341–350 of 493 posts
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Unions aren't just for compensation - it's about having a say in your work.
This is the bigger part that bugs me, I don't my job description enforced by committee.
unless you're self-employed, I have bad news
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> But could you imagine if we spoke about corporations in this manner? "I've worked for corporations and they are a mixed bag. In practice, they often abuse their employees. I've personally witnessed bosses who contributed nothing for years and just played politics." We definitely talk about corporations in this way. All the time, in fact!
> We definitely talk about corporations in this way. All the time, in fact! But it is always about individual bad actors, not "corporations". When MacDonald's franchises get press showing they're stealing employees' wages, people blame MacDonald's, or the individual franchises. When some union leader embezzles money, people talk about "those unions".
Is it wrong to belief that unions aren't all ponies and rainbows?
If the answer to both of those questions is "no" then I don't see a problem here.
Having worked for both union and non-union employers - it's a mixed bag. Unions have advantages and disadvantages. They are great for worker representation - but that's a double-edged sword. Ideally, unions protects worker's interests. In practice, they often lead to abuse, stagnation and corruption. I've personally witnessed union employees who contributed nothing for years, get perpetually shifted from team to team…
Unions can make sense for certain industries, namely factory work. Where it's hard to own the means of production, and workers are largely uniform in output, low pay and don't have much leverage. Unions don't make sense in tech because everyone owns the means of production (a computer) and have widely different levels of output. 10x engineers are a thing. Plus tech workers have high leverage, high pay (top 5%? 1%?),…
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/google-apple-wage-suppression...
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Labor movements are made up of people, yes. Not sure how that is related to unions. Labor organized in every single democracy regardless if there were unions or not. Labor movements tend to create unions, so unions are often a result of labor movements and not the source of labor movements.
>Labor movements are made up of people, yes. And so if the people in these movements made smaller organizations to advance the goals of the movement at their workplace, in their local communities, and the national level... we might even credit those organizations, yes? Just like we do with the civil rights movement? >Labor organized in every single democracy regardless if there were unions or not. Some economies skip…
For example, why even have a vote? Why have enforced term limits for unions that you can't kick them out before the limit is up? Why no bargaining as a group without a vote?
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So I’m hearing you say unions are bad because there promote anti-racism and bring up moral issues? And that’s bad because?
1. A union purports to represent the interests of a labor force to its management. Those interests are diverse, because the workplace is diverse, but the issues with largest intersection tend to be compensation, time off, and health benefits.
2. In the past several years, there has been an unambiguous inclination for the stultifying, puritanical, logocentric manner of leftist political spaces to also invade and supplant workplace norms and office culture. This goes as far back as Brandon Eich being ousted for making a donation that follows his conscience, but also includes a funded menstrual app startup that has to claim to serve not women, but "people with periods". It's an insane worldview that maybe 5% of Americans agree with, yet it's the dominant corporate culture.
3. These supposedly moral issues (I called them fashions) being broadly unpopular are nonetheless enforced norms. The way they are enforced is through the actions of HR departments, and particularly on the backs of legal theories such as disparate impact and workplace fairness.
4. Unions, i.e. labor relations, are exactly the type of concern that would fall under (3) and therefore susceptible to becoming another vector for propagating (2). That, along with the fact that most Google employees are extremely well compensated, make it reasonable that progress on (1) is not nearly the likely outcome of a union, while (2) is an easily foreseeable side effect, intended or otherwise.
5. Again, evidence of how unions in other knowledge work fields such as journalism, supports this. Journalists have been outed from their positions, without support from their unions, for expressing basic journalistic freedoms. Isn't the union supposed to protect you from being fired for doing your job? Education is another such field where we can see plainly what's happening.
Lastly, anti-racism is a moral abomination under its current critical theory construction popularized by e.g. Kendi, DiAngelo etc. Also, it's not the union's job to propagate morals or enforce them onto labor.
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I don't know, how much would he make if the NBA wasn't a monopoly?
Thats a good point, and I think in general I think using professional sports as an example either for or against unions is a bad faith argument because of the unique dynamics present.
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What's your argument? That talented people can't get ahead at Google or competing employers?
Bureaucracies often impose arbitrary measures of success on teams and employees that often have nothing at all to do with merit or productivity or any other measure that a reasonable person would use, and reduce or increase staffing levels based on those measures. See 'stack ranking' for a perfect example.
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The point which i don’t think was articulated well by the GP is that depsite these objections to corporate power nobody (ok,few people) in HN threads ever seems to endorse getting rid of corporations.
Corporations creates enormous amounts of value, as far as we know modern society cannot function without those structures. Unions however are optional, even if they help they still aren't nearly as important as corporations. Edit: For those who disagree, how many modern societies are there without corporations running a majority of the economy? Not a single one. So as far as we know it doesn't work. It can work in th…
Playing devil's advocate, what you say is probably true on the supply side. However, the other side, consumer demand, is mostly driven by people unaffiliated with corps. That is, families arguably drive the majority of the economy. (That said this argument feels more than a little pedantic, but it must be made!)