seems like if you're on an anti-union bend you could give specifics rather than vague complaints?

[ihuman]

> Seems like if you're on an anti-union bend you could give specifics rather than vague complaints?

I'm not the person complaining about CWA. That's the user "packetized."

[closeparen]

You don't get to make a "bad apples" argument against unions. It's 100% of the point of unionization that all workers in an industry are bound by its decisions with no recourse. If you find your industry's union to be piss poor, you can suck it up or find a different line of work.

That would be much worse than the current situation for software engineers, where if you find your boss's decisions to be piss poor, you can go get a better offer down the street.

[brandonmenc]

Can you provide some specifics?

We were represented by IBEW at GTE, and when my mother's job was moved to Florida, they got a pretty decent severance deal. Curious to hear how things were handled elsewhere.

[all_blue_chucks]

This is probably because most American's exposure to unions is the teacher's union, and the teacher's union promotes based on tenure, not merit.

[djsumdog]

Tenure is actually valuable at the University level .. or at least it was when professors weren't afraid of controversial research. People like Churchill, post 9/11, kept their jobs and promoted ideas that, although not everyone agreed with, at least promoted discussion and made people think.

Today, let's take an controversial issue like say: climate change. There are actually quite a few secular scientists that don't agree with a lot of the man-made climate change ideas. Al Gore would have you believe differently. Many of them even get their ideas published, but they're often criticized heavily and often pushed out of Universities, even though they have tenure.

There are also documentaries like Waiting for Superman that place every fault of child development on bad teachers and teachers unions. It's a pretty bias film and doesn't even consider other factors like bad neighborhoods, bad parents or poverty and tries to squarely place all the blame on teachers unions.

[ryanwaggoner]

There are actually quite a few secular scientists that don't agree with a lot of the man-made climate change ideas

Quite a few credible experts in relevant fields of study?

I recognize that if there’s genuinely an academy-wide bias that pushes these people out or discredits them it might be hard to give examples, but could you try?

I’d really like the see the other side of an intelligent climate debate.

[djsumdog]

Dr. Judith Curry is one of them. She's a Georgia Tech professor wrote the book Climate Models for the Layman.

Here's also a somewhat more editorialized report about the recent adjustments/recalibrations to the Remote Sensing Lower Troposphere Data:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlnwhcO5NC0

I don't like some of the political/Orwellian stuff he goes into in the beginning, but the remote sensing data is interesting to me as I'm currently working on a project to get soil moisture data in Ethiopia to use it to re-calibrate satellite (remote sensing) data.

I've also talked to some farming/loan startups that talk about data variability in remote sensing data and accuracy problems. There's a lot of current climate change work that directly depends on RSS data.

[ryanwaggoner]

She seems very credible but also in agreement with consensus in many ways, but a bit less alarmingly so.

So good example but that just sounds like someone who is generally in agreement but a bit of an outlier. Doesn’t strike me as “quite a few”, but I’m not asking you to list them all. Just hoping there was a half dozen examples or a list somewhere :)

[closeparen]

Tenure in this case refers to "time in job" - teacher pay is based on how long they've been working. Raises aren't subject to performance, only the passage of time.

[fjsolwmv]

Teachers don't get promoted.

[harryh]

the only damn reason that...

Doesn't labor productivity increases and spending some of that new found wealth on leisure time also have something to do with these things?

[wasx]

What new found wealth do you think people would have without workers pushing for their rights? Without collective action and group bargaining, we would still be working 16 hour days. Progress doesn't just happen it requires people pushing and fighting for their rights, and our slice of the pie would not have magically gotten bigger just because the pie got bigger.

[ttoinou]

Should we have a law to have a 0 hour work day ?

[harryh]

What new found wealth do you think people would have without workers pushing for their rights?

The wealth created by productivity improvements due to new technology.

Programmers make a lot more money now than they did 20 years ago. Not because of unions (which are extremely rare for programmers), but because of productivity improvements. A single programmer can accomplish vastly more now than was possible in the past.

The same is generally true for all professions though the rate of improvement is obviously generally much much slower.

