Unions annoy me. Working conditions 75 years ago were truly deadly, and unions served a major purpose to humanize the work force.
Nowadays we have "tax the robots" bills being sponsored by Unions and people somehow think it's "ok" to force someone to join a union to feed their family.
When I see articles like this, I know what the right answer is but it's hard to empathetic at the same time.
At some point the majority of workers voted to organize. After that, anyone working there has made the choice to work a unionized job. I don't think it is fair to allow a single jobseeker to break the structure of a union this way. Why not consider asking these individuals to choose to work a different job if they object to paying union dues?
In general, there's an information asymmetry between workers and employers that collective bargaining presumably helps alleviate (especially in the private sector), and union advocates would say that the value of this outweighs the drawbacks of unions. That's the right question to be debating rather than the fairness of closed shops.
EDIT: To try to keep the discussion focused, and the level of discourse high, let's try to find out exactly where we disagree:
You asked: Why is ethical or fair force a worker to pay union dues as part of a job?
My answer: Because the union's negotiation affects all employees it is ethical and fair to ask every employee to contribute. Allowing every employee to opt out greatly reduces the amount of resources the union has available to reach its aims.
The assumptions behind my answer:
- That the negotiation performed by the union does affect all workers in the job, whether union members or not.
- That collective bargaining enabled by unions can in many cases be a positive thing for workers.
- That right-to-work laws do indeed adversely affect the resources of a union. (The data shows that public sector union membership greatly dropped after Wisconsin's public sector right-to-work act passed: https://projects.jsonline.com/news/2016/11/27/for-unions-in-...)
Let's move this debate forward: Which part of my response/assumptions do you disagree with, and why?
(Aside: I'm actually not the biggest fan of public sector unions, but I think it's likely private sector laws would have a similar effect.)
The union asks for that contribution because they are negotiating for all employees, and no one can claim that they'd negotiate themselves because the union has fought for the baseline. If the union has won the right to require that contribution for all workers, what is the issue with this requirement? Again, why try to debate whether the employee should have this choice when they had the initial choice to work a different job?
That said, I think that the right-to-work debate is a red herring. The first question we need to answer is whether collective bargaining can be a net benefit, and if so, how we can make it work.
Stepping back even further, I think folks tend to forget that model of an optimal free market carries several assumptions, perfect information being the one most notably broken by a large employer to single employee relationship. That doesn't mean that free market model isn't useful, in fact we should be trying to aim for the results of a perfect free market in most cases. But it does mean that there can be areas where a bit of intervention does a huge amount of good.
Technically, I don't think there is anything to prevent an employer for forcing you to attend company parties as a condition of employment. Of course the vast majority of employers wouldn't do this, but in this case your only choice is to go to the parties or take a different job.
Now an argument could be made that the employer-employee relationship is different from the union-employee relationship, but is there a reason that any such difference implies that a union can't set conditions for employment?
I'm pretty ambivalent about this. In some sectors you hear the story "he got paid $40 an hour to change light bulbs" but in other sectors (teachers?) workers are still chronically underpaid and mistreated.
In short: you can't make black and white generalizations about these things. In some cases a union still makes sense, in others they've become dead weight or obsolete.
The teachers unions keeps terrible teachers employed. In California some school districts have pulled teachers from classrooms because they are unfit to teach, but they can't fire them because of union rules. They are literally paid to do nothing [1]. Many of the teachers I've talked to hate the union, but it's a very strong union and not much can be done about it.
Uh-huh. All the people who tell me about this think the solution is kids straight out of school teach in charter schools for a couple years and then leave, which it seems to me would not really result in better education.
Public unions and private unions are entirely different beasts IMO. I don't like the idea of public unions because they can essentially bleed taxpayers dry. See California or Illinois unfounded liabilities for the result of that. Not to mention the atrocity that is police unions.
And be careful where you wave your wand. Illinois pensions are very underfunded while California pensions are not even close to as bad, we just have a much larger denominator.
Also, the rate of funding in California is set by the employer (the city / county, etc) and not the state, the union, or the unionized employee. The pension organizations (CalPERS and CalSTERS) have unreasonable rates of return projected in the system (7.5% annual last I heard) and the employers, not the state, are on the hook if those pensions are underfunded due to that high rate of anticipated compounded interest.
Stockton went bankrupt soon after the 1999 bubble burst because there was no possible way they could make that level of anticipated returns in 2000-2001 (in addition to other bad investments the city made).
> I don't like the idea of public unions because they can essentially bleed taxpayers dry.
