[aliasxneo]

I have pretty mixed feelings on unions. I spent most of my early career as a non-union blue collar worker embedded into mixed teams (union + non-union members). The general experience I walked away with was that unions seemed to attract the worst employees. I remember one individual in particular who, having worked with him for two years, never once actually did any work. He was actually one of my first mentors and I vividly recall riding in the truck with him as he explained "the game" to me about how to make good money while basically doing no work, and how it was "unfortunate" I couldn't play because I was "working for the man."

This might not seem so annoying, but in the Bay Area where I worked, the unions had lobbied to secure work that could _only_ be done by union members. For example, I was a controls technician, and I legally couldn't wire a 12v controller because it was considered protected work. Which means I had to try to convince the same people who were not incentivized to be productive to help me.

So yeah, after a few years of that, I left with a pretty sour taste in my mouth. That being said, philosophically I like the idea of unions. I've had my own share of experiences being abused by "the man." The retirement plans offered in particular were always alluring. But, despite being invited to join, I never felt compelled because I just couldn't find myself enjoying working with the people they attracted.

[WillAdams]

The experience which I had which sums up the negatives about unions was when I was working at the then 4th largest printer in the U.S., and the largest privately owned print shop, when I pulled up in my then several years old Chevy Cavalier and parked next to a one year newer one --- an erstwhile union rep then pulled up in a brand new Lincoln Town Car and got out and asked me if I was interested in unionizing the company --- I pointed to the car I was parked next to and stated, "That car belongs to the owner of the company, it's the first new car he ever purchased, previously having driven company vans which had such high mileage that the company auctioned them off. Why would I give money to someone who is driving an even nicer car?"

The flip side was when the company owner retired from active management to the board of directors, and a management consultant was brought in to make the company more profitable --- he opened the curtains of the boardroom where he was making his pitch, pointed out at the parking lot filled with nice cars and trucks in good repair and stated, "You're paying too many people too much money."

An uncle of mine in the coal region of the northwestern Virginia mountain once noted that a local union organizer was noted for having 3 things in his trunk:

- a mimeograph

- a fifth of whiskey

- a sawed-off shotgun

Any discussion of unions needs to include a history of the Pinkertons.

[HappMacDonald]

My name is Jesse James and I would like to know more about the history of the Pinkertons 8I

[salawat]

A group of private investigators and strike breakers engaged by the wealthy to quell the rabble. When you hear someone talking about it being cheaper to pay 10% of the working class to keep the other 90% down, shit like the Pinkertons is always the answer as to how.

https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-pinkertons

https://daily.jstor.org/how-steelworkers-stopped-a-paramilit...

Not hard to find.

[WillAdams]

That was actually a reference (joke?)

https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/January-26/pinke...

[phil21]

Similar life experiences. Like the idea of unions - especially how they are explained at a textbook level. I fully believe labor needs as much leverage against capital as possible for the scales to be balanced at all.

But US unions seem to exist nearly exclusively to protect people who don’t want to work.

Not my thing. At all. One should be able to be rewarded for hard work and productivity when you are expending more effort than the guy clocking in and doing everything possible to avoid it.

I’ve often thought you solve this via old fashioned guild based systems. The guild trains and provides labor while guaranteeing skills, quality, and honesty. They vet their members and cull the losers - a poor performing member should be seen as a liability for the rest of the pool of labor and very quickly corrected or removed from the guild.

That way employers know that even if they are paying more than they would like, at least the labor being supplied is going to be top tier and the job will done done to a high standard and on time.

Unions devolving to simply protect the lowest common denominator is a problem.

There are some trades unions in local chapter formats that work somewhat like this today. I’d just like to see more of it and more formalized with local competition between different union groups.

[aliasxneo]

Thanks for sharing. Very interesting to hear someone else with a similar experience.

> Unions devolving to simply protect the lowest common denominator is a problem.

I've always wondered if this is because the ones most incentivized to stay are the ones that eventually make it into upper leadership. It always seemed to me like the decisions being made at that level were intended to protect those same people. For example, rather than seeing poor-performing members as a risk to the union, the answer was to just lobby legally secured work so that companies had no choice but to hire its members. Which is quite the game, because I'm sure at face value it sounds great (companies can't ignore unions), but the hidden reality seemed to be that it just ensured these people always had a job.

[Muromec]

Honest question -- what should happen to poor performing people? They should have less money, less food, be homeless or what? Should they be more stressed and as a result somehow perform better?

On one hand I don't like to deal with results of bad craftsmanship, on the other hand I don't desire of the suffering of others.

The thing is real, but so are the people.

Not a snark or a gotcha, I'm a union member and recognise this thing at work.

[aliasxneo]

> Honest question -- what should happen to poor performing people?

The union should help them find roles they can be successful in. It should offer them more specialized training, mentorship programs, and other ways to help build up their skills. If they refuse to take any of these seriously, they should be fired. To me, that's the difference between poor performing and intentional laziness.

[ytoawwhra92]

How is any of that the responsibility of organised labour?

We used to expect training, mentorship, skill-building and effective job placement from employers.

If anything, unions should be lobbying employers to provide those things to poor performers.

[HDThoreaun]

> what should happen to poor performing people?