You're certainly right to claim that unionization can somewhat move the needle when it comes to the distribution of earnings between capital and labor, but overall this effect tends to be pretty small when compared to improvements due to productivity gains as long as we're looking at things on the scale of decades and not just the short term.

[sedachv]

> Programmers make a lot more money now than they did 20 years ago. Not because of unions (which are extremely rare for programmers), but because of productivity improvements. A single programmer can accomplish vastly more now than was possible in the past.

That is complete nonsense. If your hypothesized productivity increase were true, it would be reflected in a decreased demand for programming labor (just like the advent of combines and tractors made farm workers more productive and decreased the demand for farm labor). The only reason programmers are paid more now than 20 years ago is because of an increase in demand for their labor.

The productivity improvements come from the product of this labor: software. This explains the growth in demand for programmers - telecommunications infrastructure improvements and ubiquitous computers mean that companies now have many more opportunities for automating processes with software than they did 20 years ago, and are trying to take advantage of these opportunities to increase profits.

[fjsolwmv]

Programmers make more money because their work is profitable AND demand far outstripped supply. Walmart is also highly profitable but labor supply exceeds demand so low wages.

[prewett]

Google has a profit margin of 20% while Walmart has a profit margin of 2.3%, according to Yahoo! Finance. Labor supply for Walmart probably does exceed demand, but that is only because Walmart uses unskilled labor. Walmart can't pay much more than it does without raising prices, but it also can't raise prices much and maintain its market segment as lowest cost provider.

[dreamfactored]

No - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day

[harryh]

Labor Unions were obviously a big factor and that link does a great job documenting that. But why did unions at that time choose to bargain for a decrease in hours worked instead of pay increases?

Because wages had risen sufficiently that workers valued an increase in leisure time more than they valued an increase in income. It required productivity rising to get to this point.

[eropple]

Unions bargained for defined-length days because longer days were killing people through both physical grind and the inevitable failures of (non-negligent) attention that happen when one is worked to the bone.

[darpa_escapee]

Instead of speculating about the reasons why workers wanted defined work hours and work weeks, why don't you use the many free resources at your disposal to either read primary sources or a summary someone wrote up?

[harryh]

I have.

That's how I know that the labor protections brought up by OP are not solely the creation of organized labor but also part of a long term trend of increased wealth and productivity due to technological advancement.

[mwfunk]

I agree with you that historically unions were (and still are) critical in making the world a better place, by being the only force representing the exploited. I don't dispute that at all. But there can be a dark side too.

I grew up in the Detroit area, through the '70s and the '80s, which was a time of great decline for the city and for the American auto industry, which neither the city nor the industry ever recovered from. I was a kid, I didn't really understand the details of what was going on, so I would appreciate opposing views of what was going on if anyone's more informed than me. But what I absorbed from the adults around me was a sense that the UAW (United Auto Workers) had a stranglehold on the American auto industry, and it eventually killed the golden goose. It helped raise wages and benefits over the years, but in the same way that monopolies in business can be detrimental to the consumer, monopolies in labor can be detrimental to an industry as a whole.

Which is not to say that unions are bad- I think they are a net good. I'm just providing an example of why many Americans have negative associations with labor unions, even on the left sometimes. America may have soured on unions because of a black swan; I don't know how true that narrative is, but that narrative is the basis of how many Americans see unions.

[WalterBright]

In America, if you open a business and advertise for workers and offer slave wages, nobody is going to apply.

[w0m]

not true - we have a historically stagnant minimum wage artificially deflating salaries; they are surprisingly not market or economy based in many fields, simply '2usd more than minimum wage, y our doing great!'

.. when minimum wage should be ~50% higher at least. Yay for market distortions.

[freedomben]

Why only ~50% higher? The minimum wage should be at least $100k a year. That would do wonders at fighting income inequality.

[kevingadd]

I wouldn't complain about a $100k/yr minimum if it was actually sustainable (I doubt it) but the 50% is mostly intended as a response to the fact that the current minimum wage is dramatically below the poverty line, in some cases to the point that you need more than 80 hrs of work a week just to pay rent and buy food.