Private sector unions can bleed companies dry just the same. GM had negotiated itself into a corner pre-2008 and was less than 60 days from bankruptcy if not for US Government intervention (which helped them renegotiate their labor contracts). You can argue that a city in bankruptcy can't shed its pension liabilities the same way a company in bankruptcy can, but it's heavily dependent on the state law and the contracts.
The problem isn't that "they can essentially bleed taxpayers dry". They problems are that government jobs are largely undesirable for high-performing employees (with a few notable exceptions) and that government union jobs in the states you named mandate union dues by law. The latter was challenged at the SCOTUS during the Scalia absence[1].
Of course private sector unions can bleed companies dry. The difference is that I am not involuntarily invested in said companies that are being bled dry. That is, I suppose, unless the government jumps in to bail them out.
"About 160 teachers and other staff sit idly in buildings scattered around the sprawling district, waiting for allegations of misconduct to be resolved."
So, an "allegation of misconduct" is "unfit to teach"?
In some cases, these teachers have openly abused students, but it is very hard to prove such cases even though there is proof (some level of irony applies here).
Here in Maine, we either don't have a teachers union, or it is not a problematic cancer like it is in California and New York, and we still have problems firing toxic teachers that have actively harmed students.
Due process should be carried out in a way independent of involved parties; ie, it doesn't matter if the union strikes, cases involving abuse of students or other similar misconduct should be heard by a court or other legal body independent of the school system.
As in, the school should not have the authority to fire or punish teachers inside of its structure, and needs to be outside of the influence of both the schools and the unions to maintain fairness and safety.
If you did the crime, you do the time, no matter if it even results in the union striking for the entirety of your prison sentence.
> Unions annoy me. Working conditions 75 years ago were truly deadly, and unions served a major purpose to humanize the work force.
Just because a company isn't literally trying to kill you or introduce hazardous conditions for the sake of maximizing profits doesn't mean that unions aren't useful. In a lot of cases, their very presence is inhibitory to regressions in the rights of employees.
Do unions have problems? Yes, absolutely, and we shouldn't neglect those either. At the same time, scrapping them would be a very bad idea.
> Do unions have problems? Yes, absolutely, and we shouldn't neglect those either. At the same time, scrapping them would be a very bad idea.
Existing unions are not taking much in the way of steps to address those problems or clean up their image in the eyes of the public. Until unions can once again demonstrate openly and conclusively that their primary concern is the welfare of the worker rather than just being another power player jockeying to get their share of the pie, scrapping them would be a very good idea.
> Until unions can once again demonstrate openly and conclusively that their primary concern is the welfare of the worker rather than just being another power player jockeying to get their share of the pie, scrapping them would be a very good idea.
As I said, their presence is an inhibitor to regressions in employee rights. If you scrap them, the inhibition is removed, so you'd have to replace it with stronger employee protections in the form of regulations if you wanted to keep the status quo for rights.
That's a bell that can't be easily unrung. I would think carefully about whether we want to introduce government-mandated rules into each industry about what is appropriate, as opposed to having the efficiency of self-regulation and negotiations.
You could say the same about many other public institutions. To demonstrate:
The media seems more interested in sensationalist irrelevant news than informing the public (it pays better).
Until the media can once again demonstrate openly and conclusively that their primary concern is informing the public rather than just being another power player jockeying to get their share of the pie, scrapping them would be a very good idea.
> Until the media can once again demonstrate openly and conclusively that their primary concern is informing the public rather than just being another power player jockeying to get their share of the pie, scrapping them would be a very good idea.
Good, let's just throw away the first amendment. Only government-sanctioned news can be broadcast from now on, and the sitting administration gets to appoint who heads up the department that determines what real news is.
You could say the same about many other public institutions. To demonstrate:
The media seems more interested in sensationalist irrelevant news than informing the public (it pays better).
Until the media can once again demonstrate openly and conclusively that their primary concern is informing the public rather than just being another power player jockeying to get their share of the pie, scrapping them would be a very good idea.
Unions are a necessary evil in my opinion. Haven't had a positive experience with them in my own life[1], but life without unions has been done (a lot), and it sucks.
[1] The first of these was telling the team I was on that because we were part-timers, we wouldn't get union resources allocated to resolve an issue we had. Funny that, we didn't pay 'part-time' dues, and our work was still just as necessary to putting food in our bellies.
Comments like this annoy me. A few decades ago unions were powerful forces for worker rights, and served a major purpose by allowing collective bargaining.
Nowadays we have "right to work" laws being sponsored by companies and people somehow think it's "wrong" to join unions and bargain collectively.
