[knewter]

When I was learning to walk, my dad was installing conveyors for an automotive factory - he was vp of engineering (later robotics) for a large engineering firm that Siemens ultimately bought.

He was trying to get the job finished and get home to his family, so he was working late one night double checking the fit on all the nuts, bolts, anything he could check to ensure the job was successful. He did this all the time, I learned how to successfully deliver product from seeing him do it.

A gang of union guys came up to him and threatened to beat him if he continued to work because he was taking a union job away from "the pipe guy", call him Frank.

My dad says "that's fine, can frank come help?"

"Frank's out sick"

And that was that. He either stopped getting the job done or they would visit violence upon him.

I'll never side with people that think this is acceptable behaviour.

[TheCoelacanth]

With that criteria, you have ruled out siding with any form of organization that humans have ever created.

Businesses, governments, churches, sports teams and probably even Girl Scout troops all have a history of committing violence when it serves their aims.

[sershe]

For most organizations, this behavior is incidental to their incentives. For unions, it's a primary motivation. Throughout their history, unions would always be maximally exclusionary to the degree it wouldn't backfire in terms of PR (and sometimes beyond that, e.g. Cesar Chavez conducting anti-immigrant border raids), because that is their whole point.

[tshaddox]

> For most organizations, this behavior is incidental to their incentives. For unions, it's a primary motivation.

I don't see much of a distinction. I suspect a significant portion of workplace or work-related crime involves the criminal being motivated by work-related incentives.

[autoexec]

> For most organizations, this behavior is incidental to their incentives. For unions, it's a primary motivation.

For unions, it has only ever been a means to an end (with that end being things like having days off, and safe working conditions) Corporations on the other hand throw human lives away because it makes them money, and making money is all they care about. That's why the bodies of children were being mangled in the machinery of the industrial revolution and it's why children are still dying in garment factory disasters today.

[sershe]

For corporations, even their bad behavior is incidental to their goals. Corporation in a vacuum is a form of capital organization, typically used to provide some service for profit. Sure, if a corporation can e.g. buy a government (like United Fruit did), it will totally do that. However, it's incidental - if it couldn't it would do something else, so by setting up decent rules it is easy to make corporations do far more good than harm.

For unions in the vacuum though... if we assume no other workers exist and no innovation is possible, unions (at least, US-style unions) would have no reason to exist - company cannot replace workers, or between multiple companies it can only replace workers in a game of musical chairs, so all the workers individually would have great bargaining power.

An approximation: tech 5 years ago, maybe even now, I haven't interviewed recently.

So, the only/main reason unions need to exist is to protect the jobs of their members against (1) other workers, including immigrants (2) being obsoleted by innovation. That is not incidental to their goals, that is their whole goal. I find both of these incentives to be inherently evil (I am also self aware enough to know that while e.g. banning AI coding innovations, any further immigration of developers and outsourcing to boot would be amazing for my compensation, it's still evil)

[autoexec]

> unions (at least, US-style unions) would have no reason to exist

Of course they would, because corporations exploit workers all the time. If workers aren't being paid the backpay they're owed, the union will handle that. If workers want to be able to take the time to walk to a bathroom instead of having to wear diapers or piss in plastic bottles while working, the union will handle that. Same with being forced to work excessive hours, having unpaid overtime, being locked in overnight, being forced to continue working under hazardous conditions, being forced to submit to strip searches by management, etc.

These are the types of abuses that happen in the US, and even if every employee were part of a union, companies would continue to do those types of things for as long as they could get away with it. The difference is that workers with unions can pressure the company to stop abusing workers for example, like when employees are being forced to share underwear with their co-workers (https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2001-jun-08-fi-7876-...)

unions protect workers against a hell of a lot more than just being replaced by slave labor, or robot slave labor.

[sershe]

You are missing my point, or rather confirming it. Multiple times actually.