It wasn't always this way. The federal minimum wage used to be livable.

[freedomben]

What would you think about have a base income or "mincome" where every citizen essentially gets a base level to provide for necessities, and then anything else you make through employment is bonus?

I've been thinking about that a lot lately due to the mass robotization of jobs. Not sure how I feel about it, but it seems like an important conversation to have.

[w0m]

guaranteed minimum income. Honestly; that's the future (and dream?) the closer we get to a post-scarcity economy.

Are we there yet? I'm not sure; but... maybe in some areas of the US...? Lots of issues with abuse though until post-scarcity is widespread. Lots to think about, we live in an interesting time.

[w0m]

Honestly; engineers '100k/year' salaries are also distorted by the false floor on the job market. I'm honestly not sure if actually for the higher or lower, though I do know goods/services tied to minimum wage are too cheap currently by far. The min wage has allowed employers to utilize business models relying on arbitrarily-cheap labor as, 'that's what everyone pays' functionally keeps all entry level work low through collusion. The biggest flaw with the Big Mac Index IMO; it's too cheap in the US.

[conanbatt]

At least it might help people buy an economics book and realize why that could not happen!

[zerr]

I hear your waiters have slave wages, that's why they depend that much on tips.

[chimeracoder]

> I hear your waiters have slave wages, that's why they depend that much on tips.

Waiters make quite a lot of money off of tips. They actually have been upset with the changes in places like California that "raise" their base salary to minimum wage, because it results in a lower take-home pay overall.

[zerr]

The minimum wage in US is a slave wage.

[chimeracoder]

> The minimum wage in US is a slave wage.

Talking about $15/hour as a "slave wage" is honestly insulting to people who, you know, lived under actual chattel slavery.

You may not like that threshold, but lumping the two together undermines your own point. This sort of racial insensitivity is one of the biggest reasons that leftist movements have such difficulty gaining traction with minority voters, and black voters in particular.

[dragonwriter]

> > The minimum wage in US is a slave wage.

> Talking about $15/hour as a "slave wage"

Isn't happening, because that's not the US minimum wage.

> is honestly insulting to people who, you know, lived under actual chattel slavery.

I'm pretty sure they are the ones who actually coined the phrase in reference to crushingly inadequate post-formal-emancipation wages.

> This sort of racial insensitivity is one of the biggest reasons that leftist movements have such difficulty gaining traction with minority voters, and black voters in particular.

Being (partially) black, left-leaning, and actually having studied American political history more than a little bit, I tend to think racial distrust and the absence of as critical mass of visible black leftist leaders is more of a factor; as is a kind of existential despair in the wake of the civil rights movement and nominal victories that have still left blacks far behind.

Obsessing over details of wording is more an issue of concern among a narrow group of elite intellectuls than the broader community, and I'm not even sure most of them would be concerned in the direction you suggest.

[WesleyLivesay]

I'm not going to necessarily get into a discussion about what constitutes a "slave wage" but most states have minimum wages far below $15/hour, in fact no state mandates that much, only a few cities.

https://www.minimum-wage.org/wage-by-state

[toomuchtodo]

And yet, Amazon fulfillment centers are fully staffed.

Side note: The minimum wage is a slave wage, as it’s not indexed to inflation.

[freedomben]

That sounds like an improvement. Slaves used to be paid nothing.

[fjsolwmv]

They were paid room and board, obviously.

[dredmorbius]

The wear and tear of a slave, it has been said, is at the expense of his master; but that of a free servant is at his own expense. The wear and tear of the latter, however, is, in reality, as much at the expense of his master as that of the former. The wages paid to journeymen and servants of every kind must be such as may enable them, one with another, to continue the race of journeymen and servants, according as the increasing, diminishing, or stationary demand of the society may happen to require. But though the wear and tear of a free servant be equally at the expense of his master, it generally costs him much less than that of a slave. The fund destined for replacing or repairing, if I may say so, the wear and tear of the slave, is commonly managed by a negligent master or careless overseer. That destined for performing the same office with regard to the free man, is managed by the free man himself. The disorders which generally prevail in the economy of the rich, naturally introduce themselves into the management of the former: the strict frugality and parsimonious attention of the poor as naturally establish themselves in that of the latter. Under such different management, the same purpose must require very different degrees of expense to execute it. It appears, accordingly, from the experience of all ages and nations, I believe, that the work done by freemen comes cheaper in the end than that performed by slaves. It is found to do so even at Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, where the wages of common labour are so very high.