In my experience most poor performers just arent putting the effort in. They should be made to understand that low effort compared to peers will lead to less money, yes. If theyre genuinely unable to perform the duties they should do something else/

[pbronez]

Genuinely poor performers are so toxic. They might not recognize their poor performance and suck up infinite amounts of support for no improvement. They might be ultra-aware of their game and manipulate the institution in mind-boggling ways to protect their graft. You have to get these folks out ASAP.

Of course, they could also be unrealized potential just waiting for someone to believe in them and mentor them to greatness. If you drop them too quickly you miss out on wonderful, loyal, capable people.

The trick is being able to tell the difference quickly, make the best choice you can, and move on.

[mc32]

There should be disincentives for poor performance, options to improve performance (training, counseling, etc.) and incentives for good performance (better raises, perks, etc.) to incentivize good employees.

[WarmWash]

>But US unions seem to exist nearly exclusively to protect people who don’t want to work.

They don't exist for that reason, but their inevitable ground state is that.

The fundamental and intractable problem with any form of socialization is that it naturally attracts free riders. The idea doesn't have a balanced equilibrium, so it's either logistically/bureaucratically heavy or always being pulled towards collapse.

Everyone who starts these systems has pure intentions, and the initial members tend to be dedicated too. But over time it will either naturally decay, or turn into the thing it was trying to fight.

[virgildotcodes]

This doesn’t seem to be a universal rule at all, but smells more of a boogeyman promulgated within US society.

The nordics are anywhere from 50% - 90% of all labor unionized and they absolutely destroy the US on every standard of living metric.

It seems to me a case that echoes “better to let 99 guilty men go free than to execute an innocent man”. Of course, in this case, the ratios are actually reversed. Should we execute 99 innocent men to make sure that 1 guilty guy gets punished?

There will be some free riders, just like there will be some welfare queens, just like there will be some voter fraud.

That said, these cases represent a vanishingly small minority of the whole, and the cure is far worse than the disease.

[WarmWash]

>It seems to me a case that echoes “better to let 9 guilty men go free than to execute an innocent man”. Of course, in this case, the ratios are actually reversed. Should we execute 9 innocent men to make sure that 1 guilty guy gets punished?

We don't have to do an echo. We can just do it as it is.

9 men hunt and 1 man eats free, so the 9 men are carrying the weight of the 1.

This system is inherently unstable and unsustainable. Maybe you can mitigate it (nordic style) by keeping a small population and drilling into people's heads from birth that "you take turns being the 1, and the 1 needs to be eager to get back to the hunt or shame will be had", but even then that is a not an inherently stable system, but one propped up by trust.

[virgildotcodes]

> 9 men hunt and 1 man eats free, so the 9 men are carrying the weight of the 1.

Updated the quote to the historically accurate 99 vs 1.

> This system is inherently unstable and unsustainable.

The countries cited are extremely stable. Arguably far more stable than the US.

That said, we can bring in the rest of Western Europe if 5 countries aren't enough of an example. They have union participation rates between 10% and 50%, median around 20%. The thing is, they have much larger proportions of their workforces covered by collective bargaining agreements - France for example is at 10% union participation yet 98% of labor covered by bargaining agreements.

Western Europe and the Nordics combined = ~400 million people, bigger population than the US, and far more diverse, so the common refrain of "small homogenous population" doesn't hold up to scrutiny.

Of course, all societies so far have eventually been unstable.

We can just choose whether our unstable society will be a vindictive one that prioritizes punishing wrongdoers over the wellbeing of the whole, or a pragmatic and (as a nice bonus) compassionate one which prioritizes the wellbeing of the whole over a puritanical urge to purge the unworthy.

[WarmWash]

Europe is in a borderline catastrophic economic situation. I wouldn't use them as an example, because it ultimately just illustrates my point more. Lots of people are aware of Europes excellent quaility of life, far far fewer (but thankfully including Euro leaders) are aware of the existential financial situation and forecasts.

Europe was supposed to have a vibrant tech scene and a globally competitive technology stack (go back 40 years). But it doesn't. It also doesn't really have a growing economy. Or much ability to defend itself. Or much ability to power itself. Or much ability to finance itself.

Europe has a very impressive social systems, absolutely, but it's important to recognize the incongruity between what these countries promise, what they will need, and what money they actually make.

[blks]

Correct analogue would be: 9 man hunt, 1 doesn’t, and most of the hunt’s proceeds go to 11th man who eats for free:

[faidit]

>9 men hunt and 1 man eats free, so the 9 men are carrying the weight of the 1.

You just described every non-union tech company I've worked at but maybe ratio reversed. Full of lazy entitled takers, not a shop steward in sight.

If unions are inherently unstable and unsustainable, so is capitalism as a whole.

[georgemcbay]

> but smells more of a boogeyman promulgated within US society.

Particularly the ultra-capitalist part of US society.

Do unions attract some percentage of people who want to abuse them to do less work for more pay? Sure, humans are flawed. But unfettered capitalism also attracts some percentage of people who will greedily exploit the labor of others to enrich themselves.

Both extremes are why we should have rules and regulations as a society to curb the worst excesses, because we can't trust all humans to do the right thing in any system.

That aside, I'd also argue that while both are unfair the actual practical outcome of some people being a bit lazy in a union has a far less disastrous impact on society as a whole than the people who greedily exploit on the other end.