1) The reason corporations can do these things is because there's competition for jobs. If there wasn't, they wouldn't be able to get away with it - see tech industry pay and perks, and the fact that people just leave and find another job for a reason as normal as having to work at an office. If there's competition for labor, unions have value - by excluding other labor. That is their only goal.

2) What's wrong with "robot slave labor"? My point exactly, again. Unions protect a subset of workers from innovation. Good for a few newly-useless workers, terrible for society.

[tshaddox]

That just sounds like humans committing assault. Really awful, but to me it doesn't indicate much about the concept of unions. I bet there was a firefighter once who murdered someone, but likewise that doesn't indicate much about the concept of firefighting.

[adamrezich]

> I bet there was a firefighter once who murdered someone, but likewise that doesn't indicate much about the concept of firefighting.

exceedingly terrible analogy, because the hypothetical firefighter hypothetically committing a hypothetical murder, wholly unrelated to firefighting, is a completely different situation than union guys threatening violence on a worker for union-related reasons, in the pursuit of union-related ideals.

[tshaddox]

The point, of course, is that it wouldn't matter whether the firefighter's murder was in pursuit of firefighting-related goals. If the firefighter murdered a coworker who was competing for a promotion, that still tells you very little about the concept firefighting.

It's not some huge gotcha that the union workers who committed assault did it in pursuit of their own goals. Most people do most things in pursuit of their own goals.

[LindeBuzoGray]

So the union and company came to a legal agreement about work and your father chose to do work breaking that agreement.

What would happen if I began installing or moving pipes at my company that management and ownership told me not to? A "gang" of security guards or policemen would visit violence on me to stop.

You are aghast at the people actually doing the work and creating the wealth enforcing their rights, but make no mention of the heirs who own Siemens and their "gangs" working to expropriate surplus labor time and profit.

[throwawa14223]

> So the union and company came to a legal agreement about work and your father chose to do work breaking that agreement.

Adding value deserves to be met with threats. This is a stunning argument against unions you're making.

[LindeBuzoGray]

If I add value which management does not approve, then I am met by threats on their end. That is a stunning argument against management.

The workers create all the wealth and do all the work. The heirs who own the controlling stake in a big company like Siemens do not work, but expropriate surplus labor time doing work.

You have the workers who do all the work and create all the wealth on one end, and the heirs who parasitically expropriate the worker's surplus time on the other. It's obvious to those of us who work who the "argument" is against.

[hackeraccount]

If you add value and management threatens you it's both wrong and a mistake on their part - in that it goes against managements interest.

If the Union does the same thing it's wrong - because threatening people is wrong - but not actually against their interests because as you say a Union isn't interested in the company doing well. All the company does is exploit them and the customers. The Union just wants to make sure they get a pound of flesh out of the company (and presumably the customers too).

[pydry]

There's a long and storied history of anti union violence that is far, far worse than what your dad suffered:

For instance, when a company

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

>By August 29 the battle was fully underway. Chafin's men, though outnumbered, had the advantage of higher positions and better weaponry. Private planes were hired to drop homemade bombs on the miners. A combination of poison gas and explosive bombs left over from World War I were dropped in several locations near the towns of Jeffery, Sharples and Blair. At least one did not explode and was recovered by the miners; it was used months later to great effect as evidence for the defense during treason and murder trials.

Or the anti union assassinations in Columbia:

https://prospect.org/features/coca-cola-killings/

>After the leader of their union was shot down at their plant gate in late 1996, Edgar Paéz and his co-workers at the Coca-Cola bottling factory in Carepa, Colombia, tried for more than four years to get their government to take action against the responsible parties. Instead, some of the workers themselves wound up behind bars, while the murderers went free.

>I'll never side with people that think this is acceptable behaviour.

It sounds like you are implying that you would never side with any union ever. Not even these.

Is that accurate?

[knewter]

Yeah I meant I wouldn't side with anyone that thinks it's acceptable to do what they did to my dad. I still mean that. Showing me some other examples does nothing, and modern unions largely think more of what happened to my dad should happen.