[pmoriarty]

The problem is when anecdotes about isolated abuses are used to reject unions outright rather than looking at whether unions as a whole would benefit society.

You could argue from personal experience that you went to a bad school therefore all schools are bad, or you had a bad experience with <insert skin color, ethnicity, or religion> therefore all people of that sort are bad.

It's just not very convincing.

[rayiner]

It’s not “anecdotes about isolated abuses.” Even parents I know who are solidly on the left are outraged by how completely inflexible teachers’ unions have been during the pandemic. Even people I know who are ardent Democrats in states like Illinois grumble quietly about the government having no money because they’re crushed under pension obligations.

The problem is that, in the US, most peoples’ experiences with unions is with public unions, which are the worst kind of unions: https://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2019/10/29/coolidge-and-...

> For decades, that was the mainstream Democratic view, too. “The process of collective bargaining, as usually understood, cannot be transplanted into the public service,” President Franklin D. Roosevelt affirmed in 1937.

[quadrifoliate]

> Even parents I know who are solidly on the left are outraged by how completely inflexible teachers’ unions have been during the pandemic.

As a dueling anecdote, I know plenty of libertarian/right-leaning folks who privately tell me that they totally understand that teachers (regardless of unions) should not have to face a highly infectious disease in classrooms just so a bunch of double-income parents want to keep doing their office jobs over Zoom. The current problems have almost nothing to do with unions directly.

[aetherane]

Though you don't need unions for that. Enough teachers at a local school refused to go in individually that the administrators were forced to make sane policies.

[guerrilla]

"It's not only anecdotes" and giving more anecdotes isn't an argument.

[dahfizz]

They said "It’s not anecdotes __about isolated abuses__". At a certain point, anecdotes become universal experiences, and therefore inform general political views.

[boomboomsubban]

>At a certain point, anecdotes become universal experiences, and therefore inform general political views

In reality though we just went from one anecdote to two. We are unable to tell when something is universal experience just by hearing more anecdotes.

[ardy42]

> In reality though we just went from one anecdote to two. We are unable to tell when something is universal experience just by hearing more anecdotes.

And even if we somehow got to negative universal experiences, those very well could be:

1. Part of a conscious tradeoff (e.g. firms being less profitable due to higher labor costs). A lot of anti-union rhetoric seems to amount to complaining about not being able to have one's cake and eat it too.

2. Artifacts of law (either direct or indirect) that could solved through legal reform. My understanding is that at least some of the "adversarialness" of US unions derives from the requirements of US law, and German unions (for instance) operate very differently (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetermination_in_Germany).

[dcolkitt]

Well, if you look at large-scale carefully controlled data, unionized firms tend to be at least 10% less productive than their non-unionized counterparts.[1]

The most defensible thing you can say about this is that the cost is primarily borne by the shareholders rather than the consumers. Thus you tend to see that the best unions for workers tend to be in large, established, highly profitable firms with little to no competition. A prime example are the American automakers before the 1980s when foreign competition kicked in. Working on the GM assembly line in 1970 was a very good job.

However Amazon is barely profitable as it currently stands. Since there's essentially no room for lower profitability. The only give is either higher consumer prices or deadweight loss, i.e. fewer customer and therefore fewer (but higher-paid) employees. That might not necessarily be a bad thing, especially to the extent that the average Amazon customer is wealthier than the average Amazon warehouse worker. But given Amazon's extremely thin profit margins, I don't really see anyway that consumers won't end up paying for the sizable bulk of the unionization costs.

[1] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/001979399204600...

[TeMPOraL]

> unionized firms tend to be at least 10% less productive than their non-unionized counterparts

That's not entirely surprising. Unions aren't optimizing for company productivity, but for the conditions and pay of the workers. And conversely, a company can abuse its employees to a large degree while reaping productivity gains from it.

> However Amazon is barely profitable as it currently stands. Since there's essentially no room for lower profitability.

Amazon is "barely profitable" because of clever accounting. They rake in tons of money, and reinvest it into growth. There is plenty of buffer to eat the unionization costs. But of course Amazon may opt to pass these costs to customers instead.

[Retric]

That sounds like Unions doing their job really well. The entire point is for workers to better capture the value they create. From a combination of lower risks and or higher compensation.

Amazon’s warehouses for example have some serious safety issues which they largely ignore. One example being heavy items being stored in such a way vastly increase the risk of back injury. Stuff can be good for efficiency and a really terrible deal for workers.

[Jochim]

> Well, if you look at large-scale carefully controlled data, unionized firms tend to be at least 10% less productive than their non-unionized counterparts.[1]

It's not large scale or even necessarily generalisable. I don't think a study limited to 83 "Sawmills in the Western U.S." can be presented as an example of unionisation in general.

> However Amazon is barely profitable as it currently stands

Amazon actively avoids profitability... Modern economies do not reward profitability, they increasingly reward the promise of potential future profitability. Amazon is perfectly capable of earning a healthy profit, but it is actively incentivised not to in favour of chasing further growth. Uber, WeWork, and Doordash all exemplify this attitude; although it could be argued that they are incapable of profitability at all.

Companies are actively choosing to remain in the red in order to stack the house of cards that little bit higher, steal a little bit more of their market before they turn around and exploit the fragile and artificially inflated position they've bought their way into.