[WarmWash]

The irony in this is that the image of exploited labor is always minimum wage workers, or dead end job workers, generally the lowest rungs of the labor ladder.

However the reality is that the most economically exploited labor is generally the educated white class workers who ostensibly live pretty comfortable lives. These people are the cash cows getting the smallest cut of of their output.

What this reveals is that the inoculation against anti-capitalist rhetoric (giving people the simple comfortable upper-middle class life they dream of) is in fact the very thing that is most exploitative in a capitalist society.

[theamk]

Are you saying that "aliasxneo", thread starter who worked as "controls technician" is an "ultra-capitalist"?

I love the idea of unions, but it's hard to take its advocates seriously when they just dismiss anyone they disagree with. You can't blame everything on the ultra-rich when the regular workers also report negative stories.

[Muromec]

A healthy organisation can reflect on this tendency and purge some free riders to preserve itself. The fact that it doesn't, to me personally, just means it's not under external pressure.

[WarmWash]

If there is one thing free riders are generally skilled at, it's hiding the fact they are free riding. There is then an internal decay where as others learn the tricks, they realize that they can start coasting too, and they should, because why would you do extra work if you don't have to.

To defeat this you need intense oversight, but then you yourself become the man with an iron fist.

This is a super common theme whenever you dig into anything socialized. It works great when everyone understands the system and is dedicated to the work, the mission. But as soon as a single atom of "I can get away with not doing my full part" seeps in, it's like a seed crystal that eventually collapses the whole system.

[HardlyCognizant]

It's the prisoner's dilemma. I believe any self-preservation optimized intelligence is going to suffer from these problems until those behaviors are countered in interaction by design (e.g. process, societal/cultural pressures, etc.) or removed from the baseline (i.e. evolved out.)

Our desires make us our own worst enemies, and until we acknowledge and openly plan to counter these tendencies, any social structure at some scale is going to fail to them. Unfortunately, the problems we face as a species are increasingly at larger and larger scales.

I'm not sure if we can remain what we would recognize as "human," and solve for this without surrendering some level of executive function to an entity not afflicted by it. Government and regulation are already expressions of this, while retaining our intrinsic nature, but history has demonstrated this is inherently unstable.

[AlotOfReading]

Human societies already have solutions to this problem. There's a proposed explanation for why strict religious groups (like the Amish) survive so well: costly signaling. There are benefits to remaining in the community, so you have to demonstrate adherence to the group by constant, expensive signaling to keep receiving them.

In a union context, that could be anything from dues, to volunteering for shitty work, to community service obligations. Unions don't really exercise the power to expel members though, because it reduces their own leverage.

[arjie]

What definition of organizational health demonstrates this? Certainly none of the long-lived and powerful US unions have this property. Observationally, it seems that the strongest US unions also exercise their power to protect all within their fold. The worst offenders fail to be protected by the union, but in general, they are not purged. And US unions are quite powerful. The leaders wear Rolexes.

This seems logical. A labor union carries power commensurate with the number of members in it. It is more important for members that they be protected than that they be held to a high standard. If the latter is done, it is in service to the former. That is entirely the purpose of the union after all. No one forms a union so that others can hold them to a high standard of performance.

[finghin]

Unions are supposed to defend the value of labour. I think in a fair society where losing your blue collar job didn't mean dog food for dinner the balance of responsibility and squeamishness could shift away from employers and unions in terms of keeping food in people's bellies after they get fired. Then unions and businesses can actually have somewhat aligned goals, which is better for everyone, really.

In order to protect the long term value of a profession or some other labour corps, you can't skip efficiency and defend poor work ethic. I think to a degree the medical profession exemplifies this with professional bodies regulating conduct and standard of care/work. Part of this is the generally earnest approach to the scrutiny, but I believe part is the lack of immediate grave concern to anyone ‘on the stand,’ who can be presumed to earn comfortably, upon losing their job.

[chii]

> I fully believe labor needs as much leverage against capital as possible for the scales to be balanced at all

Competition is required, rather than unionization. If an industry is dominated by monopolies, not only do customers suffer, workers do too. Unions don't really fix the problem - only make certain groups win over others.

[Muromec]

For once, the union is one of the rare in-groups that are very easy to join and actually benefit their members

[missedthecue]

The problem is that they tend to benefit their members in a zero sum way. For example the LIRR wants a double digit raise not in exchange for hitting targets on on-time arrivals or some other metric. They want it or they strike and hold the community hostage. It bothers me that there's no value exchange it's just take take take, and ultimately at my expense.

[Muromec]

Double digit raise in this economy and for the economic strata that does this work and is more exposed to prices more than some others, double digit sounds reasonable. The union just wants their members to not be piss poor. Is this bad?

[missedthecue]

They earn $220k a year for jobs that aren't worth that. Income equals expenditure; they are one and the same. So the $220k comes from someone else, and those people aren't getting value for money, they're being robbed and stolen from by a greedy union that doesn't know when to stop biting the hand that feeds. It's pretty disgusting.

[AnimalMuppet]

Worse, public sector unions are ultimately at my expense in a way that I can't even fix by not buying the product, since they're taking it from my taxes.

[BobaFloutist]

>that are very easy to join

That's the case for most service-sector unions, but a lot (certainly not all) of builder's unions seem to meter the amount of people that are allowed to join, making it prohibitively difficult to actually get into the union.

