[Zarel]

I'm pretty confused by your argument here.

When employers band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "cartel" and it's radioactively illegal, and not a single person defends it as a good thing.

When employees band together to negotiate collectively, we call that a "union" and have a variety of opinions on it; with plenty of people thinking it's a good thing.

Corporations don't seem remotely analogous to unions and are mostly created for legal reasons, not for anything related to collective negotiation?

[TomMckenny]

I believe the following is being referred to:

Inside a company, the management/owners regularly talk together about how to minimize the cost of employees, including compensation. But employees talking together about maximizing their compensation is considered scandalous, harmful or even unethical. The practice is even given special names "organizing" and "unionizing" and is certainly considered unusual.

Corporations acting together are not analogous to a union because, legal fictions aside, corporations are not people.

But the activities of humans working together inside a cooperation to maximize some benefit, say a promotion or higher personal profit buy cutting employee costs vs a group of employees seeking a pay increases, seems a credible analogy.

[mikekchar]

I'm going to be controversial here. I don't think management/owners regularly talk together about how to minimize the cost of employees. I mean, it happens occasionally, but it's not actually a normal conversation in a company.

Instead companies talk about how much they can afford to pay for salaries. Frequently they talk about increasing the cost of employees from the point of view of expanding. Should we hire more people? Will it improve the business? Should we increase salaries? Will it allow us to attract better employees?

When companies are talking about reducing or restricting the cost of employees, it's usually in the context of solving problems in the company. The company is losing in money in some areas. Should we lay off employees? Can we negotiate a pay freeze or a pay cut until the company can get in better shape? Will we lose too many employees if we do that? Will we lose our best employees if we do that?

The biggest problem I have with unions (being one of the few programmers who has actually worked as a programmer in a union) is that in my experience is the conversations almost never discuss the health of the company. They only discuss strategies for maximizing pay, benefits or ensuring that layoffs are impossible.

I honestly believe that the attitude of "They are doing it so we have to too!" is a thing that destroys companies. The Us vs. Them approach helps nobody. Yes, if you have no choice and the company you are working for has decided that they want "Us vs. Them" and you can't convince them to join you in making the company and it's employees successful, I can completely see the point of a union. For me, that's a last resort. I'll try everything I can to fix the problem a different way before I'll say, "We're going to organise so that we can effectively compete with you". This includes simply quitting my job and finding another one.

Or to be more clear: I greatly value working at a company where I wouldn't ever think of organising a union. I value working at a company where the company values me and sees it as a cooperative venture. I don't want to work for a company that views me as an adversary or as someone they need to manipulate. That's why I don't want a union. In my fairly long career I've worked for both kinds of companies, so I know both exist.

[TomMckenny]

I agree that there is nuance and details that make it more useful in some cases than others. Conversely, unions can assist a companies survival. There are cases where even the teamsters(!) agreed to pay cuts to save businesses. And of course it can occasionally go wrong and there can be incompetence just like everything else in this world. But there are some widely held beliefs that demonize unions more than should be.

For example[1], empirically the presence of a union does not correlates with a bad workplace or failing business because the bulk of last half of the twentieth century saw widespread union membership yet was dominated by enormous growth in both production and quality of life along side high job satisfaction. While the last 40 years with declining union membership has seen slower GDP growth and in some cases quality of life reversal. So unions can't be causing the problem.

And the Us vs Them attitude is certainly close to catastrophic. But people aren't going to go through the effort, stress and risk of forming a union unless there are already some never addressed grievances in the first place. The antagonism would have to precede the talk of unionizing not be caused by the appearance of the union. And after the fact, there is at least some small chance of discussing, explaining and solving the problems. But I too would bail long before it got that broken. But for tight labor markets, with few and poorly run industries, this choice doesn't exists.

[1]in western countries and Japan

[Apocryphon]

> in my experience is the conversations almost never discuss the health of the company. They only discuss strategies for maximizing pay, benefits or ensuring that layoffs are impossible.

Those topics may dominate the discussions, but unions can be a way to leverage worker power for the good of the organization as well. How many times has a company turned out to have leadership that refuses to heed the concern of engineering, mandating development by sales bullet point and failing to allocate the necessary time to maintain product quality? How often does management order prioritize the wrong choices, leading to fiscal straits where the workforce suffers? How often are the concerns of the rank and file ignored, either dismissed at all-hands or filed away by powerless HR orgs? And how often do we hear stories of tech companies with toxic dysfunctional cultures?

