I wonder why US companies keep pulling stunts like this despite the data showing little negative impact of unionization to overall productivity nor company survival.
It looks to be a purely dogmatic ego trip where somehow blind loyalty is demanded even when it's not actually necessary.
I don’t understand how so many HNers are anti-union and anti-collective bargaining.
The fact that corporations and billionaires are so anti-union and engage in regular conduct like this demonstrates that unions are pro-worker and ideal for the balance needed in the US and across the globe.
Balance is key between workers and owners. Without it we are left with growing wealth inequality such as…
- ridiculous housing prices
- stagnant wages
- poor public school education
- no retirement benefits
- expensive public universities
Public school education is poor in part because it’s darn near impossible to fire bad teachers though. And I don’t see how unions would improve housing affordability.
I’m not against unions per se, particularly for positions which are not as lavishly compensated as a typical white collar FAANG employee. I’m merely pointing out that you need to pick better examples. Otherwise you just undermine your own argument.
Neither of you are giving examples, only conjecture. Bad teachers are a noteworthy cause of poor schools. House prices wouldn't be so high if we had unions. Ok, prove it. Or at least give me some reasoning to go off.
House prices wouldn't be so high if we had unions.
In Switzerland, all the large unions (railroad workers, public service workers, ect.) have so much money and so much access to cheap credit, they can (and frequently did in the past) start housing co-ops for their members.
This results in large developments in the middle of the most expensive cities, where only union members have a chance to rent. And even those have year-long waiting list on every new development.
Since the housing co-op is non-profit and pays rock bottom interest rates on its loans, rent is frequently around half the fair market rate.
Where did those unions get so much money from?
Dues, I imagine. If you don't strike very often, the war chest keeps filling...
That war chest, in combination with it being unthinkable that a big union goes bankrupt, and the fact that they are building real estate, pretty much means they can borrow more money dirt cheap.
I guess it just seems strange to me for a union to be so rich, yet their members can't afford to live in regular housing. I grew up in a factory town in America with a unionized workforce and despite the things people say about American unions, the workers there all did very well. At least until the plant was sold to private equity about 10 years ago... I hear bad things now... but for several generations the union succeeded in getting the workers paid enough to be regular members of the community, not some sort of second class living in company/union housing.
They are decades old organizations with millions of members. That is probably a drop in the bucket to them.
What is the mechanism under which houses would be more affordable if employees had more money thanks to the unions? Real estate (and by extension rents) will take up any available slack on income.
I think gp was referring to tenants/renters unions: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenants_union
They are quite common in the UK.
Real estate (and by extension rents) will take up any available slack on income.
Only if allowed to do so - but yes, landlord are leeches who do nothing and in return soak up every penny of income they can from their tenants.
However, isn't the typical market-capitalist argument to this, "if they could be making more money now, they would?" Don't "markets" set the price of real estate?
Markets don't, but it's really funny to me when people argue against good things, such as increasing minimum wage, with absurdities, like somehow a minimum wage increase is simply a subsidy for landlords.
What is the mechanism under which houses would be more affordable if employees had more money thanks to the unions?
Employees have more money thanks to unions -> those deriving income from capital have less money -> narrower distribution of wealth -> goods (including housing) which both classes pursue are more affordable to the working class. QED.
Housing prices rose much, much faster than inflation or rises in wages. So they are obviously not driven by income. Try again.
Bad teachers are a noteworthy cause of poor schools
You have that completely backward. Virtually all bad teachers start out hopeful and excited to teach kids, that's why they become teachers in the first place. They are then worn and beaten down by bad schools. Bad schools are mostly caused by bad students, who are disrespectful, disruptive, get into fights, etc. Bad students are mostly caused by bad parenting. If they aren't raised to respect adults, education, authority and their peers, then there is little that teachers can do about it. The reason "bad schools" have trouble keeping enough teachers despite high levels of state and federal funding is because the students burn through the teachers quickly. The teachers who hang on for a long time at those schools are often ones that develop coping strategies like not giving a shit, finding pleasure in yelling at kids, etc.
Read the thread in its entirety please, you are quoting me quoting someone else.
impossible to fire bad teachers though.
It's impossible to fire bad teachers (it really isn't, btw, at least not in Texas) because there are no teachers because teachers wages are pathologically low because every education department in the country is underfunded.
IIUC the USA spend near the top per student of all countries. Why is it other countries get better results with less money?
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...
White and Asian students, if stratified separately, rank in the top 10 academically world wide.
Everyone else brings down the average, and it has nothing to do with teachers or how good they are.
Teachers in my county are assigned to schools randomly, and yet some schools score 9/10 and others score literally 1/10 and 2/10 on great schools for academic performance. Funding between schools is the same. Teachers assigned are from the same pool.
It’s not the money. It’s not the teachers.
Anyone who talks about “education in the USA” without addressing the giant disparity in academic performance that begins in kindergarten for black and Hispanic students is ignoring the single largest factor on student outcomes.
Why do black and hispanic students score worse?
Those kids are growing up in much harsher circumstances. Little money, parents working multiple jobs, homes with flaking lead paint, communities with lots of drugs and poor access to preventative healthcare. It also creates a vicious cycle where the culture adapts to distrust and discourage academic achievement, in favor of lottery odds in sports and entrepreneurship.
I’m sure there are whole sociology degrees on the subject. But this is even true intra class, in kindergarten. Probably as early as preschool, from what I’ve seen here.
Growing up in a book dessert.
Even adjusted for family wealth, income, and adversity nonimmigrants* with these backgrounds score worse at all schooling levels; even when placed in schools with double the funding per student.
It would be nice if socioeconomic factors were the whole answer here. But that does not appear to be the case. Even Hispanic and Black students adopted by White families do not score much higher than peers of their ethnic group. This is a dark rabbit hole that you may not want to go down.
*Legal immigrants are self selected for higher ability.
Yes, but if we look at teacher salaries, the average in the state of New York is 79 637.
In Sweden it's around 41550 SEK per month, which implies 498 000 SEK per year, which including the tax would be 647 400 SEK per year, i.e. 59 000 USD.
But Sweden has a per capita GDP of 56000 USD whereas the per capita GDP of New York State is 104343. It's not going to be incredibly competitive.
You need to subtract the tax rate, not add it.
No. In order to compare a wage to GDP one should calculate the amount of money that the employee actually costs the employer.
So tax is in. I need to compare the same kinds of things. The American numbers are also pre-tax.
Here in Sweden though, the fully pre-tax numbers are rarely reported. Rather, what is reported is the wage minus a 1-1/1.3 tax, so I have to reverse that tax by multiplying by 1.3.
I am going to go out on a wild limb here, and conjecture that one of the US's biggest weakness is how they handle teachers.
1. Above average talent in any subject field do not join the talent pool for teachers in the USA. Industry pays better and has better working conditions (both real and perceived). This is going to be a major cultural hurdle but the USA needs to break away from the idea that teaching is lesser work. This will create more political will to boost teacher funding.
2. Free Market Economics. You heard me. Teachers in the USA have the unique "opportunity" of having to find and interview for positions. Two problems: First, you end up with talent pooling unevenly. Next, you have teachers stagnating at one school for decades. Solution: central deployment. Teachers are hired by districts, and then the district rotates teachers through all schools in the district over the course of their career. Seniority grants some preference ranking, and longer rotation periods.
This also counters a third problem: Teachers finding themselves out of a job, or facing job prospects so dire that they just leave the field altogether. There is a level of security, and those who wish to proceed to administration are given opportunities towards the ends of their careers.
3. Administration as a separate career track. Administrative bloat is becoming a real problem, and both the higher pay associated + the opportunity to laterally move into the track via "further education" is a root cause. This makes them a separate class with competing interests, and incentives will only lead to more bloat as well as siphon away talented teachers who get burned out by teaching (mostly due to the abysmal pay). My time in Japan gave me perspective on a perhaps better way:
a) School based administration (principals and vice principals) is a role only obtainable at the end of your career, on a fixed timeline. If you decided to put yourself on that track, you will most likely be in the last 6 years of your career, and your last 3 years as principal will end in retirement. This both prevents admin bloat and class distinction, while allowing skilled, senior teachers to provide guidance and pass along wisdom.\
b) School District administration -- that is all the bureaucratic management of schools -- is a completely separate career track of professional, general bureaucrats who are assigned to school administration as part of a career rotation inside their career at government.
And thus begins a virtuous, positive feedback loop of good teachers rotating around a school district reinforcing good teaching, and then ultimately being rewarded by becoming the ultimate teacher. At the same time, administrative entrenchment is avoided because administration is an assigned, rotating task.
That’s causing the same problem then. If there are no teachers to hire, you’re less likely to fire
I’m not anti-union, but I’m not pro-union either.
I was in a union, Teamsters in fact. It protected crappy workers, prevented any change to work processes that might save time and put a low ceiling on high performing workers.
Not all unions are like that, but they certainly aren’t panaceas to all workers ills (in fact, sometimes they are the cause of new ones).
It would be better if they could fire the bad students as well
FWIW, my decade as a high school English teacher indicates otherwise. People weren’t let go in the middle of a semester, but they would absolutely be let go without fuss during the summer break.
