[omegaworks]

So you'd rather your friend be worked harder for his minimum wage? You'd rather he be liable for the things people steal from the store? You'd rather him be fired and be without medical insurance if he slips and falls at work?

Unions are why your friend isn't worked to death while he waits for his teacher's certification.

[adamrezich]

How does a part-time cheese monger get "worked to death," and what is Kroger's union doing to prevent this from happening?

I ask this 100% seriously.

[evan_]

Totally hypothetical but a union may push for safer equipment (cheese slicers/packing machines), thereby avoiding accidental injury.

[adamrezich]

OSHA exists though, it's not like they were using chainsaws to cut cheese until the union came along to save the day.

[eqdw]

Believe it or not, some people actually are willing to work harder for more money

[anth_anm]

A lot of the people who work hardest, horrible hours out int he cold doing hard labour before you wake up, only make a reasonable living because of unions.

People have literally fought and died for the right to unions, for unions to be taken seriously. A bunch privileged silicon valley tech workers (not me, I'm a privileged seattle based tech worker, totally different ;) ) write off unions as inefficient and useless.

[omegaworks]

The great lie is that the harder you work, the more money you make. Under a fully unregulated capitalism (no unions, no min wage) your wage is uncorrelated to the hardness of your work, it is correlated to your worth and scarcity on the market.

Sometimes harder workers are harder to find, so they get paid more. Sometimes they're not. If working harder simply led to more money, salary negotiation would not be a teachable skill.

[fastball]

Yeah, literally everyone was worked to death before the existence of unions.

/s

[matthewowen]

I mean... they kinda _were_

[fastball]

Henry Ford invented the 40 hour work week.

Without Unions.

[bobwaycott]

Where did you get that idea? That is so very far from true about either Ford or the 40-hour-week.

Are you of the opinion that more than a century of labor fighting for reasonable working hours and conditions meant nothing, or are you just wanting to give Ford all the credit, despite him drawing on decades of increased movement toward an 8-hour workday before he ever decided to try it as a company policy?

[matthewowen]

No, he didn't.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Owen#Eight-hour_day

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight-hour_day#United_States