Where do we draw the line? What tactics are ok for a company to use to combat unions if it doesn't want them? Or should companies just accept and work with any union that forms?
> What tactics are ok for a company to use to combat unions if it doesn't want them?
They don't have a right to combat them at all. Union organizing is literally a human right. Of course ownership doesn't want them -- the feelings of ownership are (supposed to be) irrelevant.
It really amazes me what some people think qualifies for a “human right”. If you are paying someone and they are doing something you told them not to do isn’t it your “human right” to stop paying them? Where do you draw the line with what a “human right” is?
Think about it this way: both sides have the right to freely negotiate a contract, and then decide whether or not to enter into it. The CEO can't prevent the workers from talking to each other and figuring out what they think a fair contract would be, and the workers can't prevent the CEO from talking to other CEOs for the same reason.
As you observe, workers talking to each other to agree on prices for labor is the flip side of the coin from CEOs talking to each other to agree on prices for labor. But the latter is in fact illegal. CEOs can't talk to each other and agree to pay $10/hour for warehouse workers. Coordinating with others to set prices for labor or goods isn't viewed as within the scope of freedom of association. Union activities are in fact specifically exempted from anti-trust laws because otherwise they would fall within the scope of them. Workers can agree with each other not to accept less than $15/hour for warehouse workers.
You need something more than freedom of association to justify unions, rooted in the recognition of bargaining disparities between employers and employees.
The way I'm thinking about it, you don't need anything extra to justify unions, but you do need something extra to prohibit wage fixing. I agree that freedom of association, when considered alone, would allow wage fixing and price fixing and all sorts of anti-competitive behavior.
We're moving away from areas where I'm confident I know what I'm talking about, but I think as a society we've decided that while anti-competitive laws do infringe on the rights of business leaders, we're trying to balance their rights with those of everyone else, and the laws are necessary to prevent a permanent class divide between business leaders who cannot be challenged, and workers under them. In the long run, allowing complete free association among CEOs would limit the freedoms of the rest of society.
Society is a constant project of balancing various conflicting rights, and this is one of many cases where we limit the rights of a few to defend the rights of many.
Sure but if both sides have the human right to freely associate, then the employer should surely have the right to reject associating with the union at all. But that's not afforded to them under US law, per my understanding.
"Associate" has a specific definition here that's a little narrower than normal conversation. It refers to being a member of a group, not just being connected to it in some way. The CEO is free to not join the union if they don't want to. They can also quit if they don't want to deal with it at all.
By the same token, the company’s management is free to fight union creation, by sharing anti-union messages. Freedom of speech and assembly on both sides.
"I heard Donny got both kneecaps busted after he passed out a union flyer last year" said the manager conveniently holding a baseball bat from the "baseball club" he just so happened to be involved in.
I think this is legally the case in most places, but IMO it is extremely unfair to give ownership acting through the corporate entity the same rights as employees, which are actual people.
You are paying someone to work 18 hours a day, every day. They would like to not work 18 hours a day anymore, and stop working at a mere 12 hours; they are even willing to accept less pay. You fire them, because you clearly told them not to do that. They organize with other workers and demand the right for a 12 hour day, with this right enshrined in law and with penalties for employers who do not comply. You say “they are free to work for someone else or quit if they don’t like it!”
Fast forward many decades later. This is a right you and I both enjoy. (This is also why we both have time to shitpost on HN.) If there was a serious proposal to take it away, you and I would probably be standing side by side on the street demanding our rights back.
It’s easy to talk a big game about human rights when your rights aren’t on the line.
In the real world, "rights" are not inalienable. I mean, who among the lower classes wrote the US constitution? Not a single one. That's because it was written by the bourgeoisie who were protecting their interests.
Who do these people, the "United Nations", writing their "Universal Declaration of Human Rights," think they are with declaring union organizing a human right? (https://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/ - article 23)
FWIW, You can pick out any other number of declarations of human rights and the right to form and join trade unions is in them. It's very widely considered to be a human right, not some fringe thing.
Just to add, most of the bathroom related ones are other employees complaining, not management. Management has to respond to that. This is because US culture insists on separate gender bathrooms.
In the context of Amazon, though, performance quotas are inhumane, warehouses are huge, bathrooms are sparse, so employees aren't able to use the bathroom without taking performance demerits. So you get people passing out due to dehydration because they don't want to need the bathroom.
His point is it doesn't matter what you are "guaranteed" simply because if the real world was so black and white in regards to how laws were interpreted and followed, we wouldn't be having these arguments.
> What tactics are ok for a company to use to combat unions if it doesn't want them?
In the US they could improve working conditions to the point that employees are happy with the status quo. Unionisation efforts are typically driven by employees who are stressed by unhealthy/unsafe working environments, employee mistreatment, or poor pay. We see the opposite of this in the tech sector, where decent pay, safe environments and plenty of benefits leads to a rather union hostile attitude.
> Or should companies just accept and work with any union that forms?
If we accept that unions act to address the power imbalance between employees and employers and unionisation is mainly driven by employers exploiting that power imbalance then I think it's both good for society and in line with the spirit of the laws that exist in many places that make various forms of union busting illegal.
At the same time in most Western countries decent working conditions and wages are already mandated by law. I don't know what's the situation in the US but in Europe that means that conditions cannot be horrible to start with if the company acts within the law (which would be expected of a company like Amazon, but maybe I'm optimistic).
Unions are a way to negotiate a better deal than the legal minimum for unskilled labour.
> At the same time in most Western countries decent working conditions and wages are already mandated by law
Are they though? There are a plethora of activist, legal, legislative groups focused on both working conditions (often on narrower groups, like say migrant farm labor) and minimum wage issues would probably argue this.
