[northern-lights]

This thread is filled with so many anti-union takes that you have to wonder if they are paid bots.

If you assume that most of the crowd that visits this website works in tech or tech-adjacent fields, how can you be against an entity whose main objective is to safeguard and work for your interests over your employers? Unfathomable that people are willing to do so much against their own best interests. Or...they are bots.

[scoofy]

Unions are complicated. Generally speaking they are good for workers, but when they start focusing on job security over compensation and build in seniority-based advantages, the leverage unions have can be wielded against consumers and fellow workers, not just against employers.

“Unions are unequivocally good” is about as naive as “unions are unequivocally bad.” It’s always a question of how the union prioritizes their power, and that can lead to bad practices in the long run.

If you care about fairness, generally, and not just “what’s good for me personally” you don’t have to look hard to see powerful unions acting in bad faith.

[bb88]

On the other hand, it's far more voluminous to catalog the list of corporations acting in bad faith and abusing their employees than finding the abuses of unions.

Firing managers for egregious behavior only makes the legal case for the victims. That's also why cities don't fire bad cops, but instead keep them around until pending litigation is resolved.

[scoofy]

If “who is worse” is a relevant metric, the question of unions would not be complex. Again, though, this is an entirely naive view of what is a very complicated reality.

The very obvious reason that corporations are “worse” is simply that they have more leverage. The idea that “leverage is likely to be abused” is a much more thoughtful heuristic for the paradigm.

[bb88]

Your point is noted.

But unions have never existed in a vacuum. And without the context of why they came about, that is from corporations abusing employees, it's easy to say "Unions are complex" when the world in which they exist is far more complex than unions are and perhaps far more vile.

[scoofy]

I'm generally pro-union. Don't think that just because I criticize them that I don't think they're generally a good idea. The problems I'm pointing to are general problems of democracy in general. Incumbents tend to ignore future generations well-beings when it comes to current generations ability to negotiate.

The point I'm trying to respond to is: "This thread is filled with so many anti-union takes that you have to wonder if they are paid bots."

I think there are plenty of reasons why normal folks are anti-union, and generally, it's because different sets of workers are in different positions and have different perspectives.

Generally speaking, if there were some kind of "Workers Bill of Rights" built into organized labor law, preventing these abuses, there would be much stronger support for unions generally.

You want to be a longshoreman? Tough shit, they aren't any jobs for you as a longshoreman... and it is a total coincidence that the extremely high paying gigs for longshoremen tend go to the children of existing longshoremen. Not to mention their effort to shut out technological improvements that are standard in most other countries now.

You want medical costs to go down? Tough shit, the professional organizations for medicine have managed to artificially limit the number of med school students and residencies.

If there were limits on what unions could to stifle competition within their own industries, if there were limits on the extent of job security for poorly performing union members, if there were legitimate rules that meritocracy has to be the rule, not the exception, then I think the vast majority of Americans would start clamoring for more union membership. What we currently see is a lot of good work, but also a lot of fiefdoms being established and locked down.

There are unions that protect workers from firm's abusive practices. There are also unions that protect lamplighters job from the "tyranny" of the electric light bulb, and make everyone poorer in the process.

[bb88]

No argument from me, other than: All those things can be also be said about corporations.

You brought up lamplighters and the electric lightbulb. It's worth noting that corporations had a cartel that prevented lightbulbs from running longer than a few years. And to some extent that still happens.

Big Clive did a good video on the Dubai Lamp a few years back, and why you can't buy them anywhere but in Dubai.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klaJqofCsu4

[_DeadFred_]

Also theft by corporations is one of the largest types of theft in the US.

https://www.epi.org/publication/employers-steal-billions-fro...

[wredcoll]

> The very obvious reason that corporations are “worse” is simply that they have more leverage. The idea that “leverage is likely to be abused” is a much more thoughtful heuristic for the paradigm.

If you enjoy thought terminating clichés, I suppose.