[Muromec]

Now that sounds like a guild and illegal as fuck, but what do I know

[rstuart4133]

> But US unions seem to exist nearly exclusively to protect people who don’t want to work.

It's a similar dynamic here in Australia, but it seems not in Germany and Japan.

I think the difference is that in the USA and Australia the unions are organised on a craft or occupational basis. You see this in the sorts of laws they want passed - they are invariably after laws that only union members can do a certain job. It isn't always so direct. Doctors for example insist on certain qualifications, which seems fine and necessary at first glance, but then the doctors' associations somehow manage to gate the institutions that can issue the qualifications. It's interesting how doctors have no trouble with that, but computer engineers can't bring themselves to do it.

Anyway, the outcome of "guild based unions" ends up being what others here noted. Instead of everyone in the same firm cooperating to get work done, they are all fighting to preserve their patch. In Germany and Japan, unions look to be organised around large companies. If the company goes broke the union disappears with them, so the company's incentives and the union's are more aligned. So much so the union reps are given seats on the board, and are expected to make a contribution. The unions are still focused on ensuring the distribution of profits goes more towards the employees than the shareholders of course, but nonetheless the outcome seems to be far less dysfunctional than the USA and Australian systems.

[BobaFloutist]

Honestly I think the problem is that unions are also acting as guilds.

Which is to say, as a union, they make deals with companies and the government and fight for regulations requiring union labor, but then they turn around and act as a guild by restricting who can join and get trained and become union labor, keeping wages high with an artificial labor shortage.

So you end up with a situation where you're only allowed to hire union elevator technicians, but also there aren't any union elevator technicians. They get high wages and all the work they want, and everyone else gets broken elevators.

[josefritzishere]

I am sorry but that is utter nonsense. Unions exist to bargain collectively to protect workers from exploitations, full stop. You will find more people who don’t want to work in the C-suite than anywhere else.

[FatherOfCurses]

The same behavior displayed by union workers occurs at a level where people can hide behind a title (Vice President, department head, whatever). Yet people rarely look as critically at senior management as they do at union workers.

I also find it that people who are critical of union workers never seem to be critical of police or fire fighters, both of whom are unionized.

My dad was a union worker for 19 years and I don't think ever displayed any of the negative characteristics assigned to unionized workers.

[HappMacDonald]

ACAB largely exists due to the police union, and I always hear people astutely bring this up. Firefighters unions I know less about, but I've also only ever heard about volunteer firefighters and scarcely enough about them either..

[Jcampuzano2]

This is usually one of the arguments made against unions, and I find it an interesting phenomenon.

Philosophically unions benefit the majority and are probably a net good on a social construct level. But they are likely a net loss to the top percentage of workers who are extremely motivated to move up and probably hurt innovation overall.

Unions exist to benefit the median and bring up the floor, but it stifles competition among those who really do desire to be at the top. And in doing so while it brings up the floor, it also brings down the ceiling because people who would normally be motivated enough to move up would not have much incentive to do so anymore.

Additionally most companies arguments against unions make the assumption that EVERYONE wants to be part of that top percentage, that everyone is extremely motivated to move up the ladder, etc. Also they bank on convincing everyone they could be part of that top percentage that moves up.

But statistically only so many can, and there is no universe where everyone can be that top worker who is successful because only so many can move up anyways.

Edit: Adding that this is from my perspective on US views of unions. I don't know much about how it differs elsewhere since many point out it seems to be done differently here vs elsewhere.

[underlipton]

And the part no one talks about: the "higher floor, lower ceiling" paradigm is actually much better for sustainability (including, in many cases, sustained growth), so long as there is an actual moat around the business (i.e., it actually provides value). It is death for companies that are poorly-managed or that have unworkable business models. "Growth at all costs, including the worker well-being that union presence embodies" is a principle of businesses that are trying to outrun their own fundamental deficits, particularly among that "top percentage". They seek to portray unions as dragging the company down because it distracts from the truth of their poor leadership and business sense. Unions are like a boat's keel and anchor; smaller or non-existent ones make the boat faster, but less stable in rough environments.

Ambitous Icaruses didn't get us heavier-than-air flight; sustained investment in a series of societies that supported educated middle classes over years of technological development did. The key wasn't the "obvious" straight line of gluing wings to your arms, it took a few decades of people literally spinning their (bike) wheels. Ironically, the sky was the limit only once the ceiling was lowered.

[Veserv]

A key problem in the US is that in a unionized job you are legally required to be represented by the union. Union membership is non-voluntary.

If you think you are part of that top percentage or even if you think that the union is not representing your interests, tough luck. It is illegal to quit or reorganize like-minded individuals to form your own that better represents you. To reform the union you need to get 50% of the members to vote for change instead of just forming a new, smaller organization that represents your interests.

This is in contrast to many European unions where you can choose to join because you think they provide worthwhile benefits. Or you can choose to not join because it does not. Unions need to compete on benefits to their members and are thus incentivized to provide better benefits.

[jltsiren]

Voluntary unions have a free rider problem. You may choose to join the union because you believe it's the right thing to do, but the benefits are rarely worth the dues. Non-members also benefit from collective bargaining, but they have a bit more money to spend.

Legal representation is probably the main exception. Other benefits you could just pay on your own, but unions are the easiest way to get access to lawyers specialized in labor issues, and they will often represent you for free.