Obviously working condition protections are much better than they were before 1950s-ish, and the existence of a minimum wage is greater than zero (where applicable). But neither of those inherently meet a bar as fuzzy as "decent".
> here are a plethora of activist, legal, legislative groups focused on both working conditions (often on narrower groups, like say migrant farm labor) and minimum wage issues would probably argue this.
That's right and most of their work in Western Europe is helping workers enforce the law.
Depends on the country but _tentatively_ yes, America has a infamously anti-union, anti-worker history though so there's significantly more holdover of it actually happening, what most other countries don't have is services like the Pinkertons, previously a literally rifle-armed military/police force for the purposes of seeking out and often murdering union leaders and breaking up strikes by force.
What I was taught was that generally most older countries already had established police forces that wouldn't allow groups like the Pinkertons to exist by the time the union movement came along where America didn't and instead their police actually came _from_ groups like the Pinkertons.
But I'd take that with a grain of salt given that it was second hand summarized information even when I first got it.
It is basically correct that the US police descend from a mixture of slave patrol remnants and strikebusters near the late 19th / beginning of the 20th century (though sometimes in opposition to them, the initial state police ranks were still largely drawn from private police, racist "town watches", and militia forces).
England and the rest of the Anglosphere adopted what are often called "Peelian principles," focused on policing by community consent, 50+ years earlier than that.
Do you have sources on any of these? In the 'defunding' era, I often see this claim about the origins of police but a) it seems unlikely to be generalized (police forces in the Northern states are obviously not derived from "slave patrol remnants" and b) it seems irrelevant since whatever the police was in the past doesn't mean that's what it is today and it doesn't mean the goals or the culture are the same.
In the North, rich merchants socialized the costs of the guards they hired to protect their assets in port cities through municipalization. In the South, that wasn't the case, and the police are direct descendants from slave patrols.
From Time's "How the U.S. Got Its Police Force"[1]:
> The first publicly funded, organized police force with officers on duty full-time was created in Boston in 1838. Boston was a large shipping commercial center, and businesses had been hiring people to protect their property and safeguard the transport of goods from the port of Boston to other places, says Potter. These merchants came up with a way to save money by transferring to the cost of maintaining a police force to citizens by arguing that it was for the “collective good.”
> In the South, however, the economics that drove the creation of police forces were centered not on the protection of shipping interests but on the preservation of the slavery system.
With regard to police originating from strike breakers, that's also true.
> For example, businessmen in the late 19th century had both connections to politicians and an image of the kinds of people most likely to go on strike and disrupt their workforce. So it’s no coincidence that by the late 1880s, all major U.S. cities had police forces. Fears of labor-union organizers and of large waves of Catholic, Irish, Italian, German, and Eastern European immigrants, who looked and acted differently from the people who had dominated cities before, drove the call for the preservation of law and order, or at least the version of it promoted by dominant interests.
heavyset_go has provided a good source for my more general statements but I want to specifically address
> police forces in the Northern states are obviously not derived from "slave patrol remnants"
This is a common misconception that the north was "free" even as the south kept enslaving people. It's true that the north also had other economic forces influencing its policing, but the Fugitive Slave Acts gave plenty of legal cover for anyone wanting to make a buck by finding "escaped slaves" (often just whatever black people they found) in the north.
What if I run the most worker-centric paradise, with employee empowerment, great wages, benefits and conditions?
And what if the national organization of an umbrella labor organization considers my non-union workforce as a threat to both their budget and their political power? And what if they provide materials and advisors promoting unionization, despite the fact that they are acting in the interest of the union organization itself, and not the workers they hope to represent?
If you “ran” the most worker-centric paradise, you’d be the elected CEO of a co-op where the workers had democratic control of the means of production. In such a place, there’d of course be no need for a union because the workers would have the say in what happens already.
Now your strawman benevolent dictatorship could never exist since you would still be denying workers control over their workplace. Thus they may form a union to fight for that control.
If you are such a wonderful, caring employer what difference would it make if your employees were unionised? I think that part of the problem here is that the history of unions and union busting in the US appears to be one of corruption on both sides; but this is not a necessary or inevitable feature of unionisation.
There's a huge difference between "argue against" and "actively try to sabotage".
Here (Italy) unionization is a constitutionally protected right. My employer can try to persuade me not to join one, but is absolutely not allowed to retaliate against me if I do, discriminate basing on union membership, etc.
They could do whatever they're doing with their tech workers. Around these parts any talk of unionizing developers is usually meet with skepticism or derision. So whatever big tech is doing is keeping most of their tech workers happy and unwilling to unionize.
They could do the same for their warehouse employees, but that would mean paying them very well and giving good benefits.
Nobody is asking that warehouse workers or store clerks be paid ridiculous amounts like $120k/yr, a fair liveable wage will do, failing that a lot of the problems would be resolved if such companies scaled back whatever policies they have that lead to news stories like Amazon workers peeing in bottles because they can't take toilet breaks, but as neither of these things happen you get exploited workers who naturally want to unionise.
It's also not that feasible to pay developers $120k/yr as the rest of the world has found out, America manages it for a number of reasons and because of this you likely won't see developers unionise any time soon even if you guys do have some very questionable contracts.
But it could be feasible to pay them more than a poverty wage. Something where working full-time would reasonably cover housing and food costs (and ideally healthcare as well) without needing government assistance.
That's not really my point. My point is that workers wanting to unionize is not some inevitability that Amazon must be forced to deal with. If their workers are happy they may not want to unionize. I think it's telling that white collar tech workers generally are against unionizing while Amazon's blue collar workers are trying to. So you have workers in the same company, some who feel that it is unnecessary to unionize and some who feel it is.
They don't have a right to combat them at all. Union organizing is literally a human right. Of course ownership doesn't want them -- the feelings of ownership are (supposed to be) irrelevant.