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US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds

theguardian.com

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Re: US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds

#71

Post by mothballed »

well_ackshually wrote: post #17
indoordin0saur wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm generally pro-union and certainly fair wage, but it's important to keep in mind that unions will grow into their own power centers and have leadership with its own internal goals which are not aligned with either their working members nor the employers.

Instead of repeating vapid arguments from the past 30 years designed to disincline people from joining unions, maybe you could look outside of your own borders and realize that it's not an inherent property of unions. Inherent to the US and your extremely unhealthy relationship with work, maybe.

It's not 30 years old though, the longshore union leader a few years ago literally went on live national TV with a fucking rolex and gold chain screaming how broke he was and that (in his own words) his message to America is "I will cripple you" if people trying to import things like medicines, foodstuffs, and everything else into American ports don't pay more union money to their monopolized union instead of investing in automation and modernizing our ports.

---- re: due to throttling ------

>"I will cripple you" must have referred to the bosses, not the entire country including his people.

No he literally threatened normal people like construction workers and car salesman that he would ensure they were laid off, he was using "cripple" to refer to normal Americans and everyone.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DZQ-80PRbA

>Idk why it matters that he had a gold chain. Are people without tech jobs not allowed to have money?

If you're begging for charity in the form of trying to block automation and upgrading of ports, while arguing you need your union monopoly because you are broke, then yes it's relevant that the way you choose to present yourself on live TV is all blinged out. If you can get a gold chain without threatening others in one hand and begging with your hand out in the other then go for it. Don't cry though if people notice your bling bling and cry fowl that people actually noticed the way you went out of your way to present yourself to the world.

Re: US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds

#72

Post by yifanl »

chii wrote: post #59
oblio wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if the apples are in a 3.5m high tree and you're 2m tall and I'm 1.5m tall, it's fair if we both get 1m ladders?

why isnt it fair? Someone taller has a better chance at becoming a pro basketball player. Shorter people are not given more leeway. But both tall and short people have the chance to try out (at least on paper).

Because the equivalence between being signed for the NBA and having apples to eat is nonsensical. We accept some things being unfair, not everything being unfair.

Re: US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds

#73

Post by tptacek »

The word "fight" is doing way too much work in this Guardian headline, because that money includes labor relations work employers do to try to stave off the incentives to start unions. You can feel any way you like about it, but logically if you're going to argue that you have to argue that every dollar above median a non-unionized shop pays is also an effort to fight unions.

Re: US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds

#74

Post by Muromec »

WarmWash wrote: post #56
phil21 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Similar life experiences. Like the idea of unions - especially how they are explained at a textbook level. I fully believe labor needs as much leverage against capital as possible for the scales to be balanced at all. But US unions seem to exist nearly exclusively to protect people who don’t want to work. Not my thing. At all. One should be able to be rewarded for hard work and productivity when you are expending mor…

>But US unions seem to exist nearly exclusively to protect people who don’t want to work. They don't exist for that reason, but their inevitable ground state is that. The fundamental and intractable problem with any form of socialization is that it naturally attracts free riders. The idea doesn't have a balanced equilibrium, so it's either logistically/bureaucratically heavy or always being pulled towards collapse. E…

A healthy organisation can reflect on this tendency and purge some free riders to preserve itself. The fact that it doesn't, to me personally, just means it's not under external pressure.

Re: US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds

#75

Post by xur17 »

bonsai_spool wrote: post #33

Think about the recent tech layoffs - we spend a lot of time comparing one set of severance concessions to another. Wouldn't it be better if this were a matter of contract instead of your great corporate overlords deciding how much they deign to give you as they take away your job? This may be the moment to start thinking about unions seriously in tech. The large employers have, themselves, acted to suppress worker p…

I feel like the general consensus on most of the recent layoffs were that they severance was pretty generous. If it seems to be working okay, why do we need to introduce additional inefficiencies to get something we already have?

Re: US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds

#76

Post by wat10000 »

mothballed wrote: post #62
wat10000 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't exclusive contracts pretty common in business? There's a big difference between monopolizing the supply to a single customer, which happens all the time, and monopolizing an entire market.

