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.
>CBA with the police union prohibits the use of this register
Have they explicitly state why? It seems strange to the uninitiated that more information about the performance of the same job would be considered irrelevant.
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. :(
Public services are a special industry (not unique to just police) so the dynamics of unions are different.
For one, many public services exist because they are critical to the functioning of society. You can tell this is fundamentally special case because the govt carves out special mechanisms to mitigate the risk (see the the current threat of a rail strike). Secondly, the government doesn't allow competition, so there is not the same solvency problem that a private union has to address. This second point exacerbates the first. A private police force can't just come in and out-compete the existing one to show that they can work better or more efficiently.
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.
The short answer is you measure student progress over time via standardized testing. Someone was able to obtain anonymized per-teacher data via FOIA request and verify that some teachers perform consistently and significantly better than others in terms of helping their students progress, and that this performance was stable across time and even when teachers moved to different schools. At one point, schools were required to provide this data until the law was successfully repealed at the behest of teacher's unions.
Teacher's unions pay mainly based on seniority, but this same data showed that, after about 5 years, teacher performance didn't really improve much. The unions also pay more for higher degrees, but there was no association found between higher degrees and teacher performance.
The book also discusses how different types of testing have been shown to be strong predictors of both future academic and professional success. You should not be so dismissive of objective numeric testing, whose results can be tracked and compared over time. No metric is perfect, but just about any metric beats that of the unions, who, in one area, had 99.8% of their teachers rated as "proficient". The union's metric is useless, and that is a feature for them, not a bug.
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.
Now it's true I have not lived all over the world, but I have lived in numerous places in the U.S, in Denmark, and spend some time in Italy every now and then. I also lived in Germany as a kid, but I've never really seen these fearsome unions you are familiar with, and did I say again I am in Denmark? Even here it isn't like such a powerful organization.
Certainly one can find historical instances of powerful unions, but they do not seem to exist now, and thus your analysis must be faulty somehow. If unions are naturally more powerful than the other forces of society their power should always increase and not decrease, but as the data linked above shows the opposite is the case.
If you want people to accept your logic you will probably need to back it up with data, arguing about real world things like unions tend to bring forth such requirements.
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.