261–270 of 377 posts
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The workers aren't drones, they have the agency to choose another job. If a company is underpaying workers relative to the rest of the market, they'll struggle to hire and retain employees without the interference of a union.
This is the magical "perfect competition" view of the market that often doesn't match reality at all.
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You forgot that collective ruin is also an option and we have seen this many times when societies attempted to do away with economic & market concepts.
Unions are part of a healthy market economy. The succesful suppression of unions is a market failure.
A healthy market would allow voluntary decisions by both parties. It would allow management to choose whether they want to negotiate with a collective broker, and it would allow workers to choose whether they want to find employment congruent with their preferences to either self negotiate or hire a third party.
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> Because that's really the choice it has to make: do you fight for the interests of disabled workers, and female workers, and trans workers, and black workers, and immigrant workers? Or do you only fight for the interests of white male workers? You fight for the interests of tech workers in this case, or truckers in a truckers union, so on and so forth. Why are americans so obsessed to make everything about race? If…
> If a union member is facing discrimination at work, get them a lawyer for it. As part of the policy of the current administration, the EEOC has dropped all cases related to LGBT discrimination in the hiring and the workplace[1] and is refusing to take new cases. If you focused any effort on addressing that, I suspect someone who isn't even in the union would come out of the woodwork to say "that union shouldn't be…
Also, title ix still exists, civil court should take the case.
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> Benefits are part of an employees compensation package. A competing offer could have even better healthcare than Id. If a period of unemployment kicks you off an insurance program that's covering life-essential treatment for a loved one, there is no mechanism of "choosing freely" here; ex-employees don't have the option of covering health care themselves and there are no guarantees that the other employer's health…
Id employees can apply for jobs while remaining employed at Id. You're writing as though Id employees must first quit their jobs before seeking a new one. And even if they do have a period of unemployment between jobs, COBRA continues to cover them for up to a year. > Every recruiter has spreadsheets of blacklisted employees If you're going to allege illegal anti-poaching agreements, you ought to provide evidence of…
Yes because companies are famous for being highly law-abiding under every circumstance and every major instance of corporate fraud has been identified and properly punished at a criminal basis.
C'mon man, the US is a country where wage theft is 3 times higher than all other formst of theft combined. Informal blacklists are as simple as keeping a notebook in writing and letting people know through hidden WhatsApp channels.
> Actually, I just checked this and in 2024 the FTC banned non competes nationwide.
The rule is vacated by an injunction.
> And? Id software developers are free to work non-gaming software jobs. A big part of the reason why game dev jobs offer less renumeration is because people are passionate about games and are willing to take a pay cut to work in the industry.
I have no idea why you think that a job being desirable and in high demand means that the people who effectively perform the job are somehow less deserving of workers' rights. The entire point behind having workers' rights is that basic job affordances and rights a non-negotiable because we do not allow certain forms undignified work.
Funny how the "story" doesn't link to the announcement it mostly copied from the CWA.[1] Here's the link to the union organizing page.[2] No draft union contract for Id, though. Interestingly, this is an industrial ("wall to wall") union, rather than a craft union such as The Animation Guild. IATSE Local 839, in Hollywood. TAG only represents specific jobs, mostly animation artists. A key point in TAG contracts is ho…
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> When they are industry wide, it prevents any company from gaining an advantage by exploiting their workers. If one company is exploiting their workers in a competitive market, what prevents those workers from going to work for any of the other companies? > For example, the economy of the early US was both very competitive and had slavery. Slavery is a government regulation that says that if someone pays a stranger…
> If one company is exploiting their workers in a competitive market, what prevents those workers from going to work for any of the other companies? Depends, is there a labor shortage or a surplus? It might be cheaper for a company to train a replacement than it is to treat employees better. If there's a labor surplus, then the employer has a lot of power of the situation. > Slavery is a government regulation that sa…
That determines things like wages. It doesn't allow companies to do things like cause $1000 in damage to you in order to save $10, because then they'd have to pay you $1000 more than the company that isn't doing that or you'd still go work there instead.
