[bobthechef]

While I sympathize with the need to push back on bad management, the situation is a bit like being between a rock (bad management) and a hard place (unions). Tyranny of the few vs. tyranny of the majority or the mob. The latter is worse.

It's also kind of a mediocre bandaid for deeper social problems. An employer that can get away with asking you to do unreasonable amounts of work, work ridiculous hours, or achieve impossible feats OR ELSE probably doesn't have much market competition.

Also a quote from C.S. Lewis:

“Of all the tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under the omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.”

[jchrisa]

Solving the market failure looks like UBI. I bet a lot of people who think unions are tyranny really don't like the idea of "free money".

[wutbrodo]

This is a bizarre generalization. I'd be willing to bet that most of the people who supported UBI before its moment in the political spotlight in the last five years are not as sanguine about unions as the average person on the left. This certainly describes me: I believe in heavy redistribution and taxation (especially of land!) but think that the left (which I consider myself a part of) has a consistent problem with being too arrogant to recognize how complex people's lives are, and damaging the worse-off in the name of helping them.

Insisting that support for unions and support for UBI must be linked is the same energy as insisting that more tightly restricting what food stamp recipients can buy is "helping" them.

[Viliam1234]

Both unions and UBI try to address the same problem: make it so that people do not have to choose between abuse and starvation.

But they are completely different approaches to this problem. For example, unions do not protect unemployed people, while UBI protects everyone. On the other hand, a union is something you could create tomorrow at your workplace without waiting for the rest of the country to change their minds.

In some sense, they are competing solutions, because if we had UBI, unions would be less necessary, because everyone who feels abused would have the opportunity to walk away... without ruining their life.

[wutbrodo]

Exactly, which is why the conflation of the two is so silly. There's a very tiny portion of humanity who actually _want_ others to starve, so competing solutions to the problem can easily show up in different views of the world.

Many people have a very simple-minded view of both politics and the world in general, which leads them to a low-resolution model that lumps things into two massive buckets and assume that everyone else takes their set of beliefs wholesale from one of the buckets.

[gtfoutttt]

I work in a union in the USA and I love it. 40 hrs every week. Paid vacation. Paid medical dental and vision. A real pension.

And CS Lewis is no expert. He's a preacher.

[xg15]

You still expect the 'mob' to work for you though, do you?

[tboyd47]

That's an amazing quote.

[minikites]

Really?

>The robber barons cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated.

We wouldn't have any billionaires if this was even remotely true. If having 999 million dollars doesn't satiate you, I submit there is no amount of money that will. We look down on hoarders who fill their house with old newspapers and knickknacks but when it's money hoarding we lionize it.

[tboyd47]

I'm more interested in the bit about "omnipotent moral busybodies." If shutting down 100,000 businesses, pausing children's education including special education services for a whole year, forcing the entire populace to wear cloth masks, shutting down religious services protected by the Constitution, mandating where you can & can't stand in the grocery store, and demanding the right to censor the news on all digital platforms doesn't satisfy their thirst for power, I submit that no amount of power will.