I never experienced anything like the about “rubber rooms” in NYC (they may exist in NYC, IDK - but the suggestion that they are “business as usual” in school districts across the country is a fantastical lie). If admin wanted a teacher gone, they simply put them on the education version of a PIP, collected evidence of poor performance, and let that person go at a non-disruptive time.
Public school education is poor in part because it’s darn near impossible to fire bad teachers though.
The funny thing is that public employment (in the US) is where unions have the least impact on firing difficulty, because employees have a property interest in their employment which means government — even as their employer — cannot deprive them of it without due process under the 5th (for the federal) or 14th (for states and subdivisions) amendments even if they are not unionized.
Also, the line you push about teachers is pushed by privatizers (and sometimes administrators as an excuse for their own failures), often supported by one or two anecdotes, so often as to have become an article of faith ib sone circles, but there is no systematic evidence for it.
I don’t understand how so many HNers are anti-union and anti-collective bargaining.
I had the displeasure of working with union labor in the US, they would come in at 7 (who does that) and leave at 4 on the dot. Then worked with non-union labor: cheaper, worked as much as possible per day, got the job done faster. Money-wise it was less than union labor.
Now tell me how is good for me, as a company that needs stuff done, to use union workers?
Now tell me how is good for me, as a company that needs stuff done, to use union workers?
Because in a race to the bottom, even the winner ends up in shit. The reason America is turning to crap now is because everyone is just out for themselves, and that's mostly folks like you who just want to get stuff done cheaply. Unions may not be the answer for your company, but please at least treat your workers like they matter, and pay them better than you think you should, because they are your company, they are America, and the rampant evisceration of the middle/working/blue collar class by the greedy corpos will destroy us all before anything else.
I truly don't understand how businesspeople cannot understand that humans are your most important resource. You run roughshod over them for a bit more profit. It's perplexing!
Y'all missing the point in this:
- I hired a company to do some construction work and in that particular location, due to how the contracts were set, I could only get union work. Expensive and no over time.
- In another location which did not had this kind of restriction, I hired another company that was not unionized: they worked longer hours and as a result finished faster. Also their hourly rates were lower.
Point being, in a non-union market you can do a lot more faster.
And to get to the financial issue, all hours were paid, so just in case it is not clear, there was never a question of not wanting to pay overtime. The question was why I should pay ~20-25% more for the same work?
Have you ever researched the difference between the companies, the workers, how satisfied they are, how much they are paid, and why it was a quarter cheaper? You keep saying how the union affected you for your two projects, and how the union was the bad guys because you had to spend more time and money. Did you ever think that perhaps the workers at the union company could have been secure in their jobs, happy with their work/life balance and that the workers at the other company could be beaten down, pushed too hard, paid too little?
In any case, your few experiences could be caused by a lot of stuff, perhaps not even the union! I don't know, without more research. Your particular story is from your perspective only, and doesn't even delve into any other reasons this could have happened, like local noise ordnances or something.
This is my point: you don't care about the human cost of your entrepreneurial enterprises, and that is in my opinion the reason that America seems to be infighting and "going downhill" as they say. Greed, an uncaring attitude about others, and narcissistic "me me me" behavior is the problem, not a few workers trying to get a bigger cut. Unions aren't the enemy, those who would attempt to take advantage of workers are. America is only strong if we're all strong, not just a few tenths of a percent at the top.
I am not replying any more to this thread, all I have to say was said here.
You do know that you can switch jobs if you don't like the one you're in at the moment, right?
And it is not my problem with how much someone if paid, really. I put out a request for work, companies bid, the cheapest one overall wins. That's how the free market works.
And sure, believe whatever you want, but getting the best deal possible is not going to be the end of the US :)
Why would it matter if they can switch jobs or not when all jobs would exploit workers the same way in your non union ideal.
No one is exploiting anyone. As a free individual you agree or not to be paid a certain amount of money for a unit of work - an hour in the majority of cases.
The only reason unions exist is so they can extort business owners into paying more than the market is willing to pay for that unit of work. And the fact that as a business owner you can't easily fire a unionized employee is the worst thing possible.
You can downvote me to oblivion, but unions are cancer and they need to be abolished.
Ah yes, American capitalism well known for not exploiting anyone.
how is good for me, as a company that needs stuff done, to use union workers?
For the company, it's very good, because unionization, or better yet, being a co-op, means your company will be more likely to be profitable in the long term.
But you are correct that in these situations, your employees are more difficult to exploit for longer hours, harsher conditions, and worse pay. So yes, if you're trying to be a major shareholder-owner, unions may hurt your individual bottom line, even if they benefit the corporation as a whole.
I think you should read my initial comment again. And then the next one, answering to an angry person just like you: It is about working as much as it is needed to get work done, not about not paying. And there is nothing wrong in getting the best possible price on a contract.
they would come in at 7 (who does that)
To answer your question human beings who want work life balance and want to do things with friends and family in the afternoon. Or do you believe that a work day should ONLY be for work?
My gripe is with the fact that somehow they got the building owner to only allow union work. And by doing this, they distorted the market in having no option but to get things done on someone else's schedule. And having this kind of restrictions is hurtful to the business.
Oh no. Working a nine hour day. The horror.
I'm anti-union AND pro labour regulation. Your government should be targeting wealth inequality with legislation and public services on all of these issues. The union tends to become another opaque organisation with a power hierarchy of its own and layers of internal politics and power struggles. The unions rarely if ever push for legislation change either because it would risk their existence.
The corporations should live in fear of the government, not an independent union.
Also my father was a union member for many years but was ousted after suggesting that full time management were wasting members' money on expenses. This turned into a 2 year long shit show where he was pretty much forced out of the job he had for being a non union scab. As much as being told he was a lesser human.
"The corporations should live in fear of the government, not an independent union."
I think that membership funded union would be much likely to protect worker rights than tax funded government.
But the union has little to no legislative power, only relying on lobbying and private legal cases, at which point you end up competing with non-union entities who have a lot more money.
A general strike has a lot of power. Which is why they are banned in many countries.
It's not not always been the case that the unions were the weaker non-state actor, in fact they used to rival political parties and business cartels in their ablity to lobby/negotiate.
And in some countries that power havent completely faded away.
The interests of the people working inside a union might align with the interests of the workers they represent but as in any other organization they are focused on their own job and careers. The people at the bottom are probably more idealistic. When I hear about strikes in my country and their purpoted goals and the way they are made, most of the time I feel like their goal is to advance the careers of somebody in the union and not to get something for the workers. Furthermore most unions have clear links with some political parties, from left to right. They are part of the overall political play to the next elections.
Even the interests of the older members of the union diverge from the younger members (not unlike a country). Pretty much every defined benefit pension plan has “tiers” of benefits, where the older members voted themselves higher benefits in exchange for younger members getting less.
You're scared of monolithic unions, so give all power to government? Unless workers own the company, unions are needed to give voice to power.
I think unions are great! I'm even a member of one, and have been known to encourage everybody else around me to unionize. Notably, though, I love in Belgium.
The American implementation of unions, on the other hand, is not great. While in the US, I've run into rules like not being allowed to plug something in because only union electricians are allowed to do that, and that's just one example among many. Police unions and teacher's unions are mostly known for making bad employees unfirable outside of egregious circumstances, and teacher's unions in particular don't seem to have improved pay or working conditions much.
I have no idea where the difference comes from, but for people who have only seen and interacted with the American system, I don't blame them for not liking unions
While in the US, I've run into rules like not being allowed to plug something in because only union electricians are allowed to do that, and that's just one example among many.
I obviously don't know anything about the particular union you're talking about. But rules like this are often written to close a loophole. For example, the union negotiates higher wages for their electricians. After the deal is signed, the company hires more office secretaries, reassigns to them most tasks that used to be done by electricians, and fires a bunch of electricians because there's "not enough work."
teacher's unions in particular don't seem to have improved pay or working conditions much.
The difference in pay between unionized and nonunionized teachers is big enough that I wonder where you got such an idea.
Yep, they feel like different institutions sharing some similar objectives and the same name. In the US they had a very institutional, "role-based" org feel rather than being a work welfare and wellbeing observer I've experienced in most of Europe. I can only assume this is due to the more adversarial relationship between workers and employers?
The sad part is that unions have greatly increased pay, benefits, and improved working conditions for teachers. There is constant struggle between school administrations and teachers. Admins will fuck them over immediately if given the chance.
The differences were made law with the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947.
I.e. sympathy strikes are illegal in the US, so the only real power left to unions is jealously guarding the petty pearls available to them.
I suspect most people here are highly educated in sought-after, high-paying jobs. There is a valid point that the net benefits of unions in such cases are low.
Workers unions were created by and for factory workers, miners, etc. People who had zero leverage individually.
In addition, we might be a more individualistic and competive crowd who think they are better than average and thus better off bargaining for themselves.
People who had zero leverage individually.
This is interesting to say considering the record amounts of layoffs we've had across the tech sector of these "high leverage individuals" in the thousands the last few quarters.
Layoffs are not a good example when discussing highly paid jobs with plenty of perks.
In a historical perspective I really mean being squeezed to the limit with no possibility of complaining or of "just moving somewhere else".
You are trying to blame literally every public policy failure in US on unions, that's simply incorrect and they stem from many other sources. I know its convenient in some populist fashion, but unless you understand the root cause of each of those, any sort of fix has no chance of arriving.
