[wallawe]

If this is your take, you're not being honest about the downsides of unions.

Here is a list of reasons for not wanting a union[1]:

- I want my underperforming colleagues to be fired quickly. It's unfair and annoying that laggards are protected and free riding off their colleagues' (my) effort, and it leads to ineffective orgs.

- I don't want seniority or rank to be rewarded. It's unfair to young people (me) who are more competent and ambitious, and it leads to ineffective orgs.

- I want to negotiate individually because I believe I will make more money as an outperformer. I don't want a centralized handicapper to blunt my compensation.

- I don't like that unions are rent seeking in nature.

- I don't like that unions often are exploited by organized crime.

- I don't like that unions interfere in the broader political process and democracy via activism and political pressure (e.g look at the fact that the new EV subsidies will be going to everyone except Tesla, it's a perversion).

- I think people should be free to organize, but I don't like that the state grants special asymmetric powers to unions.

- I don't like especially public sector unions that I believe are doing significant damage to society broadly. For example police unions that shielded Chauvin after a large number of complaints.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28958674

[winkeltripel]

I don't think you quite understand how the unions work.

-in most cases, the employer is able to fire with cause. The union keeps the employer from using layoffs as a weapon.

- pay scales reward loyalty and keeps the workplace stable.

- without the union, you have almost no bargaining power. The union usually gets a better rate for everyone than any one person could have negotiated. This is in fact the point of collective bargaining. Even the presence of a union job site can lift wages across industries. I see this in Oshawa, where the CAW jobs making car bits helps waitresses and sales associates draw higher wages.

-the employer is rent-seeking on their capital. The union balances this.

-unions are not criminal organizations. The teamsters have done some things in the past. If we didn't have so much union busting, there would be more unions competing for workplaces, and this would drive bad unions out of business.

-unions are political, and need legal protections for workers. Tesla will eventually have to deal with a union or treat their workers better than the UAW.

-I don't like that the state grants asymmetric privileges to the employer class, like never prosecuting white collar crimes, and not clawing back exec severances during bankruptcy, and giving them a lower tax rate than their employees.

-there are many things wrong with policing in the us, but all could be fixed with fedral legislation. The unions are aligned with their membership, and doing great work. The wider outcomes are horrible, but that's a good union doing good work.

[credit_guy]

> without the union, you have almost no bargaining power.

You absolutely do. The most powerful bargaining power of all: the power of the alternative. It's also called "pay me, or I leave" (most often accompanied by "I have an outside offer"). I exercised this power a few times in my career. I did not need any union to bargain for me.

[krainboltgreene]

You're describing a bargaining power that unions have, except instead of "pay me or I leave" it's "pay me or we leave".

Why would you want a less powerful version of the same thing? Even if you don't involve your union, you can still do what you're describing.

You've gained nothing unique by avoiding the union.

[credit_guy]

> you can still do what you're describing.

I doubt you can. Your boss will tell you he can't pay you more than what's on the grid negotiated with the union. My wife works in a place with a union (and is a member of it), and there is such a grid. Nobody even thinks individual bargaining is a possibility.

[krainboltgreene]

So you leave, like you said.

[credit_guy]

"Pay me or I leave" is bargaining. "I leave" is not bargaining.

[dehrmann]

> pay scales reward loyalty and keeps the workplace stable.

The tech industry has arguably developed quickly because people move around a lot, taking best practices with them. Workplace stability might appear locally great, but it hurts the industry as a whole.

[mcguire]

The tech industry is flooded with money, but is enormously inefficient. How many projects are you familiar with that got trashed, often after key people moved on?

[mcguire]

You forgot the part where they are all founded on organized crime.

/s

[ceres]

All great points. To add: As someone who's worked blue collar jobs, it is all too common for unions to protect assholes from getting fired. This leads to a hostile work environment created by the "high seniority" workers.

Something I don't like whenever these discussions come up is the condescending tone, from white collar workers. "Don't these poor people know what's good for them????"

Working class people are capable of thinking for themselves and it's not that uncommon for people to move from a union shop to a non-union shop due to the reasons outlined above.

[7sidedmarble]

All the things you dislike about unionized working environments are things that can go wrong in any working environment. If we had more unions, you'd have more of a choice, instead of the situation now where only the most corrupt survive.

[ditonal]

Poor people? I think rich techies are crazy - or rather, badly misinformed- not to start a union.

Exhibit A of poorly informed: grandparent poster seriously thinking he has more individual bargaining power against trillion dollar corporations than a collective bargaining agreement would.

Exhibit B: grandparent poster thinking collective bargaining _must_ entail many aspects like seniority based compensation that are totally optional.

Tom Brady is in the NFL players association. Tom Cruise is in the Screen Actors guild. Naive techies think being good at leetcode hard gives them bargaining power. A lot of ex Tweeps are getting a wake up call.

The only reason techies had the illusion of negotiation leverage is that they were generating such absurdly high revenue for their employer, the slice they got seemed huge compared to the rest of the country’s gutted middle class. Factor in inflation, housing, and that Wall St is now gunning hard to bring tech compensation down, and you’ll realize techies are the last gasp of Americas dying middle class, and that really pisses off activist hedge funds . See Elliott Managements recent takeover of Pinterest so they could “re-level” employees.

Read the emails between Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin w.r.t high tech class action lawsuit. Read about Google hiring union busting consultant firms.

If unions didn’t work, tech execs wouldn’t be so terrified of them.