-- Adam Smith

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-adam/works/...

[knowThySelfx]

Agree with some points. The state I live in has a strong union culture. There is a tendency in which unionized places think about only "Rights", but not "Responsibilities". This in turn affects productivity. I guess when the balance tilts to their side, the union leaders try to take advantage of it; shows us human nature. The trick is to achieve correct balance. That can happen if both sides are willing to discuss and understand the aims and problems associated with it.

[nsxwolf]

It’s great that unions got us weekends off and ended child labor. Thanks unions!

But that was a century ago. What have they done for us lately besides bankrupt state pension systems?

[dang]

Please don't post snarkily on divisive topics. It degrades discussion and leads to worse.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[djsumdog]

The states bankrupted their own pension systems by borrowing against them. That money was there, it was promised early on and it was funded by bonds. If the city starts to run out of money, borrowing from a pension is not the fault of the worker. It's the fault of the god damn fucking state. The money was there.

If you fell short because the market shrunk and you told your workers it was privately vested in mutual funds, that's fine and just pay out everyone less. But most cities and states backed them by bonds and then borrowed against pensions when they started running out of money thinking they could make it up later. What the actual fuck?! No. You're not going to be able to do that. You're an idiot mayor/governor for even thinking that. Leave money that isn't yours alone.

[DannyBee]

" That money was there, it was promised early on and it was funded by bonds."

This is not factually accurate, in the sense that nothing could have stopped this in a bunch of states. The rate of pension payout growth in a bunch of states is far above what they could ever pay back, no matter what the investment and how well funded. It was only a matter of time.

(and the union response in most cases was .... not great) It's certainly not the case everywhere, but definitely the case in some places. You are basically arguing that the problem with a ponzi scheme is that they did invest enough up front and leave it alone.

[fjsolwmv]

So you want to go back to child labor on weekends?

[kevingadd]

Weird how the pension system is the responsibility of the state to operate, but somehow when the state doesn't put enough money in it, it's the union's fault.

[DannyBee]

You act as if this is one sided. States need to fund them for sure. But you can't have a liability that grows faster than it can be funded. When states push on larger contributions, unions need to not essentially blackmail states into bankruptcy. We'll stop working now if you don't kick the can down the road.

I have never seen a state that funded them properly but i have never seen a union that acted like they understood (i'm sure they understand, they just look out for their members) that if you are paying out pensions at a unsustainably growing rate, everyone loses.

[lovich]

Same argument could be applied to corporations and pollution. They understand it's destroying the environment but they are looking out for their profits and everyone loses.

As many comments like this in this thread have shown, the arguments for and against unions can be applied wholesale for corporations. Why is it that everyone gets something stuck in their craw when it's labor that's pooling it's power and not capital? Hell if you were super laissez faire capitalism like some libertarians you shouldn't care at all as it's consenting adults joining a contract together

[DannyBee]

What makes you think i think the state of corporations running things is great? :)

I just don't think unions actually solve any problem in that realm, and any problem they could solve, i believe there are more effective, less risky, less problematic ways of doing.

[kevingadd]

Whether a pension is sustainable into the future is something you should factor in before committing to operate and provide pensions. It's obscene to make that commitment and then back out later and expect everyone to be OK with their retirement fund evaporating.

If you hadn't lied and set up the pension, they would have had advance notice that their retirement is entirely up to them. Instead, they get screwed out of their retirement and somehow the unions are the villains for fighting that.

[DannyBee]

"Whether a pension is sustainable into the future is something you should factor in before committing to operate and provide pensions."

