481–490 of 493 posts
It is called blasphemy and made into an absolute scandal and people get stoned/fired for simply saying the word immediately.
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> I say join the leadership and run the union the way you think it should be run This is like saying if you don't like the gangs in your area you should join them and try to reform them to do social work instead. Why isn't it valid to say you don't like unions and so don't want anything to do with them?
If you don't want anything to do with them you absolutely have the right to go somewhere the union doesn't exist. You do not have the right to ask the union to make your life easier. That's not their job.
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> How much evidence are you going to demand before considering that perhaps they actually aren't treated fairly, by any reasonable definition of the word? You're largely refusing to engage with the actual topic at hand and instead squabbling over "shibboleths". Do you have an preferred way to discuss this, because I do think there's a legitimate concern here. What are you talking about? The "actual topic at hand" is…
I'm aware the topic at hand is unionization. You turned it into something about shibboleths and polarization - while BIPOC is regularly used in mass media - and implied I'm using scare quotes because I don't know what it means. I don't think you're having this discussion with anything near a neutral viewpoint, and I don't really want to engage further. You've said in the past you're not a Trumper, but you definitely…
Which is highly relevant to the topic of unionization. To get a union, you have to win a vote, and your chances are much better if you don't turn off voters unnecessarily. Why use a term like BIPOC in your unionization drive, which is a neologism strongly associated with progressives, when it's likely to turn off a lot of people you may be able to convince to join your side? It's stupid marketing.
I mean, literally this thread started with someone who's an example of that (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29908024), which you had trouble understanding and I've been patiently trying to explain to you. There are many other examples in this post.
That's not to say that a union can't address issues that Black women have, but it's going to fail as a union if it can't accommodate a wider variety of people. Someone in another thread said something along the lines of "The underlying mistake is thinking about this like a game where you can make up rules for the government to follow." You're making a similar mistake, except you seem to think you can make up rules for voters to follow. Or maybe you don't think about voters at all because you're too busy sorting people into a reject bin. It's hard to say exactly.
> while BIPOC is regularly used in mass media
So? You know, a lot of people reject mass media culture to various degrees. You're kind of proving my point for me.
> I don't think you're having this discussion with anything near a neutral viewpoint, and I don't really want to engage further.
I feel the same about you.
> You've said in the past you're not a Trumper, but you definitely appear to lean quite far right.
Nope, wrong again. I'm just not so polarized that I'm repulsed by people who disagree with me and utterly reject them, so I can still think about how they think and believe some things can get done with their cooperation.
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If you don't fire bad employees and just shift them around, it's more likely they will find a manager that promotes them, is it not? Unions sound to me like just another layer of bureaucracy, with its own mind and interests. Any extra bureaucracy increases corruption and inefficiencies.
I mean. Maybe? Seems I could just as easily blame management for not better training and removing bad managers.
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I would say that an organized group of workers that calls itself a union and advocates on behalf of those workers for labor rights is a union, and I think most people and dictionaries would agree with me. If that's not what you meant by the word "union", I think the burden is on you to provide an alternate definition for this discussion. For example: "an organization of workers formed to protect the rights and intere…
So you would call a labor party a worker union? Labor seems to be able to organize just fine regardless if there are unions or not, as long as they are allowed to vote.
Honestly I think this is just continuing a very uninteresting semantics discussion - now we have to decide what "labor party" means. The point here is that you seem to have a different definition of "union" than the average person, which is fine, you should just be aware of that and watch out for misunderstandings when you're discussing with someone so you aren't talking past each other.
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I would say that an organized group of workers that calls itself a union and advocates on behalf of those workers for labor rights is a union, and I think most people and dictionaries would agree with me. If that's not what you meant by the word "union", I think the burden is on you to provide an alternate definition for this discussion. For example: "an organization of workers formed to protect the rights and intere…
A union is recognized by the NLRB and has certain statutory entitlements regarding strikes and the ability for employers to fire striking workers. "Labor movements," writ large, do not require those statutory entitlements. Modern unions can be understood in terms of their ability to collectively bargain without fear of direct reprisal in terms of employment. Otherwise, collective bargaining has always been an option…
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> but a union rule forces them to pay everyone with that job description the same Why would we advocate for this though? You keep making the claim that unions would advocate for more and more restrictive policies. First it was guidelines, now it's strictly regimented salaries with no room for performance based pay at all. You're generating objections because you keep changing your argument. Yes, paying everyone exact…
I mean, literally the entire point of collective bargaining arrangements is that instead of negotiating salaries individually, the firm agrees to pay everyone a wage schedule agreed with the union. Hence the whole subthread starting with another poster talking about collectively negotiated pay bands for all staff having less scope for large pay rises than a firm's discretionary policy, as the union also has to look a…
Also, a salary agreement between a single individual employee and a huge corporation has by definition a huge power imbalance. Unions reduce that power imbalance. You can argue which is best (full negotiation freedom with massive power imbalance vs. collective bargaining with or without variable/performance pay and a much smaller but still non-trivial power imbalance), but there's no point in just arguing for one skew and ignoring the legitimate arguments for the other.
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I mean, literally the entire point of collective bargaining arrangements is that instead of negotiating salaries individually, the firm agrees to pay everyone a wage schedule agreed with the union. Hence the whole subthread starting with another poster talking about collectively negotiated pay bands for all staff having less scope for large pay rises than a firm's discretionary policy, as the union also has to look a…
There are plenty of unions (some examples up thread) that do variable pay. If you're arguing against a specific kind of collective bargaining agreement, then just say that, and be aware that it's a far more oblique criticism of unions, especially in this specific context of Google. Also, a salary agreement between a single individual employee and a huge corporation has by definition a huge power imbalance. Unions red…
As I pointed out a very obvious situation in which power imbalances ensure even the best performers would benefit from collective wage bargaining from the very beginning, I'm pretty confident I am not the person in this subthread arguing for just one skew. But I am equally adamant that there are people Google considers [near] indispensable, and most of them are plenty employable enough for wage bargaining to be skewed in their favour, an imbalance not improved by people who want others to see pay rises first taking over negotiations.
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I'm no legal expert, but I'm pretty sure being forced to pay union dues is not a violation of any human rights.
Forcing a person to pay something against their will is definitively a human rights violation. That's forced labor.
People pay commissions to work all the time, they might agree with taxes, they might disagree with union dues, but regardless, I'm pretty sure it's not a human rights violation.
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I appreciate your comment, but I'm not sure what your point is. Corporate personhood is literally a legal fiction due to the granting of personhood in order to fall under the umbrella of existing law. This personhood is accepted as true, even though it is objectively untrue; this is a textbook example of a legal fiction.
Maybe I have the wrong understanding. I thought the legal concept of a "person" can be said to be a legal fiction https://www.jstor.org/stable/1342652 , but a corporation is not. It's a real thing that is created and exists according to corporate law. That might happen to use legal fictions as part of its definition, but the corporation is not a legal fiction. But even if I was right there, I would agree I was trying…