[SecondHandTofu]

More political arguments about the other effects of unions aside - I've never heard a good answer for why unions are good for workers in professions with wide ranges of skill and impact, such as lots of types of knowledge work. Do you have an answer for that?

Roles that are more fungible, train drivers, factory workers, I can see the case from the worker's perspective, even if I think there are externalities.

But I can't even see it from a worker's perspective in roles such as software or sales, why would anyone good want to work in an environment where much worse workers are protected, compensation is more levelised etc?

I'm assuming this will boil down to some unspoken values differences but still thought I'd ask.

[jon-wood]

A union does whatever its members want the union to do. I'd argue that an environment where pay negotiation is a case of every person for themselves isn't actually good for anyone but if the majority of members disagree with me then the union won't get involved in pay. If they wanted to they could scope the union's responsibility purely to being notified of budget reductions/redundancies and given a seat at the table when working out how to handle them.

[bluGill]

A union works best when workers see they are all in it together. There are lots of unions, but it is much harder for them to be powerful when members see defecting as helping them. There is a reason unions are most common in labor areas where everyone is the same. You can't be a better bus driver than someone else (either you are bad enough to fire or you are as good as everyone else). The assembly line is as good as the worst/slowest person on it, so there is no advantage in being faster at putting bolts in, or whatever you do (unions can sometimes push safety standards, but also comes from others who have the union take credit)

[eru]

> The assembly line is as good as the worst/slowest person on it, so there is no advantage in being faster at putting bolts in, or whatever you do [...]

I guess you have no experience with assembly lines?

> (unions can sometimes push safety standards, but also comes from others who have the union take credit)

Btw, health and safety are what economists call a 'normal good'. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normal_good

> In economics, a normal good is a type of a good for which consumers increase their demand due to an increase in income, unlike inferior goods, for which the opposite is observed. When there is an increase in a person's income, for example due to a wage rise, a good for which the demand rises due to the wage increase, is referred as a normal good. Conversely, the demand for normal goods declines when the income decreases, for example due to a wage decrease or layoffs.

That explains fairly well, why rich countries all have more-or-less similar health and safety standards despite very different histories and especially histories of labour activism, and why poor countries fare worse in this respect--even if some of them have laws on the books that are just as strict.

[bluGill]

> I guess you have no experience with assembly lines?

I've spent a few weeks on one, so not zero, but not a lot.

Note that I simplified greatly a real assembly line, and there are lots of different lines with different configurations. Nearly everything is multiple lines. There are often buffers along the way so that you can get ahead of the line by a little (or if you need to use the restroom the line continues). Sometimes there are two people in a station with the understanding that if both are perfect they are 80-90% busy (or some such number), but if someone is slow the other can help up. Lines often go slower than possible because of safety. There are likely more issues, but there is a point where the line is waiting on the slow person.

With the above in mind, what am I missing?

[eru]

I'm not a great expert on assembly lines, to be honest. But two things:

- From theoretical considerations (less important): you can be better not just by improving average speed, but also by reducing variance (ie being more reliable) and improving quality.

- A practical consideration (more important): from what I recall, even people on assembly lines are often paid piece rates. Ie they are paid more or less proportional to their output. Assuming companies aren't complete idiots, we can assume that they have a good reason for rewarding individuals for higher output? That seems to be in at least mild contradiction to "The assembly line is as good as the worst/slowest person on it, [...]"

[eru]

> A union does whatever its members want the union to do.

Just like a democracy does whatever its voters want it to do?..

Different people want different things.

> I'd argue that an environment where pay negotiation is a case of every person for themselves isn't actually good for anyone but if the majority of members disagree with me then the union won't get involved in pay.

Well, I feel for the minority that doesn't want the union to get involved in their affairs.

[bravetraveler]

Not a developer, but close enough: so that 'good' stays 'good' and doesn't become 'expected'. Or, said another way, I can enjoy protections too. Automation allows us to do more, actually doing more isn't necessary: remember the tools/why they were made. Yet expectations continue to ride an escalator.

I don't know why one would want to maintain a system of 'look how high I can still jump after all these years, reward please'. Again, expectations: they rise faster than the rewards.

The adversarial framing with coworkers is confusing, discipline is a different matter from collective bargaining.

[sfn42]

> why would anyone good want to work in an environment where much worse workers are protected

The "much worse workers" are the majority. That's why you see everyone complaining about technical interviews and such - those of us who crush the interviews and get the jobs don't mind.

[kaoD]

How old are you? I'm in your boat but I suspect we'll change our tune when we get older.

[sfn42]

My 40s aren't too far off. I don't expect to lose that much of my ability

[kaoD]

Yeah I'm not worried about my ability, but the perceived value from employers. We're probably in the sweet spot where we're still "young" but also very experienced.

[sfn42]

That would be quite ridiculous in my opinion. Most of my peers hardly stay in one job for more than 2-3 years anyway, so unless you're retiring in the next two years I don't see why they would have a problem with it.

Of course I live in a country where retirement savings isn't your employer's responsibility. I think the US has some ridiculous retirement practices that may make older employees a bit of a hot potato situation?

[yunwal]

I’m quite good at technical interviews, and I still think they’re not a good way to find the best person for the job in 95% of places they’re used

[sfn42]

I'm not really commenting on that, I'm saying the practice is good for me as an interviewee.

However I do think it's a good way to filter candidates. I should clarify that what I'm talking about is fairly basic programming tasks, not very hard leet code style DSA type tasks. I've never been given an actually hard task in an interview, they've all been fairly simple tasks like write a bracket tax calculator, write a class that stores car objects and can get them by plate number and stuff like that. Helped a friend do a take-home one where we fetched some data from spacex's api and displayed it in a html table.

Every time I do these, people act like I'm Jesus for solving a relatively simple task. Meanwhile I'm just shocked that this is something my peers struggle with. I would have honestly expected any decent dev to be able to do these with roughly the same proficiency as myself, but it turns out almost nobody can.

That's why I think it's a good way to test candidates. If you're going to work as a programmer you should be able to solve these types of tasks. I don't care if you're frontend, backend, finance, healthcare, data science, whatever kind of programming you normally do, you should be able to do these kinds of things.

If someone can't then by my judgement they don't really know programming. They may have figured out some way to get things done anyway but I bet the quality of their work reflects their lack of understanding. I've seen a lot of code written by this kind of people, it's very clear that a lot of developers really don't understand the code they're writing. It's honestly shocking how bad most "professional software developers" are at writing simple code.

[wongarsu]

In theory you could limit the scope of the union to not include things like negotiating salary or defending workers from being fired. I don't think anything prevents you from having a union that just fights for basic rights like good chairs, not having to review AI slop and not being exposed to asbestos.

Of course keeping the union narrowly focused is an issue. Unions are a democracy after all

[eru]

> Of course keeping the union narrowly focused is an issue. Unions are a democracy after all

Yep, and I don't want my neighbours to vote on the colour of my underwear or what I have for breakfast either. They can mind their business, and I can mind mine.

[wizzwizz4]

Look into SAG-AFTRA.