There is at least some precedent for unions forcing leadership to be aware of market realities:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13986889

[zaroth]

Everyone who works for a company is an employee of the company, with a wage (or an hourly rate), and potentially some equity as well. Every employee should be considering how to make the company more profitable, which could be by accelerating a development schedule, overdelivering in a new feature/performance, or hiring and retaining key talent.

The wages of these employees is not set by the company. It is set by the market, and in a market as competitive as tech, this is particularly true. Management can decide what tier of employee they want to target when they set hiring budgets and salary ranges, they can decide how risk averse they want to be with losing top talent with retention bonuses and benefits, but they don’t get to directly “minimize the cost of employees” in that sense.

Only a set of companies colluding together can act to minimize the cost like that, for example what we saw in the past with anti-poaching agreements, which the big tech companies were sued for successfully.

The individual corporation vs union analogy is highly tortured. Companies incorporate for the legal liability protection, for the ability to issue shares, for the ability to file taxes as a separate entity, etc.

[TomMckenny]

>Everyone who works for a company is an employee of the company, with a wage (or an hourly rate), and potentially some equity as well. Every employee should be considering how to make the company more profitable, which could be by accelerating a development schedule, over delivering in a new feature/performance, or hiring and retaining key talent.

Absolutely. And in a sufficiently abusive environment, none of that will happen. It is a terrible thing when executive staff destroy a company by creating a toxic environment. But employees would rather be improving the orginization since they need the company to survive and everyone would rather work with smart people than someone they have to carry.

But I know of cases where employee pressure in tech has slowed AI use in warfare and stopped physical abuse toward workers. I hear theory about it being bad but where has it made things worse?

>The wages of these employees is not set by the company. It is set by the market

If that were true then negotiating would be irrelevant. And previous salary would not be the primary determiner of your next offer. And there would not be formulaic pay raise percentages that rewards those people who changes jobs frequently over those who say on and so are in fact more valuable but less savvy.

More than that, labor prices have as much to do with housing prices as anything else (from which extra expense neither employer nor employee benefits). That is not the tech market.

So skill availability is only tangentially related to compensation. The market favors a set of behaviors other than technical skill such as negotiation and job hopping. And ironically for the job hopper, who is selected _for_ by this system, would have minimum interest in the companies success.

>Companies incorporate for the legal liability protection, for the ability to issue shares, for the ability to file taxes as a separate entity, etc.

Being incorporated has nothing to do with analogy. Or even to being called a company. It has to do with some communication being acceptable while other similar communication is not. It's also a specific description of the friction that emerges anywhere only a subset of people decide the allocation of revenue to the whole group including themselves. In this case, in a work place.

Which becomes more suspicious when the opposition to full participation in decision making is on moral grounds or is followed by implicit threats rather than showing how the arrangement is best for everyone.

[mikeash]

Why aren’t corporations analogous to unions? They’re an organization of people who work together as one. When was the last time you heard about a bidding war between two different managers in the same company trying to hire the same person? It doesn’t happen because the company organization doesn’t allow it to happen. This is exactly the flip side of two union members not undercutting each other on pay because the union organization stops it from happening.

You say that corporations aren’t created for collective negotiation. When was the last time you bought something from a corporation? Did you negotiate with individual members of that corporation on the price? Do you get individual cashiers to bid for your business? Of course not, because the organization they belong to insists on handling price negotiation in a consistent fashion across the company.

I suspect a lot of the negative attitude toward unions comes from an incorrect assumption that a union must be a monopoly (or perhaps monopsony is the right term). I think that’s why you immediately jumped to “cartel” for the analogous organization on the other side. There’s no reason a single union has to represent all workers in a field, any more than a single company has to be the only employer in a field.

[gok]

> There’s no reason a single union has to represent all workers in a field, any more than a single company has to be the only employer in a field.

There is a reason for it, actually: unions are exempt from antitrust regulations. Combined with closed shop unions (where legal) it can be effectively impossible to form a second union.

[mikeash]

Those would be reasons a union can represent all workers in a field, not reasons it has to.

