I believe unions are necessary in a world of humongous companies.
That is because, in case of disagreements, an employee's prospect (losing 100% of their income) is a much worse negotiating position than a large company losing <1% of its workforce.
One point I've seen little or no discussion about on hn, is that employers are often (at least in Norway) organized. So they will have access to legal aid, standard contracts, training on negotiating etc - this in addition to the skewed bargaining power between a single employee and the company as a whole.
Is this not common in the US (illegal collusion on wages aside)?
It's always seemed strange to me that people will be reluctant to join unions, while employers are eager to join organizations.
Ftr at the moment I'm not a member of a union - as there's isn't really one that feels applicable to my current situation, and I have relativly good bargaining position.
> Research has found that 58 percent of major franchisors' contracts in 2016, including those of McDonald's, Burger King, Jiffy Lube, and H&R Block, contained agreements not to hire the workers of other franchisees
You mentioned "standard contracts".
I had a possible customer want me to toss my contract in favor of one they wanted. It said that I "will defend or settle any action brought against Customer" - basically, if they were sued for their use of my software then I would have to pay the court costs.
This is very unusual. I DDG-ed it, and found it likely came from a "subscription based contract database and resource center that helps over 300,000 lawyers and business owners draft and negotiate contracts more effectively", found at https://www.lawinsider.com/clause/ptcs-obligation-to-indemni..., with the example has "PTC, at its own expense, will defend any action brought against Customer based on a claim that any Licensed Product infringes a United States patent, copyright or trademark and ..."
So, along the lines of what you said, though from a vendor perspective.
BTW, I said "fuck off", though in polite terms. "This clause will require renegotiation of the price as I have not included litigation in the pricing. I can identify an appropriate insurance company and pass the costs to you."
Keep in mind that unions in Europe are not the same thing as US unions, despite the same name.
In Europe there are multiple unions you can join for an employer. This competition keeps them working well.
In the US it's a single union per employer, and if the employer has one, you are forced to join it (and in some states you can decline to join, but still be required to pay fees). This causes lots of problems with corruption, and the union is more interested in their goals, than yours.
Can't confirm this for Germany - we usually have a single (dominant) union per trade or industry segment - e.g. Ver.di for the entire service sector. I think in this way, unions here are significantly more centralized than in the US.
Standard salary rates are usually negotiated by those dominant unions for the entire sector (though in the last decades, a lot of this stuff has been deregulated, so the salary rates have become less relevant today, except for state employees)
Employees are not required to join a union - however in every company above a certain size, they have the right to a work council. Unions can initiate an election for such a council even against the orders of the company's management. While the unions can enforce creation of work councils and usually offer ongoing support, the councils are generally independent and staffed by company employees.
That's not the case here in NL. There's sector unions which represent types of work (logistics, call centers, retail work) and each can negotiate for their members. It's not a shopping mall of orgs you cherry pick from.
I noticed before you said "In the US it's a single union per employer".
In the US a company may have employees each in different unions.
Consider a Hollywood movie studio, where the writers, actors, stage workers, and truckers may all be in different unions.
The US unions are by trade, and I think that's what l3uwin also means for NL.
That said, multi-unionism is indeed more common in Europe, if my reading of Google Scholar is correct. Eg, "Multi-unionism and the Representation of Sectional Interests in British Workplaces" at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/104346311454631...
> Unlike in the United States, exclusive jurisdiction is exceptional in Europe (Visser, 1992), and unions commonly negotiate with employers simultaneously with other unions on the level of the sector as well as at the company level (Akkerman, 2008). The majority of the European Union member states have multiple labor union confederations, organizing members along political, religious, or occupational (status) lines (Eurofound, 2014). Even in the United Kingdom, Austria, Ireland, and Latvia— countries with just one union confederation—unaffiliated unions and union representation by several unions within the same confederation exist. Thus, multi-union bargaining is a common if not dominant feature of Western European industrial relations. Sometimes, these unions coordinate their bargaining activities, for instance, by setting joint wage demands and synchronizing the communication to their rank and file. Joining forces increases their bargaining power.
I am a recent member of the UAW (a more white collar local), and it's been insightful. I think unions are much weaker than people perceive. Their strengths are mostly superficial. Striking is something members don't want to resort to. Other than that all you can really do is rally and file NLRB complaints. The NLRB is a slow moving bureaucracy that any competent employer can usually effectively dance around. Rallying and building public support comes with all the pitfalls of politics, media, etc.