When I see posts like this, I shake my head and wonder where we went wrong.
oh, that's easy, the unions fought for what was fair, and when they got it they KEPT GOING. we need a good balance, not for the side who happens to have the power at the moment taking all they can get.
I don't understand why collective bargain is expected on the employer side and reviled on the employee side. If employers can band together to form a company and present a unified front to the people they pay, why can't the people they pay band together to form a union and also present a unified front?
Why do we trash the very concept of unions because bad ones want to tax robots and such, but don't apply the same standard to companies, when so many of them kill people and poison the planet? If unions are bad because the Teamsters abuse their power, what do entities like Koch Industries, Mylan, or BP tell us about companies?
Collective bargaining is never mandatory on the employee side. The employee is not forced to work for a particular collective. The employer on the otherhand is forced, by law, to only hire people who are part of some government-recognized collective, known as a bargaining unit.
In other words, employees can monopolize the employer's hiring options, using anti-free-market laws inspired by the 'labour' movement and socialism.
Being forced to join a union looks like equality to me. If I want to work at a particular place, I have to join that company. I can't come in on my own, expect to get paid, but not be a part of the company that runs the place. Why should the union be any different?
If an employee doesn't want to work for a particular company, they have to find a different place to work. If an employee doesn't want to join a particular union, they have to find a different place to work. Why is the former reasonable but not the latter?
If an employer really wants to hire non-union labor, they can leave their company and join a different one that doesn't have a union. You're playing an interesting semantic trick here where you use "employee" to refer to the individual, but "employer" to refer to the company. You thereby paint the asymmetry as unfair, when in fact there's no expectation that they should be the same. Let's compare individuals to individuals (laborers to management, say) and groups to groups (companies to unions).
Why do the arguments against unions not also apply to companies? Give me something where if I replace "union" with "company" the result isn't an equally compelling argument against not letting employers organize collectively.
The relationship between you as an employee and employer is totally different than you and a (potential) union. The one is paying you a salary for certain work done. The other is to (potentially) help you to negotiate better working conditions. You are absolutely making no sense at all.
> The one is paying you a salary for certain work done. The other is to (potentially) help you to negotiate better working conditions
That's like saying that the role of elected officials is to represent their constituents and serve their interests, treating them all with full equality under the law.
It's a nice statement, but it's completely idealistic and doesn't accurately describe what actually happens in practice.
wtf? You work for a salary and you join a union if you want better working conditions and believe that is the only way to get it. This is not rocket science. What does politics have to do with it?
As an employee, the union is an organization you belong to which works to further your interests, and the company is an outside organization in a hopefully symbiotic relationship, where you provide them with things they want, and they provide you with things you want.
As an employer, the company is an organization you belong to which works to further your interests, and the union is an outside organization in a hopefully symbiotic relationship, where you provide them with things they want, and they provide you with things you want.
I am not saying that an employee has the same relationship with their union and their company. I'm saying that when you break it down into employee/employer and company/union, it becomes fairly symmetrical. Look at the individuals on both sides, and then at the organizations on both sides. If one side shouldn't band together, why should the other side do so?
> As an employee, the union is an organization you belong to which works to further your interests
If that were actually true, it would be nice. But I doubt it's true for very many unions. Certainly my past experience in the auto industry indicated that it was not the case for the UAW, which is the union involved in this particular case.
> If one side shouldn't band together, why should the other side do so?
My personal belief is that unions should take this to its logical conclusion. If they really believe they can manage working conditions better than the employers, they should back that claim up by becoming full-fledged for-profit corporations, employing the workers they represent and negotiating contracts with the companies that want the services of those workers. If union claims are true, this arrangement should be a win-win: employees now work directly for the organization that represents them, and companies that want those services get them cheaper because the union can provide them more efficiently since they now employ the workers directly instead of being an inefficient middleman.
If this were actually done and worked, it would be great. But I won't hold my breath waiting for it.
Your "logical conclusion" sounds like the proliferation of third-party suppliers which I understand is now a huge part of the auto industry. Sure, they're companies rather than unions, but my underlying point is that the two aren't particularly different: they're both ways for people to band together and get better deals collectively than they would individually.
In any case, I'm not saying unions should do this or that, or that we should necessarily cheer them on. I just want the same standards applied to both sides. It looks to me like people decry unions based on things that are not unique to them, but give companies a free pass.
> the proliferation of third-party suppliers which I understand is now a huge part of the auto industry
Yes, it is, even more so now then when I was working in the industry. But that's something different from what I'm talking about. At each of the factories run by those third-party suppliers, the workers are employees of the supplier company. (And many of those factories are also unionized under the UAW.) Similarly, at the assembly plants where finished vehicles are put together from the parts from all of those third-party suppliers, the workers are employees of the auto company (GM or Ford or Toyota or whomever), and (mostly) unionized under the UAW. (AFAIK that's true of all the plants of the US auto companies, but some foreign ones, like Toyota, have US plants that are not unionized.)
