[mustang-med]

My hard and fast rule in america is that everything aside from unions do not work in the interest of the people. The sooner this is taught to our kids, the better off they'll be from being indoctrinated from the trash on instagram/tiktok.

[swatcoder]

The more complete and histocally evidenced rule is that all institutions eventually just work to continue and/or expand their existence in itself.

They can get founded in the genuine interests of some cause (and often are), but each transition in leadership tends to find itself more professionalized in some way and more divorced from the founding cause, with process (and/or corruption) becoming their effective mandate instead.

Unions, sadly, have shown no exception, which is what allowed public opinion to eventually swing against the post-war batch of them. We could use some fresh unions in many industries for sure, but there's no truth in putting them on a pedestal. They're prone to devolve and corrupt just like everything else, and there are people who still carry the experience of having seen them do so.

[zoidb]

"First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization. "

It's the Iron Law of Bureaucracy https://www.jerrypournelle.com/reports/jerryp/iron.html

[7thaccount]

I found this revelatory at one point in my career, but this shouldn't have been a surprise as the administrators literally control all promotions and will thus turn the organization into one that serves the managerial class over actual technical ability and knowledge.

As a technical worker, your best option is to try to become extremely valuable and make it known that your continued employment is predicated upon promotions when they should be due. For example, if senior engineer is available at 5 years and you're working your butt off, you need to make it known that you're expecting it or they may just push it out to 6 years if they think they won't lose you. If you're really good at your job and it would be difficult to replace you and put your manager behind schedule, they'll be incentivized to take care of you. It's all a game.

On the flip side... don't try this if they're trying to get rid of you. Be prepared to walk away if you can if they're not taking care of you.

Another thing I learned is that if you want to join management, you have to pretty much stop acting technical. They usually don't like adding technical staff to management as 1.) it may make them look incompetent, 2.) you provide more value to the company doing technical work at a lower salary, and 3.) it shows you might actually not be a good fit for that kind of work, although this isn't necessarily true.

[bobthepanda]

Not all unions are perfect and there are certainly issues. That being said, the American solution of getting rid of them entirely is throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Individual employees just do not have the negotiating heft of a corporation, particularly in the US with employer provided healthcare and whatnot.

[keybored]

> The more complete and histocally evidenced rule is that all institutions eventually just work to continue and/or expand their existence in itself.

This isn’t more complete and historically evidenced. This is a Law Named After Person/Dilbert Quip, which is the pit of cliches that a lot of HN comments fall into on sociology.

What, other than just cynicism,[1] have these Stated Truisms contributed to? These rules are so rigid (so they can be pithy, snappy) that they sound immutable. Is the point only to, say, feel smug about how the manager directly above you has been promoted to his level of incompetence?

[1] Cynicism is fine and good. But just-cynicism has no way of moving beyond itself to a better state. The difference between critique and throwing your arms up.

> They can get founded in the genuine interests of some cause (and often are), but each transition in leadership tends to find itself more professionalized in some way and more divorced from the founding cause, with process (and/or corruption) becoming their effective mandate instead.

Nothing in history is ever just a downward spiral of corruption and rigidity. Outside things happen, revolts happen, things are replaced, systems are overturned.

[watwut]

That quip is a cynic joke, not a statement of historical fact. There are many organizations that simply kill themselves and die out via people leaving as the original purpose don't matter anymore.

[swatcoder]

Quip? Joke? I don't know what you mean.

It's an extensively treated paradigm in sociology. With sociology being a "soft" science and not having access to a methodology as rigorous as physics, it's certainly contestable and there are of course many sociologists who have made arguments against it or that simply don't consider it convincing, but it's not just some casual insight and certainly not someone's "joke".

The reason I mentioned it, in any case, was to relate it to previous commentor's supposition that unions were excluded from their "rule" (which was a casual insight). You needn't take either this perspective nor theirs as true yourself, but there's not much case to exempt unions if you're going to start looking through the world from that lens in the first place.

[watwut]

Maybe in some pop sociology books, but actual real sociology as a science does not treat it as an established truth at all. The sociology being "soft" does not mean you can cherry pick what suits you and pretend there is consensus about your cherry pick.

In that sense, not even physics is like physics.