The worst part is actually my employer hates the union for no other reason than its an organization they can't control, so it makes the situation of being unionized a bit toxic unfortunately.
From a union supporter who's spent some time reading about anti-union sentiment here, I've found it generally boils down to a few things:
1) A large portion of users on this site are entrepreneurs or in higher-level tech. For the former, unions can be seen as getting in the way of the startup lifecycle; for the latter, many believe that the value they provide makes them untouchable, or believe that the supply of high-level tech workers will never meet demand so they will simply be able to move to another company if needed without much friction.
2) Many people believe that unions spend too much time protecting "low-performers," and that a union enacting barriers to protect employees from quick firing for performance will hurt the overall team/company.
3) Many people also believe that both paying union dues, and a union negotiating for the "average" worker will lead to them making significantly less money. IE, say your company was split 75% junior/25% senior devs, and paid junior devs $75k and senior devs $300k. If the union put pressure on the employer to raise the minimum salary to $100k, then they believe that money will come out of the senior devs salaries (reducing it to ~$225k).
I can say in my experience, the first point is at least somewhat true right now (I had no issues moving to a more senior and better paid job after my last company sold out). I personally think the sentiment of point #2 is interesting; I generally don't view this as "protecting" those who should be fired, and more view it as a public defender ensuring everyone receives legal representation, even if they are clearly guilty.
I'd also just note that even I'm not blanket pro-union; Police unions are a prime example of what happens when unions consolidate too much power because they went decades without any pushback. I'd consider that an extreme outlier though.
Public unions seem to be a special case and, while I generally support unions, I can understand the perspective that public unions bring about specific problems.
E.g., a strong bargaining chip for a union is the right to strike. The idea that a public service can strike creates problems. As another example, I witnessed changes in competition and economics force auto unions to compromise for the business to remain solvent; in the public sphere there is not the same competitive pressure.
Another reason police unions are entirely different, even from other public sector unions, is that the police are used to break strikes. They're structurally antagonistic to every other part of the labour movement.
This is right, but the national guard are often used as well. I alluded to these points in a comment below before noticing that you posted this first.
I would caveat it to say they are used to break illegal strikes, which I think is an important distinction. Their job is to uphold the law, regardless of the side that labor is aligned.
The main problem with the police union (in the US) is that they have been able to repeatedly stop officers who have done horrible things from being fired or even truly punished (paid leave is not punishment).
People often say "there should be a register of police offers nationwide that records officers who were terminated for cause, resigned in lieu of termination, etc."
And there is.
But in the very vast majority of police departments, the CBA with the police union prohibits the use of this register for hiring decisions.
This is the same argument about unions protecting bad employees or low performers. It seems to be an underlying problem of organizational power and not a distinction between public/private unions.
The issues I was pointing out are somewhat different. For example, there are unique problems if a police force tries to strike. In the private sector, there is the opportunity for other organizations to fill that void due to competition within the market. There is no such mechanism for most public services, public unions may have disproportionate power.
Can you explain a check that prevents the same abuse from happening in other settings?
I'm always very wary of the arguments that somehow police are a special industry where unions are bad. I don't really see any logical reasoning put forth to support that. Just evidence on how things have gone. :(
There are a lot of people here who see themselves as temporarily disenfranchised members of the ownership class, and so unions are a negative thing for them because some day they'll hit it big and be rewarded for their steadfast adherence to greed.
There are at least a few of us that view unions as just a smaller extra government entity, and would prefer we rather had stronger governments. To wit, I don't want folks dependent on their job. Period. And unions often do give workers better conditions, but only so long as they are workers.
That said, I typically fall on the pro-union side of most debates. Often is a better alternative than where we are.
It would be great if benefits unions are known for fighting for like health care was guaranteed by the government, but there's some things that a union closer to the workers, which is focused on one thing, can better fight for than the government, like standards for safety beyond OSHA, standards for scheduling, training, discipline, etc. If I understand what you're saying right.
If you think unions are a smaller extra government entity, how do you view Apple in that same lens? Likely, the unions have the least power in this triangle (besides individual employees not covered by a union), and Apple has more power than the government in some, but not all, respects.
I'm not clear what you mean "safety beyond OSHA." Training and such can feel better tailored to the company, I suppose?
I'm not sure what your point is on companies regarding smaller extra governments. I do think corporate power needs checks. My view is that that is best done by governments. I'm also game for training and other benefits, but I don't like them being tied to employment. Especially not a particular employment. Health care is a good example of how that goes wrong.