What I'm describing is something different: a factory belonging to GM or Ford or whomever, but staffed by workers (and supervisors up to whatever level seems appropriate) who are employees of, say, the Auto Workers' Company (AWC), which is a full-fledged, for-profit corporation that specializes in representing and managing automotive factory workers. That company negotiates a contract with the company that owns the factory and supplies it with raw materials and ships out its finished products, just like any other contract between companies. The contract specifies what jobs the workers are to do and under what conditions, and the factory owner pays the AWC for the services it provides according to whatever payment terms are in the contract. The AWC then pays the workers, since they are its employees.
> It looks to me like people decry unions based on things that are not unique to them, but give companies a free pass.
I don't see companies getting a free pass, but I also think that, to the extent that unions get decried more than companies, it's because unions combine the worst features of companies and democracies:
- Unions have a corporate command structure (they have officers, finances, etc.), but it's subject to democratic rule (members vote on the leadership). Thus, the leadership has a long-term mission (to sustain the viability of the labor pool), but a short-term focus.
- Unions have, or at least try to have, monopoly power. This means that the actual benefits they can provide from collective action (which is what makes it more sensible for them to be corporations) are more than swallowed up in the deadweight losses associated with having the monopoly (which is demanded by the membership for the same reasons people in a democracy demand government benefits).
So if someone should either be forced to join a union that they don't want to be apart of or just find another job. Doesn't this kinda provide an argument against unionizing in the first place? If you are joining a company that isn't part of a union you accepting that fact... why should employees be allowed to unionize when that it is against the wishes of the pre-existing wishes of the company?
I agree that this is an argument against unions, but only to the extent that it is also an argument against companies. Swap union/company and employee/employer in your argument and it remains just as valid.
They're not the same arguments at all. The corollary would be if you started working for a company, and the company then created a union with other companies, and made it illegal for you to work for any company other than those that are part of this corporate union.
In a free society, a company would be able to fire its workers for unionizing and hire new ones.
>If an employer really wants to hire non-union labor, they can leave their company and join a different one that doesn't have a union.
This makes no sense. The employer shouldn't be forced to 'have a union'. It's not a voluntary relationship, and thus it totally violates the company owner's right to their own private property.
Unions as they exist today are rent-seeking organizations that prey on employers. No wonder investors invest in other countries, and companies outsource.
>> If employers can band together to form a company and present a unified front to the people they pay...
How does this statement even make any sense?
IANAL, but I'm interpretting this as deliberately conflating the term employers with people within a company whose duties include making hiring decisions--themselves employees.
The share of national income going to labor (people who work for a living) has declined ever since capital's triumph over unions. You might not like unions we know what happens without them.
Wages are stagnant or falling in most industries and Tesla and other auto plants have fairly significant rates of injury. I don't see how it's a solved problem.
People are still being taken advantage of. In some ways it's worse because 75 years ago if you managed to struggle through a shitty assembly line job for enough years you could afford to own a home, retire comfortably, send your kids through college, and hopefully ensure a better future for them. Today these jobs don't pay as well comparatively, and a lot of key expenses needed to get ahead are much, much more expensive. So instead of getting ahead working these dangerous jobs is like being on a treadmill.
Criticisms of existing unions might be valid, but you seem to be attacking the very concept.
Most of us are forced to sell our labour or starve. Therefore the labour market can not be a free and fair market. Having unions and collective bargaining makes it a more efficient and fair market.
Otherwise, unless you are one of very few workers (who are over-represented on HN) that have considerable power in the job market, you will get shafted.
I get an even bigger laugh imagining the same sentence being used in an article about a different industry. Imagine "A nurses' strike today was averted when management agreed to install a rollercoaster and free frozen yoghurt machines"...
""There will also be little things that come along like free frozen yogurt stands scattered around the factory and my personal favorite: a Tesla electric pod car roller coaster (with an optional loop the loop route, of course!) that will allow fast and fun travel throughout our Fremont campus, dipping in and out of the factory and connecting all the parking lots," Musk wrote. "It’s going to get crazy good.""
I sometimes wonder what happened to functioning adults.
I think a union is something you earn - not something foisted upon you. If you dont want workers to join a union, treat them well, pay them significantly above market rates, give good benefits.
Or just replace them with robots? That is what's happening across various industries today. Nurses will be replaced soon too (in the next 10 years). No union can stop that.