Also, the actual sociology, if anything, tend to be very nuanced where majority of the claims are packed into conditionals and probabilities. As a science, it super rarely makes simplistic claims like this.

[mistrial9]

this has lots of "real" in it but details matter. At a formative time, American politics specifically substituted "safe" leadership in union upper management.. either connected to party politics or just directly from old-Right Europe who had lots of experience dealing with workers and systems. Yes, there were real Mafia families in the Teamsters, in other words. The fiery and violent revolutions across the world did have their impacts on America.

Since the 1980s, evolution via bureaucracy and golf clubs, court cases and election results seem to have been more the driving force.. people can only get so fat before their eyes start to glaze over and trivial concerns take the airtime.

[newshackr]

Unions also don't always work in the interest of everyone they represent. For instance, they tend to be protective of older and longer working members in exchange for limiting upward mobility of younger members. Or building policies that encourage the growth of the union as an organization, despite potential costs.

[CSSer]

It’s true. My first job was as a cashier at Kroger. I remember looking at the pay tables and being shocked. You could make impressive money as a cashier at Kroger… if you worked there for 30 years. Virtually no one I worked with had even worked there for more than a few years either. Meanwhile, I earned just above the federal minimum wage and multiple hours of my weekly earnings went to little more than protecting my “right” to “no-call, no-show” for six straight days in a row before being fired. I never did this. It seemed unfair. Others did and I had to work that much harder on those days.

One day a union rep stopped by. He was very well-dressed, and he had this beaming smile. He gave me a t-shirt. That pretty much summed up the benefits I experienced.

I remain pro-union, but every time the subject comes up I think there’s a lot more nuance there than people would like to admit. My Dad, for example, has worked at a union job for over 30 years. Ironically, he’s a Republican. He makes decent money now, but the job is very labor intensive, and the healthcare sucks. He’s repeatedly turned down a promotion into management because he’d be out of the union and earning a salary that is not that much higher than what he currently earns per hour. He’s also told me repeatedly that kids just don’t want to work anymore because the turnover rate is high. Many starting out, especially those with dependents, complain that it’s not worth it for what they earn. He holds that although it’s not great it’s enough. Recently, in an attempt to persuade him to take a promotion, he learned that the healthcare plans offered to management are 2-3x cheaper for better benefits than what the union has negotiated. It’s been pretty crazy to watch his opinion slowly begin to shift.

[ipaddr]

He is staying in for protection. The extra money doesn't make up for having your experience count as added protection (they can't fire him, they can reduce those jobs and employees with more service time will keep the job first).

If a company can fire quickly and replace with cheaper options no one is going to last more than a few years. Many software shops do this (meta, Amazon, generic local company, etc.

I share your experiences working in a union environment when younger and having family have live long jobs. In one case I felt the union was against me or my class of worker (student employee) because we took away from regular union jobs. Still had to pay dues. The other union job just took a few dollars from my paycheck but gave me a wage I couldn't earn elsewhere.

[crmd]

When you become an older worker, and experience firsthand the vulnerability of seniority, you realize why your union was always so protective of older workers. I would think many tech workers over ~35 can relate.

[akira2501]

The fundamental idea of most unions seems to be, that once labor recognizes that it is working for a monopoly, instead of working to break up that monopoly, they decide to form one of their own in order to gain some power of negotiation with their employer. Typically to the detriment of the consumer market and the labor market.

For new entrants into the labor market, as you've flagged, now they have to successfully negotiate between two overly large entities with predictably unfortunate results. Labor is best served as a competitive market and unions should only be used in the few limited circumstances where they are otherwise unavoidable.

[hawkice]

Unions aren't acting in the interest of the people generically, often not even the members of the union. Otherwise they wouldn't go to court to force people who don't even want to be in the union to pay dues, even when the dues go to political campaigns unrelated to the purpose of the union, as in Janus v. AFSCME (where the support for political causes by the union meant it violated public sector workers freedom of speech if they are compelling fees from non-members, a relatively narrow ruling not impacting most unions).

[beryilma]

> Otherwise they wouldn't go to court to force people who don't even want to be in the union...