The bigger difference between American and European unions is that Europe tends to treat union membership as sensitive personal information. Your employer has no legitimate reason to know whether you are a union member, and it's not allowed to ask. The union is also generally not allowed to tell its members which of their colleagues are members. Many of the issues surrounding American unions just disappear when union membership has no impact on your daily job.

[Veserv]

Voluntary unions do not have a free rider problem. That is only the case if you legally require collective bargaining to apply to non-union members (as is the case in the US).

For instance, in Germany [1] collective bargaining agreements are agreements between employers and unions, and are only required to be applied to union members. Companys may voluntarily choose to extend those same benefits to non-union members. Despite the fact that unions are voluntary in Germany, they still have significant union membership as a whole and German unions are frequently held up as a good example of the benefits of unions to both workers and society which is evidence against the claim that it is necessary to legally enforce union membership.

[1] https://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.86564...

[jltsiren]

There are plenty of incentives, practical reasons, and even legal requirements for extending the benefits to non-members. Germany also has a mechanism for declaring a collective bargaining agreement generally binding, which means that it applies to everyone working in the field in every company.

[psadauskas]

Also in the US, when Unions were starting to get going, the "good" ones that stood on principles and tried to do right by their members had their leadership harassed and even murdered by oligarchs and the government. The corruptible ones were allowed to exist, and be corrupted as another means of control, and for the anti-union people to point at as proof that unions "don't work".

Reading up on this has been eye-opening, they didn't teach much about it in school, except maybe a paragraph in the history textbook about the Ludlow Massacre. They don't mention at all the IWW or other leftist unions from the 1910s and 20s. If they mention the Taft–Hartley Act, they don't talk about how it targeted "communist" union leaders, and left "capitalist" unions alone.

[dimitrios1]

I always viewed unions as a temporary solution to a long term problem. Fundamentally, its simply a unit or type of organization. But for some reason here in the west they have become this entrenched institution in of itself, presumably because it tasted a modicum of power, that power had real influence over people, and wherever there is an institution that exerts power over people, it becomes prime targets for demonic and corrupting influence.

You had guilds in the middle ages, and that worked well to serve the primarily agrarian feudal society. Unions worked well in a rapidly industrializing country with little to no enshrined worker protections or rights. We saw measured, direct, positive change. But the last 30 years or so, I can't really say the same has happened. In fact, some of the most unionized sectors have seen the most degradation. Blame who you will (I've heard it all in this point), but the main take away is its not working. Maybe its time for a new structure for this modern, post industrial society.

[deepsquirrelnet]

> Unions exist to benefit the median and bring up the floor, but it stifles competition among those who really do desire to be at the top. And in doing so while it brings up the floor, it also brings down the ceiling because people who would normally be motivated enough to move up would not have much incentive to do so anymore.

I think people tend to fixate on the worker-to-worker differences inside of unions. Yes, that is the most visible part of a union when in place, and at least in the US has valid arguments about meritocracy.

What is missed when limiting the scope to just that is the population-level abuses of workers that no amount of meritocracy will fix. When corporations engage in collusion against workers (now common and nearly unpunished in the US) the top-level wages are suppressed industry wide.

The whole pay band alignment that comes out of that undermines the meritocracy argument, and doesn't even begin to address the wage-fixing that has gone almost unchecked in tech for decades[1,2]. As a merited employee, you might have more options to where you can go, but it won't protect you from predatory hiring/layoff cycles and it certainly won't guarantee that you'll receive a truly competitive wage.

On paper, meritocracy sounds great. I have worked many places in tech and never once observed it, personally. Best case, if you have warmed a seat for enough years, then you advance that way. Worst, your employer knows they can just take advantage of you because you're willing to work without a dangling carrot.

As before, either the government frees itself from corruption and enacts justice or unions will come back. That is point we are at.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/37...

[2] https://conversableeconomist.com/2025/10/31/the-silicon-vall...

[robtherobber]

> On paper, meritocracy sounds great.

In reality, meritocracy was a slur word. It was coined in 1956 to describe a farcically unequal state that no one in their right mind would want to live in: https://archive.discoversociety.org/2018/10/02/meritocracy-a...

[Jensson]

Meritocracy is still a slur word by the left, that never changed, the left doesn't like meritocracy and the right likes it. So a left winger writing about the horrors of meritocracy doesn't mean that meritocracy is bad.

[robtherobber]

I find the left/right approach altogether ridiculous for this, it's but a spurious oversimplification which usually shows lack of understanding for the topic discussed. In this particular case, it also shows that you didn't bother to read what meritocracy actually is, since you claim, against the very inventor of the word, that it's a good thing without producing any evidence or reasoning.

[phil21]

It’s not about just being a top worker though.

It’s about showing up ready to do an honest days work for an honest days pay. Not going above and beyond, but being reasonable about the fact that at the end of the day it’s work and things need to get done for everyone involved to put food on the table.

Instead it becomes a cat and mouse game of figuring out how to game the rules and scam as many hours as possible while doing either nothing, or as bad of a job as possible. The whole “not in my job description” thing makes a bit of sense when first implemented as a union rule, but devolves rapidly into nonsense like office workers being unable to plug in a monitor at their desk and sitting around idle for a few days until a union electrician can amble on around.