Unions make corporations extremely sluggish when they need to react quickly to sudden market shocks or changes of direction of companies, be it positive or negative (yes, includes firing people for which there is suddenly no work anymore). There are corporations that have them heavily and they are not the top of the cream when it comes to progress, agility nor salary pay.
The money is the key issue here - people want extra safety/bargaining net as long as their ultra massive FAANG-like salaries are not touched. How many would agree with say 20% cut while working exactly the same, but being unionized? That's maybe how much that additional burden is to the owners/managers. I suspect not that many but maybe I an wrong.
It’s far easier to tell people that if we just fix this one thing then everything will be fine than try to deal with the complexity of the world and actually make things better.
In the UK it’s been the EU, which we left so they moved on to immigrants. That was too hard to fix so they’ve recently decided to pick on the sick.
The fact that corporations and billionaires are so anti-union and engage in regular conduct like this demonstrates that unions are pro-worker and ideal for the balance needed in the US and across the globe.
No, that's incorrect. The corporations could also be anti-nuclear war, this would not make it good for workers.
A better example is to look at countries with functional unions and functional capitalism, like the Netherlands, Denmark and others.
The quality of life won by union conflicts with capital owners is a measurable fact.
Unions can be implemented and be useless for the workers (an example for the most part is Greece), or maybe too demanding like France. It's up to the participants of the union to shape it as a net contributor to society. The point is that each individual member has a significant say in how a union operates, meanwhile in corporations, even middle management can be completely powerless.
I don’t understand how so many HNers are anti-union and anti-collective bargaining.
If you're talented and skilled then collective bargaining hurts your position because now every low rung and non-productive is along for the ride with your bargaining.
Balance is key between workers and owners. Without it we are left with growing wealth inequality such as…
Inequality is inevitable and its only going to get a lot lot worse, in 20 years time you'll dream for house prices as they are today. The only way out is in your own hands and collective bargaining will just mean existing in a slightly better low with the people a fraction of your skills and drive, any small union win will be inflated to nothing in single digit years but if you bargain on your own there is no real limit if you can back up what you're asking for.
I don’t understand how so many HNers are anti-union and anti-collective bargaining.
You underestimate the appeal of libertarian propaganda to software engineers. It's got the oversimple but neat models we can't resist, plus our relatively advantaged economic position allows allows us to easily confuse ourselves for capitalists.
Are so many of them anti-union? I don't see much evidence that they're any more against unions than the general population. It's surprising to me that nobody has pointed out this article has far fewer anti-union than pro-union comments.
Its Apple. They can't have cognitive dissonance about the company they fanboy over.
They come up with rationale because its part of their identity.
Consider how Tesla looks like Elon Musk and has a bad reputation. We need to defend Apple or Apple will start to look cheap like Elon Musk.
(That or its astroturfing, which we aren't allowed to talk about here, but isnt exactly unheard of in unionbusting, time to get deleted for talking about astrotrufing and history)
It’s because HN folks seem to consider themselves above working-class or soon to be above. They’re just temporarily stuck before they find their big ceo level breaks.
They often demonstrate ideals that go counter to their own interests while simping for daddy ceo’s boot and money.
I don’t understand how so many HNers are anti-union and anti-collective bargaining.
HN is full of the aspirational haut bourgeois, of course they want the proletariat maximally exploitable.
The fact that corporations and billionaires are so anti-union and engage in regular conduct like this demonstrates that unions are pro-worker and ideal for the balance needed in the US and across the globe.
I think there are a lot of things that demonstrate that unions are pro-worker and ideal for the balance needed in the US and across the globe, but that isn't one of them.
Corporations & billionaires are so anti-union because they perceive unions as reducing their profits, which is not necessarily the same thing as them being pro-worker or ideal.
You'll find that, outside of the defense industry, corporations & billionaires generally don't like wars, for exactly the same reason; that doesn't really suggest anything good about wars.
It’s a forum run by a VC firm.
The purpose of a union is to serve those inside the union. They don't care if the consumer has to pay for higher cost, the unionized company stagnates, or if all new jobs in that company get shipped overseas. Naturally, this means that people who aren't members of a union already have a negative opinion of unions.
- ridiculous housing prices
- stagnant wages
- poor public school education
- no retirement benefits
- expensive public universities
Outside of "no retirement benefits," none of these have anything to do with unions, and HN-goers probably would prefer self-funded retire anyways so they can FIRE. Notably, ridiculous housing prices are mostly the result of grassroots NIMBYs, and capital tends to be on the side of build whatever you want. However, when they're operating in a NIMBY environment, they adapt and buy up the existing supply.
Because unions are a leveling mechanism, so if you consider yourself an above average, or even average performer there’s a good chance a union is going to leave you worse off. Why would you want to submit your labor to a collective agreement if you think you can do better or at least equal to the rest of the collective? The only thing a union is guaranteed to be is pro-union, not pro-employee and certainly not pro-you-in-particular.
The only time a union definitely makes sense to an existing workforce is if they can suppress labor supply by implementing onerous barriers to entry into the profession, like lawyers, doctors and pilots have.
They can be a force of good for enforcing labor laws. But law enforcement is certainly not a job that should be left to private organisations, that really should be the role of the government. But even then, if you’re earning an SV salary, you absolutely don’t need a union’s help to settle your civil disputes.
It seems like most of the "union problems" in the US arise from workers clashing with overly-greedy, abusive employers. The employer generally has more power in this relationship, and uses that power to squeeze every last bit of value out of their workforce. The workforce has few ways to push back against this, with unions being one of the options. Maybe if other options were on the table, there would be fewer union problems? As a worker, would you join a union for protection (and pay for it) if your government provided robust legal defences for you?
employers have HR, employees have unions. HR is corporate police. employers hate the idea of having employee police.
I don't know what you've heard, but HR is not police for the employer, they protect the employer from the employee 99% of the time.
That's what they wrote.
State police == police who work for the state
Private police == police who work for a private entity
Corporate police == police who work for the corporation (against the employee 99% of the time)
Yep I misread that.
I think employers hate having to deal with a gatekeeper and some rubric as to who they can hire to do what, how much to pay them etc
I've worked in places where there was union labor for building management. You literally weren't allowed to unplug your computer and move it yourself. You had to file a ticket and have somebody come and do it for you and bill handsomely to do it. What's not to love from an employer perspective?
I'd argue that policies like that are the fault of employers not unions. Those sorts of rules are meant to protect against employers reducing workforce by heaping extra work on a smaller number of employees. If employers didn't try to pull stunts like that then the rules would not be necessary.
yes, employers hate that, employees also hate that. dumb police is dumb police - union or HR.
HR usually doesn't do stupid shit like that because it reduces employer KPIs so even if they do that for some time it gets killed quickly. unions have different KPIs to optimise for and if they're pathological and/or parasitic, you get dumb shit like the above.
an union which is not a parasite is absolutely possible in the same way a non-exploiting employer is also possible.
Most employees in the US do not in fact have unions. Only about 10% of US workers are unionized, partly because of their employers' attempts to prevent that.
The corporations are the only ones that can pay the salaries being requested by labor activists though. IMO, a lot of the agitation for higher wages as a universal right has a negative effect on smaller businesses, while the corporations (which are the actual targets) have an easier time adapting to changes in federal and state law, for example by compensating with foreign revenue.
I can't imagine it makes starting a new small business any easier when you're required to pay employees $20/hr. Think about how many startups are designed from the ground up for corporate acquisition, almost like a fire-and-forget model never intended to scale.
I'd like to think unions and labor reformers consider such things, but to be honest it's probably tertiary at best.
I can't imagine it makes starting a new small business any easier when you're required to pay employees $20/hr.
Oh no! Anyway…
A new business with 1 employee isn’t going to be union. Federal and (in many) state minimum wage laws don’t even apply. Labour regulation kicks in as you get more and more employees.
Most activists are demanding higher wages from bigger employers.
20 bucks an hour in some areas is literally unlivable. That's around 40k yearly (before taxes), and in the areas where the minimum wage should be at least 20 an hour, that's barely enough to afford to live.
I can't imagine it makes starting a new small business any easier when you're required to pay employees $20/hr.
Why should workers suffer because some techbro wants to get rich from the Nth AI chatbot he shits out using VC money?
That's $40k (gross) a year assuming the job is full time, which it won't be. Unless you're living in an extremely low CoL area that's a meager existence that pays for rent, food, bills, health insurance and not much else. You might be able to afford a house someday at that wage.
Where else would you put the minimum if not "scraping by?" If businesses literally can't afford it then maybe government should step in and pay the difference.
Maybe if other options were on the table, there would be fewer union problems? As a worker, would you join a union for protection (and pay for it) if your government provided robust legal defences for you?
Yes. The solution you provide might seem to on the surface, but it doesn't in reality. Let me give you an existing exemple, and one that people associate with strong workers right and yet the relation between workforce and employers is horrible : my country of France.
France made a capital mistake compared to our other european neighbors, by making an inverted order of agreement. Countries where it works (like nordics, etc ...) have a flow of importance like this :
1 Union collective agreement
2 Country's law
3 Company local agreement
Meaning the defining rules are made through the union, some are set by the country (but they're not overriding union agreement), and local companies can make their own internal agreement but they can't override the law nor the union agreement (so eg you can give extra holiday, but you can't take out a national holiday or a union negotiated holiday).