Unions are odd because they are setup as representative governments. Complete with elections and essentially taxation of the represented individuals in the form of dues. Note that I am explicitly not arguing against the dues, necessarily. I would instead argue that those should go to make the entire community stronger in the form of general taxes.
And again, with the current setup, I would likely fall fully on the "pro-union" side for most debates.
>2) Many people believe that unions spend too much time protecting "low-performers," and that a union enacting barriers to protect employees from quick firing for performance will hurt the overall team/company.
This is not a "some people think" issue. This is a reality of running an organization like a union.
Literally every low barrier to entry organization from unions to political parties to organized religion to organized crime has to invest a significant amount of resources in giving a good chunk of its "dolts" a better deal than they could get anywhere else (even sometimes going to an extent that is not sustainable in order to advertise to other members how far the organization can/will go for you) because that ensures that those people will 100% go to bat for the organization. It is a necessary part of operations at scale.
This is especially true of teacher's unions, who have been openly hostile towards any meaningful way of measuring teacher performance, and have made it astronomically expensive to fire any teacher no matter how bad or incompetent. The world would be a much better place if teacher's unions didn't exist.
How do you measure teacher performance? Have you looked at the actual proposals? They're atrocious, as if education needed to be any more of a rat race of chasing idiotic """performance""" metrics.
I can be kind of mixed from a union standpoint. It really just depends on the goals and outcomes of a particular union. Airline unions tend to be particularly bad when it comes to controlling internal dissent against the union, and regulating peoples pay and flying hours (especially around furloughs). Things may have changed since I heard this criticism, but I'd hate to have this happen in software.
That said, we could use standardization in pay, better and more standardized promotions, and someone to tear down the existing LeetCode interview process. I have not seen any software unions that aim to do this though.
I see unions as mostly other entrenched institutions that add their own layers of bureaucracy and politics. They aren't any better or worse than corporations and governments, but simply by having a place at the table, things move slower and with less efficiency than they could. Of course, if the alternative is abuse of power by corporations and/or governments, they are a necessary evil.
The government artificially grants corporations power by virtue of creating the concept of a corporation and limited liability, so to me it seems only fair for them to grant a collective of workers power as well.
> Basically, I'm opposed to unions as they exist in the US because of the government being involved and "artificially" granting them power.
Artificial is an unfair characterization of history. The President didn't just descend from on high and grant unions powers out of magnanimity. At one point the unions were extremely powerful to the point that they were able to codify in law the rights they had attained.
Rights they had to fight for, in many cases _die_ for. Corporations and the government were not above using police, private firms to do violence, even fatal violence, to employees who were not willing to bend over backwards (unsafe, unhealthy, inhumane working conditions) for their employer.
To add to the other good comments, unions existed and were effective before there were any laws specifically enabling or regulating them.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commonwealth_v._Hunt . There was no law which "artificially" granted the Boston Journeymen Bootmaker's Society power. The "five or six good workmen" who would have walked out should Horne continue to be employed, were exercising their right of free association.
And, fundamentally, that's where union power comes from - the right to collectively decide to quit.
Union laws give unions specific powers, it's true. But they also restrict union power. If you oppose the artificial granting of power, then you should also oppose the artificial restriction of power, and allow "jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns" [1] -- once-legal practices banned by Taft-Hartley and all fundamentally based in the power to collectively decide to stop working.
most american laws around unions are actually prohibitory and limiting. if legal recognition and regulation for organized labor were eliminated, i don't think it would result in less power wielded by unions.
I think you made my point for me, at least partially.
The real teeth in a union is the ability to strike. In joining a union, you signify that you're willing to strike if enough other people aren't getting what they want.
I'm happy with what I have. My team seems pretty happy, too.
If things were bad, I'd consider joining a union. But until they are bad, union dues are just wasted money, and the obligation to strike if enough others want to.
I think you've also pointed out the need for unions, though. Lots of employees literally can't afford to strike because it means they don't get paid, even if it's temporarily. That means that your assertion that "if enough others want to" is kinda meaningless.
I have no desire to be part of a union because of my one-person removed (friends) experience with union violence.
1) Interns, not being part of the union, needed to cross the picket line (Canada Federal Government strike). My friend (female) was punched in the face by a union member.
2) Another friend working on the factory floor, doubled then tripled their work quota. They were pulled aside and told it was amazing how much damage can happen to a vehicle in the parking lot when it's snowy.
Yeah, I have no interest in helping or encouraging that.
However, I do support people's ability to organize and strike. I disagree with a union deciding that they won't cross picket lines. That's cartel-like behavior, like price fixing between shipping companies, or OPEC.
