My feelings about unions (or at least how they're done in the US) are mixed, but Amazon warehouse employees are a perfect fit for a union. Workers clearly have a case of being subject to poor working conditions while being a commodity, Amazon has few reasons not to fire someone and hire somebody new off the street.
> Workers clearly have a case of being subject to poor working conditions
How do you know this though? Did you read a couple of articles about the poor working conditions and someone having to urinate in a bottle? Or have you actually gotten out and talked to some of the workers?
I've done the latter and my take (along with that of the workers I chatted with) has been that the media and press are doing what they do best, and exaggerating the issue or at the very least making rare circumstances appear to be the norm.
The media does this all the time depending on what kind of message/agenda they want to push. It's a form of deception. Reporting on a rare circumstance should require a disclaimer at the very top: "Note: This particular circumstance has only been recorded to happen 5 times nationwide" vs. falsely implying it happens all the time and falsely implying that the problem is endemic.
Similar experience. Amazon warehouse guys I know shrug it off as 'just another warehouse job'. That doesn't mean warehouses are pleasant to work in, even in comparison to similarly paying positions. But Amazon isn't quite the great satan of employers. Just another megacorp.
If the employers can unionize and the union works well, then good on them - they deserve to claw as much of the surplus value they produce back from their employer as they can negotiate.
I've spoken with both Amazon delivery workers and Amazon warehouse workers. Small sample set, but the delivery workers seem reasonably satisfied, and the warehouse workers seem abused.
In both cases former employees were more willing to discuss working conditions than current ones.
I've also spoken to Whole Foods employees. Those who were working at the time of the Amazon acquisition universally despise the new management, and those hired since the acquisition are indifferent. But everyone's afraid to actually discuss this inside the store -- they believe they're being closely monitored.
The important part would be how this compared to Walmart warehouse workers, or Target or Home Depot, to determine if this needs legislation or union action.
Why does that matter? If the New York Amazon employees want to unionize for whatever reason, that's their right to do so. Doesn't matter how you or I - who don't work there - feel the quality of their job compares to Wal-Mart, etc.
I did not intend to imply there is anything wrong with unionizing. I just do not find any substance in article after article being solely about Amazon warehouses with no point of reference. It was already known before Amazon that warehouse work sucked, that information is trivial.
It would be interesting to see what difference retail employers are like, especially considering how fungible they are and how similar their profit margins are.
> Or have you actually gotten out and talked to some of the workers? ... I've done the latter and my take (along with that of the workers I chatted with)...
I would be curious to know how many workers you spoke with, relative to the number of employees in their warehouses. I would also be curious if the employees you spoke with all worked in the same facility/region, or if they were scattered throughout the country/world.
It's one thing to talk to a few people from the same spot, it's a completely different thing to speak to a good sampling of people that is more reflective of Amazon as a whole.
I wonder if all the journalists pumping out articles about Amazon work conditions are taking a sampling from across the country, or are seeking out a single outrageous event to report on.
Actually, I don't wonder that, because I know what the answer is.
For what it's worth, I ask the same question of any journalistic piece about Amazon warehouses. I expect a good sampling from them, just as I do from anyone touting their anecdata as representative of a whole.
> Or have you actually gotten out and talked to some of the workers?
A friend of mine had to move to a new city on short notice when his wife got a new job. He applied at an Amazon warehouse while he applied to longer term jobs.
He expected the worse given all of the news stories, but then he started working there and it was fine. He said it was the most well-run warehouse job he’d had. Still a warehouse job, but nothing like the horror stories in the news.
Obviously only an n=1 anecdote and it’s entirely possible that other locations are worse, but it wasn’t the dystopian job that we’ve all read about in every news article about Amazon lately.
There are explanations for why these stories come out about Amazon needing to be unionized that which can put bad actors on either side of those stories.
I'm not anti-union, but I'm amazed that so many people view them as 100% pure agents of good in all cases.
People also conflate historic unions with the current post-New Deal legal framework around unions, which is a framework that only really benefits labor lawyers without really benefitting other people. Just because they're called "unions" does not mean that they are the same thing as the historic "unions." They're a completely different thing governed by a highly complex body of law which is utterly different from the previous framework, operating under totally transformed social and economic conditions.
Current day unions are fee bonanzas for lawyers paid for by the workers, the corporation, and the shareholders. The New Deal is often misinterpreted by current day leftists who incorrectly conflate their own views with FDR-era progressivism and the legal reality that it created. They like the fantasy idea of unions in the same way that we can admire the elven kingdom of Lothlorien, and do a lot to avoid perceiving the bureaucratized reality of contemporary unions in favor of nostalgia LARPing.
What bourgeois newspaper readers tend to get twisted is that they try to compare an FBA warehouse job to something like being a hospital administrator, and find that it sounds like a bad job. But the comparison is really between an FBA warehouse job and another warehouse job. The FBA warehouse job tends to pay more and have better working conditions than the non-FBA warehouse job.