There is of course a balance here, and it seems the US is one extreme or the other outside of the trade specific unions. Other countries apparently have avoided much of this absurdity somehow.

The grocery store union I was forced to join as a teenager made sense on paper. Make sure employees were kept in safe working conditions, couldn’t be fired arbitrarily, had a reasonable pace of work anyone could keep up with. But it was more about protecting that group of guys who spent half their shift out back on smoke breaks, purposefully damaging cartons of goods while stocking since they didn’t like a particular manager, etc.

[bombcar]

If the unions were more really trade guilds and policed themselves people would have much higher respect for them, I feel.

And some unions practically are this, where the union negotiates rates and benefits, but the "customer" still gets to decide which particular people he hires (and so the "bad apples" never get any reliable business) - which I've seen in AV production, etc.

[Jcampuzano2]

I don't disagree and thats likely the opinion of the vast majority of people. Thats why i say that unions and collective bargaining are most likely to be a net benefit overall.

It just hurts competition among those who have an internal motivation to go above and beyond. They will feel they are being held back and either lose motivation or go somewhere where they feel a union isn't holding them back.

And the downside of that is companies losing their most hardworking/motivated people.

Edit: the above was written before the edit adding the cat and mouse game.

Added: I agree as well that when implemented wrong unions have pretty annoying affects on peoples motivation or work ethic. People who are qualified for things aren't allowed to do things outside of their explicit job description/contract. Etc. Some argue this is good, others argue it just wastes tons of time and hurts progress.

[AshleyGrant]

> The grocery store union I was forced to join as a teenager made sense on paper. Make sure employees were kept in safe working conditions, couldn’t be fired arbitrarily, had a reasonable pace of work anyone could keep up with. But it was more about protecting that group of guys who spent half their shift out back on smoke breaks, purposefully damaging cartons of goods while stocking since they didn’t like a particular manager, etc.

Why do we constantly denigrate these "free loaders" and exalt the capitalists who quite literally free load off of our labor extracting untold billions and trillions of dollars off the backs of average folks like you and me while we get relative pennies?

I worked in Big Tech for a while. For a normal person, I made good money. But the founders and top shareholders of these companies made literal billions off the labor of myself and my coworkers while contributing absolutely nothing on a day-to-day basis. I would have to work 100 lifetimes to earn what many of them take home in a year.

Frankly, if the system allows some normal folks to dick around and get paid the same as billionaires jetting off to spend time on their megayachts then more power to the folks taking a smoke break.

[tristor]

> Why do we constantly denigrate these "free loaders" and exalt the capitalists who quite literally free load off of our labor extracting untold billions and trillions of dollars off the backs of average folks like you and me while we get relative pennies?

We should do both, but when I agree to take a job at a given pay, I show up every single day capable, ready, and willing to work for the wage I agreed to. When other people don't pull their weight, it means I have to take on an unfair amount of work to make up the difference so that I can complete the things I've committed to in the workplace. The focus is on worker to worker relationships, because those are the most locally impactful relationships you have in the workplace. At the giant corporation I currently work for, I'm in the ladder fairly high up compared to most people as far as steps from the CEO, and yet I still only see the CEO on video calls with the whole company 4 times a year. The person in the office down the road from me that is blocking me from completely the thing I need to do to meet my own quarterly objective is far more tangible and legible to me than whether or not the CEO is a bum who spends all day golfing.

The fundamental difference is I take personal accountability for my own behavior and commitments, and that is one camp. The camp that doesn't see an issue with union free riders not pulling their weight are generally folks who only see accountability collectively, rather than personally, or maybe don't even take any accountability at all. Accountability is generally in short supply in our current society, so maybe its a novel thing, but I actually don't like doing a shitty job and if its due to somebody else screwing me over at work, I don't like that person a whole lot more than I don't like someone who I've hardly ever met and never talk to (CEO).

[AshleyGrant]

And I personally think that billionaires extracting untold wealth from those of us doing the actual work is a far greater societal problem than some normal folks who are lazy but are making 0.0001% of what the capitalist class is extracting from my efforts.

> The camp that doesn't see an issue with union free riders not pulling their weight are generally folks who only see accountability collectively, rather than personally, or maybe don't even take any accountability at all.

And while I don't like that the Union protects folks like this, I believe the work they do to protect hard working folks like me from being "managed-out" or even laid off so that the billionaires can make even more money next quarter is of great societal value. We as workers deserve to have security that as long as we are meeting reasonable productivity targets, we won't be kicked to the curb.

Having dealt with a manager deciding they didn't like me and doing everything in their power to manage me out (successfully), despite me meeting every goal given to me, management and the capitalists can take a long walk off a short pier for all I'm concerned.

[tristor]

> And I personally think that billionaires extracting untold wealth from those of us doing the actual work is a far greater societal problem than some normal folks who are lazy

There can be two problems (or more). We can care about two things at once (or more). The fact that we all hate bad coworkers who make our lives harder and fail to pull their wait doesn't mean we can't also hate billionaires. I'm just explaining why the former gets more heat than the latter. It's human nature to feel more intensity of a problem the closer it is to you, and we are so far removed from billionaires that while we all can and should be taking actions to steer society in a better direction, it does not have the tangible immediacy of having better quality coworkers.

[chii]

equality of outcome is unnecessary, only equality of opportunity is required.

