Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 230 posts

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

#91

Post by Muromec »

chii wrote: post #46
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…

> I fully believe labor needs as much leverage against capital as possible for the scales to be balanced at all Competition is required, rather than unionization. If an industry is dominated by monopolies, not only do customers suffer, workers do too. Unions don't really fix the problem - only make certain groups win over others.

For once, the union is one of the rare in-groups that are very easy to join and actually benefit their members

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

#92

Post by [deleted] »

miltonlost wrote: post #15
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.

You're not pro-union if you still spout anti-union propaganda. You spent more words arguing against unions than you did for them. I'd say your first part of the sentence is probably more of a rhetorical trick than anything close to true

[deleted]

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

#93

Post by maerF0x0 »

wat10000 wrote: post #23
blitzar wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but it's important to keep in mind that without unions the corporation 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

The discourse around unions is so weird. A bunch of people form an organization so that they can work together to sell stuff. When they're selling widgets, or other people's labor, we call those people "management" and we call their organization "business" and it's the standard way of doing things. When they're selling their own labor, we call it a "union" and suddenly people have Opinions about whether they're reall…

As i see it, Unions are groups of employees where they have agreed to cooperate to get a better group outcome than they might be able to negotiate individually. It often caps the outcomes for the very very best, and raises the outcomes for the very very bottom. But across a wide swath they are earning more, or treated better, than they would be had they tried to do it alone. TBD if the union fees negate more or less than this gain.

IMO Cooperatives are a better model, it combines cooperative behavior with the dual risk/profit model of entrepreneurship.

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

#94

Post by tristor »

yifanl wrote: post #72
chii wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> We accept some things being unfair, not everything being unfair.

Life is fundamentally unfair. Anything that tips the balance in the other direction is due to specific, continuous human effort. It's a good thing when we can make things more fair, but the inherent unfairness of life is not a cosmic injustice.

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

#95

Post by virgildotcodes »

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…

This doesn’t seem to be a universal rule at all, but smells more of a boogeyman promulgated within US society.

The nordics are anywhere from 50% - 90% of all labor unionized and they absolutely destroy the US on every standard of living metric.

It seems to me a case that echoes “better to let 99 guilty men go free than to execute an innocent man”. Of course, in this case, the ratios are actually reversed. Should we execute 99 innocent men to make sure that 1 guilty guy gets punished?

There will be some free riders, just like there will be some welfare queens, just like there will be some voter fraud.

That said, these cases represent a vanishingly small minority of the whole, and the cure is far worse than the disease.

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

#96

Post by tristor »

AshleyGrant wrote: post #84
phil21 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 particul…

> 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?

We should do both, but when I agree to take a job at a given pay, I show up every single day capable, ready, and willing to work for the wage I agreed to. When other people don't pull their weight, it means I have to take on an unfair amount of work to make up the difference so that I can complete the things I've committed to in the workplace. The focus is on worker to worker relationships, because those are the most locally impactful relationships you have in the workplace. At the giant corporation I currently work for, I'm in the ladder fairly high up compared to most people as far as steps from the CEO, and yet I still only see the CEO on video calls with the whole company 4 times a year. The person in the office down the road from me that is blocking me from completely the thing I need to do to meet my own quarterly objective is far more tangible and legible to me than whether or not the CEO is a bum who spends all day golfing.

The fundamental difference is I take personal accountability for my own behavior and commitments, and that is one camp. The camp that doesn't see an issue with union free riders not pulling their weight are generally folks who only see accountability collectively, rather than personally, or maybe don't even take any accountability at all. Accountability is generally in short supply in our current society, so maybe its a novel thing, but I actually don't like doing a shitty job and if its due to somebody else screwing me over at work, I don't like that person a whole lot more than I don't like someone who I've hardly ever met and never talk to (CEO).

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

#97

Post by linkregister »

yifanl wrote: post #72
chii wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fixating on apples is key to the metaphor. The shorter person has other opportunities to collect food that they are better suited for, e.g. picking strawberries.

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

#98

Post by missedthecue »

Muromec wrote: post #91
chii wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I fully believe labor needs as much leverage against capital as possible for the scales to be balanced at all Competition is required, rather than unionization. If an industry is dominated by monopolies, not only do customers suffer, workers do too. Unions don't really fix the problem - only make certain groups win over others.

For once, the union is one of the rare in-groups that are very easy to join and actually benefit their members

The problem is that they tend to benefit their members in a zero sum way. For example the LIRR wants a double digit raise not in exchange for hitting targets on on-time arrivals or some other metric. They want it or they strike and hold the community hostage. It bothers me that there's no value exchange it's just take take take, and ultimately at my expense.

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

#99

Post by slibhb »

Recently the LIRR (Long Island Rail Road workers) went on strike. The NYT has covered it, including this interesting fact:

> For instance, if an engineer drives a diesel train at the start of a shift but is asked to switch to an electric train in the same day, the M.T.A. must compensate that worker with two days’ pay. If, on the same day, the engineer is also asked to switch from driving passengers to driving a train back to a yard for maintenance or storage, that worker is entitled to a third day’s pay.

Take from that what you will.

My view is that -- with some exceptions -- unions today are mostly bad, and worth fighting.

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

#100

Post by mc32 »

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…

Another issue with unions is that they should be symbiotic but often transition to parasitic. What I mean is there are times despite it being obvious the demands will drive companies into either re-org or bankruptcy proceedings they’ll go full steam. The demands also at time accelerate offshoring or sending some of the work over-seas. Obviously all these scenarios are detrimental to the future of the workforces they represent.
Post reply on HN