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by danuker 1688 days ago
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.
2 comments
AnthonyMouse 1688 days ago
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?

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93po 1688 days ago
>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

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AnthonyMouse 1687 days ago
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.

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eru 1688 days ago
Compare and contrast https://pseudoerasmus.com/2017/10/02/ijd/
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