[oblio]

So if the apples are in a 3.5m high tree and you're 2m tall and I'm 1.5m tall, it's fair if we both get 1m ladders?

[chii]

why isnt it fair?

Someone taller has a better chance at becoming a pro basketball player. Shorter people are not given more leeway. But both tall and short people have the chance to try out (at least on paper).

[yifanl]

Because the equivalence between being signed for the NBA and having apples to eat is nonsensical. We accept some things being unfair, not everything being unfair.

[linkregister]

Fixating on apples is key to the metaphor. The shorter person has other opportunities to collect food that they are better suited for, e.g. picking strawberries.

[tristor]

> We accept some things being unfair, not everything being unfair.

Life is fundamentally unfair. Anything that tips the balance in the other direction is due to specific, continuous human effort. It's a good thing when we can make things more fair, but the inherent unfairness of life is not a cosmic injustice.

[anon291]

Strawman.... No one is dying for lack of apples in America

[anon291]

Yes? Maybe the 1.5 m tall guy should find another line of work where he has a natural advantage that could be turned into profit. People are not the same. The market is the best way to allocate resources fairly to people of different ability

[oblio]

Unfettered markets are how we get burning rivers.

I know we're on the bastion of libertarianism, but even though I work in tech, I don't feel that tech (hardware/software) is tackling the truly big problems of humanity, just the ones that bring the most money. We should at least acknowledge that and mitigate it.

[anon291]

Tech and the market are orthogonal issues.

Burning rivers? No failure to protect the environment is a failure of property rights enforcement. If your stuff is leaking off your property you should be forced to pay for it. That's just basic property rights. You don't have the right to put your stuff on others property

[HDThoreaun]

The shorter person should pick root vegetables where they have an advantage over the tall person. Not all people are equally suited for all tasks

[perfmode]

Squid Game

[pasquinelli]

i like my union because they force the management to actually take care of our equipment. every non-union job i've had involves a lot of making fucked up shit kind of work. that's what i want from a union, tangible benefits to my working conditions. it's not a social club, and i'm not one to be worried about the caliber of people i associate with.

[regularization]

> never once actually did any work

I work at a company creating wealth, and heirs who own stock collect dividends from the company. What work did they do? You're talking about the guy sitting near you who you don't feel is working hard enough, and nothing of the parasitic heirs expropriating the product of unpaid surplus time of those working and creating wealth. Which unions are formed to rest control back from.

[faidit]

There were many tech companies I've worked at where lifers got paid top dollar to sit around and do nothing. And had to be convinced to do any work or help you.

I remember non union non tech jobs where the entire workforce were lazy and useless too.

Seems like an American thing or a human thing. Not a union thing.

[infecto]

Similar mixed opinions. I think labor absolutely has an ability to make collective decisions but I also believe business should have the ability to fire at will and I am not convinced that unions should be protected from that.

I have only been exposed to unions like dock workers where who you know or the color of your skin matter more than your ability to execute on the job.

[tristor]

Very similar experiences here. My first job was in a union shop, but you could not be forced to join. Whether you joined or not, though, you had dues taken from your pay. I refused to join initially because I could choose to join at any moment, it wasn't a locked decision. I immediately had people trying to convince me to join, while within months of working there I realized how little pride or effort anyone took in their work. I worked at that company for three years and never joined the union, which apparently made the management think I wanted to be in management because they kept trying to promote me. I never wanted to be in management (then). I was easily 6x as productive as anyone else there, and I saw lots of really ridiculous petty corruption take place amongst the union members. Really soured me on unions, despite the general high level idea being something I agree with. I can't imagine ever joining a union.

[dfxm12]

It's rather arbitrary to monolithlize "union members" based on this limited experience.

[oldnetguy]

My wife is in a Union and she has been getting info that has nothing to do with her job. Some unions cross pollinate with whatever cause someone in the union is interested in. She wants a raise but can't because of collective bargaining, but the union isn't doing anything about that. However they are talking about other political issues. So her dues are not helping her but whatever political issue is being promoted.

[davkan]

I’ve had just one job where I was in a union and it was the only time in my life where the boss had ever had to bend to me on anything. The only place I’ve ever had a shred of power beyond my ability to walk out the door. I’ll take all the downsides that come with it over the feeling of being in the palm of management’s hand.

[arh5451]

My first job out of college was a government union job (optional to join). I was pretty appalled by the behaviour I saw from older colleagues and the union reps. Government unions should be illegal in my opinion. Becoming the head of these unions is insane money, the union fees can run up to $50-$100 per month per member and if you look at the union salaries it mostly goes to the leadership sometimes earning $100-$200k or more on their part-time job on top of their actual job. Also the union organisers make pretty solid money setting it up. I think if you have more competition and more competing companies than wages stay competitive and employers have to be good to attract labor, it’s probably the best option. Humans are too dishonest to be trusted with such organisations. Invisible hand forces are harder to manipulate.

[vlan0]

It feels like a systems problem. It seems like the same theme that we see in for say, startup to corporate transformation. I think ultimately it comes down to size. They become too big and the power consumes. And they become what they once fought.

[honkycat]

There are a lot of people who are not in unions who do no work.

It is a plague in the programming field.