Not everyone is entitled to a job. If you complain, then get out. Automation will help enforce this.
the major appeal of the union is that you can't get fired or laid off. This type of job security is crucial because it gives you massive leverage when it comes to fighting for those other things. No matter how good the pay is, you can probably get better via striking, etc.
Unfortunately, that's an overreaching statement. I personally know a few people who have accepted pay cuts to leverage the type of job security afforded by certain unions.
>> How many unions in the private market can really claim you wont get fired.
Certainly none, but does it really matter? There's exists a threshold where the difference between won't get fired and very difficult to get fired are pragmatically indistinguishable.
So was the one I was responding to. And I doubt that whatever personal anecdotes you have can be applied to unions in general as parent did.
And yes it matters as the parent wanted to dismiss unions based on these false claims.
Unions are neither good nor bad. Some of them have too much power, others have too little. Some should have a union (like uber drivers) etc.
My own father tried to start a kind of union for a group of self-employed drivers working for one company. The result was that the company he worked for simply stopped his contract and scared everyone else off from backing him and a few others up.
I have seen unions be both really bad, really good, unnecessary and not existing where they should.
They are no different than consumer interest groups and other collections of people trying to reach some sort of balance.
In many industries today they aren't needed but in some they still are.
Do unions work differently in the US? Because I am pretty sure that while you can't get fired for being in a union (or strike action), you can get fired for every other reason you could get fired for.
If collective bargaining wasn't mandatory, and employers were free to decide who to hire and fire, the manufacturing sector in the US would be vastly larger, and offer millions more jobs to Americans.
There is very little that does more damage to society than the so-called labour movement.
Without the labour movement we'd have Triangle Shirtwaist fires and Ludlow massacres every week. I don't blame you for not knowing that, because our educational system is designed to produce obedient workers, not class agitators. You might want to pick up a history book though.
> Without the labour movement we'd have Triangle Shirtwaist fires and Ludlow massacres every week
It's a little disingenuous to conflate the labor movement with NLRA-regulated unions, especially in the context of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the response to it. They're not one and the same, although modern unions have done their best to erase that distinction from the historical narrative.
You might also want to consider the other things unions of the time were involved with.
Early 20th century unions passed bylaws excluding non-white members from their ranks, and then (successfully) lobbied for federal laws excluding them from the country altogether.
Without the AFL, we may not have had the Chinese Exclusion Act, and we might not have stripped Americans of Chinese and Indian descent of their naturalized citizenship, seized the homes they legally bought with the money they earned, and then given the land to white Americans.
You're wrong. The Triangle Shirtwaist fire was a result of the economy being primitive at the time, with very little resources available per capita for risk reduction. Work place accidents were decreasing every single decade before cookie-cutter work safety standards were mandated. The world today would be extremely safe in and out of the workplace in the absence of such mandates.
This bias toward central economic planning and mandated standards is a consequence of the great complexity of a modern economy not being appreciated by the typical person. Central economic planning is based on oversimplifications that are easier to reason about.
As for the Ludlow Massacre, that was largely a result of illegal and violent actions by unions. We don't have those anymore, because unions impose their will through political decree nowadays.
Most teachers in the United States are unionized, and an increasing percentage are under collective bargaining agreements, to the great detriment of education:
The education system is consequently heavily biased toward unions and their dishonest narrative. Here in BC, teachers openly tell their students they hate the governing party (which stood up to the teachers union) and kids almost uniformly hate the governing party as well.
Do you think there is some historical example we could refer to to see what it would look like if we had industrial capitalism with no labor rights whatsoever?
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[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 149 ms ] threadNowadays we have "tax the robots" bills being sponsored by Unions and people somehow think it's "ok" to force someone to join a union to feed their family.
When I see articles like this, I know what the right answer is but it's hard to empathetic at the same time.
That's fine, don't force people to organize and pay "dues".
In general, there's an information asymmetry between workers and employers that collective bargaining presumably helps alleviate (especially in the private sector), and union advocates would say that the value of this outweighs the drawbacks of unions. That's the right question to be debating rather than the fairness of closed shops.
So it's fair to force them to put part of their paycheck towards something they have no interest in using? That's neither ethical nor fair.
You asked: Why is ethical or fair force a worker to pay union dues as part of a job?
My answer: Because the union's negotiation affects all employees it is ethical and fair to ask every employee to contribute. Allowing every employee to opt out greatly reduces the amount of resources the union has available to reach its aims.
The assumptions behind my answer:
- That the negotiation performed by the union does affect all workers in the job, whether union members or not.
