[guywithahat]

Lets not forget the hometown of the UAW was Flint, MI. Detroit used to be the richest city in the US by a very significant margin; now most car factories aren't even in Michigan. People may claim otherwise but good employees don't want to work for unions because it limits career growth and innovation, while companies don't want to deal with an adversarial unit within the company. Any private sector unionization is bad, even if this is just going after rideshare drivers now.

[breakyerself]

This is the opposite of what's true. Unionization is good. What's not good is using slavery adjacent labor to undercut good paying jobs in the US. US trade policy destroyed Detroit.

Nobody wants to go back to the bad old days of 16 hour days in the factory just to live with 16 other people a tenament and then die broke in a gutter when the machine takes your hand off.

[JumpCrisscross]

> US trade policy destroyed Detroit

US trade, fleet environmental standards and yes, the unions turning into an insular political force each destroyed Detroit.

[AnimalMuppet]

I agree except for the word "political". Unions destroyed Detroit by their cost far more than by their politics. Particularly the cost of the pensions and the work rules.

[JumpCrisscross]

Political as in the political incentives of union leadership is to constrain entry into their electorate and extract rents for their members.

[guywithahat]

If unionization were good Flint wouldn't have been in such a poor state it could lose clean water access. What is true is auto jobs didn't leave the US, they left Michigan, primarily for right-to-work states. The same story is true for most of the rust belt; a lot of heavy industry jobs didn't necessarily leave, they just moved to Texas or the south.

Also unions didn't get rid of 16 hour days, market competition and regulation did that. Private industry unions have been consistently behind the private market in terms of benefits. The past you're talking about never existed.

[bigyabai]

Detroit used to be one of the most-industrialized places on Earth, behind only Germany. Like programming or financial services today, 100 years ago it was considered a privilege to work in a manufacturing.

You can ask any economist what happened. They won't blame unions, they'll blame the proliferation of industrialized economies. America cannot compete in a world where poverty-labor outperforms America's standard-of-living.

[guywithahat]

The research is mixed, with lots of researchers directly blaming unions. This is remarkable, given being a professor is a unionized position and researchers/professors are some of the furthest-left leaning groups (famously a 2006 study showed 25% of sociologist professors identify as Marxist). I would also argue working in unions was never considered an especially big privilege (or any more than it is today). I mean it couldn't be, the Packard Plant employed over 30,000 people. That's just too many people in one city to be an exclusive, privileged job.

Cities do not fall from grace like that for no reason; Detroit and Flint fell from grace because they made it impossible to invest in the cities future. It's easy to say who cares about rideshare drivers, but if you can't operate companies in CA then people will stop founding them there, and then good engineering jobs will leave. Everyone once thought MI would be prosperous forever too

[vjvjvjvjghv]

I know, it's always the workers' fault. It can't be that maybe the highly paid execs in Detroit slept on trends and instead tried to coast on big gas guzzlers. But yes, it's the workers who screwed it up with their greed.

[bigyabai]

> Cities do not fall from grace like that for no reason

I just told you the most commonly cited reason, and instead of arguing that I'm wrong, you're arguing orthogonal to my point. Detroit became less special as time went on and there was nothing that Americans could do about it - the culprit was neoliberalism. Unions or not, that is the reason why the economy could not persist.

So let me rephrase my question: barring unions or state-subsidized housing, how was the US supposed to prop-up a manufacturing economy in the 1980s?

[nradov]

Government policies were a part of the problem but a lot of Detroit area manufacturing companies were simply not very good at their jobs. They coasted on past success while being unresponsive to customers, and failed to improve on quality or productivity. This was primarily a management failure — only a true moron could approve production of vehicles like the Ford Granada — but the adversarial approach taken by most union leaders certainly didn't help. Union leaders were mostly corrupt and incompetent, acting to win elections and enrich themselves in ways that ultimately hurt their members.

The best thing the US government probably could have done to prop up the manufacturing economy in general would have been to spread knowledge of modern best practices, like those promoted by W. Edwards Deming. Plenty of people were willing to improve but simply hadn't been trained in how to do it. For auto manufacturing specifically, legislators and regulators could have phased in emissions and fuel economy rules more slowly to give manufacturers a few more years to react instead of forcing them to hastily modify old powertrain designs in ways that drove up costs and ruined reliability.

[waltbosz]

Very tangential: In the 1967 Disney film "The Happiest Millionaire", a character sings a song wanting to move to Detroit and get a job designing cars. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-tYKSzlZiUo

It such an anachronistic song.

[triceratops]

> good employees don't want to work for unions because it limits career growth and innovation

Tell that to any movie star, director, writer, NFL starting quarterback, soccer star...

