211–220 of 335 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is generally why Insurance is more regulated in certain industries, eg. Motor vehicle insurance can’t drop you because the get a claim about how you totaled someone else’s Lamborghini. Are there similar protections that regulate unions themselves?
Car insurance companies can very much drop you if they deem you to high of a risk.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unions don’t prevent getting rid of dead wood, people get fired from union jobs regularly. The point is they need an actual pretext to fire someone, and layoffs are more difficult. It’s mostly protection vs the Amazon style fire people regularly so we can avoid paying unemployment insurance when we do seasonal layoffs etc.
The Police Union and the Teacher's Union have certainly been reported to be responsible for making it hard to fire people.
Some of this just comes down to both being local government jobs run by a multitude of independent systems some of which are going to be far below average. There are ~13,506 school districts in the US, so the bottom 5% consists of 675 different systems with a huge range of issues.
The other issue is it can be hard to get replacements.
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That's exactly the time to unionize! The employer has limited leverage to bust any union efforts. When the employment market is weak and you are scrounging for a job it's a lot easier to threaten/scare everyone into submission.
What if you do not want a future where you have to pay union dues and give up individual agency in your relationship with your employer? Unions might be a necessary evil to rectify massive power imbalances but that is hardly the case in tech, so all we are left with is the evil part.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unions don’t prevent getting rid of dead wood, people get fired from union jobs regularly. The point is they need an actual pretext to fire someone, and layoffs are more difficult. It’s mostly protection vs the Amazon style fire people regularly so we can avoid paying unemployment insurance when we do seasonal layoffs etc.
The Police Union and the Teacher's Union have certainly been reported to be responsible for making it hard to fire people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I understood the parent comment, there are two kinds of leverage being discussed here: there's the leverage that individual tech workers currently have (as high demand, high income laborers in a hot market) and then there's the leverage inherent to collective bargaining. I believe the GP was saying that unions can deliver when circumstances give individuals large amounts of leverage, but they don't need to. But we…
And what’s stopping tech companies from doing the same thing manufacturing companies do when they don’t want to deal with unions - hire cheaper labor overseas? My hometown use to be booming with multiple manufacturing plants. Every time the union got involved, the plants just picked up and left.
Unions have been around - especially in manufacturing - long before they started offshoring production. The cost of labor in China and elsewhere was simply too low, unionized or not.
Its not "what use is a union to me", it is that there is an ethical imperative to try and fight against the destructive force of profit seeking itself, when left unchecked. It is about giving agency to the only force that can stand opposed to those destructive forces.
The general resistance in this thread is something. Every day on here we all find issues with the industry as a whole, have complaints, identify negative patterns grounded in investment goals or profit. A huge majority of people on here agree: there are problems and things as a whole need to change. Its not "what use is a union to me ", it is that there is an ethical imperative to try and fight against the destructiv…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's exactly the time to unionize! The employer has limited leverage to bust any union efforts. When the employment market is weak and you are scrounging for a job it's a lot easier to threaten/scare everyone into submission.
What if you do not want a future where you have to pay union dues and give up individual agency in your relationship with your employer? Unions might be a necessary evil to rectify massive power imbalances but that is hardly the case in tech, so all we are left with is the evil part.
A union should not do much (and therefore not cost much) when the times are good.
Still, it could lobby for the workers' interest in, say, laws. God knows Big Tech is lobbying:
https://www.statista.com/chart/26673/highest-lobbying-spendi...
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Of course they can - unless you live in a jurisdiction with a so-called “right to work” statute. If you weren’t forced to join then, in theory, management could subvert and then break the union by hiring lots of new employees who are compensated to “opt-out”.
That’s absolutely insane that a union can prevent people from working for a company without paying for their “protection”.
A union is just a counterweight to executives. If you are not paying for the former, you are definitely paying for the latter.
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As parent said, in good times (demand >> supply), the difference between individual optimal and union optimal is relatively small. Or negative! In bad times (demand Ergo, you're not going to see a lot of union benefits in good times.
People don't pay a monthly subscription for a lawyer their not likely to use even though a lawsuit or criminal charge is one bad day away. You're view of supply and demand matches that of a paranoid actor rather than a rational one. If ever the market were to contract, there are alternative solutions like savings, downsizing, or looking for another job. It's not as though one company has a monopoly on all the job opp…
People do not pay monthly subscriptions for a lawyer because they are extremely expensive. Those that can, do have lawyers on retainers though.