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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

#191

Post by blks »

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…

Correct analogue would be: 9 man hunt, 1 doesn’t, and most of the hunt’s proceeds go to 11th man who eats for free:

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

#192

Post by rstuart4133 »

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…

> But US unions seem to exist nearly exclusively to protect people who don’t want to work.

It's a similar dynamic here in Australia, but it seems not in Germany and Japan.

I think the difference is that in the USA and Australia the unions are organised on a craft or occupational basis. You see this in the sorts of laws they want passed - they are invariably after laws that only union members can do a certain job. It isn't always so direct. Doctors for example insist on certain qualifications, which seems fine and necessary at first glance, but then the doctors' associations somehow manage to gate the institutions that can issue the qualifications. It's interesting how doctors have no trouble with that, but computer engineers can't bring themselves to do it.

Anyway, the outcome of "guild based unions" ends up being what others here noted. Instead of everyone in the same firm cooperating to get work done, they are all fighting to preserve their patch. In Germany and Japan, unions look to be organised around large companies. If the company goes broke the union disappears with them, so the company's incentives and the union's are more aligned. So much so the union reps are given seats on the board, and are expected to make a contribution. The unions are still focused on ensuring the distribution of profits goes more towards the employees than the shareholders of course, but nonetheless the outcome seems to be far less dysfunctional than the USA and Australian systems.

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

#194

Post by ytoawwhra92 »

aliasxneo wrote: post #130
Muromec wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 recogn…

> Honest question -- what should happen to poor performing people? The union should help them find roles they can be successful in. It should offer them more specialized training, mentorship programs, and other ways to help build up their skills. If they refuse to take any of these seriously, they should be fired. To me, that's the difference between poor performing and intentional laziness.

How is any of that the responsibility of organised labour?

We used to expect training, mentorship, skill-building and effective job placement from employers.

If anything, unions should be lobbying employers to provide those things to poor performers.

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

#195

Post by Jensson »

robtherobber wrote: post #111
deepsquirrelnet wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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, t…

> On paper, meritocracy sounds great. In reality, meritocracy was a slur word. It was coined in 1956 to describe a farcically unequal state that no one in their right mind would want to live in: https://archive.discoversociety.org/2018/10/02/meritocracy-a...

Meritocracy is still a slur word by the left, that never changed, the left doesn't like meritocracy and the right likes it. So a left winger writing about the horrors of meritocracy doesn't mean that meritocracy is bad.

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

#196

Post by Jensson »

faidit wrote: post #145
missedthecue wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

And why can money hire workers? Its because that money lets them get goods that was produced by previous investments. Without the investor class you wouldn't get large new projects organized. The alternative to private investments is communism, and we all know how that works out, it results in politicians hogging all the wealth and generally making even worse decisions with that money than the greedy capitalists does.

People prefer working for greedy capitalists since it generally pays better than working for the government.

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

#197

Post by Jensson »

archagon wrote: post #186
indoordin0saur wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Certain markets are highly competitive for labor. A good example is software engineering. In those cases, because neither the corporation has a monopoly on their tech products nor does a union have a monopoly on labor the sector can be highly productive and everyone can get rich. In such a situation it seems pointless to have a union. Why would an employee want to be beholden to both his employer and his union? Union…

Software engineers are gonna wish they’d unionized in the coming years.

Unions doesn't protect you in revolutionary times, so no. Detroits manufacturing sector was totally devastated even though they had extremely high unionization rates.

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

#198

Post by Jensson »

halestock wrote: post #188
wccrawford wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Always. Power begets power. Everything needs to be kept in check. The only question is where the line is.

Why don't unions seem to have that problem in pretty much all of Europe then?

Because European unions doesn't have as much power over workers as American unions, since Europe as right to work. Right to work means you can just quit a bad union if you don't like it without having to change your job.

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

#199

Post by [deleted] »

Jensson wrote: post #197
archagon wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software engineers are gonna wish they’d unionized in the coming years.

Unions doesn't protect you in revolutionary times, so no. Detroits manufacturing sector was totally devastated even though they had extremely high unionization rates.

[deleted]

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

#200

Post by gitaarik »

Balvarez wrote: post #57
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…

Your probably a normal guy making a comment in good faith, but I can't help but think this is the exact sort of dark marketing that I would do if I was an anti union commenter/marketer. Attack the vague made up values of union members because you can't attack the fact that large companies have been anti-worker for awhile and most people believe that. I'll also add onto here that if this comment gets down voted into t…

So there are no issues with unions in your view?

Of course it's not that black and white, but I don't think the previous commenter was necessarily painting it like that.

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