OSHA records show amazon had twice the amount of serious injuries than lets say walmart in 2020. In 2019 their injury rate was in the 7's and it was twice the industry average.
> The SOC found that these DSPs reported injury rates of 14 and 13.3, respectively, per 100 workers. Additionally, the majority of injuries reported by DSPs in 2019 and 2020 were severe, requiring employees to take time off work to recover, the SOC said.
Comparing against the industry averages and against competitors is not the media exaggerating anything - its how you would understand what is normal or not.
edit: can't reply because hackernews is limiting my posting rate but for the poster below who asks maybe its because amazon is so good at reporting, the evidence suggests otherwise and there is no evidence to suggest they are reporting better.
It could be but the evidence suggests otherwise, so unless you have some evidence to the contrary all you're doing is conjecture. A higher injury rate is just be a higher injury rate unless there's evidence to suggest otherwise, which you don't seem to have.
>Amazon may also be underreporting warehouse worker injuries. A physician who inspected Amazon warehouses for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found that workers at some Amazon facilities were being discouraged from reporting injuries and seeking outside medical care, according to Reveal.
>Another company initiative designed to curtail "lost-time injuries," or those requiring time off work, ended up preventing them from being counted as lost time, according to Reveal, directly contradicting Amazon executives' framing that such injuries were down due to enhanced safety measures.
Honest question: If the injury rate climbed even higher, would you believe that Amazon was somehow an even BETTER company, because they were so diligent in reporting injuries?
With no evidence to support your claim, I don't see how to conclude anything other than a higher injury rate === more dangerous work conditions.
That is because you are assuming every company other than Amazon is playing by the rules, which is equally absurd.
Barring better information, I can't really say one way or the other. Ot isn't a terribly unreasonable hypothesis- running warehouses is basically Amazon's core business model, paired with AWS.
amazon had twice the accidents as walmart even after their improvement in 2020. They just injure their workers more. Would them reporting even more injuries mean they were a more safe and better working environment for you? How does that make logical sense?
It's what you would expect when they have harshly enforced production quotas. Safety is inevitably secondary in that sort of environment.
Trying to minimize the severity of the injuries is very questionable. You can't force someone to walk 10-20 miles a day after they injure their ankle. Reporting accidents resulting in missed work or doctor visits is completely normal, saying that Amazon follows the law and nobody else does is a little rich for me.
Different structures like union protection or looser production requirements provide a lot of slack. Even averaging the same production over months/years, it allows for working slowly or more carefully in situations that demand in it. Going slower because your back is feeling off is an escape valve; a fistful of Ibuprofen and hitting your hourly quota might mean a recordable injury 2 days later.
Well I'm not the absolute judge. But warehouse work is hard, I know that from close connections. I've heard 1st person accounts of things that suck working in an Amazon warehouse. The fact that for Amazon particularly, there's a very revolving door for warehouse employees.
It all comes together to "yup, a union seems reasonable". Not a conviction that Amazon is the devil, nor do you need condemning evidence for collective bargaining to be a good idea.
One can understand much of the US’s politics through the lens that fully 50% of the country sees themselves as, if not small-business owners, then having small-business ownership in their career trajectory.
As such, fully 50% of the country thinks that any measure that prevents them from being fully competitive in the worker-exploitation race-to-the-bottom that is business in most commodity markets (such as minimum wages, unions, more than 2wks mandatory vacation, etc.), will mean that they’ll fail to launch that phase of their career, and have to go back to flipping burgers.
Of course, 50% of Americans will never be small business owners. It is thought by some that large corporations push this vision as propaganda, because voters who think of themselves as small business owners, vote for things that end up benefitting these large business owners.
Though you do get into this weird territory where the side that hates unions also loves police unions and coal mining unions. I've seen people have a full-blown existential meltdown when you point out that their favorite police union is in fact a union in the yay socialism sense. "No that can't be, that's different...." etc.
I don’t think it’s so strange: these people (the temporarily-embarrassed capital class, one could call them) are against unions they could see themselves managing. Not one of them wants to run a coal mine; that’s something that moustache-twirling aristocrats do, not decent bourgeoisie like themselves.
And government unions aren’t a concern to them either, because this type of person also could never imagine themselves working for the government.
(Few seem to have the inferential capacity to realize that they are nevertheless a shareholder of their government, and a marginal dollar saved in taxes is the same as a marginal dollar gained in dividends. One might in fact call taxes a dividend that’s usually net-negative.)
The temporarily-embarrassed capital class can rest assured their negative dividend will reliably go toward state violence. The police unions hold a special place because of what is known as Police Nationalism. For those people police determine that others need policing can can't imagine being on the receiving end of it.