Corporations, in general, have a very different set incentives and ways they can wield power and ways that people outside of their power structures can interact with them.

It's the same issue when people try to claim a corporation having the power to do X is the same as a democratic government having the same power. It's not.

[dash2]

It’s a plausible take that the best government in human history (say Sweden) is worse than the worst corporation. Sweden had an active eugenics program.

[wredcoll]

I fail to see the plausibility. Afterall, the east indies corporation existed.

[bwestergard]

Do you have a particular historic incident in mind? In what national context was this taking place?

There have been very few incidents where a union successfully defended its particularistic interest in a way that harmed the interests of working people generally in the long term. Employers' associations have characterized union activity this way even when the unions were objectively losing ground in every way (e.g. declining wage shares of output, declining membership, etc).

For structural reasons, unions are constantly faced with a choice between limiting their interests to the defense of some small section of workers alone (e.g. lamplighters, software developers, truckers) or expanding solidarity with ever wider sections of the working class. To generalize for the sake brevity, unions that go the former route tend to become very weak and get captured by employer interests. Only unions that go the latter route, which requires them to adopt a broader view of their struggle, have any chance of becoming strong.

For a clear historic example in how these diverging approaches can play out, see Eley's discussion of the knife grinders union versus the metal workers union in turn of the century Germany (around page 77).

https://koncontributes.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018...

[scoofy]

The advent of parallel treatment of different workers in a shop the late 1970's is one of the main reasons we saw union membership start declining. Two-tiered bargaining structures started to show up as soon as there were difficult economic headwinds. When one segment of the union with some seniority is unwilling to make sacrifices for the younger generations, you end up with as system that is bad for non-trivial number of workers, and is literally the opposite of meritocratic. Solidarity only goes as far as "I've got mine" for many folks, and when that happens, the union as a way of protecting workers turns into a vehicle for extracting concessions at the expense of others.

Examples of ruinous two-tiered contracts include UFCW's 1978 contract, Teamsters' 1979 contract, UAW's 1979 contract and their 2007 contract.

[bwestergard]

No disagreement from me there. I am a stalwart financial and activist supporter of LaborNotes, which organizes across unions to eliminate two-tier contracts.

But two-tier contracts are the result of employer power. Employers always portray them as an inevitable outcome of the legal form of collective bargaining; the historical record cannot sustain this reading.

The solution to two tier is more powerful unions, which are inherently more democratic unions, because wage workers only have leverage if they act in concert.

[aidenn0]

> ...how can you be against an entity whose main objective is to safeguard and work for your interests over your employers?

This is like asking how people can be anti Google when Google's mission is to "organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful."

I personally lean pro-union, but it takes very little empathy to understand that the people who are anti-union don't believe that the unions will serve their stated purpose.

[tbugrara]

I think you underestimate the anti-union propaganda of the last century. Any working class individual against unions parrot the same surface-level talking points predicated on their own limited understanding of labor. In a way they are bots; the alive variety.

[drusepth]

I would wager that a high % of the HN audience are the employers, not the employees.

[satvikpendem]

Or just highly paid or now retired employees. Which makes sense, why bite the hand that feeds.

[xboxnolifes]

I don't think they're bots, since I've seen the sentiment on HN for a long time. Instead, it reminds me of the idea of people seeing themselves as "temporarily embarrassed millionaires". If you see yourself as being part of the capital class in the future and think strong unions hurt the capital class, one might be against them.

[JKCalhoun]

I agree.

If not careful, it can come across as elitist: the notion that unions are for people who are replaceable—people that need unions.

I wonder though if those absolutely certain that they thrive in a meritocracy will have second thoughts if/when Corporate decides they're replaceable by AI.

[satvikpendem]

I mean, many on HN are actual millionaires who've made fortunes from tech money. They are the capital class, so unions hurt them directly.

[northern-lights]

How many?

[satvikpendem]

You can do the math yourself if you so choose. If you don't want to or disagree with the results, well, it's not my job to educate you, as you've said.