France being centralised as it is, and believing in the messiah governement above adult talking with rules; decided to invert this with the following scheme :
1 Country's law
2 Union collective agreement
3 Company local agreement
On the surface, it seems like it makes sense or is even better. In reality, here is what happens : if you are a worker and want a change, or there is a strike and you're the employer negotiating, or ... The end game is not the other side. It's the governement. This doesn't promote discussion between both side of the work share, it makes it useless.
So you have the joke about employer's association regretting that the governement make news laws and rules every time there is a major strike instead of negotiations, and the employee's union regretting that when a strike is stalling the situation employers go to the governement instead of negotiating harder ... You get the governement having to "invite both side to the table" in front of them at every major strike. Because ultimately, our system makes the governement the daddy when workers and employers are the kid.
And what's really insane is that both side hate this and criticize it, yet when Macron made a push to change it both side where also against it because they saw it as destroying their position : employees union pretended it would allow employers to do whatever since they have more power, employers pretended it would put them in a kidnapped situation every strike.
Meanwhile you go on the french subreddit or any other center to left place, you will regularly see things like union agreement that have minimal salaries in them BELOW the french legal salaries, acting like this is horrible, while in reality it's like that because nobody cares about that because it doesn't matter because the minimal is the country's one.
I love my country's approach to people rights and society's rules, but this is one where we're really wrong, except it gives everyone a taste of power (gov like to be in power; employees like that they can call daddy to "screw the evil employer", employers like that they can circumvent their peole to go straight to daddy to "skip those lazy workers").
I don't know if proper union in charge is the best solution. All I know is every place doing better than us at that have strong union and a governement that doesn't try to do their job for them.
I don't think the conversation gets to a high enough level of complexity as it necessarily should for employees to fully understand the stakes.
They need to always include the influence of industrial complexes and an uneven playing field with international competition, nations not having same cost structures because not having alignment on services and quality of life minimums for its population - so those who don't take care of their population as well get a competition advantage on pricing.
Fascism also needs to come into play, for example, when countries give certain companies $10s of billions of the taxpayers' money to "compete" for those factories being local instead of built somewhere else, but the serious risk is fascism is authoritarian politicians partnering with industrial complexes, so long as the companies receiving the money are willing to toe the tyrannical line.
someone down here in this thread said:
The problem with government (or too-large unions) is that different jobs have different employment concerns. It's hard to legislate in a way that covers all cases from seasonal farm work to IT office jobs to airline pilots. A union gives you more fine-grained representation to address the problems specific to your profession and workplace.
In Sweden government labor protection rules are somewhat low (there is not a minimum wage for example), but unions have a lot of power and a good chunk of workers are unionised. The job of the gov is to guarantee a basic minimum of labor regulations and unions do the rest.
By your "overly-greedy" conclusion, in your equation do you include the pressures of international competition that exist on an uneven playing field?
If your competitors can sell for lower costs than you due to the cost of living is not as high (likely the quality of life is not as high either) - because they don't take care of the population as much, don't have safeguards in place, etc), and 2) therefore the margins to be lower - and so if not competing with pricing from the uneven playing field - then the whole company may go under, or worse be taken over by states or companies essentially owned/controlled by totalitarian states?
If you extrapolate out that then means more and more power-money-control flows towards bad actors, propagating, compounding, and accelerating their takeover of potentially everything globally - so while in the short-term unions may maintain a certain quality of life, until totalitarians centrally control the means of production - and then everyone becomes slave labor, the ones who last will be those conditioned to comply and/or think whatever controlled-relatively low quality of life is normal and the only thing possible.
Also, the solution is the relatively free market to your conundrum, right? If it's "so easy" then the people who want to unionize for a certain maintained standard can then find investment and start their own company - and then they too can face the economic pressures of international competition on an uneven playing field, and they'll see how well they can fair too; and then cool if they can outcompete everyone and maintain their desired quality of work-life, but in their effort to aim for their goals they're far more likely to get a rude awakening of competitive market forces.
There's a reason there's a naturally formed hierarchy of competence, and highly competent people gravitate towards voluntarily wanting to be led and employed by the most highly competent people they can identify - who helps drive and support their passion by having a foundational trust or belief the company being led by whatever organizational structure (especially including founder(s)) has allowed them to reach their current state of success; and then an ideological mob of workers who apply pressure for improvements, where the business will want to keep good employees happy - presumably they'll be more reasonable than not in work load, work conditions, etc, in part as keeping trained employees is far cheaper and more efficient than hiring new - if they can match the requirements the company has set for the system, if the system appears to be functional-fluid and efficient for the majority - the majority ideally highly competent-healthy individuals who are gauged as accurately as possible to being happy enough with their income and conditions, then that is arguably the best way to orient and determine course corrections if/when necessary.
And then we haven't even begun the conversation of when Tesla Bot et al will be able to replace more and more tasks - to begin the discussion of how then how do we safeguard against tyrants from capturing and deploying these systems against humanity and creating a Terminator-like future?
It seems Elon has thought-extrapolated this far out, and why he's concerned with AI - and why he also believes UBI is likely inevitable; UBI which can be weaponized by bad actors as well, e.g. if you have everyone getting enough money to survive then boredom and cults will be easy to form, who can then be weaponized against the very system they now depend on; why education and understanding the fundamental mechanics and policy that allows for whatever thriving society we design and follow next, tapping into the abundance of the universe as soon as possible - and forming Heaven on Earth, thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.
There is no such thing as "overly greedy" in the US. There is only "serves you right for not being greedy enough".
Govt is a tool of the large abusive employers at this point. Tesla, Amazon and Apple have all been in the news for illegal anti-union behavior and I expect them to get no significant punishment for this at all. Meanwhile the trials take years in which they can simple continue to misbehave. This "policy" is probably discussed within their giant legal depts and c-family with plenty of plausible deniability sprinkled on top.
Meanwhile the word "socialist" already freaks so many voters out in the US, that frankly I do not see an easy way out for you guys.
"union problems"
Glad you put it in quotes, as unions are solutions for oppressed workers. Though unions you got weekends, holidays, end of child labour, minimum wage, paid sick leave and more.
In Japan, there's a really symbiotic relationship between unions and corporations.
Unions are very powerful, but they also take stakes in the corporations. I'm pretty sure that union reps often sit on corporate boards.
Japan has a long culture of employee relations, but they also work their asses off. I don't think Japanese unions would cover slackers, which is a popular view of US unions.
It’s a popular view of anti union propaganda. No one wants to work with lazy people and unions don’t especially want them either
There's a lot of anti-union propaganda, and some of it is self-inflicted.
Anyone that has ever participated in a trade show at the Javits Center, has seen unions do serious damage to their own cause.
Yeah, LV and NYC convention sites are probably the worst/most-obvious examples.
Plenty of stories of presenters being disallowed from plugging in their own equipment without a union employee there to assist and other things like that.
The worst I heard, was one of our sales reps (a woman) came in, with a "weekender" purse (big purse). She was stopped at the door, and wasn't allowed to enter the main hall, for about five minutes, until someone was called over, with one of those huge, hydraulic skateboards they use for moving big furniture.
They put her purse onto the center of the cart, and escorted her to the booth. Then, they got upset she only tipped one guy $5.
I know these are "one-off" stories (and she probably gave attitude), but there's so many of these anecdotes, that it causes huge damage.
I'd rather work with a million "lazy slackers" than kiss the ass of some soulless corporate stooge who'd kill his own family if it made him 0.01% more profit YoY.
My friend’s brother was in the pipefitter’s union. Those guys worked so hard, I don’t think I would have lasted a week on the jobsite. He eventually quit after saving enough money because of the long hours and hard physical work.
He did get paid very well, got good overtime for those long hours, and safety came first. The benefits of a union.
It may be better to say “Unions cover workers whom management accuses of being slackers.” In my experience, the worst “slackers” are often in management (my view on this is from when I was in management myself).
Unions are why people that do difficult, dangerous, dirty work, can afford to live in cities like New York.
The apprenticeship system is just as difficult and time-consuming as college (maybe more so).
The issues with unions often revolve around corruption, but there seems to be corruption in almost any human endeavor.
Japanese work culture is another beast. I don’t think US unions are so much about covering ‘slackers’ but I would say enforcing healthy work—life balance is a component.
Like I said...popular view. However, I have many friends that are quite pro-union, and the reality seems different.
That's also largely true in Germany (the relationship between union and corporation).
This seems to be part of a persistent pattern of businesses thinking they are above the law, and when challenged, the filing of endless countersuits and appeals.
At some point, the democratic process elected Congress and the laws passed therein, and businesses exist at the pleasure of the people and their elected representatives, not the other way around. A business that doesn’t want to unionise is free to close up shop and go out of business. They are not free to simply ignore lawful unionisation activity.
> businesses exist at the pleasure of the people and their elected representatives
As one noted politician famously said: "Corporations are people". The issue is that soo much of US jurisprudence has granted corporate entities all the rights of personhood. The only thing they cannot yet do is vote, but that too will come. They are certainly today allowed to vote with their wallets by financially supporting candidates.
Part of this issue is in turn tied to how so many powerful people in the US cloak themselves in corporate status. Taylor Swift exists are a person, but all her money flows through her corporation. Trump exists as a person, but all his property is held by his corporations. Some of this is a game to avoid taxation but it is also used to shield people from liabilities. So such powerful people take any attack on corporate personhood very personally.
