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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

#141

Post by AshleyGrant »

tristor wrote: post #96
AshleyGrant wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 oth…

And I personally think that billionaires extracting untold wealth from those of us doing the actual work is a far greater societal problem than some normal folks who are lazy but are making 0.0001% of what the capitalist class is extracting from my efforts.

> 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.

And while I don't like that the Union protects folks like this, I believe the work they do to protect hard working folks like me from being "managed-out" or even laid off so that the billionaires can make even more money next quarter is of great societal value. We as workers deserve to have security that as long as we are meeting reasonable productivity targets, we won't be kicked to the curb.

Having dealt with a manager deciding they didn't like me and doing everything in their power to manage me out (successfully), despite me meeting every goal given to me, management and the capitalists can take a long walk off a short pier for all I'm concerned.

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

#142

Post by honkycat »

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…

There are a lot of people who are not in unions who do no work.

It is a plague in the programming field.

Not having unions is not a silver bullet for that problem. So maybe it is a false attribution/bias on your part

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

#143

Post by underlipton »

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…

And the part no one talks about: the "higher floor, lower ceiling" paradigm is actually much better for sustainability (including, in many cases, sustained growth), so long as there is an actual moat around the business (i.e., it actually provides value). It is death for companies that are poorly-managed or that have unworkable business models. "Growth at all costs, including the worker well-being that union presence embodies" is a principle of businesses that are trying to outrun their own fundamental deficits, particularly among that "top percentage". They seek to portray unions as dragging the company down because it distracts from the truth of their poor leadership and business sense. Unions are like a boat's keel and anchor; smaller or non-existent ones make the boat faster, but less stable in rough environments.

Ambitous Icaruses didn't get us heavier-than-air flight; sustained investment in a series of societies that supported educated middle classes over years of technological development did. The key wasn't the "obvious" straight line of gluing wings to your arms, it took a few decades of people literally spinning their (bike) wheels. Ironically, the sky was the limit only once the ceiling was lowered.

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

#144

Post by faidit »

mothballed wrote: post #71
well_ackshually wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 investi…

"I will cripple you" must have referred to the bosses, not the entire country including his people. Idk why it matters that he had a gold chain. Are people without tech jobs not allowed to have money?

Yeah this brief out of context video is obvious proof that unions are the #1 problem in society. A prole with a Rolex?!? If we allow dockworkers to wear Rolexes then the entire social order will break down! What happened to the America I grew up with when only a vampire CEO could afford a Rolex? Oh the humanity..

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

#145

Post by faidit »

missedthecue wrote: post #103
miltonlost wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they provide capital. It's the workers who provide value to the company.

It's hard to explain why entrepreneurs want capital so much if it provides zero value. They're all stupid and doing something they ought not to?

So they can hire workers. Without whom more capital can't be produced

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

#146

Post by BobaFloutist »

phil21 wrote: post #25
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…

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…

Honestly I think the problem is that unions are also acting as guilds.

Which is to say, as a union, they make deals with companies and the government and fight for regulations requiring union labor, but then they turn around and act as a guild by restricting who can join and get trained and become union labor, keeping wages high with an artificial labor shortage.

So you end up with a situation where you're only allowed to hire union elevator technicians, but also there aren't any union elevator technicians. They get high wages and all the work they want, and everyone else gets broken elevators.

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

#147

Post by BobaFloutist »

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

>that are very easy to join

That's the case for most service-sector unions, but a lot (certainly not all) of builder's unions seem to meter the amount of people that are allowed to join, making it prohibitively difficult to actually get into the union.

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

#148

Post by faidit »

honkycat wrote: post #142
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…

There are a lot of people who are not in unions who do no work. It is a plague in the programming field. Not having unions is not a silver bullet for that problem. So maybe it is a false attribution/bias on your part

This. 100%. The absolute irony of techies getting paid big bucks while doing zero work, just posting on their phone on HN during the "workday", complaining about ... union fat cats getting paid too much and doing no work. Maybe there's actually some wisdom to it. like "Uh oh.. if the people at the bottom figured out their own scams and aren't working either.. this whole house of cards I'm on top of might collapse!"

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

#149

Post by georgemcbay »

virgildotcodes wrote: post #95
WarmWash wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 e…

> but smells more of a boogeyman promulgated within US society.

Particularly the ultra-capitalist part of US society.

Do unions attract some percentage of people who want to abuse them to do less work for more pay? Sure, humans are flawed. But unfettered capitalism also attracts some percentage of people who will greedily exploit the labor of others to enrich themselves.

Both extremes are why we should have rules and regulations as a society to curb the worst excesses, because we can't trust all humans to do the right thing in any system.

That aside, I'd also argue that while both are unfair the actual practical outcome of some people being a bit lazy in a union has a far less disastrous impact on society as a whole than the people who greedily exploit on the other end.

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

#150

Post by faidit »

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…

There were many tech companies I've worked at where lifers got paid top dollar to sit around and do nothing. And had to be convinced to do any work or help you.

I remember non union non tech jobs where the entire workforce were lazy and useless too.

Seems like an American thing or a human thing. Not a union thing.

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