[Alupis]

> That's just why workers' unions are useful though. Workers need breaks, especially more experienced (older) workers, managers don't want to provide those breaks.

The post you're responding to just stated they had 4 breaks a day. I doubt Boeing isn't providing breaks either, since that would be illegal.

It's entirely possible to have a non-union shop and still have highly skilled and fairly compensated employees.

There are always going to be some employees that abuse things - people taking bathroom breaks every hour, 10 minutes at a time, etc. Those are the ones that get let go, when you're not a Union Shop. Unfortunately, for all the good Unions do, they also tend to protect exactly these sorts of employees, making it difficult or impossible to trim poorly performing employees.

[txru]

4 breaks a day isn't either enough or too much in general-- it's very job and industry dependent.

Refusing to provide breaks is illegal, true, but it's trivially easy to legally force employees to take many fewer than they're entitled. Amazon employees in FCs don't piss in bottles because they're very into logistic efficiency of picking...

True, there will always be entities that abuse understandings, employer and employee. The thing is, corporations are superentities with monopsonic power. Employees are units, discouraged from communicating, with limited time in a day to make complaints or study potential improvements to working condition (or law, for that matter).

Unions are a method for setting up a superentity that has the bargaining, informational, and legal power to have a more equal footing with the corporate superentity.

Particularly when Unions have substantial ownership of the company, they have no specific wish to lose dues-paying members or make the company fail.

[Alupis]

> or make the company fail

Hostess famously failed due to the Bakers Union stalling wage talks, even though the Teamsters (representing the other portion of the employees) agreed. Now... nobody works for Hostess and everyone lost their jobs.

Not all Unions actually align their goals with what's best for the employees. Sometimes, it's all about collecting union dues...

[bsder]

> Hostess famously failed due to the Bakers Union stalling wage talks

Except that Hostess had a bunch of debt loaded up from financial "engineering", and Hostess had already asked for and been granted concessions several times.

At some point, you're better off forcing the company into bankruptcy and rolling the dice--especially if the owners are bleeding it of cash via financial arrangements. It's going to be dead anyway; the only question is whether the owners also get to bleed the retirement fund, for example.

If Hostess can't employ those people after bankruptcy and reorganization, then those jobs were certainly dead, anyway.

[txru]

I don't think you can use Hostess as a simple case of the BCTGM getting too hungry for dues, since Hostess has reformed under a new corporation after a defensive bankruptcy filing, to hire an entirely new set of employees. That is something that companies can do, and have done so for centuries.

At the very least, that seems like a case of a mix of vulture capitalism and failed union negotiations.

[Alupis]

The Hostess of today isn't the Hostess of yesterday. It was shredded up and pieced out. What is today called "Hostess" is owned by a holding companies and is not the original ownership.

They went from well over 30,000+ employees, down to 2,000 today.

Pretty sad honestly. The company was in a tight financial situation, and asked to postpone paying into the pension fund for a few years. The Bakers Union was the only holdout... and now nobody has a pension or wages.

[txru]

I suppose I look at this as sad from a different angle than you. The brand itself has been losing consumer trust for decades, due to changing tastes and increasing health-consciousness. Eventually, that makes it so the company can't pay on its obligations. The debtors say those obligations are non-negotiable, the company folds, and now we're left with the private equity firms driving down costs at the cost of what consumer trust was left.

If a company I worked for was ever late on a paycheck, or refused to continue paying for a pension/matching 401k, I think it's perfectly reasonable that the company should collapse.

[Alupis]

> If a company I worked for was ever late on a paycheck, or refused to continue paying for a pension/matching 401k, I think it's perfectly reasonable that the company should collapse.

Perhaps. Personally, I'd take it as a sign of whats-to-come, and leave. If other employees decided to stay, and agreed to some terms to save the company, let them.

In Hostess' case, I believe it was the Teamsters that had negotiated an equity stake in the company during a previous bout of poor financial times. There's always options.