A rather key difference is that people who break the law can and do get put in prison. Whereas consequences and penalties for corporations seem to be nonexistent.
An obvious solution would be to revoke limited liability for a corporation, converting it into a general partnership… shareholders could either abandon or sell their shares, and ones who remain would assume both liability and control over the corporation. (Imagine something like this at Boeing.)
Limited liability is a privilege, not a right, bestowed by state governments.
Revoking the charter is in fact an option, however seldom it's invoked, but it's not actually necessary.
Courts can, and do, pierce the corporate veil, either criminally prosecuting responsible parties or holding them to full liability for corporate action. Corporate personhood is a useful fiction, but it's just that, a legal fiction.
Regulatory capture and non-existant enforcement mechanisms would beg to differ.
It seems more and more that the US is waiting for the general public to commit egregious acts and then will crack down and that this is the ONLY function of the US government at all levels.
This is the issue.
Even when an entity is cornered for wrong-doing, it'll be a fine, paid with other people's money, that amounts to a pittance compared to the profits gained from their malfeasance, all while "admitting no wrong-doing".
The C-suite that made the call, set the culture, and determined budgets suffers zero penalties in a majority of the cases, so there is literally no incentive to comply.
We can thank congressional bribery for that.
a persistent pattern of businesses thinking they are above the law
In the aggregate, they absolutely are. Capital, not democracy, elects US politicians. Those politicians create, enact, and enforce the laws.
businesses exist at the pleasure of the people and their elected representatives
not in late-stage capitalism they don't
From the article: "The board cannot impose fines or direct punishments against Apple for its violations."
So there is literally no consequence to Apple, or any other company from doing these actions, meaning there is no law to be above. If the IRS could do only make public statements that people didn't pay income taxes without any repercussions otherwise, no one pay their taxes ever.
If CxOs and Board could be held accountable and fined say 10% of annual compensation, maybe they would be less inclined to allow these actions to occur.
The whole idea of the executive branch functioning as the judicial branch is a bananas concept to me.
Instead of the same old talking point, what solution do you propose?
Should the executive branch agency make decisions by fiat, without due process? The use of due process doesn't make them a judiciary; it's just a more fair way to make decisions within their purview.
Should we move every such judgment out of the executive branch's hands? First, they have to be able to make some decisions.
But the heart of this issue is, as is well known: There aren't nearly enough capacity in the judicial branch to handle all that work. It's a trick to prevent lawful and needed regulation from happening by severely cutting their capacity.
Instead of the same old talking point, what solution do you propose?
Unnecessarily hostile opening, but full separation of powers as written in the Constitution.
Should the executive branch agency make decisions by fiat, without due process?
It should not be adjudicating any kind of legal controversy. That is not the role of the executive branch.
The use of due process doesn't make them a judiciary; it's just a more fair way to make decisions within their purview.
It's very often worse. Executive agencies often have legislative functions, i.e. APA rulemaking, as well judicial functions, e.g. in this matter. The SEC is another one, (see SEC vs Jarkesy currently before SCOTUS).
Should we move every such judgment out of the executive branch's hands?
Yes.
But the heart of this issue is, as is well known: There aren't nearly enough capacity in the judicial branch to handle all that work. It's a trick to prevent lawful and needed regulation from happening by severely cutting their capacity.
Total BS.
This makes no sense. They are not adjuticating a legal issue, they are investigating whether they should start legal proceedings.
What's your alternative? That they should just sue every company every year so that a judge can decide if that company is doing illegal union busting activities?
And what solution do you propose?
This whole thing is a misunderstanding of how the US system works. None of this is a legislative function, it is a determination by a rule making body. While I agree that the courts are often overworked and we need to vastly expand the number of judges to make sure cases are heard on time, this isn't the root of the reason the functions of the NLRB or the SEC aren't handled by the judiciary. It's that they're simply not judicial.
Instead, congress has designated some rule making authority to a group of experts, this group of experts is an executive body doing executive work, so it's normally under the executive branch. This body makes rules that have to follow any laws set down by congress, which is one check, and the courts can settle disputes between someone who has to follow the rules and the rule making body, or congress and the rule making body, etc. which is another check. The rule making body makes the initial determination on whether it's rules have been followed not because they're taking on some function of the judicial, but because they're the experts who know what their own rules mean. If they get it wrong, willfully abuse that power, etc. the judicial is still there. It's separation of powers all the way down. If you removed them from the executive and put them in the judicial you'd be giving some judge rule making authority and the ability to interpret those rules later. The whole point is to separate that between two branches of government.
There aren't nearly enough capacity in the judicial branch to handle all that work.
Then appoint more Article 3 judges. It could even be the same people who are now "administrative judges"—but take them out of the executive branch hierarchy, and give them the independence that the constitution requires judges to have.
They aren't functioning as the judicial branch. As part of the responsibilities of the executive branch, they have to decide when there's a problem, so they can decide if they need to execute. Indeed, the next step here is to take Apple to court.
The key section of this story is
The board cannot impose fines or direct punishments against Apple for its violations.
Which makes me wonder why they spent two years working on this investigation.
They have a lot more power than you might think from that quote.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Labor_Relations_Board...
They can now try Apple in an administrative court, with an 'administrative judge' selected by the agency, then get a (normal) Article 3 court to rubber-stamp their 'order'.
To the contrary, the order already exists (“stop it”) and this article describes the second part of the process you linked to:
> The decision of the Administrative Law Judge may be reviewed by the five member boardNot a lawyer here. Why does an Article III judge need to get involved, and not in other administrative matters, like say, in an administrative immigration case?
edit: further investigation has indicated that it's immigration law which deviates from usual practice of administrative law, which would potentially expect an automatic stay in a context like this.
That's like saying "the police can't hand out sentences, so what's the point of having police?" The NLRB's investigation is part of the process. It can and does cooperate with the DoJ and various other federal agencies and courts.
Pure speculation—the doj can use that determination against apple in any future proceedings.
It’s like a GAL report for a family law case; independent investigator provides a report which the court will then use to inform it’s decision.
I’m in the HN minority that actually likes Apple’s products and business model. I like the consistency the closed ecosystem brings, I like the product design, I like the vertical integration.
But this union stuff pisses me off to no end. Apple has high margins and is generally ahead of competitors in things like sustainability and supplier responsibility (yes yes not perfect, I just said ahead).
It would be 100% in line with the company’s ethos to embrace unions. Not necessarily to encourage, but certainly to treat them as an important part of the economy and a good check/balance to ensure the benefits of customer loyalty and high margins are shared with those who make it happen.
Just like renewables or supply chain audits, this wouldn’t have huge impacts on profits but it would make the world better. Serious misstep by Apple that pisses me off.
It's always hard arguing the counterfactual, but do you really believe that Apple would be the Apple you love if their employees were unionized?
Put another way, and before you downvote me to oblivion, what are the most innovative tech companies that have unions?
What if Steve Jobs wore green instead of black when announcing the iPhone? Would Apple still be the same company today?
Who cares? That's a stupid question, we can't possibly know and either way we can't change the past. What we CAN do is change how things are now and implement a union with Apple as it is today. Why postulate about the upbringing of the company and how things could have been different ideologically when that's not what the discussion is about? People just want job security, protection from abuse by their employer, and reasonably consistent raises to at least match inflation.
I don't think you're in the minority at all. Just look at the massive number of comments any time some new iToy gets announced.
But putting aside the tech jihad for a moment, I'm curious:
It would be 100% in line with the company’s ethos to embrace unions
What gives you that impression? I admit I'm a hater of all big tech, but I think an objective view of Apple shows that they're a brutally self-interested megacorp. Even if you believe all their marketing about how they are consumer focused, that wouldn't logically extend to them treating their employees well. It's not in their interests to do so (at least in this case), and Apple is basically immune to bad press so it's not like it'd affect their image.
People easily forget that both Apple and Google actively suppressed tech salaries (along with other tech companies) in collision with each other:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...
I am not sure how they can "interrogate" stuff. Can't they be simply told to go fuck themselves and do not stick their nose where it does not belong?
America has "at will employment". Except for certain classes (gender, disability, race, etc.) that are illegal to discriminate against, an employer can fire someone for any reason. Therefore, employees have to go along with what the employer wants in order to keep their job; even if what the employer wants is unreasonable or illegal.
I agree with you with the caveat that it's "only" most of America (it can vary by state and even whether you work for the local government or not).
Yes you have the right to tell your employer to "fuck themselves", but will find that you no longer have a job a millisecond later. When it comes to an employer-employee relationship an "optional" request isn't really optional.
Can't they be simply told to go fuck themselves and do not stick their nose where it does not belong?
If you live in a country where corporations are subject to the rule of law, sure.
I simply don't trust companies that crack down on union organizers.
It doesnt matter, if you want blue bubbles or to compile for iOS, you pay the cartel.
I have a similar problem with M$, businesses use Teams, so I pay for it.
These companies are beyond our abilities to 'not use them'. Although Apple is one of the few companies I don't seem to have almost any products. There always was a better alternative when I needed it.
I know a lot of distsys people who went from Google to Apple a few years ago and it sounds like a terrible place to work.