Even worse, they might request your dismissal if you don't join. Here is a direct quote from the Union agreement of a major university, where I teach part-time: "The Union may request that a Part-time Faculty Member who fails to join the Union, maintain Union membership, pay an agency fee, or make a charitable contribution in lieu of an agency fee shall be dismissed. If the Union makes such a request, the Employer shall comply... If the Part-time Faculty Member fails to pay within that time period, and the Union so verifies, the Part-time Faculty Member’s employment will be terminated at the Union’s request".

If anything, unions are only acting in their own interest.

[sircastor]

Arguably, a union has to hold the position of requiring membership, and against those who don’t want to join. Collective bargaining only works when your position represents the group to the point where it can’t be dismissed.

But yeah, It’s challenging for a union to remain exclusively dedicated to serving its membership. I think it’s increasingly complicated with national unions which exist for the sake of unions as a concept, but not necessarily any union members.

It’s weird.

[Jensson]

Unions doesn't work that way in Europe, it is not something unions must do.

Collective bargaining works as long as you are a collective that bargains together, you don't need to have every single person be a art of that collective.

[elicash]

I strongly disagree with you about Janus.

The point of that decision by a right-wing court was to make it harder for public sector workers to stand together in unions. Unions are democratic institutions, with dues and leadership decided by the membership, and the idea that some people pay and some don't even though the entire unit is represented doesn't make a ton of sense. Just like it wouldn't make sense if 2 people in a unit of 1000 wanted to be in a particular union to just say those 2 can bargain collectively.

The weird "speech" argument was basically that their worksite issues are inherently political. I disagree. Unions have separate political funds from the worksite stuff that are optional.

[devilbunny]

> public sector workers

A group for whom even FDR, the great co-opter of unions, had to pretend to be opposed to unionization.

Seriously, civil service protections are there for you and don't apply to private-sector employees. But you claim the right to strike against your fellow citizens and deprive them of government services? This isn't Andrew Carnegie; it's your fellow citizens.

[elicash]

1. I’m not a public sector worker, weird assumption.

2. I advocate for private sector to unionize as well. I’m not the one who brought up Janus/private sector.

3. You’re telling me people with important jobs (private or public) shouldn’t be able to strike to improve the very services we all depend on? Hospital workers striking for better patient ratios? Teachers for their students?

Taking away those freedoms is wrong and dangerous.

[devilbunny]

"You" being used impersonally here; I don't mean you specifically.

Private sector unions are crap under US law, but they're a good concept in general.

No, public sector employees should not be allowed to strike. They get special protections (civil service) that do not apply to private-sector workers. Public sector workers work for the rest of us; we're not all fat-cat capitalists taking their potential wages to make ourselves rich. We're their fellow citizens, and when government employees strike, what's the average citizen to do? Your mother died while abroad, your passport is expired, but hey, the State Department clerks are on strike, so guess what? You're not going.

You want things to change, vote someone in who agrees with you like any other citizen. The only strike-breaking measure that's easily available to the government (due to civil-service laws) is conscripting everyone in the job or replacing them with military/National Guard, which is swatting a fly with a Buick.

[elicash]

I think our fundamental disagreement is that I view public sector employment as more similar to private sector in the day-to-day than you do.

Secondarily, I think you fail to think through what happens when PRIVATE sector workers like hospital workers, or nursing home workers, or other important jobs go on strike. It can't just be the case that if the general public is hurt by it, they lose worker protections. Especially when often the goals of those strikes are to improve the services. There's not really a reason to separate out private from public sector here. Private sector jobs are also important to the general public.

[hn_version_0023]

There’s a movie clip I’ve seen with Brad Pitt of all people, explaining how America isn’t a nation, it’s a business. A business you don’t own and can’t escape. And you’re on your own. Something to that effect anyway. I’d love to know the movie or show! Its such a perfect example of a truth we all know but that never gets spoken aloud.

The Founding Fathers would be deeply ashamed of us, I think.

[sircastor]

I think the founding fathers would be confounded by us more than anything else.

Probably by federalism, the focus on the presidency, Senate elections by the general populace, the role and power of the Supreme court, and a pile of other things.

[rawling]

Killing them softly?

[hn_version_0023]

Thank you kindly :)

The irony is I had never seen the entire scene, and Jefferson is called out hard!

[AmVess]

Yep. Quote is at the end.

[adhamsalama]

Fight Club?

