There are countless counter examples that are obvious. Teacher's unions (hard to fire teachers, poor quality). Transit unions (mandating 2 drivers per subway car, crazy benefits, etc). Auto industry fighting EVs.
Sorry, it just doesn't make any sense to make such a broad statement regarding this at all.
Teachers can be bad without union, and unionized EV manufacturing was never a problem. If you are playing at German auto unions. The lack of European sourced batteries is the problem, unions have nothing to do with that.
so there is no data or there are counter examples to the data? because you seem to have shifted to an entirely different assertion... Also to say the counter examples are countless is a pretty broad statement itself.
2 drivers per subway car sounds like (at least with old tech) a good thing for everyone's safety.
> Auto industry fighting EVs.
Sounds like this was more the companies themselves, but I don't have the details.
In my view unions are largely a good thing to balance out companies power, but I've also heard stories where they have become too strong. There's nuance to the matter, but I feel like at least the US could use much more and stronger unions.
Anecdotally, if increasing resources improved outcomes, California would have fantastic education results, as would every purely economic intervention in low-median-income school districts.
Teachers may be underpaid on a time/effort basis compared to other jobs, but paying them more doesn’t actually improve outcomes. I am no expert—not even a parent—but my understanding is that curriculum choice and implementation are really, really important. (Can’t say how important relative to, say, family situation.)
According to one news report I read, 50% of the public school teachers in California are actively ignoring the state’s recent switch back to a phonics-based language curriculum, and the union itself is anti-phonics. Is the union just representing the will of those 50% of law-defying teachers, or are the teachers inferring their behavior from a politicized union?
I have exactly 0 knowledge of the situation in California, but I'd be curious if they have (on top of my head, might be missing many more factors)
- adequately paid and educated teachers
- small classroom sizes
- available support for special needs kids
If all of these are in place, are the bad outcomes explainable by poorer socioeconomic factors? And are there any forced learning policies like standardized tests that promote rote memorization?
It just seems so far fetched that a teacher's union would single handedly sabotage the whole education system. Even if they push for a certain kind of teaching, it would simply not tank the whole ship, so to speak.
(I know I'm talking slightly past your points, but I'm mostly interested in the point of how much does the union actually affect the learning outcomes, all the other factors considered)
There are countless counter examples that are obvious. Teacher's unions (hard to fire teachers, poor quality). Transit unions (mandating 2 drivers per subway car, crazy benefits, etc). Auto industry fighting EVs.
Sorry, it just doesn't make any sense to make such a broad statement regarding this at all.
A union's job is to protect the union. Nothing else.
That is an entirely different argument that's not particularly germane to this topic. One can agree that unions, in the past, have helped workers, and also understand that they are not always in the best interest of the general public. It's complex, but possible!
No, that is not a “complex” position at all. On the contrary, it’s a fairly simple position where you take no strong stance but still want to claim the positive aspects from each side.
Are unions universally good? No, because humans are in the loop, and humans can do bad things.
Does that change the fact that the concept of a union is one of the greatest innovations in all of human history? No.
Can unions today help disparate human workers collectively improve their working conditions? Yes, because this is what unions were designed for, and I think is the key outcome the Rockstar folks are betting on.
For a recent example, read up on the Samsung union bargaining for company wide bonuses in the wake of the huge profits made off the surge in demand for memory.
The Samsung deal is exactly what I'm talking about. It is not all entirely good. Everyone at Samsung not working in chips got screwed. And those lucky few union members used their power to extract an unfair amount of money from the company. This will cause the company to lean towards other avenues in the future, potentially harming everyone else.
Why are those people getting a huge check? Not because they worked harder. Because AI came along and made their product more valuable.
> But a smaller union associated with workers in the consumer electronics division — which boycotted the negotiations and whose 15,000 members were excluded from the vote — accused the lead union of neglecting their interests, and decried the deal as “discriminatory.” Under the agreement, workers in the consumer electronics division are expected to get payouts that are a fraction of those of their semiconductor division peers.
"Are unions net benefit for the general public" and "whether reforming or abolishing the unions is the best course of action for the general public" are two separate questions. The unions could be beneficial (and still a reform could improve this benefit) or they could be harmful (but a reform could make them beneficial without abolishing them). The original claim was they are beneficial right now, in heir current form, but no actual proof had been provided.
https://www.ae.dk/debatindlaeg/2023-05-staerke-fagforeninger...