I have a hard time believing the 30,000+ employees wanted their union to destroy the company, particularly since many of them had worked there all their life, their town had little or no other large company to provide jobs, and their pensions/retirement were tied to the entire mess. It's entirely possible Hostess was in bad times partly due to Union negotiated wage and pension funding levels.

In general, I guess I'm more skeptical of Unions than some. I've never been in a Union personally, and would chafe at the idea of being compelled to pay union dues (some jobs require this), and not being able to negotiate my own salary and benefits that fit my situation best.

[CraigJPerry]

>> It's entirely possible to have a non-union shop and still have highly skilled and fairly compensated employees

It’s really hard to do though due to the wrong incentives being in place. You’d need something like worker co-op’s to get the incentives aligned reliably in all cases, such that you don’t need unions.

[Alupis]

Not really. Plenty of businesses don't have unioned employees, and get along just fine. I'd wager there's more non-union employers than union employers in this country.

Unfortunately, unioned jobs where it's known to be difficult or impossible to fire poor performing employees, seems to attract exactly that type of employee, in my experience.

[perl4ever]

Everybody knows the cliched arguments about why job security leads to inefficiency, but have you ever thought that job security leads to efficiency in that people don't resist automation and labor saving innovation as much when it doesn't threaten them?

When someone figures out how to do your job better (or tries) at a private company, then you may need to pretend it's a great thing, everybody goes around pretending, but it's a mortal threat and there are tons of ways to passively sabotage a project.

But when someone figures out how to do your job better at a government agency, either the automation makes it easier for you, or you are (nearly always) guaranteed a transfer to another position. People generally accept that work is a bad thing in itself so if you want to eliminate it, they like you. Laziness has its merits.

I've had some first hand experience in both types of environments.

[CraigJPerry]

>> still have highly skilled and fairly compensated employees

>> get along just fine

Those are 2 different standards. The domain of highly skilled and fairly compensated is a subset of companies getting along just fine. Many workers are unable to fire their boss as it were, due to lack of alternatives. It’s hard to quit when there’s no alternative job and you’re tied to an area.

Like i suggested earlier, you can’t fix this while the information and power asymmetry exists. You can certainly hide it sufficiently in most cases to get along just fine though but that is under-rewarding the labour.

>> difficult or impossible to fire poor performing

Sure, but what’s the cost of that situation?

Sometimes the cost could be so dire it kills the business. That’s not to be sniffed at for sure. Sometimes though it just protects the worker who’s trying but their kid or SO got incapacitated or something equally horrible is happening to them and the last thing they need is fired.

It’s ok if the player with the lions share of the cash pays more than their fair share from time to time.

It’s not ok to protect the player with the lion’s share at all costs even to the detriment of the poorer players.

[Alupis]

> Sometimes though it just protects the worker who’s trying but their kid or SO got incapacitated or something equally horrible is happening to them and the last thing they need is fired.

OK, but private businesses in the US are not public jobs programs, and shouldn't have any obligation to keep paying unproductive employees.

That puts a financial strain on the organization, and can be toxic to a healthy work environment.

(For the record, I'm not railing against people in that position - I'm railing against people perfectly capable of working productively, but choose not to because there is no consequence. It would be analogous to government jobs where the worst that happens is you're transferred to a different department and become their problem instead.)

[CraigJPerry]

>> I'm railing against people perfectly capable of working productively

I get that and i’m in no mind to let them off but i’m not willing to hurt good actors just to be sure no bad actor ever scores a free lunch.

[Alupis]

Fair enough. There is a fine balancing act with heavy-Union shops.

My experience might be more sour than others... I've never personally seen a Union step up to help someone justly... it's always been to keep bad employees employed, and to sue management for various things, and demand higher wages even though the business can't afford them.

You end up spending a bunch of time worrying about what the union will think, instead of what the employee needs.

[Teever]

Unions and union-shops set the standard that non-union shops have to match. If they didn't people would just go across the street and work at the union shop with better benefits and breaks because of the nature of markets.

So in a sense employees at non-union shops are free loaders that reap the benefits of union shops without paying into the organizations that create them