[7speter]

>The Founding Fathers would be deeply ashamed of us, I think.

Sorry, but the founding fathers who held other humans in bondage for all sorts of free labor?

Those founding fathers, or did I wake up in a parallel universe this morning? Let me check wikipedia…

[mistrial9]

> the founding fathers who held other humans in bondage for all sorts of free labor

Actually, slavery was a bitter dividing line among the founders of the USA. It is intellectually lazy to ascribe slavery to all of the founders of the USA. It also insults those who were vocally and politically against slavery, from the very earliest days. You can find many examples with any effort at all.

[beepbooptheory]

Is there anything at all to be said about the fact that slavery ended up being permissible anyway? Or is that just lazy?

Like, doesn't the sheer magnitude of the inhumanity that actually existed in these times kind of overshadow whatever armchair-enlightment some guys voiced?

How could you be aware of what they did in those times even the slightest bit, and yet still be concerned that one might "insult" guys who have been dead 200 years? How can that even make sense?

[mixmastamyk]

Slavery wasn't invented in America. It was common during the Roman Empire and thousands of years before that. Blaming 18th century folks for not righting every wrong up to their time is lazy, as it would be to attribute full-responsibility to you today for something improved and looked down upon in the future.

(None of us are fully independent but gain and suffer inertia from history and society at large.)

Still, we can learn from Ancient Greece, American Founders, as well as folks today.

[beepbooptheory]

I apologize, this is such a strange way to be positioned to all this. The point of bringing up something like the practice of slavery in early America is not about "blaming" people about anything. They are already dead! Many generations over. This conceit that the bare acknowledgement of history itself should merely serve to assign blame or culpability to certain people or another feels just so wrong.

The point is that it happened. It was determined and sustained by countless totally mechanical and impersonal conditions and tendencies. Just as the operative ideologies in play in the minds of all our fave founding fathers can only be viewed from our purview as some composite of factors, not as some collection of good guys and bad guys. To point out that maybe they should not be a moral compass to us today is not scapegoating them in some grand moral court of human existence! Its just making a point, and urging historical context as a tool to maybe be a little more rational about our world today. There is nothing at stake but that.

[7speter]

Yes it was so divisive in the late 18th century in what became the U.S. that the founding father punted the issue so that the 13 states would ratify the new constitution. The issue was swept under the rug until that rabble rouser Abe Lincoln got elected, and all the slave states seceded between the time he got elected and inaugurated, sone 80 years after the signing of the declaration of independence.

Feel free to downvote because I’m not gonna accept your revisionist history.

[sapphicsnail]

Almost all of the founding fathers either owned slaves or weren't willing to stick their necks out to stop it. We absolutely should question their judgement.

[mistrial9]

less than ten seconds of research:

$googlesearch "how many signers of the US Constitution were slave owners?"

25 Of the 55 delegates to the Constitutional Convention, about 25 owned slaves. Many of the framers harbored moral qualms about slavery.

Historical Context: The Constitution and Slavery

[devilbunny]

Politics is the art of the possible. Given what post-slavery America looked like for the former slaves (not much different), the question becomes: do you care so much about slavery, which is an ancient institution, that you give up the idea of forming a united front?

Was it good? No, it was a bad idea. But that's something we say comfortably from our homes in a large, powerful country. In 1787... this was a remote and weak place. If you wanted the slave-dependent colonies to join, you had to either buy their slaves from them or allow it to continue. And there wasn't enough money to buy them.

[goto11]

There is no "the interest of the people". There are lots of different people with different and often conflicting interests.

[rpmisms]

Unions work in their own favor, not necessarily the workers'. That's the real rule: everything tries to benefit itself.

[yongjik]

I'm not sure why you're complaining about instagram/tiktok, because "everything aside from unions do not work in the interest of the people" is the kind of facile, black-and-white statement that is perfectly suited for the modern ragebait industry.

[citizen_friend]

What property do unions possess that makes them different?

[Nasrudith]

The standard rhetorical sleight of hand that is standard any time "the people" are cited. To be fair unions are slightly better than most users in that department as they have actual votes.

[aardvarkr]

That’s… honestly not a bad take. If we’re not paying for it then we’re the product, not the customer. Need to clarify that unions aren’t for ALL PEOPLE, just the people who pay for them