They're also super secretive. None of my friends can tell me what they work on. Awhile back it was hinted that they were working on a search engine with K8s as the backend but it's been 2-3 years since I inferred that and there's been nothing. Everyone I know there is/was a k8s contributor.
I used to work for a super secret company making cool stuff and it was so lame that I couldn't talk about any of it.
The Trump administration appointed an extremely anti labor person to head the NLRB(they had been involved in Reagan's mass air traffic controller firings in the 80s). One of the first things the Biden administration did, hours into the new administration, was replace that person.
The ACLU is currently going through a court case involving the NLRB. The ACLU is fighting with the novel argument that the Biden administration replacement was done unlawfully, therefore every action of the NLRB since then is illegal.
I'm sure a potential future Trump administration will try as hard as possible to destroy labor and the NLRB.
https://www.nlrbedge.com/p/the-aclu-is-attacking-free-speech
https://prospect.org/podcasts/2024-03-18-aclu-nlrb-lawsuit-l...
https://dailycaller.com/2024/03/12/aclu-worked-undermine-bid...
disgusting fascist behaviour
Is that actually true, you do see unionized pilots and police unions functioning pretty unproductively and in bad faith
Police aren't labor and therefore are not a labor union.
In what sense aren't police labor? "Labor" literally just means "work"? It's not like the unions of managers, pilots, lawyers, NHL players or software developers aren't "labor unions"? Policemen are employed so their organization as employees is a labor union (or just "union" for short)?
Police are what shows up when labor strikes. They’re part of the government, not a part of the collective “labor” that is the rest of the working world. As an example, police are part of an association but not a union. They aren’t legally allowed to strike anywhere in the US. They serve the interests of capitalism, which is the other side of the coin of workers’ rights
So they have a union, which is not a labor union? fair enough. It seems like a distinction without a difference for the topic.
Some restrictions on strikes usually covers lots of different jobs (e.g. nurses).
There is a difference though, it's which side they're on
When it comes to employee vs employer, they are employed just like everyone else and can have disputes with their employer just like everyone else. They are on their own side. If police want to end single person patrols for safety concerns, or want a minimum number of hours rest between shifts, that's what their union would be for. It doesn't look any different when it's police vs. teachers in that case.
This comes of as ahistorical to me (as an american at least). Every significant moment in the US labor movement came down to workers vs. police, it's not like the robber barons were shooting the miners, steelworkers, etc. themselves
The unspoken thing about cops is that, yes, they surely care about vacation time, working hours, healthcare. And, yes, they are probably just as much victims of liberal economic austerity and such as the broader workforce. And, yes, its even not that much of stretch to call their labor "productive" (in the Marxist sense) considering how much money they extract from the population they are "serving" (only speaking for the U.S. here).
But regardless, even if they are struggling to pay rent or save for their child's college, they are singularly compensated by the one thing almost as valuable as money in our world: bare authority.
But its a bitter reward! Spiritually unhealthy. Forever opposed to everyone around them, specifically trained to think as such. Which is why, imo, we see huge numbers of them suffering from PTSD, committing suicide, engaging in domestic violence...
The biggest tool a union has is striking. If you can’t strike you’re not really a union.
I don't think that's a useful definition. Laws may require employers from negotiating everything from working hours to safety with unions. Some countries have laws that require unions have voting power in company boards etc.
There's an important distinction because a police "union" is in opposition to any other workers and unions. The police are the tools of capital, they break up strikes. The cops aren't going to join you in a sympathy strike.
Indeed. “Cartel” or “guild” would be better terms than police “union”.
If they aren't allowed to strike why do people keep signing contracts with them?
Because the police union covers for cops that break the law.
"Labor" isn't being used in the dictionary definition of "doing work", here, it's being used in the sense of "the labor movement".
The movement that gave rise to the term is hardly relevant for who uses it today. Labor union means "employee organization". Do the police call their union "union" but not "labor union"? That's just a language thing then (The two terms aren't separated in my language - I always assumed that in English "union" was short for "labor union")
I'm struggling with what you meant by "it's just a language thing", that is of course true and what I was pointing out. For the purpose of good communication, everything is a language thing and language things are important.
When we say "the police union isn't a labor union", we're people rejecting them from the classification even though they use the word because we don't think they fit in with our values. That's because we have labor (movement) values. You could also talk about any group of employees getting together and acting towards a common goal and call that a union, or a labor union, that wouldn't mean that everyone else automatically means the same thing. In this case, the poster didn't mean that.
Ok fair enough. In english there is a distinction between just "Union" and "labor union". And under this distinction, a police union would not be a labor union. Language is important.
Moving beyond language though, I can't see where the distinction is important e.g. legally or ethically - which is perhaps why the distinction has disappeared or never existed in some other languages.
It's curious - perhaps related - that in English the difference between "salary" and "wages" also remains and is even relevant in some parts of the market.
It's because the police are always on the side of capital
Which of course, isn't true. The Red Guard was a police force in a very real sense as was the NKVD.
Article is about US company violating US labor guards so yeah my comment really only applies to the US labor movement. Can't speak to Red Guard don't really know anything about them
Police are always on the side of the state.
This is a useful distinction, and I'm mildly surprised it doesn't show up in your native language. A salary is fixed compensation for full-time labor: the employee is expected to work during (usually) business hours, in exchange for a contractually-agreed amount of money.
Wages are hourly: the employee works when scheduled, and is paid an agreed amount for each hour they work.
The distinction can matter because the core purposes of the two are different. A "Labor" union is one that represents one side of the relationship between capital and the workforce: that is, the side that has a portion of the value it creates in its work extracted by the other.
It exists fundamentally in order to be able to collectively negotiate around the amount of that value extracted and attempt to retain more for those who create it. That in doing so it also establishes workers' rights, policies around treatment etc is a nice to have.
The police, as an extension of state power much like the army, are generally understood to be broadly on the "side" of capital (in capitalist states). They are not value-creating, and their "unions" have nothing to negotiate for a share of. This is why you'll more often see them represented as "associations" or "federations", much like civil service, nursing or fire service staff bodies. Their goal is simply to argue for better terms and conditions for their members.
Does the distinction practically matter? In many cases, no. When the interests of capital or the state are at stake, yes: police officers will break up labor union strikes, even when those officers are members of a federation. They are fundamentally not part of the same movement.
By the way I feel the need to share that despite this conversation, somewhere between few and no Americans distinguish between "union" and "labor union". This is the first time I've seen the difference and I believe those who are making this point are downplaying the fact that in common language these are used entirely interchangeably.
Not saying I disagree or agree with their point, but that this rhetorical method of argument by definition doesn't match reality.
"Labor" isn't being used in the sense of just "someone who does work". It's being used in the sense of one of the sides in class warfare. Police generally work on the side of management rather than the side of labor therefore they aren't labor in the sense being spoken about.
Note that solidarity is an important principle in the labor movement. So the fact that police the police might act as "labor" in their personal negotiations with management isn't considered to make them part of "labor" in the general sense; because they don't show solidarity with other unions.
Think of it in terms of regular warfare. Just because two nations separately fight the same country in different wars doesn't make them allies. They are only allies if they support each other in wars against that other country.
I’m actually with the parent — police are administrative, like judges and building inspectors.
I don’t have a fully formed opinion, but I think there is something wrong with unions for government functions. Unions are good because they allow a large number of weak stakeholders to band together to negotiate with a powerful business.
But governments aren’t businesses and don’t have the ruthless profit motive companies do, so I think government unions have too much bargaining power against the very diffuse stakeholders of a government. Police unions especially seem to exist more to avoid accountability than to further wages and working conditions.
I guess I would say that “labor” in the union context is in contrast to “shareholder”, and governments and their employees just don’t work that way.
What are they if they're not "labor"? Certainly a police officer considers their upcoming shift as "work". Certainly the police could not function without on-duty officers on patrol and at the precinct?
I hate to be so blunt on this site, but what is the flippin point of these sort of definitional and semantic arguments? What are you trying to gain, other than muddying the waters of conversations. I legitimately don't see how any position, yours or otherwise, benefits from this rhetorical approach.
> What are you trying to gain, other than muddying the waters of conversations
How does enhanced clarity muddy the waters? Police are not labor, not practically or legally. Likewise, a CEO is not labor either, even though the CEO is apt to be an employee who shows up to work just like anyone else. Having a job that you go to work at is not what defines labor in this context. Considering all people who do work to be the same is what muddies the waters here.
How is a police officer like a CEO, and not like a factory line worker? It seems very clear that they are more the latter (labor) than the former (admin).
> How is a police officer like a CEO, and not like a factory line worker?
Both the police and CEOs are incentivized to protect the interest of capitalists. That is a primary duty of their job. Labor, on the other hand, challenges the interests of capitalists.
> It seems very clear that they are more the latter (labor) than the former (admin).
Clear in what way? Where there are people there are people problems. Indeed, police often have associations to help with people problems, hell even the capitalists sometimes have unions (e.g. farmers), but these are not labor unions. If this is what you are talking about, there is nothing clear about it – it is all quite arbitrary, but is also beyond the topic at hand.
With even a basic history of labor power under capitalism it's clear that police are one of the greatest threats to organozed workers due to their role enforcing the capitalist status quo.
Don't expect a wolf in sheeps' clothing to baa.