Not having unions is not a silver bullet for that problem. So maybe it is a false attribution/bias on your part

[faidit]

This. 100%. The absolute irony of techies getting paid big bucks while doing zero work, just posting on their phone on HN during the "workday", complaining about ... union fat cats getting paid too much and doing no work. Maybe there's actually some wisdom to it. like "Uh oh.. if the people at the bottom figured out their own scams and aren't working either.. this whole house of cards I'm on top of might collapse!"

[mc32]

Another issue with unions is that they should be symbiotic but often transition to parasitic. What I mean is there are times despite it being obvious the demands will drive companies into either re-org or bankruptcy proceedings they’ll go full steam. The demands also at time accelerate offshoring or sending some of the work over-seas. Obviously all these scenarios are detrimental to the future of the workforces they represent.

[desmoulins]

I had similar experiences as a former unionized worker. Unions definitely solve some problems, but they're not a panacea, and a lot of company BS just gets replaced by an equivalent amount of union BS. The most miserable people I've ever worked with were people at my former union with 10+ years on the job (I remember one lady was in the process of suing the company AND the union, lol); they couldn't leave without losing all their seniority and benefits, couldn't be fired, but still had a long way to go before retirement.

[keybored]

Typical HN war story about how one’s coworkers are incompetent or chronically lazy. I guess this is the HN version of hard-hatters being vehemently against immigrant labor.

Meanwhile the concern for being abused by people with actual power is just an emotionless throwaway scare quote. “The man”.

[throwaway27448]

It'a worth noting shareholders also provide no value. We need to fix both ends of the equation to move forward as a society.

[MattDamonSpace]

they literally provide value

Shareholders are investors who give valuable resources to business

[miltonlost]

No, they provide capital. It's the workers who provide value to the company.

[achenet]

arguably, capital is also value.

If you have a machine that makes widgets, which requires people to operate, the machine (capital) without anyone operating it (labor) is worthless, but if you have people (labor) without any machine (capital), you won't have any widgets.

I feel like this is one of those situations where "the whole is larger than the sum of the parts" - combining the power of capital and labor, you get much more value than just capital or just labor.

Of course, this does NOT imply that "I provided the capital, it couldn't have happened without me, ergo I deserve all the rewards" is true, even if, if we look at the history and current state of the world, generally speaking it is more advantageous to provide capital than it is to provide labor.

[throwaway27448]

Yes, but capital only has value traced back to the product of labor and production

[missedthecue]

It's hard to explain why entrepreneurs want capital so much if it provides zero value. They're all stupid and doing something they ought not to?

[throwaway27448]

> It's hard to explain why entrepreneurs want capital so much if it provides zero value

Because they want to abuse people. If they wanted to provide value they would have found a skill

[faidit]

So they can hire workers. Without whom more capital can't be produced

[Jensson]

And why can money hire workers? Its because that money lets them get goods that was produced by previous investments. Without the investor class you wouldn't get large new projects organized. The alternative to private investments is communism, and we all know how that works out, it results in politicians hogging all the wealth and generally making even worse decisions with that money than the greedy capitalists does.

People prefer working for greedy capitalists since it generally pays better than working for the government.

[throwaway27448]

We certainly don't need private investment to develop an economy. I, for one, am tired of supporting lazy parasites whose only contribution is money, and who don't know how to invest it for the rest of us. It's a completely broken model.

[2OEH8eoCRo0]

Your anecdote is useful and will be upvoted

[Balvarez]

Your probably a normal guy making a comment in good faith, but I can't help but think this is the exact sort of dark marketing that I would do if I was an anti union commenter/marketer. Attack the vague made up values of union members because you can't attack the fact that large companies have been anti-worker for awhile and most people believe that. I'll also add onto here that if this comment gets down voted into the dirt, I'm likely right. Also let me be clear, I'm not attacking your comment but what sort of comment would be most-likely amplified by anti-union forces.

[aliasxneo]

Well, I'm the sole provider in a single income family with several dependents. My assumption is that would make me the natural fit for a union given how much my employment means my family stays off the street. That's why I have mixed feelings. The idea of a union aligns with my living situation. The reality, however, always left a sour taste in my mouth.

[xur17]

Maybe, but I have heard the exact same experience from my Dad and others that have worked with unions. It unfortunately seems to attract people trying to take advantage of the system. Personally if I were offered similar jobs, one with a union, one without, I'd take the one without.

[jandrewrogers]

The poor reputation of unions in the US is well-deserved. The unions are writing their own anti-union propaganda, you can't blame other people for noticing this. Your argument is essentially that we should pretend this obvious badness doesn't exist because it makes unions look bad.

It is weird how much discourse these days is about pretending something obviously true isn't actually happening. The first step of fixing a problem is being honest about its existence. The inability of some people to be honest about the existence of obvious things is why so many problems go unaddressed.

[robocat]

A worldview where you see manipulation in everything seems sad.

I suspect the guidelines explain voting behaviour: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

[gitaarik]

So there are no issues with unions in your view?

Of course it's not that black and white, but I don't think the previous commenter was necessarily painting it like that.

[izacus]

Yep, this is textbook unionbusting propaganda.

[ericd]

Rein in the worst excesses, and you won't have the general population spreading these stories as a response to their own experiences with unions. Living in NYC and observing union workers was enough to fully convince me that union regs weren't promoting efficiency in the workplace, no need for shady capitalists to try to convince me. And a lot of times, those people were working for public dollars, so it was hurting all of us.