Yes, poor people should also unionize. And yes, unfortunately a lot of their options are as broken and corrupt as their employers.

That doesn’t change the fundamental fact that collective bargaining is the _only_ answer .

[deepsquirrelnet]

> Read the emails between Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin w.r.t high tech class action lawsuit. Read about Google hiring union busting consultant firms.

Worse still is that these firms have been caught collectively bargaining against workers through illegal secretive non-compete clauses. Wage suppression has been going on for years, even while these companies have been at the very top of thriving businesses.

It’s simply not a question of affordability. These companies did it because they could.

I’d also like to point out that much of the union activity of a hundred years ago was also about poor working conditions, and not just compensation. Much of that was quelled by increasing government regulations that protected workers against exploitation. Is the government adequately performing this job?

[UncleEntity]

> Tom Brady is in the NFL players association. Tom Cruise is in the Screen Actors guild.

You think that has anything to do with their compensation? Tom Brady has won how many Super Bowls? Tom Cruise has had how many blockbuster movies?

The opposite should be true if unions were the great equalizers, no single actor/athlete would be making hundreds of millions a year and all of them would be making enough to buy a house in Beverly Hills.

[krainboltgreene]

> The opposite should be true if unions were the great equalizers, no single actor/athlete would be making hundreds of millions a year and all of them would be making enough to buy a house in Beverly Hills.

This makes no sense. Two people that are in unions are doing the thing you say they can't. What in the world?

[ubercore]

I think you have a very US-centric lens on unions. In the Nordic countries, for example, unions operate entirely differently. So you need to be clear where your points come from.

[BobbyJo]

> So you need to be clear where your points come from

They were responding to a post specifically asking about Americans' feelings toward unions. That made it pretty clear to me where his points were coming from.

If they were responding from Finland I'd be a little confused why they were responding at all.

[ubercore]

Because Finland is a great example of unions working for the benefit of employees? Why are we constrained to only discussing how (some, not all) unions are in the US?

[jasode]

>Why are we constrained to only discussing how (some, not all) unions are in the US?

In general, nobody is constrained to just discussing USA unions but the particular subthread[1] that you're in which was started by gp (Zeyka) was asking specifically about America. And that's probably because this thread's article is about American unions.

That's why your clarification (to poster wallawe) was perceived as redundant and out of place.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34028480

[Jensson]

Because in USA every union is a battle. There isn't much to talk about with respect to Scandinavian unions, if you don't want to be in one just don't be, if you want to be in one just join, it is much simpler, while in USA one side forces the other side to take the same route, so you can't choose union other votes for what union you are in etc.

[ensignavenger]

The above comment was clearly in response to another comment about how Americans feel about unions, thus it is obvious it was looking at American unions.

[otikik]

> It's unfair and annoying that laggards are protected and free riding off their colleagues' (my) effort

With your unionized coworkers that might be a possibility. With the business owners that’s a certainty. Do you feel differently about these two groups of people?

[onetimeusename]

The way that many union bosses have become part of the political class is something I rarely see discussed when talking about union benefits. The bosses seem to be well removed from the rank and file members and can have completely different goals and priorities. The definition of a union does not really seem like it should have anything to do with politics either. I am sure that people will defend union bosses by pointing out that union leadership jobs have a different nature than what the members do which may be so. But I would like to point out that it seems pretty rarely people talk about exploitation and corruption of and by union bosses themselves as if this can't possibly exist. I would argue there is potential for union leadership to be exploitative of union members and this is worth discussing.

[larksimian]

Beautiful sentiments. Young programmers in the hottest job market in history don't need a union.

Fortunately for your ability to empathize with the plebeians in the regular world, Musk has shown that software companies are probably employing at least twice as many programmers as they need, so this job market should be turning south soon.

After ten-twenty years of being employed half the time and your salary going down with every new job I'm sure you'll be mentally broken down enough to empathize with the blue collar pro-union perspective.

[dragonwriter]

> Musk has shown that software companies are probably employing at least twice as many programmers as they need

No, he hasn’t; he hasn’t even shown that Twitter was doing that.

[larksimian]

He's shown enough for the tech elite hive-mind to trample workers into the dirt for a few years. It's not like the amount of staffing SV companies have makes any sense anyway.

[BHSPitMonkey]

> - (e.g look at the fact that the new EV subsidies will be going to everyone except Tesla, it's a perversion).

If you mean the federal tax credit, it was the OLD one that stopped going to Tesla (due to the per-model caps in place; caps that any competitor could also reach after enough sales, mind you). The new credit that was signed into law this year does not exclude Tesla (instead, it excludes cars manufactured overseas).

[underbrush]

Take your reasons, which are really more opinions, and insert "free speech" instead of "unions" (after the appropriate changes) and you might understand why people would disagree.

[leereeves]

How does "free speech" reward seniority, protect underperforming colleagues, prevent negotiating individually, etc?

[underbrush]

That is why I said make the appropriate changes.

- I don't want free speech because it is unfair to award lazy thinking free riding off established publications.

- I don't want free speech because it is often exploited by terrorists.

- I think people should be free to say things but I don't think it should grant them special protection from the government.

etc.

It isn't an exact comparison but that also isn't the point.

[xboxnolifes]

You're right, it's not a comparison at all.

[underbrush]

It is it just isn't an exact comparison which is also what I said.

[tgv]

tldr: I think I can get more money, and screw the rest.

You’ve proven the point about inequality.

[joshlemer]

Thank you for articulating this so well!