It seems you are anti-union because of bad experiences two friends had. Do you have any friends who have bad experiences with corporations? Do you hold corporations to a lower standard than unions?
> 1) Interns, not being part of the union, needed to cross the picket line (Canada Federal Government strike). My friend (female) was punched in the face by a union member.
Many of us on HackerNews work for businesses like Amazon, or Tesla, or Apple, or Microsoft, which have also been found to have broken the law. Anywhere there is power there is corruption. It seems to me that joining a union where some of leadership have been convicted of crimes should be no different than working for a corporation where some of the leadership has been convicted of crimes -- you make your own decision on a case by case basis.
If none of us ever associated with anyone who's broken the law, I don't know how many folks here would ever work for a company bigger than 100 people.
Even "The Most Pro-Union President You’ve Ever Seen" couldn't bring himself to side with the rail union. The sad part is despite this, even though he isn't the most pro union president, he might be up there. That is to say, our federal government in general is very pro corporate.
I believe the parent is saying that if your logic were correct unions would be extremely powerful in relation to multinational corporations and everyone would be afraid of getting the union angry, as this is not the case something must be keeping unions in check or they cannot, at any rate, grow to be as powerful as you suppose.
That your logic as stated does not hold any identifiable logical error does not mean that it gives the correct result.
And unions are exactly that powerful. A strike can easily shut down a company, a town or a country. I do not see a similar power on the corporation's side. Firing everybody would just kill the corporation as well.
Many unions soon get corrupted and get in bed with the government (or atleast one side of it).
Here in slovenia, many worker unions were against the lowering the taxes on paychecks (higher net with same gross pay), because their political parties were against those, even if the workers themselves would benefit from those.
We also have some areas (eg. a government rail company), where you cannot even get a job, if you don't get approved by one of the two unions, which mostly means that you have to pay off someone in the union to get an approval (for a very cozy job).
Many companies also do things that are a lot worse, like taking massive profits and then laying off the people that gave up time with their families and other opportunities to create those profits. I heard they also do things like give executives that don't do a great job millions while stiffing the individual contributors. Unions can help companies run better by forcing them to take a "longer than 2 year" view on decisions.
Unions that are run like a business eventually become a business. Unions need to be democratically-controlled, where regular workers can propose new contract terms and vote on them, as well as voting to call a strike.
Right. It’s completely unsurprising that to see corruption in groups that were forced to elect leadership that holds views contrary to the foundations of unionization (i.e. they were all but required to elect capitalists because of the communist control act and the internal security act).
This is not a law of nature, many unions just do their job. Many companies also treat their workers unfairly, so there's that. Workers need a way to organise.
What's worse, a company churning through employee after employee or a company captured by its union? Both can happen.
I don't think it's valid to write off all unions based on anecdotal evidence. For every example of bad unionisation one can probably provide one or more counter-examples of good unionisation (e.g. the Scandinavian countries).
Well, yes, but if there's a one-to-one correspondence between good unions and bad unions,that pretty much implies that the expected value of a union vote is zero. It's just the same as not unionizing.
In my personal anecdotal experience, the unions at the places I've worked have been mired in factions. They supported some workers but not others because they picked sides. They weren't just neutral, they undermined some workers to benefit others. It really soured me on them.
>Here in slovenia, many worker unions were against the lowering the taxes on paychecks (higher net with same gross pay), because their political parties were against those, even if the workers themselves would benefit from those.
You can't lower taxes without some sort of tradeoff, which is usually a cut to services. I don't know the context here but it stands to reason that you are not giving the whole situation.
>We also have some areas (eg. a government rail company), where you cannot even get a job, if you don't get approved by one of the two unions, which mostly means that you have to pay off someone in the union to get an approval (for a very cozy job).
Corruption is going to exist without strict governance regardless of unions. I'm a unionized worker in the USA and no one needs to bribe their way into a job here. We have robust oversight and documentation of the hiring process.
Yep, we still have a """temporary""" increase of VAT in action (19->22%) from the 2008 financial crisis... and we got nothing new (neither new or better services) from this.
> You can't lower taxes without some sort of tradeoff, which is usually a cut to services. I don't know the context here but it stands to reason that you are not giving the whole situation.
You cannot increase wages without loss of profits or increase in prices.
The union should fight for the wages, the profits and prices are someone elses problem (owners, customers).