- That collective bargaining enabled by unions can in many cases be a positive thing for workers.
- That right-to-work laws do indeed adversely affect the resources of a union. (The data shows that public sector union membership greatly dropped after Wisconsin's public sector right-to-work act passed: https://projects.jsonline.com/news/2016/11/27/for-unions-in-...)
Let's move this debate forward: Which part of my response/assumptions do you disagree with, and why?
(Aside: I'm actually not the biggest fan of public sector unions, but I think it's likely private sector laws would have a similar effect.)
(Original comment preserved below.)
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The union asks for that contribution because they are negotiating for all employees, and no one can claim that they'd negotiate themselves because the union has fought for the baseline. If the union has won the right to require that contribution for all workers, what is the issue with this requirement? Again, why try to debate whether the employee should have this choice when they had the initial choice to work a different job?
That said, I think that the right-to-work debate is a red herring. The first question we need to answer is whether collective bargaining can be a net benefit, and if so, how we can make it work.
Stepping back even further, I think folks tend to forget that model of an optimal free market carries several assumptions, perfect information being the one most notably broken by a large employer to single employee relationship. That doesn't mean that free market model isn't useful, in fact we should be trying to aim for the results of a perfect free market in most cases. But it does mean that there can be areas where a bit of intervention does a huge amount of good.
Now an argument could be made that the employer-employee relationship is different from the union-employee relationship, but is there a reason that any such difference implies that a union can't set conditions for employment?
In short: you can't make black and white generalizations about these things. In some cases a union still makes sense, in others they've become dead weight or obsolete.
[1] http://articles.latimes.com/2009/may/06/local/me-teachers6
And be careful where you wave your wand. Illinois pensions are very underfunded while California pensions are not even close to as bad, we just have a much larger denominator.
Also, the rate of funding in California is set by the employer (the city / county, etc) and not the state, the union, or the unionized employee. The pension organizations (CalPERS and CalSTERS) have unreasonable rates of return projected in the system (7.5% annual last I heard) and the employers, not the state, are on the hook if those pensions are underfunded due to that high rate of anticipated compounded interest.
Stockton went bankrupt soon after the 1999 bubble burst because there was no possible way they could make that level of anticipated returns in 2000-2001 (in addition to other bad investments the city made).
> I don't like the idea of public unions because they can essentially bleed taxpayers dry. Private sector unions can bleed companies dry just the same. GM had negotiated itself into a corner pre-2008 and was less than 60 days from bankruptcy if not for US Government intervention (which helped them renegotiate their labor contracts). You can argue that a city in bankruptcy can't shed its pension liabilities the same way a company in bankruptcy can, but it's heavily dependent on the state law and the contracts.
The problem isn't that "they can essentially bleed taxpayers dry". They problems are that government jobs are largely undesirable for high-performing employees (with a few notable exceptions) and that government union jobs in the states you named mandate union dues by law. The latter was challenged at the SCOTUS during the Scalia absence[1].
[1] http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/friedrichs-v-cali...
So, an "allegation of misconduct" is "unfit to teach"?
Here in Maine, we either don't have a teachers union, or it is not a problematic cancer like it is in California and New York, and we still have problems firing toxic teachers that have actively harmed students.
Due process should be carried out in a way independent of involved parties; ie, it doesn't matter if the union strikes, cases involving abuse of students or other similar misconduct should be heard by a court or other legal body independent of the school system.
As in, the school should not have the authority to fire or punish teachers inside of its structure, and needs to be outside of the influence of both the schools and the unions to maintain fairness and safety.
If you did the crime, you do the time, no matter if it even results in the union striking for the entirety of your prison sentence.
Just because a company isn't literally trying to kill you or introduce hazardous conditions for the sake of maximizing profits doesn't mean that unions aren't useful. In a lot of cases, their very presence is inhibitory to regressions in the rights of employees.
Do unions have problems? Yes, absolutely, and we shouldn't neglect those either. At the same time, scrapping them would be a very bad idea.
Existing unions are not taking much in the way of steps to address those problems or clean up their image in the eyes of the public. Until unions can once again demonstrate openly and conclusively that their primary concern is the welfare of the worker rather than just being another power player jockeying to get their share of the pie, scrapping them would be a very good idea.
As I said, their presence is an inhibitor to regressions in employee rights. If you scrap them, the inhibition is removed, so you'd have to replace it with stronger employee protections in the form of regulations if you wanted to keep the status quo for rights.
That's a bell that can't be easily unrung. I would think carefully about whether we want to introduce government-mandated rules into each industry about what is appropriate, as opposed to having the efficiency of self-regulation and negotiations.