Also, if there is a labor surplus then how is a union going to do any good? The company would just let them go on strike and hire replacements.
> In fact, slavery was contract/property law.
That seems to have the word "law" in it.
> It further recognized children as the property of their parents (and thus property of the slave owners).
Which is obviously not something the child consented to.
> You can consider indentured servants, for example. Someone willingly signs themselves into slavery to pay off the debt (usually the boat ride to america).
There are arguments to be made against this, but it's significantly more defensible than doing it without consent. Because then who is going to do it? And how is it really different than e.g. non-dischargeable student loans, a thing the government still does?
> The only role the government served in this situation was enforcing the slave contracts.
The only role the government serves in a contract to form a cartel is enforcing the contract too, which is why there are contracts the government shouldn't enforce.
> Libertarian ideology (particularly the free market form) has no problems with a monopoly.
Libertarian ideology assumes that monopolies form as a result of government rules. It obviously can't allow for unrestricted anti-competitive contracts because then someone with a monopoly on any necessity could force everyone into a contract to form a dictatorial government, which is anathema to the entire ideology. But contract law is the government. A government that didn't enforce contracts at all and only enforced laws against violence would be perfectly consistent with it, whereas a government that enforces contracts you never agreed to or that you were forced to sign under duress would not.
> But in a market without unions and government protection for workers, unions forming a labor monopoly is the only solution which can counteract the inherent power imbalance between employer and employee.
How is there an inherent power imbalance in a competitive market? They can choose a different employee and you can choose a different employer.
> I'd not classify them as "abusive" because far more people benefit from strong employee protections than the people harmed by those protections. The ultimate harm is it makes businesses less profitable.
The ultimate harm is that it makes the industry's products worse or more expensive to customers, or increases market consolidation if a union destroys a company in an industry with high barriers to entry and thereby causes there to be fewer of them.
FWIW, the union (CWA) via its Seattle affiliate tried to get OPT banned, a visa status that many readers of HN benefited from - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/2... . I encourage HN readers to better understand the relationship between unions and immigration before deciding whether they are in favor of joining/supporting unions.
Yes, unions can be protectionist about their work force, but there are international worker unions; maybe this is a European thing. An econ 101 observation: unions contribute to structural unemployment: Keeping wages above market-clearing levels, and by preventing wage adjustment. Through collective bargaining, unions can negotiate wages that are higher than what the market would naturally set. This can lead to the c…
FWIW, the union (CWA) via its Seattle affiliate tried to get OPT banned, a visa status that many readers of HN benefited from - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/2... . I encourage HN readers to better understand the relationship between unions and immigration before deciding whether they are in favor of joining/supporting unions.
I encourage HN readers to read your username before replying to this comment. And also to consider why self-identifying capitalists like yourself might want a large cheap labor pool of people who can be deported if they complain about their working conditions. For what it’s worth, I think it should be very easy to become an American citizen. I think these companies benefit from that not being the case. They’d call IC…
FWIW, the union (CWA) via its Seattle affiliate tried to get OPT banned, a visa status that many readers of HN benefited from - https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/2... . I encourage HN readers to better understand the relationship between unions and immigration before deciding whether they are in favor of joining/supporting unions.
Let's try to be honest when we discuss this kind of thing; Unions are like people. They have unique agendas, unique executive decisionmaking trends, and affect their members differently. No single union is 1:1 alike. When I had a family member get a job as a local grocery store bagger, then job stipulated he HAD to join the union and give his dues out of paycheck within 1 month or he would be fired from his job. He q…
I like the idea and encourage software workers unions. Is there an umbrella union that they can belong to? How effective are these new unions? I imagine these new tech unions don't have the same "shop floor" power as in industry. Why is this? Perhaps generally the ideals the new unions are advocating for are different than traditional ones?
According to the article, they are part of the Communications Workers of America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Workers_of_Amer...