Again, you act as if this is simply black and white.

Meanwhile, they work to vote out everyone who won't commit to doing so, do everything in their power to make it complete political/etc suicide to not make the pensions happen.

It's just as obscene to do this, and then not expect that, eventually, someone who says "well wait a sec this will bankrupt us", will have to undo it. That's on the people who did it, the union leadership, and the state.

It's not like the unions can't do math. They knew this would happen just as well, as did their membership, and they fought tooth and nail for it anyway in order to "get theirs" while they still could. This argument that "well they should and that's okay and it's everyone else's fault for letting them" is just silly. If that's how you see unions "helping people", good riddance to them. There are very very few innocents here. The innocents are the other taxpayers, honestly. And yes, they absolutely all are villains for the part they play in doing this. Again, it's 100% not the one-sided thing you present where the poor unions negotiated a fair deal against the evil state and people got screwed later.

Do you want me to pull up the history of votes in these states, and how the union usually campaigned heavily for decades against any attempt to reduce or taper the pensions (IE not give them to new recruits) at all to try to make them more sustainable right up until the state had to kill them entirely to avoid bankruptcy? This is why people got "screwed out of their retirement" (in plenty of cases, they voted to approve the union doing this, so ....)

[Kiro]

> the only reason I'm able to sit here typing this message

You're giving them way too much credit.

[darpa_escapee]

People died for the 8 hour work day.

What makes you believe that's a concession that would be willingly granted?

[Kiro]

You're placing words in my mouth. Don't do that please.

[dizzystar]

Unions were a major force in America as well. For what it's worth, their tactics were truly vile, and it's a bit revisionist to claim we'd have no working rights without them.

Office workers never had unions, so why the need today?

The fact is that, today we have many government controls in place that protect workers. We don't owe unions a share of everyone's salary for eternity for work they take credit for.

[wasx]

I'm an office worker and I am in a union.

> today we have many government controls in place that protect workers

You're joking right? You brought up America so I assume you're discussing America. How can you possibly, even slightly claim that the government protects workers rights when 90% of your country has at-will employment?

Is that seriously what Americans think passes for satisfactory workers protection?

[nsxwolf]

We have laws against discrimination, workplace safety regulations, the Family and Medical Leave Act, numerous state and local laws for starters. These things have teeth and companies have to take them pretty seriously.

[sjg007]

You do realize that it was unions who brought about the change for these laws right?

[isoskeles]

The suggestion is that unions need not continue to exist just because they take credit for accomplishing something in the past. And then you say, "Oh yeah, well they can be credited with accomplishing something in the past." Okay. We've gone in a circle now.

[chimeracoder]

> The suggestion is that unions need not continue to exist just because they take credit for accomplishing something in the past. And then you say, "Oh yeah, well they can be credited with accomplishing something in the past." Okay. We've gone in a circle now.

The best part is that you can point out all of the really horrible and repulsive things those same unions did at the same time - like lobbying to strip non-white Americans of citizenship and pushing the government to round them up in internment camps - and somehow they don't have to take responsibility for that part of their history as well.

[sjg007]

No, the OP left that out de facto. And it’s disengenious to ignore the primary drivers.

[dizzystar]

Henry Ford introduced the 8 hour work day. That was non-union.

Unions also openly shut out non-whites and burned down competitors businesses, and many other things.

The unions were the Mafia. They lost power over the things the Mafia likes to do. It's a minor a miracle they survived.

[sjg007]

I suggest you brush up on your American history: https://www.loc.gov/item/today-in-history/august-20/

[nhebb]

If you cannot fire workers at will, you will be much more cautious when hiring and trying to ramp up quickly. When I read about other areas trying to incentivize startup culture (e.g., France) they try to replicate one or two factors of Silicon Valley's success, they seemingly fail to realize that there is a panoply of reasons why Silicon Valley is what it is.

I won't try to argue that at-will employment is the primary reason, but I do believe that it is an important one.

[djsumdog]

You can get around that with contract-to-hire (to make sure people will work out). California also bans non-compete agreements and has 11 month turnaround times for tech workers. It's a place that has innovation because it protects workers rights and also moves, incredibly, incredibly fast.

