[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?