[sojsurf]

I live near Detroit, not Hollywood. Most union workers are not movie stars, directors, staring quarterbacks or soccer stars. Most are cops, teachers and automotive workers.

Speaking with a friend around me who worked in automotive, the unions are a double edged sword. They provide security for you, but they also provide security for a bunch of folks who realized they won't get fired if they put in the bare minimum. My friend found this incredibly frustrating.

Many unions here put large amounts of money toward political goals I don't support. If I want a job at such a company, under Michigan state law I can be compelled to pay the dues, even if the union is working against me politically. Until I can work somewhere without being forced to pay union dues, I am not interested in those jobs, even if they pay more.

[nradov]

Sometimes they won't get fired even if they put in less than the bare minimum. I know a number of people who have worked in the Detroit area auto industry and they tell stories of hourly workers who kept their jobs after being caught literally sleeping or drunk on the clock. Union leadership doesn't seem to understand that by defending those slackers they might get a temporary "win" and stick it to management, but ultimately it just encourages management to move production elsewhere.

[triceratops]

Agreed about the shortsightedness of unions.

[triceratops]

> they won't get fired if they put in the bare minimum

Why should anyone, union or not, be fired for that? Not promoted, not given raises, sure that's fine. The "bare minimum" is by definition the least acceptable level of productivity from a worker.

> I can be compelled to pay the dues, even if the union is working against me politically

Depends on what that means. Politically its job is to get you the most pay and job security possible.

[throwaway67499]

Not sure where to mention these, but they seem relevant to this part of the thread: Ben Hamper's Rivethead is a good read about working on the line during the decline of Flint. It's an excellent companion to Michael Moore's Roger & Me.

[CamperBob2]

Unions can make sense for talent and services that you don't want to keep on your payroll full-time. You could argue that rideshare drivers qualify in that sense, given that the whole idea is to keep them off of a regular payroll... but watch them fight tooth and nail to lock out autonomous operators like Waymo. That'll be next, rest assured. It'll be about "jobs," "safety," and probably, somehow, "the children."

Otherwise, the people you list are very well-represented by private agencies. Unions like the SAG can benefit the lower-level people in some respects, but they mostly serve to gatekeep their industry and encourage films to be made outside their jurisdiction.

[triceratops]

The person I responded to said "good employees" are inhibited in "growth and innovation" whenever they belong to a union. A single counter-example, of good employees with talent and innovation, reaping tremendous personal rewards, is enough to falsify that statement. I gave several such examples.

On the other hand you have retail workers and food service workers, who are largely not unionized. So what can we blame their low pay and status on?

Talent and genius and innovative ideas being rewarded (or not) is largely orthogonal to union membership. It is a factor of demand and supply, and prevailing profit margins in that industry. That is all.

Detroit declined because factory workers are more fungible than movie stars. Their unions didn't pay attention to the threat of foreign labor or competition by superior foreign firms. Their management also became complacent about competition and chose to blame it on unions.

Germany is very famously pro-union and boasts a strong auto industry. What did they do differently?

[CamperBob2]

Germany is very famously pro-union and boasts a strong auto industry. What did they do differently

The German auto industry is in a world of shit, actually, but I don't think they can blame the unions for that. Their "works council" model is very different from a typical UAW stronghold in the US. The unions (and in many cases the state itself) are active partners in corporate ownership and management, so they have a stronger incentive not to kill the golden goose.

[triceratops]

That's a more reasonable take than the person I responded to. They had the lazy anti-union talking points of "they take your dues and you stay poor". Which must be straight out of a Pinkerton handbook from the 1910s or something.

[nradov]

The German auto industry is slowly dying. It has been steadily laying off employees and cutting wages. Unionization has done nothing to prevent this. They are not cost competitive with China in terms of labor, energy, and batteries.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cz6pzwj6qq7o

[triceratops]

> The German auto industry is slowly dying

Like the American auto industry, and also the Japanese, they've been asleep at the wheel as EVs eat their lunch. For a long time it was quite strong though.

> It has been steadily laying off employees and cutting wages. Unionization has done nothing to prevent this

It can't. Unionization can't raise wages and it can't lower wages. It can provide job and wage stability. It can ensure non-union workers are laid off first. But if there's no money or the industry is doing poorly it's a management or international trade issue.

[floren]

no you don't get it, the unions are going to tamp down on all the incredibly innovative ideas the Uber drivers are coming up with.

Mostly mine seem to innovate new ways to fail at hiding that they've been smoking in the car...

[AngryData]

I take it you don't know anyone that works for the UAW if you think people dislike them?

Yeah they could be better, but people are overjoyed when they are able to get into UAW work because it means they won't have to struggle to survive anymore.