The media seems more interested in sensationalist irrelevant news than informing the public (it pays better).
Until the media can once again demonstrate openly and conclusively that their primary concern is informing the public rather than just being another power player jockeying to get their share of the pie, scrapping them would be a very good idea.
I... I agree with that statement...
The media seems more interested in sensationalist irrelevant news than informing the public (it pays better).
Until the media can once again demonstrate openly and conclusively that their primary concern is informing the public rather than just being another power player jockeying to get their share of the pie, scrapping them would be a very good idea.
[1] The first of these was telling the team I was on that because we were part-timers, we wouldn't get union resources allocated to resolve an issue we had. Funny that, we didn't pay 'part-time' dues, and our work was still just as necessary to putting food in our bellies.
Nowadays we have "right to work" laws being sponsored by companies and people somehow think it's "wrong" to join unions and bargain collectively.
When I see posts like this, I shake my head and wonder where we went wrong.
Why do we trash the very concept of unions because bad ones want to tax robots and such, but don't apply the same standard to companies, when so many of them kill people and poison the planet? If unions are bad because the Teamsters abuse their power, what do entities like Koch Industries, Mylan, or BP tell us about companies?
In other words, employees can monopolize the employer's hiring options, using anti-free-market laws inspired by the 'labour' movement and socialism.
If an employee doesn't want to work for a particular company, they have to find a different place to work. If an employee doesn't want to join a particular union, they have to find a different place to work. Why is the former reasonable but not the latter?
If an employer really wants to hire non-union labor, they can leave their company and join a different one that doesn't have a union. You're playing an interesting semantic trick here where you use "employee" to refer to the individual, but "employer" to refer to the company. You thereby paint the asymmetry as unfair, when in fact there's no expectation that they should be the same. Let's compare individuals to individuals (laborers to management, say) and groups to groups (companies to unions).
Why do the arguments against unions not also apply to companies? Give me something where if I replace "union" with "company" the result isn't an equally compelling argument against not letting employers organize collectively.
That's like saying that the role of elected officials is to represent their constituents and serve their interests, treating them all with full equality under the law.
It's a nice statement, but it's completely idealistic and doesn't accurately describe what actually happens in practice.
As an employer, the company is an organization you belong to which works to further your interests, and the union is an outside organization in a hopefully symbiotic relationship, where you provide them with things they want, and they provide you with things you want.
I am not saying that an employee has the same relationship with their union and their company. I'm saying that when you break it down into employee/employer and company/union, it becomes fairly symmetrical. Look at the individuals on both sides, and then at the organizations on both sides. If one side shouldn't band together, why should the other side do so?
If that were actually true, it would be nice. But I doubt it's true for very many unions. Certainly my past experience in the auto industry indicated that it was not the case for the UAW, which is the union involved in this particular case.
> If one side shouldn't band together, why should the other side do so?
My personal belief is that unions should take this to its logical conclusion. If they really believe they can manage working conditions better than the employers, they should back that claim up by becoming full-fledged for-profit corporations, employing the workers they represent and negotiating contracts with the companies that want the services of those workers. If union claims are true, this arrangement should be a win-win: employees now work directly for the organization that represents them, and companies that want those services get them cheaper because the union can provide them more efficiently since they now employ the workers directly instead of being an inefficient middleman.
If this were actually done and worked, it would be great. But I won't hold my breath waiting for it.
In any case, I'm not saying unions should do this or that, or that we should necessarily cheer them on. I just want the same standards applied to both sides. It looks to me like people decry unions based on things that are not unique to them, but give companies a free pass.
Yes, it is, even more so now then when I was working in the industry. But that's something different from what I'm talking about. At each of the factories run by those third-party suppliers, the workers are employees of the supplier company. (And many of those factories are also unionized under the UAW.) Similarly, at the assembly plants where finished vehicles are put together from the parts from all of those third-party suppliers, the workers are employees of the auto company (GM or Ford or Toyota or whomever), and (mostly) unionized under the UAW. (AFAIK that's true of all the plants of the US auto companies, but some foreign ones, like Toyota, have US plants that are not unionized.)
What I'm describing is something different: a factory belonging to GM or Ford or whomever, but staffed by workers (and supervisors up to whatever level seems appropriate) who are employees of, say, the Auto Workers' Company (AWC), which is a full-fledged, for-profit corporation that specializes in representing and managing automotive factory workers. That company negotiates a contract with the company that owns the factory and supplies it with raw materials and ships out its finished products, just like any other contract between companies. The contract specifies what jobs the workers are to do and under what conditions, and the factory owner pays the AWC for the services it provides according to whatever payment terms are in the contract. The AWC then pays the workers, since they are its employees.