[chimeracoder]

> You can get around that with contract-to-hire (to make sure people will work out)

Incidentally, that's one of the first things labor unions seek to prohibit in their contracts.

[conanbatt]

I wish argentina had at-will employement. Making it hard to fire is one of the most terrible things you can do in the workforce. An eternal origin of unemployment, disinvestment and poor performance.

[saget]

There are a growing number of smug Europeans on this site that seem to think they have all the answers to America's problems, even when there isn't any. This argument could go on for ages but obviously people already have their own views.

[dizzystar]

You should be able to fire slouches no questions asked. Not sure why that's controversial.

Yes, we have minimum wage laws, child labor laws, OSHA, laws in place to ensure you get paid, wrongful termination laws, and so on.

[wasx]

You're kidding yourself if you think at will employment is used to just "fire slouches no questions asked". It's a gun to your head held by your boss. One wrong step and you're on the street. It's ironic that "the land of the free" is so keen to submit its citizens to such a tyrannical workplace.

[conanbatt]

If you think your boss is responsible for leaving you out on the street, you have to believe he is your savior for giving you a job.

I rather not revere employers that way.

[dizzystar]

I lost count of how many mistakes I made on the job, but fair enough.

[freedomben]

> one wrong step and you're on the street

You'd make a great union organizer with fear mongering like that. I've worked in a variety of places in a variety of fields, and I've never seen that done. What's more, the times when I have seen people fired they usually get a fat severance package that ends up putting a lot more money in their pocket than otherwise.

I'm sure that there are terrible places like that, but generally speaking doing business that way is much more expensive than treating your people well. When I was in management, turnover was one of the most expensive things to have happen. In some cases the people were irreplaceable (the experience and history they had in their brains was not possible to transfer). From time to time we'd have someone that just wasn't working out, but most of the time we treated people exceptionally well so they wouldn't leave and go to the startup down the street that pays more and keeps the fridge stocked with beer.

If things really were like you say they are, I'd be supporting unionization as well. However, in a couple years of management and a dozen or so as a grunt, that has not been my experience.

[lovich]

If we're gonna do anecdotes here I've seen management refuse to give a 5k raise to someone when they knew replacing them was going to be 40k minimum because "no one gets more than 2%", and I've seen that multiple times.

I've also been threatened before with concerns about my "culture fit" in a meeting my boss brought me into 5 minutes after I told him I disagreed with his approach but would do it if he said so.

I've had good managers but it only takes one asshole getting Peter principled above them to neuter most of their ability to run a team well

[Bahamut]

I have seen it quite a lot in software engineering in just my 5 years in the profession, happened to myself and many friends - hell, I was even in management last time it happened to me. Many times it came down to whether the people were a part of [insert manager's] inner circle/did whatever management wanted.

The stories are all too common, even at companies that supposedly treat their employees well. At will employment is a terrible thing.

[kevingadd]

Without mechanisms to discourage unfair termination (like unions and strong law enforcement), companies can and will and do ignore the law and just fire whoever they want. The threat of being knocked around by unions and/or the government for doing it is the only thing that stops companies from firing people when they get pregnant, or when they get diagnosed with cancer, or when they get engaged to their same-sex fiance, or when they adopt a kid from a foreign country, or when they report their boss for sexual harassment.

While you're waiting for your wrongful termination/retaliation complaint to wind its way through the existing systems, you don't have a job and you aren't paying rent. It's good to have multiple layers of protection so ordinary people don't get screwed by a business operator looking to save a few dollars.

fwiw the US's current government infrastructure is absolutely miserable at enforcing labor rights laws, so that makes unions a regrettable necessity no matter how bad they are. It'd be awesome if the country was in a good enough state to make unions no longer necessary.

[ryanobjc]

Sure, but who gets to decide who is a slouch?

And once you dive in to the details, thats where life gets muddy.

I do think it's controversial that a single boss that might hate you for totally irrelevant reasons be able to fire you on a whim. Made up performance standards and the like.

