Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sershe 992 days ago
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.
2 comments
tshaddox 991 days ago
> 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.

link
autoexec 991 days ago
> 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.

link
sershe 991 days ago
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)

link
autoexec 991 days ago
> 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.

link
sershe 990 days ago
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.

link