> It looks to me like people decry unions based on things that are not unique to them, but give companies a free pass.
I don't see companies getting a free pass, but I also think that, to the extent that unions get decried more than companies, it's because unions combine the worst features of companies and democracies:
- Unions have a corporate command structure (they have officers, finances, etc.), but it's subject to democratic rule (members vote on the leadership). Thus, the leadership has a long-term mission (to sustain the viability of the labor pool), but a short-term focus.
- Unions have, or at least try to have, monopoly power. This means that the actual benefits they can provide from collective action (which is what makes it more sensible for them to be corporations) are more than swallowed up in the deadweight losses associated with having the monopoly (which is demanded by the membership for the same reasons people in a democracy demand government benefits).
In a free society, a company would be able to fire its workers for unionizing and hire new ones.
This makes no sense. The employer shouldn't be forced to 'have a union'. It's not a voluntary relationship, and thus it totally violates the company owner's right to their own private property.
Unions as they exist today are rent-seeking organizations that prey on employers. No wonder investors invest in other countries, and companies outsource.
The parent has accurately described my experience, and I'm in the US.
How does this statement even make any sense?
IANAL, but I'm interpretting this as deliberately conflating the term employers with people within a company whose duties include making hiring decisions--themselves employees.
What would you like to put in the blank? I'm using the term "employer" there but I'm happy to switch to something better.
People are still being taken advantage of. In some ways it's worse because 75 years ago if you managed to struggle through a shitty assembly line job for enough years you could afford to own a home, retire comfortably, send your kids through college, and hopefully ensure a better future for them. Today these jobs don't pay as well comparatively, and a lot of key expenses needed to get ahead are much, much more expensive. So instead of getting ahead working these dangerous jobs is like being on a treadmill.
Most of us are forced to sell our labour or starve. Therefore the labour market can not be a free and fair market. Having unions and collective bargaining makes it a more efficient and fair market.
Otherwise, unless you are one of very few workers (who are over-represented on HN) that have considerable power in the job market, you will get shafted.
I had to double-check that I was not reading a satirical website after reading the above statement.
I sometimes wonder what happened to functioning adults.
Not everyone is entitled to a job. If you complain, then get out. Automation will help enforce this.
Unfortunately, that's an overreaching statement. I personally know a few people who have accepted pay cuts to leverage the type of job security afforded by certain unions.
>> How many unions in the private market can really claim you wont get fired.
Certainly none, but does it really matter? There's exists a threshold where the difference between won't get fired and very difficult to get fired are pragmatically indistinguishable.
And yes it matters as the parent wanted to dismiss unions based on these false claims.
Unions are neither good nor bad. Some of them have too much power, others have too little. Some should have a union (like uber drivers) etc.
My own father tried to start a kind of union for a group of self-employed drivers working for one company. The result was that the company he worked for simply stopped his contract and scared everyone else off from backing him and a few others up.
I have seen unions be both really bad, really good, unnecessary and not existing where they should.
They are no different than consumer interest groups and other collections of people trying to reach some sort of balance.
In many industries today they aren't needed but in some they still are.
There is very little that does more damage to society than the so-called labour movement.
It's a little disingenuous to conflate the labor movement with NLRA-regulated unions, especially in the context of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and the response to it. They're not one and the same, although modern unions have done their best to erase that distinction from the historical narrative.
You might also want to consider the other things unions of the time were involved with. Early 20th century unions passed bylaws excluding non-white members from their ranks, and then (successfully) lobbied for federal laws excluding them from the country altogether.
Without the AFL, we may not have had the Chinese Exclusion Act, and we might not have stripped Americans of Chinese and Indian descent of their naturalized citizenship, seized the homes they legally bought with the money they earned, and then given the land to white Americans.
This bias toward central economic planning and mandated standards is a consequence of the great complexity of a modern economy not being appreciated by the typical person. Central economic planning is based on oversimplifications that are easier to reason about.
As for the Ludlow Massacre, that was largely a result of illegal and violent actions by unions. We don't have those anymore, because unions impose their will through political decree nowadays.
Most teachers in the United States are unionized, and an increasing percentage are under collective bargaining agreements, to the great detriment of education:
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article-abstract/111/3/671/1839...
The education system is consequently heavily biased toward unions and their dishonest narrative. Here in BC, teachers openly tell their students they hate the governing party (which stood up to the teachers union) and kids almost uniformly hate the governing party as well.
It's absolutely ridiculous.
http://www.jpma.org.pk/full_article_text.php?article_id=1811