[djsumdog]

And it gets more hairy because unemployment in the US (in most states) needs to be approved by your employer. That's really fucked up. If you think it helps prevent abuse of the system, I'd rather some people abuse the system and everyone get unemployment rather than people have to fight shitty employers for it.

Unemployment should be insured by the state. I've heard social workers tell me "Of course you should apply. It's your money" but I've also heard HR people tell me companies in most states have to pay out unemployment which is why they fight it so hard.

Anyone care to chime in on how unemployment generally works and who pays for it in the US?

[rockinghigh]

How about minimum vacation days, parental leave and healthcare coverage?

[ubernostrum]

Corporations were a major force in America as well. For what it's worth, their tactics were truly vile, and it's a bit revisionist to claim we'd have no modern society without them.

Many early innovators never had corporations, so why the need today?

The fact is that, today we have many government controls in place that protect corporations. We don't owe corporations a share of everyone's money for eternity for work they take credit for.

(shall I keep posting comments like this?)

[kakarot]

Many unions in America have developed into malevolent forces that seek unfair competitive advances, often to the detriment of many people working in that industry.

[sjg007]

Any examples?

[kakarot]

Most of my knowledge in this domain is contextual and thus useless but here is a good example of the more extreme side of some unions. [0]

I want to make it clear that I am not against unionization. What I am against is the use of rhetoric and promises of fair treatment to create a mob-like organization that uses threats and coercion to not only manipulate the local government but the people who exist within that organization's industry.

[0] https://www.phillymag.com/articles/2012/10/25/busting-philly...

[fjsolwmv]

As have many managements in America.

[conanbatt]

What you dont see is that unionization creates a lot of poverty as well. Those that did not get a job because they werent in on the union and were left out are not on hacker news debating your point of view.

> It might not have affected many of you with the silver spoon you have in your mouths but the only damn reason that kids still aren't working in sweat shops and you get to go home at 5pm is because of workers organising and having each other's backs when abuses and overreach occur, and a little bit of solidarity for each other is necessary when you see such flagrant abuses like this.

Not only it is debatible that unions eliminated child labor, but even if you take that as the only way to stop it, that happend a century ago. Today's unions do not have the same plight that those did.

In any case, there is no problem with unions existing, if they actually organize workers and give them better conditions and productivity, employers will be happy to deal with them and share the spoils. But thats never where unions stop.

[kodablah]

> on this site is sickening. [...] may mean nothing to Americans [...]

You're on a predominantly American site, commenting on an article about American unionization, admitting that your situation is different than Americans, and yet are sickened by predominantly American opinions towards these things? You can't admit regional differences and then be sickened by others contextual, region-biased opinions. You have flawed logic.

[acct1771]

What I read was "It seems to mean nothing to Americans - but it should, because..."

[kodablah]

"because...it is totally the same thing across regions and history." The problem is that the appeal to emotions harms rational debate. If we cannot recognize regions and times in history are different, we cannot have a rational discussion without one side being "sickened". Contextual, region-based differences are a real thing.

[acct1771]

What if they're not defending the current state of Unions, but the potential future state of Unions that indeed did help us greatly back in the day?

[DannyBee]

"What I read was "It seems to mean nothing to Americans - but it should, because..." "

Oh, it's worse. It's the typical "you only don't share my opinion because you are ignorant, not because you could reasonably disagree with me"

[acct1771]

What if they're not defending the current state of Unions, but the potential future state of Unions that indeed did help us greatly back in the day?

[reitanqild]

> I live in a country with a very strong union movement and the only reason I'm able to sit here typing this message is because my parents and grandparents unionised rather than live off of slavery wages.

Here's another: (AFAIK) where I live there is a strong link between companies with high rate og union membership and company profit.

I learned this while I worked in the industry.

I was never unionized myself, -I've considered it more than once. It seems however that every union must have terribly misguided ideas about everything from supporting local political parties to international politics.

I don't want to support that. It's not so much about the money but rather that when they say that x thousand members of y are behind the boycott of z then I'm not one of them.