[sfteus]

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.

[bumby]

>Police unions

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.

[h4n1]

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.

[bumby]

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.

[Geezus-42]

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).

[FireBeyond]

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.

[bumby]

>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.

[FireBeyond]

I think the union's position is that the register doesn't "discriminate" against officers who were terminated in spite of the union's "disagreement" that it was justified, and those who the union represented but recognized that the termination was valid.

[bumby]

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.

[taeric]

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. :(

[bumby]

>are a special industry

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.

[taeric]

This still feels like a bit of a stretch. In that I can almost certainly list reasons why a big industry in a city is critical to the functioning of said city. All the more true for all too many cities around here.

[bumby]

Again, the govt restricts the ability for those unions to do things like strike (existing rail union or previous air traffic controller unions as an example). The govt can also threaten nationalization which adds some leverage against either side holding the other hostage. I would argue that is harder to do when the govt is restricting itself. E.g., if the police go on strike, who is going to enforce it? Possible the national guard but that brings about a host of additional issues. Nationalization is no-factor because it's already nationalized. My main point is that these additional nuances make public unions create problems that don't have the same mitigating factors.

[MisterBastahrd]

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.

[taeric]

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.

[dfxm12]

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.

[taeric]

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.

[dsfyu404ed]

>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.

[PathOfEclipse]

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.

[andrepd]

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.

[PathOfEclipse]

If you read this book, there's a whole chapter dedicated to someone successfully coming up with a metric and validated it: https://www.amazon.com/Race-Bottom-Uncovering-Destroying-Edu...

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.

[eesmith]

If the grades given by unionized teachers is a better prediction of future academic and professional success than standardized tests, would you switch your support to unionized teachers over testing?

See, the thing is, high school GPA is a better predictor for academic success than standardized testing. Here are four quotes from the many relevant papers found through Google Scholar:

1) "Decomposing GPA: Why Is High School GPA the Best Single Predictor of First- Year GPA?" https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Jeffrey-Steedle/publica... :

> Research has consistently shown that high school grade-point average (HSGPA) is the best single predictor of academic outcomes in the first year of postsecondary education (Bowen, Chingos, & McPherson, 2009). Given that HSGPA is not a standardized measure of academic achievement—and is not therefore perfectly comparable across students or high schools—it likely incorporates information about college readiness beyond academic knowledge and skills.

2) "Does the ACT Composite Score or High School Grade Point Average Provide a Better Prediction of Bachelor Degree Attainment?" https://scholarworks.harding.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...

> Results indicated high school GPA to be a significant predictor of persistence to degree attainment while the ACT Composite score was not a significant predictor. Implications from this study suggest that admissions officers may want to emphasize a student's high school GPA in determining if the student will complete a bachelor's degree program.

3) "High School GPAs and ACT Scores as Predictors of College Completion: Examining Assumptions About Consistency Across High Schools" https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.3102/0013189X2090211...

> High school GPAs (HSGPAs) are often perceived to represent inconsistent levels of readiness for college across high schools, whereas test scores (e.g., ACT scores) are seen as comparable. This study tests those assumptions, examining variation across high schools of both HSGPAs and ACT scores as measures of academic readiness for college. We found students with the same HSGPA or the same ACT score graduate at very different rates based on which high school they attended. Yet, the relationship of HSGPAs with college graduation is strong and consistent and larger than school effects. In contrast, the relationship of ACT scores with college graduation is weak and smaller than high school effects, and the slope of the relationship varies by high schoolYou write "objective numeric testing", but tell me, what is the objective reason those tests tend to focus on math and short-form English comprehension? Why do they omit art appreciation, musical skills, physical education, essay writing, and other topics that students learn at school?

4) "What Matters Most for College Completion?" https://www.calstate.edu/apply/Documents/elevating-college-c...

> Both SAT or ACT scores and high school GPA are associated with the likelihood that students at four-year colleges earn a bachelor’s degree. But when considered together, the predictive power of high school GPA is much stronger. Figure 2 shows that, among students with similar SAT or ACT scores, those with higher high school GPAs are much more likely to graduate. But among students with similar high school GPAs, no strong relationship exists between SAT or ACT scores and graduation rates (except that those who score below 800 are noticeably less likely to complete college).

> This makes sense given that earning good grades requires consistent behaviors over time—showing up to class and participating, turning in assignments, taking quizzes, etc.—whereas students could in theory do well on a test even if they do not have the motivation and perseverance needed to achieve good grades. It seems likely that the kinds of habits high school grades capture are more relevant for success in college than a score from a single test.

> ... And the relatively weak predictive power of SAT or ACT scores vanishes entirely once the student’s high school is taken into account, suggesting that the test scores serve partly as a proxy for high school quality.

Sure, you can claim I'm cherry-picking. But the same holds for the book you pointed to. And given just how many papers there are which argue that GPA is more predictive than standardized scores, it's certainly nowhere near as clear-cut as you appear to believe.

Does this start to make you reconsider your opposition to unionized teachers now? If not, why not?

[PathOfEclipse]

You're conflating things together and missing the plot. I was comparing the teacher evaluations given by teacher unions to the evaluations of teachers based on student improvement over time on standardized tests. You, on the other hand, changed the subject slightly, which is fine, but then you use the phrase "grades given by unionized teachers", which makes no sense. All the studies you cited talk GPAs in general. Whether the teachers doing the grading are unionized or not is not mentioned or relevant. If you're going to have a discussion, you should take care to use more careful language. It looks like you're trying to be deceiving in order to prop up teacher's unions.

I clicked on your first study and it doesn't even do any analysis on GPA as a predictor of future success relative to other standardized tests. In fact, it assumes this as true and then tries to explain why. It also looks like a low-quality paper published at conference without peer review.

I clicked on your second link. It's not peer reviewed. It only examines data from one university. It has a very small sample size. It has zero citations. It reaches conclusions that are contrary to existing literature. It does not look like it should be taken seriously.

I decided at this point to stop wasting my time. If your first two citations are so weak, I don't have much confidence in the others.

[FireBeyond]

What might make for sensible, objective teacher metrics?

[kodah]

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.

[fallingknife]

Why would I want standardization in pay? I would make less money.

Why would I want standardized promotions? I don't want to be lead by people just because they have been around longer than me.

Why would I want to tear down the leetcode interview process? It's much easier.than having to do demo projects.

[seanmcdirmid]

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.

[Ancapistani]

I'm very much anti-unionization, but don't really fall into any of those buckets. To be fair, I didn't take it to be an exhaustive list.

Basically, I'm opposed to unions as they exist in the US because of the government being involved and "artificially" granting them power.

[dpkirchner]

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.

[arrosenberg]

> 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.

[FireBeyond]

> 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.

[eesmith]

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.

[1] Quoting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act

[andrepd]

As opposed to enforcing "artificial" property rights. That's government interference that you can tolerate :)

[ruined]

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.