[legitster]

Anytime this comes up, it's worth pointing out how deeply weird US unionization is compared to the broader world.

There is now a union ... just for Wizards of the Coast employees. UWOTC-CWA now has a monopoly on negotiating for WotC employees. Dues flow up to the CWA, but members don't necessarily get the benefit of bargaining industry-wide. There is also no choice within WotC for what union represents you.

It's still a deeply flawed relationship, especially compared to what a median European enjoys. It's not a simple "US companies bad - EU companies good" - the NLRA is in desperate need of reform by Congress and political actors across the US have stymied progress.

[derektank]

I’m familiar with sectoral bargaining in the abstract but wasn’t aware European workers had the ability to choose which union represented them in negotiations. How does that work in practice?

[sockbot]

Not only in Europe, but in Canada too. Think of the union as a corpo offering bargaining and administrative services. Unions compete with each other for workforces. The typical case would be for a newly unionizing workforce needing to choose which union to join.

It is rare, but a workforce can even choose to move to a different union.

[jgalt212]

But without a monopsony how do these choose your own adventure unions have any real bargaining power?

[jshier]

In countries where meta-strikes are legal, the unions cooperate on basic rights, and strike together when needed. Such coordination is explicitly illegal in the US, and has been since the '30s (IIRC).

[reverius42]

It sounds like they'd at least have more power than a single-employer union, by virtue of being larger and having more resources.

[jgalt212]

I'd much rather run a factory where only 10% of my workers may strike than one where 90% may strike.

[legitster]

Depends on the country.

In a lot of countries, it's not much different than choosing a pension fund option. You join a job, you choose which union best represents you based on your industry/title/etc (if you are not already a member). If you are not happy with your current agreement, you choose a different union that promises better outcomes.

It's so much less extreme than US unionization. There's not much reason for hostility between business and unions - unions don't get these all or nothing powers like they do in the US.

[fl0id]

US unionization tbh sounds a bit like works council election in Germany, as that happens per business / vendor etc and fe in case of delivery apps or Tesla, Amazon etc is met with hostility

[legitster]

Maybe if you squint a little.

Once a workplace is unionized in the US, members have no real say or transparency to the union negotiation process. The union reps do not even have to work at the facility (in many larger unions, they are professionals paid for by the union).

Elections are only union wide, not specific to the company. And there is not really any day-to-day advisory capacity. Unions reps only exist to enforce the contract as signed.

[adw]

It is common for big workplaces to have multiple unions and essentially all unions are sectoral and role-specific rather than company specific.

Take the NHS; it will have to deal with ten plus separate unions - https://nhsunions.org/#about – of which the biggest powers are the British Medical Association and the Royal College of Nursing, but the cleaners are GMB or Unite and they're huge pan-working-class institutions.

Education has to deal with the NEU, the NASUWT, and the NAHT, each of which has a different political slant. Some unions in the UK have been historically rather centrist in their politics (a good example of that is Prospect, https://prospect.org.uk/about/, which is a roll-up of a number of scientific and finance unions), some are firebreathing communists, but all of them work across employers.

There's also no such thing as a closed shop in the UK – because there are much stronger worker protections, there's less of a need for one.

(I was, at one time, in a majority-UCU workplace; https://www.ucu.org.uk.)

[RobotToaster]

There's also nothing stopping people being in multiple unions, a lot of IWW members are.

[s1artibartfast]

It depends heavily on the country but a worker at a company can pick a union to represent them. You might see a billboards saying join Union a or Union B. If you Union a is corrupt or screwing over one group of workers in favor of another group of worker, the laborers will just leave it and go to a different one.

This solves a lot of problems with us unions, where they have a state sanctioned Monopoly on the workers.

The classic example is unions are going for terms that screw over junior members but there are other perverse examples. At my friend's company the Union demanded that it be forced to return to office because the larger number of field technicians we're a voting majority of the union and angry they couldn't work from home.

[legitster]

> The classic example is unions are going for terms that screw over junior members but there are other perverse examples.'

The story I always think of is the Port of Portland shutting down was because the ILWU organized a $20 million dollar slowdown to punish the operator. The operator ended up pulling out of the city never to return, costing all the ILWU workers their jobs, as well as the city of Portland a few million a year in taxes.

The reason for the $20 million dollar slow down? The ILWU wanted to take two jobs away on the site from the IBEW!

[OkayPhysicist]

On the otherhand, having a plethora of unions at a workplace weakens labor's bargaining power: A US union, by the nature of having a closed shop, has the power to destroy the business with a prolonged strike. Nobody wants that (capital's out their investment, labor's out their jobs), but it serves as the nuclear option from which the union's bargaining power is derived.

[annzabelle]

This makes US unions very all or nothing, and excessive demands from unions (particularly RE: pensions) have driven many businesses out of business and bankrupted many municipalities.

My understanding is German and Scandinavian unions are much more collaborative and are unlikely to force demands that bankrupt companies.

This is why unions have such a negative connotation in the US. A lot of people see municipal governments being held hostage by unions over pensions and early retirement, and union employees being so hard to fire that you end up with "rubber rooms" and end up associating unions with expensive enshittification of services.

[bugglebeetle]

It’s not “deeply weird” but was intentionally legislated to prevent labor from obtaining similar sectorial bargaining power and political influence as they had in Europe. Some entertainment industry unions had already achieved similar stature pre-WWII and were grandfathered in, but the US learned their lesson here and explicitly sought to atomize at the workplace level.