> any worker unions were against the lowering the taxes on paychecks (higher net with same gross pay),
Seems to be quite a lot of context missing. I think nearly everyone agrees they want to pay less taxes and take home more money. Now if lowering taxes does not result in more money then you don't need politicians and unions to make that case.
I'm guessing lowering taxes would result in more expensive, privatized services and voters figured that wouldn't work.
Problematically, it was made exceptionally difficult—-potentially illegal, depending on the circumstances—-to hold a representative position in a union, and also hold the sociopolitical ideologies that led to the creation of unions in the first place: i.e. communism/socialism/Marxism (Communist Control Act of 1954, and the Internal Control Act of 1950).
That isn’t to say it’s impossible for an ideologue to corrupt and seek out power for themselves (it happens often enough). It’s just to say that a capitalist is not driven to act by a deeply seeded belief. They’re only interested in winning the competition. You’re all but inviting corruption.
I think the challenge is the way unions are set up in the US. It's very different than Europe. I recall some HNer mentioning in the UK (I think) your work place can have multiple unions, you can join whichever one you want.
Yeah, the whole concept of employers recognizing a union or employees being required to join a union which is raised in US union discussions are kind of weird.
Employers don't have to recognize a union in Europe, employees can still join and avail of legal support or group actions by those employees that did join.
Similarly, if the majority of your workplace is in a union, you don't have to join, just don't be surprised they don't bother defending your case if you end up a victim of unfair dismissal. Your employer may be unwilling to offer you employment terms different to what the union employees get because of the overhead for them, but if you had that little leverage you probably didn't have the imaginary invididual negotiating power the anti-union crowd imagines anyway.
Minority unions undermine the collective bargaining that underpins the very concept of a union. They make no sense to me, at all. The whole point of a union is having a large enough block of workers committed to act together that the company is forced to either negotiate or perish. This obviously works when you have all the workers unionized, as a company without employees can achieve nothing at all. As the union gets a smaller and smaller fraction of the workforce, however, their bargaining power diminishes dramatically.
That sounds like a really good argument for a union providing sufficiently valuable services to their members that they want to be a member. If a union isn't serving its members those members should be able to seek better options.
If unions worked like this in the US, it seems like many more people would be in favor of them.
Unions by and large do work like this in the US. There's fewer unions, but the unions that do exist tend to do a very good job of representing their members. The main force acting against unionization efforts here isn't that the unions are ineffective, it's that they're so effective that companies fight tooth and nail to suppress them, including spreading a lot of propaganda.
And the problem with open shops and opt-in unions is that scabs can be found who think in terms of the short term. A company, in contrast, has the luxury of playing the long game. So, faced with union demands, a company can hire a bunch of scabs offering benefits and pay equivalent or better than the union is currently fighting for, then when the union is crushed gradually fire the scabs and replace them with new workers who are back to the square 1 the union was fighting from. And because unionizing takes effort and conviction, the new lot might not unionize. The company wins.
Because unions often support policies that significant portions of the workforce do not like. If you're a teacher in America chances are your union dues are being used to oppose merit-based pay increases and retain seniority based pay. If you're a teacher who wants merit-based pay increases then you're being forced by the government to fund a group that is actively working against your own interests.
Multiple unions would let workers join the union alined with their interest.
I feel like this is such an obvious fact that I don't know how people say "contract of free association" with a straight face when it comes to the employment market.
In a small business, maybe you're the only person doing <critical task X>. This is a more level playing field, but maybe a union is still useful here also.
>In a small company, a real conversation is possible.
Why do you think employees have enough leverage across most SMBs to the extent that workers shouldn't organize?
Even SMB owners and managers organize adversarially against their workers (eg by setting compensation and benefits per VC or consultant provided guidance on labor market, by hiring HR specialists to coordinate with managers on keeping wages as low as the market will bear). Why should workers not in turn organize in those cases?
A real conversation is generally not possible anywhere. Your boss has enormous power over you and the reality is that even if you are somehow special, they won't see you that way. It sounds hopeless, but if you approach your boss in this manner (he couldn't care less whether or not you do actually get hit by a bus) the negotiation is easier to do.
In my experience, I have seen more power imbalance at small/medium sized businesses. Whereas larger companies you tend to get lost in the bureaucracy and have the ability to switch teams/orgs and get out of bad situations. HR is usually more helpful with this too.
Is this not common in the US (illegal collusion on wages aside)?
It's always seemed strange to me that people will be reluctant to join unions, while employers are eager to join organizations.
Ftr at the moment I'm not a member of a union - as there's isn't really one that feels applicable to my current situation, and I have relativly good bargaining position.