Not all people realize the bargaining power of a huge corporation is much different than that of an individual.
If a company of 100 people fires a worker, they lose 1% of productivity. If a worker loses their job, they lose 100% of income. This fundamental asymmetry makes me support unions.
On top of that, the corporation can afford paying to shift people's opinions.
I don't really get this argument. You lose 100% of income, assuming this is your only job, but only until you get another one, which could be right away, and in the meantime if they terminate you without cause you get unemployment for long enough that most people will be able to find another job.
Meanwhile this criticism is inversely correlated with the utility of a union. If you're in a market where the company is hiring unskilled fungible peons, and you try to unionize, they can just let the union walk out and hire a bunch of different unskilled fungible peons. So it doesn't work for e.g. Amazon warehouse workers.
For a strike to mean anything, the company has to have high turnover costs in replacing employees or a scarcity of skilled labor. But then that's true of the individual employees as well. So then it isn't needed for e.g. programmers to be able to negotiate beneficial working conditions, and you're paying the overhead for what you could get without it.
What does that leave for where the union is doing something good?
>they can just let the union walk out and hire a bunch of different unskilled fungible peons. So it doesn't work for e.g. Amazon warehouse workers
there's no way Amazon could come close to functioning if their warehouse workers unionized and walked out. it would take them years to find enough people to fully staff their warehouses again and it'd cost them billions of dollars
They have warehouses all over the country and all over the world. If any of them shut down, they could temporarily send product from the others.
Why would it take years to find more unskilled labor? They could literally park a bus in front of the unemployment office in the morning, load people onto it and be running again by the end of the day.
1) A whole lot of propaganda effort has gone into spreading anti-union sentiment for at least over a century, from the very deep pockets of the richest private actors in the world, like Amazon. Since they managed to capture half the politicians, it has become a culture war issue to the point that being pro and anti union is more a marker of personal identity than a reasoned position.
2) Historically, America's largest unions were often controlled by organized crime, which prevented competition and fixed prices at an artificially high level so mob bosses could get a cut and "consultants" who didn't actually do anything could be put on payroll so someone who owned 20 houses without having a real job could deflect scrutiny from the IRS. Since a lot of what was priced so high because of this was public works construction, it impacted everyone, and gave unions generally a bad reputation.
3) People like me who have never been in a "real" union, but still might have stupid one-off college jobs that nonetheless required you to join a union, have their only exposure come through something ineffective that isn't providing any actual benefits but is taking a cut of your already low pay anyway. For whatever reason, I had to join a union to work at Disneyland, but that didn't prevent me from making $10 an hour, didn't prevent my friend from practically getting her leg burned off and having it blamed on her with no disability assistance, and didn't prevent me from getting laid off when they downsized entertainment.
On the other hand, my dad was a plumber and his union seemed to bring him real benefit. But in a white collar environment like Hacker News, or pretty much anywhere you're likely to hang out on the Internet, anyone who has ever been in a union at all was more likely in something like the Disneyland union.
> On the other hand, my dad was a plumber and his union seemed to bring him real benefit.
Unions for licensed professionals are more lobbying organizations than labor representation. Their goal (which they often achieve) is, effectively, regulatory capture to create a barrier to entry into that labor market and drive up scarcity to increase prices.
It's a similar dynamic to public sector unions -- they're really negotiating with the government, and if the union is large enough then they're a significant voting constituency, so it's like a large shareholder in a publicly traded company using their influence over the organization to have the organization engage in self-dealing with the shareholder's other business.
Huh, i guess i learned some new things today. I heard about allegations of them being criminal. Usually i'd file such claims under "conspiracy crap", because until now nobody bothered to explain why.
Also i didn't know that being in a union can be mandatory. Here in Germany it's up to you if you want to be part of it or not. With it comes plenty of advantages, like legal protection insurance for work related legal issues. You can go to a consultant that will look up your case and - if necessary - give it to a lawyer. They even offer help to people who want to become self-employed. All for a quite low monthly fee.
Unions in Germany are sort-of mandatory. In the sense that whatever the unions negotiate also has legal consequences for non-union members. See https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarifbindung
Unions are relatively controversial everywhere. In the UK and other parts of Europe, for instance, they also divide opinion, either generally or in specific cases where they are accused of over-reach.
In the US I get the impression they are more controversial, perhaps because they are less common (so it is easier for those against to make mountains out of molehills because the public in general are less aware where the truth ends and the spin starts), perhaps because the US is more openly capitalistic (the old “in America many see themselves as temporarily inconvenienced millionaires, not middle-/working-/poor-class”) and unions are seen as a serious blocker in that frame of mind, perhaps because of the history if the word union by opposing political powers, most likely because of a mix of the above and the amount of shouty misinformation anything attracts from the likes of Fox “news” and similarly crap (but in some cases differently biased) outlets generate on every subject.
But they are definitely a controversial topic elsewhere too.
In Germany it's not as bad as in the US. It's more of a mixed bag. Some people are pro, some are con and some don't care. But there is not that amount of pure hatred against unions. There are some unions that retrieve heavy criticism, because of their behaviour in negotiations or public announcements. But we don't want to get rid of all of them.
I guess on average Germany is just not as polarized about unions (and other things) as the US.
If you only ever look online, you would say that American unions mostly have fanatical proponents. (Because people who express opinions online are more likely to be leftist, I guess, and everything about American politics is polarised.)
If a company of 100 people fires a worker, they lose 1% of productivity. If a worker loses their job, they lose 100% of income. This fundamental asymmetry makes me support unions.
On top of that, the corporation can afford paying to shift people's opinions.