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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

#151

Post by baron816 »

maerF0x0 wrote: post #85
baron816 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Unions often exert more power at the state and local level. In certain states, they can consistently wield a lot of power.

Unions in the US tend to be much more aggressive than they are in other places, which has in part led to their decline. Americans historically have tended to hate unions at the times when they’re powerful, and love them at times when they’re weak. In other words, people like the idea of unions in theory, but hate them in practice.

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

#152

Post by faidit »

WarmWash wrote: post #128
virgildotcodes wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>It seems to me a case that echoes “better to let 9 guilty men go free than to execute an innocent man”. Of course, in this case, the ratios are actually reversed. Should we execute 9 innocent men to make sure that 1 guilty guy gets punished? We don't have to do an echo. We can just do it as it is. 9 men hunt and 1 man eats free, so the 9 men are carrying the weight of the 1. This system is inherently unstable and un…

>9 men hunt and 1 man eats free, so the 9 men are carrying the weight of the 1.

You just described every non-union tech company I've worked at but maybe ratio reversed. Full of lazy entitled takers, not a shop steward in sight.

If unions are inherently unstable and unsustainable, so is capitalism as a whole.

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

#153

Post by theamk »

georgemcbay wrote: post #149
virgildotcodes wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Are you saying that "aliasxneo", thread starter who worked as "controls technician" is an "ultra-capitalist"?

I love the idea of unions, but it's hard to take its advocates seriously when they just dismiss anyone they disagree with. You can't blame everything on the ultra-rich when the regular workers also report negative stories.

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

#154

Post by psadauskas »

Veserv wrote: post #131
Jcampuzano2 wrote: post #38

Earlier 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…

A key problem in the US is that in a unionized job you are legally required to be represented by the union. Union membership is non-voluntary. If you think you are part of that top percentage or even if you think that the union is not representing your interests, tough luck. It is illegal to quit or reorganize like-minded individuals to form your own that better represents you. To reform the union you need to get 50%…

Also in the US, when Unions were starting to get going, the "good" ones that stood on principles and tried to do right by their members had their leadership harassed and even murdered by oligarchs and the government. The corruptible ones were allowed to exist, and be corrupted as another means of control, and for the anti-union people to point at as proof that unions "don't work".

Reading up on this has been eye-opening, they didn't teach much about it in school, except maybe a paragraph in the history textbook about the Ludlow Massacre. They don't mention at all the IWW or other leftist unions from the 1910s and 20s. If they mention the Taft–Hartley Act, they don't talk about how it targeted "communist" union leaders, and left "capitalist" unions alone.

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

#155

Post by AlotOfReading »

HardlyCognizant wrote: post #136
WarmWash wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there is one thing free riders are generally skilled at, it's hiding the fact they are free riding. There is then an internal decay where as others learn the tricks, they realize that they can start coasting too, and they should, because why would you do extra work if you don't have to. To defeat this you need intense oversight, but then you yourself become the man with an iron fist. This is a super common theme w…

It's the prisoner's dilemma. I believe any self-preservation optimized intelligence is going to suffer from these problems until those behaviors are countered in interaction by design (e.g. process, societal/cultural pressures, etc.) or removed from the baseline (i.e. evolved out.) Our desires make us our own worst enemies, and until we acknowledge and openly plan to counter these tendencies, any social structure at…

Human societies already have solutions to this problem. There's a proposed explanation for why strict religious groups (like the Amish) survive so well: costly signaling. There are benefits to remaining in the community, so you have to demonstrate adherence to the group by constant, expensive signaling to keep receiving them.

In a union context, that could be anything from dues, to volunteering for shitty work, to community service obligations. Unions don't really exercise the power to expel members though, because it reduces their own leverage.

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

#156

Post by ciupicri »

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.

Then how about Romania, a former communist country? Let me tell how things run since 1990 when we supposedly switched to capitalism and democracy. I've heard that labor laws changed a bit around 2010, but I don't know exactly how.

The leaders of the union were part of the board, they were running the show along with the real managers. They were also practically impossible to fire. Negotiations with them were a drag. All they know is sucking the blood, err, money out of the company, nothing else. They don't care if it's not profitable and company goes bankrupt (and the government has to save it because it's owned by the state). And of course the leaders get their fair, err, fat share. The workers have lousy or good salaries, but the leaders are rich. They also worked on union staff on company time/money and I think they also had their dedicated space.

Thankfully not everyone drunk the union kool aid. I had a teacher who to my surprise wasn't a union member and couldn't care less about their shit and strikes.

I almost forgot about a law that's still in place that forces every company with more than 50 employees to have some sort of union. It has to organize elections so that the employees can elect a representative. Like wtf, managers have a business to run, not some boys' club or whatever. No one is stopping employees from sending someone to talk to the manager.

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

#157

Post by ciupicri »

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…

It's the same in Romania. Union leaders are rich.

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

#158

Post by amavect »

briandw wrote: post #8

This is an adversarial process. Unions exist to fight employers. Unions spend about 23 billion a year in total. Only spending 1.5B to defend against 23B looks like a bargain.

A way to exit the adversarial process is by ending the separation between owners and workers, through things like worker cooperatives, employee ownership, and workplace democracy.

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

#160

Post by chaosharmonic »

xur17 wrote: post #75
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?

"Generous" means nothing in a context where severances in are entirely voluntary, and aren't actually a standard that you can reliably expect.
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