[legitster]

Kinda. Collective bargaining rights are great for employees but they do not automatically lead to better outcomes for customers/citizens/etc.

A good counter-example of ATC would be police. Police have strong collective bargaining rights, but mostly came at the expense of accountability and citizen oversight. (And also police departments are still chronically understaffed).

[dttze]

Police are the state's manifestation of the monopoly on violence. Comparing that to civilian safety orgs makes no sense.

[legitster]

Okay, if not police, then teacher's unions: there's not a lot of available studies, but most point to a non-existent or negative relationship between CBAs and student performance.

Or in the private sectors, non-unionized manufacturers like Toyota and Honda always outperform legacy manufacturers in the US on quality.

I'm not saying there's not a strong argument for unionization, but an improvement in quality is not one backed by any sort of evidence and it's a really weak argument. To put it another way, it would be hard for a unionized employee to outperform a Foxconn employee with no human rights on output quality - but it's not at all the kind of argument we should be making.

[lenerdenator]

> Okay, if not police, then teacher's unions: there's not a lot of available studies, but most point to a non-existent or negative relationship between CBAs and student performance.

I'm going to guess that there are far stronger correlations with household wealth when it comes to student performance than there are whether the students are taught by teachers who are employed under a CBA.

> Or in the private sectors, non-unionized manufacturers like Toyota and Honda always outperform legacy manufacturers in the US on quality.

That could very well be because of how the cars are engineered and made versus the union representation for the people who make them.

GM, for example, tends to build cars in a way as to make them as cheap as possible to build. That lets them compete on price versus quality. You need the car now, after all; what happens in 40k miles isn't as important to you now. Of course, that comes with the risk, like when some essential component on my college girlfriend's Pontiac's shat the bed, and they'd had to take the entire front of the car apart to replace it because it was cheaper to build that way. They've just taken the price of having a functioning vehicle and charged you for it at the mechanic, not the dealership.

Toyota and Honda used to do the opposite, of course. You were going to pay more (depending on exchange rate) upon purchase of the vehicle but the result was that the car wouldn't need as many trips to the mechanic. They've since started doing more value engineering.

There's also a cultural difference between Japanese and American businesses, but that's far more nebulous.

[wahern]

> There's also a cultural difference between Japanese and American businesses, but that's far more nebulous.

The abstract cultural differences might be difficult to articulate, but many of the effects are concrete: Toyota still maintains lifetime employment for Japanese factory employees. And Toyota factory workers in Japan are represented by a union, AFAIU, though like Germany the relationship between unions and management is less adversarial in Japan.

Interestingly, the change in union employment in Japan seems to have tracked the US, from a high of over 50% mid-century to 16% today versus ~35% and ~10%, respectively, in the U.S.

[slt2021]

not true, it is better for the brand long-term to build good cars. but unionized workforce makes it economically unfeasible.

GM makes crappy because, if they tried to make high quality cars, they would be priced like Cadillacs

[whycome]

Wait is the joke that Cadillacs are GM cars?

It's interesting that other car companies have backed off from the multiple brands/badges. We don't have plymouth, Oldsmobile, mercury, Pontiac.

[mullingitover]

We have an apples to apples comparison with Mexican-made vehicles, though, since both GM and Toyota build there.

What's the excuse for the shoddy non-union Mexican GM vehicles?

[slt2021]

Mexico is an assembly operation to arbitrage cheap low skill labor and preferential NAFTA-like agreements.

Vehicle designs, powertrains, critical components are all made by the HQ or its suppliers.