In the US police are often members of a union, and collaborate with the strikers, causing companies to hire professional security companies. Honestly, I have a hard time feeling much compassion for companies where the workforce unionizes: most of the time unionization is a relic of terrible management behavior over a substantial period of time.
Can you give some examples of police collaborating with the strikers in US?
There's nothing magical about a union, at the end of the day it's people working towards a common goal and it's only as good as the people in it who make it happen. If it's you and a few of your coworkers who are learning to work together and strategize towards common goals while you prepare for marching on the boss to try and make change, it will be a good organization. If it's a bunch of greedy cops who joined the police force because they have a power complex, it's going to be the same when they all get together too.
If it made no difference why would employees bother?
It does make a negative difference for employers with potentially higher costs and lower flexibility over time.
It makes a positive difference for the employees. You seem to imply that this is correlated to a negative difference for the employer, which is completely wrong.
Obviously in general it makes a positive difference for employees, that was a rhetorical question...
I have listed two main negative differences it makes for employers. I am hard-pressed to find any positive differences for them... on the issues this touches it's pretty much a zero-sum game so if employees gain it means employers 'lose'.
If something is positive for both sides then I think the market will eventually adopt it on its own.
The purpose of unions is to make sure the employees work is sustainable, easier, pleasant if possible. On a more practical level this means enforcing work regulations, if an employer is at risk of breaking regulations (intentionally or not), unions will help them keep the line.
A happier employee is more productive and less likely to leave the company on the forst occasion or do anything hostile (stealing, selling company secrets).
This is not exactly news, it has been known for at least 150 years.
The purpose of unions is to extract as much as possible from the employer on the behalf of its members, or at least to extract more than the employer would otherwise have given.
You do not contradict anything I have written nor provide any examples of how unions might be a positive for employers...
Again, if an happier, more productive employee benefits the company then the market will sort it out by itself (For instances tech companies have not needed unions to offer high pay and plenty of perks). That said, it's not an universal truth that a happier employee is a net gain.
I don't think this argument in particular stands well against reality. The market is generally driven by players with concentrated power and it's very likely the interests of those players will align creating an even more one sided power imbalance. People's preferences are low entropy.
Things that are in the interest of individuals rarely "sort themselves out" without some intervention, usually from a regulatory body. And even that's less a democratic exercise than it is a lobbying one where concentrated donations are worth more than sparse individual contributions.
In the US there was a time when more people could own a house, car, and raise a family with just one family member's income. Now it's increasingly difficult to do it even with two incomes. People didn't decide to just work more and afford less. The market sorted itself to benefit those who already had more power and could influence.
I think it does. I mentioned the salaries and perks offered by tech companies. I could also mention Henry Ford.
If something benefits the company then they will do it, and if it works it will naturally spread.
I didn't write "in the interest of individuals", I wrote benefitting both sides, which means, crucially, also benefitting the company. But again, in many cases happier employees simply do not provide a net benefit to the company.
Back to the point: The claim that unions benefit both sides is naive and a fairy tale. Obviously unions do not benefit companies hence why they are opposing them as much as they are legally able to.
This is such a weird take. Why would employees do that? Employees benefit when the company benefits. If the company increases profits by 10%, that's 10% more that could potentially go to employee benefits, salaries, etc.
I want my employer to make as much profit as possible, because that guarantees my long-term employment and allows me to ask for a higher salary. If the company folds, the union folds, and everybody loses their jobs. Nobody wants that to happen.
I don't understand your interpretation of what I wrote... I did not write nor imply that unions are there to squeeze companies until they fold.
Obviously employees want the company to do well, at the same time unions are there to extract as much as they can on behalf of their members. Both are true and not mutually exclusive.
In your example, if profits go up 10% unions might push of big salary increases, indeed.
I mean, you directly contradict me in the previous paragraph about what the purpose of unions is, can we at least agree to disagree?
That's true, some companies do well without unions, but this does not make unions universally useless.
You're saying "the market" like it's some magic word that makes everything fair. The market for employment is not fair. Companies hold most of the power in America today, for most jobs. Highly paid white collar workers may hold a slight edge, sometimes, but it's not common. One of the ways that workers can balance the power that a company has over them, is to unionize so that as a group all of the workers can affect the company's decisions. This is good for the market, because it equalizes power and allows for the synthesis of good efficiency through fair price discovery for labor and good worker conditions through the equality of power that they hold in a union.
You can scream THE MARKET until your throat is dry, but it doesn't mean that an unfettered capitalism is the best thing for the country as a whole. Everyone must be thriving, otherwise we're all failing together.
Delta’s flight attendants (and a few other groups) aren’t in a union.
This has left Delta very motivated to make sure their flight attendants are happy so that they won’t unionise.
The end result is better workers, happier customers, and more productive workplace. But this wouldn’t happen without the threat of unionising hanging over Delta’s head.
I personally think a good outcome in situations like Apple is having maybe half their stores union, half not - Apple would be very motivated to keep the non-union employees happy. Customers could end up seeing which stores work better. A competitive marketplace, if you will.
Union autoworkers make more and habe better benefits than non union auto workers.
You know that when the big non unionized auto workers recebtly got raises? Right after the unionised ones fought for and got their own.
The union is the only thing that drives wages up. Non union shops, including your example of Delta flight staff, only get benefits because the unions are there. Without the other unions in that space, they would get nothing.
You know what would ensure Delta gets all the same benefits as the unionized staff around them? Joining the same union.
"If something is positive for both sides then I think the market will eventually adopt it on its own." In Denmark we (by law) all have 5 weeks of holiday per year (besides public holidays), paid sick leave, 37 hour work week, paid maternity care (m/f), reasonable notice of termination, reasonable rules for work environment, etc. All because of our unions. How is it in the US?
Those very generous working conditions, and the mind set that it comes from and creates, I am convinced, is also why Denmark does not have an Apple, Tesla, Google, Nvidia, or SpaceX, and why the AI revolution is heavily based on the US. I’m not dinging you for it. I am US based ex EU (NL) myself, and have lived under both systems enough time to have experienced the difference. Countries and individuals can make choices between quality of life and achievement. And while there are some short range positive correlations (more quality of life leads to better thinking and more productivity), I think the long range correlation is negative (p100 achievement will require long hours and sacrifices).
Note that I am not saying one side is inherently better than the other. I’m saying it’s a choice with consequences. It is essentially a question about what you value in life.
It might also be that Denmark is half the size of South Carolina (approximately). While the US is the whole size of the US.
What is that in football fields?
You're saying we could have been free of FAANG hell if we just had unions all along?! Imagine that! Life could be such a dream.
Well, for the size of our country, I think we are doing well, we have Novo Nordisk, Maersk, Carlsberg, Lego and maybe others. We are above the US when it comes to Nobel prizes per capita, higher than the US when it comes to happyness.
Also what is the benefit of having those things, if your citizens generelly do not gain anything from it, eg with regard to life expentacy, happyness and wealth?
I have 5 weeks vacation, paid holidays, 40 hour work week, unpaid parental leave. I also make 3-4x what you make.
"If something is positive for both sides then I think the market will eventually adopt it on its own."
Due to millions of regulations already in place, the market is not really free, but very distorted. So even if the "free market" would always go for the best solution, current state is nonproof for anything.
Otherwise you might argue, that europe would be a proof, because unions here are strong.
Without regulations the market would remain free for at most a hot minute and you would get regulation again, your own or someone elses, to paraphrase.
You're missing the simple fact that this idea that the market will arrive at every positive thing that can be quantified is simply wrong. Markets will very very often converge on local maxima if allowed to. This is obvious if you think about it from a simple computational perspective: markets at best do a random walk search, and that can only ever find a local maximum, not the global maximum of a function.
It is perfectly possible that a given company performance can be reached by different paths, some better for employees, some worse.
In fact, I think that even seems like a very plausible hypothesis, given that treating your employees worse can have advantages (reduction in costs and headcount) and disadvantages (less motived and potentially productive employees, worse retention, difficulties attracting people) for the employer, so those two may roughly cancel out under a whole lot of different conditions.
So for the employer there may be no benefit (but also not really a downside) to treating employees better, but add to the mix this strong cultural idea in US business circles that unions are the worst and you get this taboo against unions and no market pressure to change that.
Obviously this is a quite horrific situation to be in because we get worse outcomes for employees and unchanged outcomes for employers. So no one benefits and most people have worse outcomes. Bad all around.
Great question. Ledt assume that you’re discussing a topic like working hours. Your company says you have to work. 14h each day, and you argue that if you have to do that, you’ll be sleep deprived, make mistakes and be so low productivity that it wouldn’t benefit the company, especially since they would have to pay you more with a constant hourly wage than if you worked fewer hours and was more productive. The company argues: “STFU pessent, you’ll work when we say, how long we say and exactly how we say or you’re fired this instance, now get back in line before I duct your pay for the time you’re wasting by even thinking you’re worthy of talking to someone in management!”
Now in that scenario the worker has no power at all, even though it actually is as we all know today, a proven benefit to have resonable working hours for the company.
So if you have a union and all the workers can collectively go “we need to talk about work hours or we strike” you force through the policy that is ultimately beneficial to the company, even though management hates the idea of there being 6hours more per day that their wage slaves are not at the work benches.