This seems particularly pertinent when discussing the possibility of starting a new union in a field that traditionally hasn't had any: you're not going to suddenly get all tech workers to join up. There will be plenty of space for competing unions, and plenty of space for non-union workers.

[tylerhou]

Employers often have much more power than employees. That is, if Google doesn't hire me, it doesn't lose out on much. For Google, maybe a small fraction of its capital isn't deployed, which is unfortunate but doesn't make a dent in the grand scheme of things. But if I don't have a job, then I will lose out on a lot -- I can't pay bills, I might lose my home. So I have a strong incentive to accept an offer from Google, and therefore Google has a lesser incentive to offer me better compensation.

The above is sort of a lie -- in the case of the tech industry, there is a lot of competition for workers. Since everyone wants to hire SWEs, I have more negotiating power than other industries. If Google doesn't hire me, I could (presumably) get a job at Amazon, Facebook, a startup, etc.. Since I could find other offers, I wouldn't have much to lose if I don't take Google's offer, and Google will therefore have an incentive to offer me better comp. Because of the above, it's not clear to me that tech workers need a union right now.

In other industries, labor is a buyer's market. If there is only one or two employers in a region, then those employers can choose to not hire any one laborer. Not hiring one laborer might mean that an employer's capital is deployed slightly inefficiently, which is again unfortunate, but nobody will lose sleep over it. But since that one laborer has no alternatives, they must work for a lower wage or risk destitution. This is a big problem in academia, where it's very difficult for grad students to switch schools (admissions offices reduce student mobility) and there is only one employer -- the school.

So unions are not analogous to cartels for selling labor -- they are not necessary when there is a balanced labor market, like in tech. But for markets which favor employers, they may often be necessary to protect workers.

[saidajigumi]

Funny enough, when I was in grad school, the graduate student employees formed a union. In a sort-of-parallel to your narrative, my department, Computer Science, had pretty good support for its grad employees. But many other departments were highly exploitative – splitting hiring lines that should have gone to a single student across three or four.. meaning that none of the recipients got a living wage but each still had a full workload. These departments were effectively trying to create an indentured servant class.

The union ended a whole list of bad practices virtually immediately. Even better, they negotiated us into the same benefits (healthcare, etc.) package that faculty received, which was a significant bump up even for students in the better departments like mine.

None of this would have been possible had the employees not been able to organize to realize their power.

[wutbrodo]

> That is, if Google doesn't hire me, it doesn't lose out on much. For Google, maybe a small fraction of its capital isn't deployed, which is unfortunate but doesn't make a dent in the grand scheme of things. But if I don't have a job, then I will lose out on a lot -- I can't pay bills, I might lose my home. So I have a strong incentive to accept an offer from Google, and therefore Google has a lesser incentive to offer me better compensation.

You're comparing apples and oranges here, in that you're comparing Google not hiring a single employee to you not getting _any_ job. The analogue to you failing to get any job is Google failing to hire any employees, at which point it ceases to exist, which isn't the case for even the chronically unemployed. The comparison as you've constructed it proves the _opposite_ of your claimed point (though I should note that I think the whole construction is weak; I'm certainly not drawing the conclusion that workers have more power than Google)

[tylerhou]

> You're comparing apples and oranges here, in that you're comparing Google not hiring a single employee to you not getting _any_ job.

Yes, which is why I clarify in the second paragraph that my first paragraph is a lie. As a tech worker with a few years experience, it is unlikely that I can't find any job (i.e. it is likely I can find a job).

But my first paragraph is _not_ a lie if you replace Google with MIT/Princeton/Harvard/Columbia/other universities, at which there are currently unionization efforts among graduate students. Or industries/regions where there are fewer employers or high switching costs.

[bduerst]

>negotiation

Cartels are not collective bargaining - they are collective price fixing by market suppliers. Employee unions negotiate with employers, while supplier cartels do not negotiate with market consumers. Not the same by a long shot.

Also, if you look at the history of corporations, they are originally created to give the capital contributors equal share in the control of the company. Hence the word shares.

For example, you could front your ship for a spice voyage to India, while other people front the crew and funds for supplies, and you would have a percent control of the endeavor equal to the value of your ship. Voting shares today are not much different, just scaled appropriately.

[empath75]

We’re not talking about corporations banding together, who, after all, are not people, but individual people joining together to form a corporation.