> The most defensible thing you can say about this is that the cost is primarily borne by the shareholders rather than the consumers.

Surely the most defensible thing is that the workers are fairly compensated and work in humane conditions? We seem unable to convince Western corporations to not use child or slave labour, but at least we don't attempt to justify it by saying "Iphones would be more expensive without Uighur work camps".

[jjj1232]

Honestly, 10% is less than I would have thought, and is something I’d trade in a heartbeat for greater benefits.

[orzig]

Thank you for a well reasoned argument, and linked evidence. I do want to point out for anyone who does not click through the link that the study is focused on just one industry (sawmills) in one year. It may well be a solid contribution to a bigger story, but it should not be represented as necessarily generalizable to a very different company in a very different world

[6gvONxR4sf7o]

I think the point should have more nuance. Nobody looks at enron's abuses and says corporations are blanket bad (okay, many do, but not most). Nor do they say enron's abuses were fine because corporations as a whole benefit society. Most look at enron and say corporations have the potential to do good or bad, so let's figure out how to keep them from going bad.

It's not unions good or unions bad. The focus should be on how to get unions that don't lead to the abuses people are afraid of. When it comes to unions, the discussion seems to be much more take-it-or-leave-it.

[iratewizard]

People do look at multi-level marketing schemes and label them as blanket bad. Unions are an organizational strategy just like MLM schemes are. One relies on the Shirky principle to stay alive, the other relies on people wanting to be fooled. Both are a con with opportunists hovering overhead.

[asdff]

For every anecdote of an isolated case of union abuse, there are probably hundreds of unheard cases of corporations abusing their workers. But that doesn't matter for most people, simplistic logic says therefore all unions are bad and capable of corruption, and ignoring that most of the time, the status quo is far, far more exploitative for the average worker. Once again, perfect becomes the enemy of good, and conditions do not improve.

[quandrum]

Wage theft is the most common crime in the US, is estimated to occur to ~20% of all employees and equal tens of billions a year, and no one talks about it.

How many union members do you think experience wage theft?

[stretchcat]

The US Department of Labor takes wage theft very seriously. If you report it to them, at no cost to yourself, they will investigate it and almost certainly scare your boss shitless so he'll never try it again.

Probably they could do a better job of advertising this to workers. Many workers experiencing wage theft probably are not aware of their options, and that's a problem. But when used, it works. I've seen it work.

[kieselguhr_kid]

If they take it so seriously, why is it so underused? I don't think this is a lack of information; people who are highly precarious can't take these kinds of risks, even if they're just percevied.

There are all kinds of de jure considerations that purport to protect workers, but they fail without an organization by and for workers to actually ensure they're enforced.

[stretchcat]

The first real job I had was the first time I saw the efficacy of the Department of Labor. I was working at a bean processing plant; semi trucks with trailers full of fresh green beans from the fields dropped beans off at the plant where they were cleaned (my job was to pick out the bits of small animals the harvesters chewed up), chopped, cooled, and loaded onto another truck. The entire operation hinges on the trucks arriving just in time.

Well sometimes a truck is late, that's just the way the world works. In one of those cases, my boss asked us to stay at the plant an hour late; the truck driver was on the phone and said he'd be there shortly, but we had nothing to do but sit around on our asses twiddling our thumbs. One of my coworkers, more experienced than me, asked if we'd get paid while waiting. My account of the conversation that followed:

Boss: "Well uh, we're all just sitting here doing nothing so.."

Coworker: "The Deparment of Labor says..."

Boss: "WHOA WHOA WHOA! I was just kidding of course you'll get paid!"

Immediate backtrack. He turned on a dime as soon as he realized there were workers who knew their rights. I think information is the key. There is no substitute for workers knowing their rights.

[dragonwriter]

> The US Department of Labor takes wage theft very seriously.

As, often, do state labor authorities.

[masonic]

  How many union members do you think experience wage theft?

Essentially all do, when "dues" are mandatory.

[ryathal]

For some union members the dues achieve the same result.

[yourapostasy]

It is a matter of incentives.

To substantiate and engage PR over abuse of workers by a corporation, the livelihood of individual workers who give witness to the allegations are at stake.

To substantiate and engage PR over abuse of the public weal, customers or the corporation by a union, usually no one's livelihood is threatened by giving witness.

It isn't surprising abuses by unions are easier to publicize and and more commonly substantiated. This dynamic will not change until workers have the equivalent of FU money. Or like in one sci-fi story I read, a genetic mutation causes everyone to fix chlorophyll in their pigmentation and get all their minimum bodily energy requirements by standing around in the sun for a few hours each day, and have to be convinced to work. I suspect a more near-term, practical direction is some solution along the lines of an intentional community co-op.

[ekianjo]

> isolated abuses

It's not isolated abuses, it's a feature of unions.

[yowlingcat]

> The problem is when anecdotes about isolated abuses

What makes you jump to label that complaint an "anecdote" and an "isolated abuse" rather than evidence of structural rot and public union corruption?

[conanbatt]

The plural of anecdotes is called data.

There are plenty of examples of unions being really bad in the US, the burden of proof is now on the other side of the court.

[boomboomsubban]

So you need a handful of people to tell you anecdotes of how a union helped them?

[conanbatt]

I'd welcome the testimony to cross-examine.