Why would workers argue for fewer hours if it doesn’t end up costing the company net profits? Because they are humans, not machines, and not everything in this world boils down to pure profit driven motives.
that's not true. In fact, the polar opposite is true - every decision is in service to profit and the bottom line. It is only laws that prevent slavery. It is only laws that prevent over-work or exploitation.
I would say that it is better to have regulation over unions. Unions may or may not act in the interest of the employee - it's a hit or miss depending on the actual union in question. But as a citizen, you have some semblence of a vote on the gov't, and at least everybody gets the same gov't.
The problem with government (or too-large unions) is that different jobs have different employment concerns. It's hard to legislate in a way that covers all cases from seasonal farm work to IT office jobs to airline pilots. A union gives you more fine-grained representation to address the problems specific to your profession and workplace.
This is a bad example and overall I don't see the argument. For decades companies did force workers into extremely long hours. The standardization of the 40 hour work week was in some sense a collective action effort, starting with the request of the National Labor Union in the U.S. in 1866. [1] Prior to those efforts, workers in industrialized positions were indeed working 80 to 100 hours a week on average, with little to no recourse.
Beyond that, you ask 'Why would workers argue for fewer hours if it doesn't end up costing the company net profits? The workers don't care about net profits, at least at the expense of their own time. Time is money, and if the company has more of your time, you have less...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-the-40-hour-workw...
> Now in that scenario the worker has no power at all
The worker holds all the power, so long as another worker isn't an asshole ready to screw over his fellow man. What's the company going to do if the worker balks? Hire nobody? Not going to happen.
Which is what a union ultimately serves: Establishing a brotherhood where the workers agree to not be assholes towards each other, to not screw each other over, so that when a worker decides the terms are un-agreeable another worker isn't waiting to pounce to take his position. This retains a worker's power.
But if workers had common decency to begin with...
It makes plenty of difference for employees, just not for overall company output. If anything if your union increases employee happiness and retention that's probably better for business in the long run.
You're assuming it's a zero sum game?
Employees should bother to improve their own lives, not to decrease productivity or affect company survival.
* Emphasis mine.
Nobody wants to admit it, but businesses are deeply ideological. Not in the typical sense, but they have lots of strongly held irrational beliefs that are contradictory. They are not rational actors.
I’m not even sure that it is irrational exactly. The owners of a company want to believe and behave as if they own the company. Its their toy to do with as they please.
Unionization changes the fundamental facts of ownership. The owner no longer do as they please, they must consult the representatives of their labor force.
That is a fundamental shift in how the business operates and the rights that the owners enjoy
The owners of Apple are its millions of shareholders. The people who made the decision to break the law are merely its operators.
Who doesn’t want to admit that? Businesses are groups of people. Is there anyone in the world who says large groups are perfectly rational?
A well-managed business tries to focus on profitability as opposed to, say, picking up horseback riding as a hobby. But the way profits are pursued is absolutely irrational and chaotic. Does anyone believe otherwise?
You could charitably assume that media companies don’t want to admit or publicize this ideological bias.
Media companies have an oversized impact on what the people of the country think and discuss
I think this is pretty correct; the owning class is ideologically opposed to worker control.
Management is deeply ideological more so than people working. Was in an IT union for over 10 years. I can't speak to how great the union was for worker issues - I was told to my face I "had a religious problem" by a manger and the union wasn't able to do much. Management also repeated "don't document" and again the union really couldn't do much. After repeatedly told not to document work I got a pocket recorder so I could talk to myself and document later on my own time. Then mgmt fired me and when I cleaned out my things I didn't find that pocket recorder. Since I was no longer an employee I told by union rep that my pocket recorder may still be at work and to watch out for it.
The next morning the union rep met with me to deliver a letter from HR to sign saying I resigned - that was all that was in it. The union rep and mgmt knew about the 'your religious problem' verbal warning I got from that meeting with a manager - the other person at that meeting was writing something down and didn't hear it and when I asked the manager what he meant by that and he clammed up. Smart move really.
So if anything the after work relationship with the union reps who could still act on my behalf helped out. Other people there were not comfortable to interact with me on anything work related at that point. Notable is that I'm not religious in any way, but was insistent that documenting work was a necessity. That was while working for a state university.
Read up on primate behavior. Top executives are alpha males, and didn't get there without lots of compulsive control-seeking, dominance-asserting, etc. behavior patterns.
Did Europeans descend from elves instead of primates?
I thought the general opinion was that the percentage or working age men your society lost in WW2 determined what lesson you learned from it.
America didn't lose enough men to qualify for the "collectivism" unlock.
I’ve never heard this before but I’m very interested in the concept. Who wrote about this?
This is not accurate at all and really has very little place in rational discussion.
Some executives in some company cultures are like this. Most companies I've worked at or collaborated with did not put up with this behavior at all.
Executives are still just a function of their masters above them, i.e., chief executives, investors, pension funds, governments, lobbyists/donors, bond holders/bankers (in that order). Executives are just functionaries, the literal managerial class or minor nobility as we know it by from the past.
Those behaviors you describe have clearly shifted somewhat in the last years for very specific reasons that the system has determined that, e.g., “DEI” is more profitable and also cedes more power and control to the top, so they’ve been working hard to put in place the more profitable and beneficial structure, and the minor nobility we call executives, have been quick to implement the King’s wishes, as they’ve come down from the Dukes and the Earls, among slick presentations and videos with upbeat audio from professional propagandists called PR firms.
Except the concept of “alpha male” was debunked.
If it saves even a little money, it will happen.
Yep but that's again a dogmatic view as there is hints that anti-unionization measures are the kind of cost cutting that kills companies rather then the kind that makes them huge successes.
In companies with a healthy culture, maybe. But if staff unionizes, how's Amazon going to make them pee in a bottle to squeeze out a few more deliveries, without running into trouble with the union. I'm sure other companies have their own terrible anecdotes.
Only if it saves money now.
Companies do all sorts of itrrational things that cost money
I personally believe companies are given way too much credit in being considered rational pure-profit motive actors. They're far worse than that (a rational pure-profit motive actor is also bad because it would inevitably select for slavery): they're typically run by extremely conservative, often ivy-league people (if not in alma mater, then in worship of ivy league culture). These people are trained from the get go to associate unions with everything antithetical to their cult heroes of people like Ford or Edison. Once in an argument with a similarly minded founder, he dropped the line on me, "unions are anti-capitalist," which to me really reveals the mindset that to at least him, negotiating from positions of equal power is not capitalism.
You mean that forcing developers to work 60 hours weeks do not work? Surprise!!
What you are describing is the ascendency of a new third class of people in capitalist systems: the managerial class. Where once you had labourer and capitalist you now increasingly have people with real power derived from their positions within large private organisations and not derived from their direct ownership of capital
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional%E2%80%93manageria...
It is a bit of an overused catch-all term though, but explains what you are describing.
At a meta level, if your government isn't particularly pro-union (and one side is rabidly anti-union with the potential for them to be in charge for the next four years), and you are to some extent hostage to governmental fortune (cf the current lawsuits against Apple, the reliance on outsourcing to China, etc.) there's probably a certain amount of political sense in being seen to be anti-union Just In Case.
The big automakers have big unions. That doesn't stop Trump from supporting them.
https://trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefings-statements/re...
A lot of large companies like to have standardized policies across the company so they can shuffle people where ever they need and everything is the same. Unions are usually location by location and often only cover a specific classification of the employees in a location (manufacturing, warehouse, maintenance, sanitation, and/or truck drivers), and each union will bargain on its own so you can have a single location running with multiple unique union contracts for each classification of employee. This is a PITA to manage for big slow corporations who would need teams of lawyers and HR people working thru and negotiating each contract individually and getting approvals from above.
One would think that technology could offer fancy scheduling, HR, etc. solutions for this.
I've been involved with an IT union for 15 years of my career, i don't know how the data shows there's little negative impact... it's a catastrophic mess from what I've seen
What issues are you seeing?
If you aren't joking, it's because executives fight against employees to enrich themselves. They only consider the next quarter, not systemic change.
I think mostly because they think it's potentially detrimental. And the financial consequences of doing illegal things to fight unions are substantially lower than their perception of what unions might cost them.
Like from this article..."The board cannot impose fines or direct punishments against Apple for its violations".
It has more to do with US politics - both the major US political parties lean to the right- and allowing unions encourages socialist ideas that obviously clash with the ideas of the political right. Unions can (and do) become powerful political blocs which means that political parties then have to try to entrench themselves in it to retain some level of influence. But that also means they also have to actually listen to their concerns and politically deliver on some of them, to retain their influence. This can lead to a dilution of the ideology of the politically right, which some politicians and businessmen do consider as a political threat.
Next to losing control, executives care little about overall productivity. CEOs are constantly micromanaging HR to pull levers and manipulate employees. It's so second-nature they don't even consider any other possibilities. They don't want to lose that control.
I recall a graph that Yale prof Ian Shapiro showed in his lecture series "Power and Politics in Today’s World" (available on YouTube) that shows a strong correlation between participation fall in worker unions and wage stagnation as opposed to corporation profits in the US. The break point is the fall of the Berlin wall. IIRC he goes on to explain how's that not an accident.
I don't remember which lecture was it though :-/
Here's the YT Link for anyone interested: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh9mgdi4rNeyViG2ar68j...