1.5B seems kinda low, no?
that was my first thought too
US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds
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Re: US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
I'm saying suppose some employees decide to form a union. And the company doesn't consent to sign an exclusive contract. As I understand it there are unions advocating that workers that didn't agree to a union still have to be bound to it anyway.
It's my understanding in some states in the US it's possible a worker will be forced to join a union if a certain number of other workers want a union, even if neither the worker nor the company hiring them consent to it. In about half of states under "right to work" though they do give employees the option to not join the union if they don't want to.
This happened to me when I was working a ~minimum wage job at a grocery store. At the time it was not a right to work state, and I was forced to join the UFCW. The union I was forced to join then made me pay dues, pushing me below minimum wage.
Re: US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds
#83Think 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?
The issue is the 'most' - and the severance packages can be changed tomorrow unilaterally.
And maybe it would be better not to have the layoffs in the first place? The profits of the hyperscalers are growing steadily even as they fire more workers.
I think this may be one of the last moments when programmers have enough power to dictate these things, should LLMs become as powerful as some suggest.
Re: US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
It’s not about just being a top worker though. It’s about showing up ready to do an honest days work for an honest days pay. Not going above and beyond, but being reasonable about the fact that at the end of the day it’s work and things need to get done for everyone involved to put food on the table. Instead it becomes a cat and mouse game of figuring out how to game the rules and scam as many hours as possible while…
> The grocery store union I was forced to join as a teenager made sense on paper. Make sure employees were kept in safe working conditions, couldn’t be fired arbitrarily, had a reasonable pace of work anyone could keep up with. But it was more about protecting that group of guys who spent half their shift out back on smoke breaks, purposefully damaging cartons of goods while stocking since they didn’t like a particular manager, etc.
Why do we constantly denigrate these "free loaders" and exalt the capitalists who quite literally free load off of our labor extracting untold billions and trillions of dollars off the backs of average folks like you and me while we get relative pennies?
I worked in Big Tech for a while. For a normal person, I made good money. But the founders and top shareholders of these companies made literal billions off the labor of myself and my coworkers while contributing absolutely nothing on a day-to-day basis. I would have to work 100 lifetimes to earn what many of them take home in a year.
Frankly, if the system allows some normal folks to dick around and get paid the same as billionaires jetting off to spend time on their megayachts then more power to the folks taking a smoke break.
Re: US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
They have the lawmakers on their side.
Who does? The unions definitely have lawmakers on their side.
AFAIK The USA is one of the most anti-union non-authoritarian countries for a very long time. In other countries people receive a lot more support and protections for the right to organize
Re: US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds
#86I 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…
The same behavior displayed by union workers occurs at a level where people can hide behind a title (Vice President, department head, whatever). Yet people rarely look as critically at senior management as they do at union workers.
I also find it that people who are critical of union workers never seem to be critical of police or fire fighters, both of whom are unionized.
My dad was a union worker for 19 years and I don't think ever displayed any of the negative characteristics assigned to unionized workers.
Re: US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds
#87Re: US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds
#88I 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…
> never once actually did any work
I work at a company creating wealth, and heirs who own stock collect dividends from the company. What work did they do? You're talking about the guy sitting near you who you don't feel is working hard enough, and nothing of the parasitic heirs expropriating the product of unpaid surplus time of those working and creating wealth. Which unions are formed to rest control back from.
Re: US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds
#89Earlier 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…
Thanks for sharing. Very interesting to hear someone else with a similar experience. > Unions devolving to simply protect the lowest common denominator is a problem. I've always wondered if this is because the ones most incentivized to stay are the ones that eventually make it into upper leadership. It always seemed to me like the decisions being made at that level were intended to protect those same people. For exam…
Honest question -- what should happen to poor performing people? They should have less money, less food, be homeless or what? Should they be more stressed and as a result somehow perform better?
On one hand I don't like to deal with results of bad craftsmanship, on the other hand I don't desire of the suffering of others.
The thing is real, but so are the people.
Not a snark or a gotcha, I'm a union member and recognise this thing at work.
Re: US employers spend more than $1.5B a year to fight labor unions, report finds
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t think it’s weird. Why should a union be a protected class that you cannot fire? If a company can find people to work cheaper than what the union offers why should they have to continue to employ union workers? Pros/Cons to everything. I generally sit into the stance that the free movement of labor is one of the things the US gets right.
They’re not a protected class that you can’t fire, unless the company signs a contract to that effect with the vendor selling them labor (the union)
Is that correct? I thought the NLRA was shaped in such a way that you cannot fire someone because they are in a union. You cannot refuse to hire known union supporters.
I liken to being similar to a protected class that you cannot discriminate against.
Edit: why would this get downvoted? If I am wrong about the NLRA I am happy to be corrected.