Yes if it's just a voluntary contract I see nothing sinister. If some employees form a union that's not sinister. If the company signs a contract with them that's not sinister. But if some employees want a union and that automatically means they've forced the other employees to join rather than allowing the other employees to pick to work outside the union, or automatically means the company is involuntarily bound to…

Involuntarily binding the company to the contract would be bad, I agree.

But what's wrong with forcing the other employees to join to keep their jobs? That is fundamentally a requirement on the company, that they only hire people in the union. And that's no different from any other sort of exclusive contract. If a restaurant has an exclusive contract with Coke, is it sinister to say that Pepsi employees can't supply them, and they have to join Coke if they want to do that?

Re: US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds

#77

Post by wat10000 »

timfsu wrote: post #65
wat10000 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aren't exclusive contracts pretty common in business? There's a big difference between monopolizing the supply to a single customer, which happens all the time, and monopolizing an entire market.

Yes, but they expire in ways that unions don’t

Does anything prevent a company from negotiating a time-limited contract with a union, other than the company's ability to negotiate?

Re: US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds

#78

Post by deepsquirrelnet »

Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #38
aliasxneo wrote: post #18

I have pretty mixed feelings on unions. I spent most of my early career as a non-union blue collar worker embedded into mixed teams (union + non-union members). The general experience I walked away with was that unions seemed to attract the worst employees. I remember one individual in particular who, having worked with him for two years, never once actually did any work. He was actually one of my first mentors and I…

This is usually one of the arguments made against unions, and I find it an interesting phenomenon. Philosophically unions benefit the majority and are probably a net good on a social construct level. But they are likely a net loss to the top percentage of workers who are extremely motivated to move up and probably hurt innovation overall. Unions exist to benefit the median and bring up the floor, but it stifles compe…

> Unions exist to benefit the median and bring up the floor, but it stifles competition among those who really do desire to be at the top. And in doing so while it brings up the floor, it also brings down the ceiling because people who would normally be motivated enough to move up would not have much incentive to do so anymore.

I think people tend to fixate on the worker-to-worker differences inside of unions. Yes, that is the most visible part of a union when in place, and at least in the US has valid arguments about meritocracy.

What is missed when limiting the scope to just that is the population-level abuses of workers that no amount of meritocracy will fix. When corporations engage in collusion against workers (now common and nearly unpunished in the US) the top-level wages are suppressed industry wide.

The whole pay band alignment that comes out of that undermines the meritocracy argument, and doesn't even begin to address the wage-fixing that has gone almost unchecked in tech for decades[1,2]. As a merited employee, you might have more options to where you can go, but it won't protect you from predatory hiring/layoff cycles and it certainly won't guarantee that you'll receive a truly competitive wage.

On paper, meritocracy sounds great. I have worked many places in tech and never once observed it, personally. Best case, if you have warmed a seat for enough years, then you advance that way. Worst, your employer knows they can just take advantage of you because you're willing to work without a dangling carrot.

As before, either the government frees itself from corruption and enacts justice or unions will come back. That is point we are at.

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/37...

[2] https://conversableeconomist.com/2025/10/31/the-silicon-vall...

Re: US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds

#79

Post by vlan0 »

aliasxneo wrote: post #18

I have pretty mixed feelings on unions. I spent most of my early career as a non-union blue collar worker embedded into mixed teams (union + non-union members). The general experience I walked away with was that unions seemed to attract the worst employees. I remember one individual in particular who, having worked with him for two years, never once actually did any work. He was actually one of my first mentors and I…

It feels like a systems problem. It seems like the same theme that we see in for say, startup to corporate transformation. I think ultimately it comes down to size. They become too big and the power consumes. And they become what they once fought.

Re: US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds

#80

Post by ambicapter »

crims0n wrote: post #6

Considering the annual revenue of Fortune 500 companies is near 20 Trillion, that is a much smaller amount than expected.

They don't need to spend that much to convince people, Americans are already predisposed to hate unions (see the comments in this thread).
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