Would people object to prosecuting the Jan 6 perpetrators unless they feel police shouldn't be interfering in right wing attacks?
There is so much anti-union disinformation coming out of most large and medium corporations at all times that by the time you are an adult, you probably know very little about unions but have this inkling that they are bad. This gets solidified as you go into the work force for [large corp] and are bombarded with anti-union propaganda. The disinformation is also class-based. Blue-collar workers and below are bombarded with this disinformation the second they start working at [large corp], and also hear it by virtue of their parents hearing it while they grow up, while white collar workers largely are not, which is why you see this peculiar progressivism amongst the elite, other than the portion of the elite that actually perpetuates anti-union sentiment because doing so is tacitly in their job description.
So sadly, someone with a 1099 job at Amazon or McDonalds is much more likely to have anti-union sentiment, because they are much more likely to have been exposed to a "union education" pamphlet or "educational" video at work.
Anecdotal, but well, I’m on online centrist who worked for the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. Nearly all of the concerns raised in this thread are justified. In my experience, the benefits are threadbare and don’t offset the downsides.
I often see people promoting or defending unions who have never worked for/been a member of a union, which is interesting.
Reposting a relevant comment I wrote a few years ago (although the last paragraph isn't relevant to Amazon warehouse workers specifically):
First, culturally, US Americans are much more individualist than most Europeans. (Obviously I am painting with broad strokes here, but it’s true in a general sense, on average). US Americans are somewhat less likely to feel solidarity or a sense of common cause with coworkers, and more likely to value the freedom to negotiate their contract on their own.
They are also much more likely to distrust large organizations and bureaucracy, sometimes to an extreme extent that would be puzzling to Western and Northern Europeans. Rather than being on their side, many would perceive the union as just one more large bureaucracy trying to screw them.
Third, there are many current examples of unions in the US that have made industries meaningfully less efficient. And highly-paid US Americans are less likely to see themselves as oppressed by their employers and more likely to see themselves as making common cause: after all, they have a common goal of making a lot of money. If my company, say, found it harder to fire low performers (an almost certain consequence of a union), it would be less efficient, make less profit, and be less able to pay me my current high salary.
There’s also a long history of union propaganda - like good ones, it’s usually mixed with truth. The entire Valley of Fear Sherlock Holmes novel was based on union busting.
The fight for employee rights probably had a lot of bloodshed and now that we generally enjoy decent protection, we have forgotten the need for a union.
>They are also much more likely to distrust large organizations and bureaucracy, sometimes to an extreme extent that would be puzzling to Western and Northern Europeans.
As an English person I have to disagree, there's certainly a level of cynicism towards bureaucracy in much of our society. Just look at a lot of British comedy, The Thick of It, Yes Minister, The League of Gentlemen, swathes of Monty Python, The Office, and many other examples couldn't have come from a culture where there's genuine deference to institutions and authority.
I think it's largely the power that unions have here once established. For recent examples, one can look at the spate of news about union crane operators at the ports of LA and Long Beach, but there are a ton of them.
Large unions become huge political contributors, and affect policy decisions to an extent that often outweighs any influence they could get without that money, and that rubs people the wrong way as well.
Specifically for HN: this is a forum made up of predominantly young, hyper-mobile, extremely well compensated, white collar workers with an often unstated belief in meritocracy as the key determiner of success.
Many of them do not understand the need of a union because they don't work in a milieu to which unions were previously prominent, nor do they understand their purpose. They see anything that could affect the above conditions as unnecessary or "bad".
There has also been decades of corporate promoted anti-union propaganda. A simple google search shows that companies like Amazon will go to extremely intrusive lengths to control the narrative around unions by employing tactics like mass texting and communication campaigns, mandatory anti-union information meetings, etc. Do that enough and you get people who begin to earnestly support an anti-union sentiment, even if the union would help them.
I will offer an opinion as a staunchly anti-union person, so that you can get a feel for the perspective.
If working conditions and pay suck, I much prefer a UBI so people can work less. It has none of the downsides of the below.
- I want my underperforming colleagues to be fired quickly. It's unfair and annoying that laggards are protected and free riding off their colleagues' (my) effort, and it leads to ineffective orgs.
- I don't want seniority or rank to be rewarded. It's unfair to young people (me) who are more competent and ambitious, and it leads to ineffective orgs.
- I want to negotiate individually because I believe I will make more money as an outperformer. I don't want a centralized handicapper to blunt my compensation.
- I don't like that unions are rent seeking in nature.
- I don't like that unions often are exploited by organized crime.
- I don't like that unions interfere in the broader political process and democracy via activism and political pressure (e.g look at the fact that the new EV subsidies will be going to everyone except Tesla, it's a perversion).
- I think people should be free to organize, but I don't like that the state grants special asymmetric powers to unions.
- I don't like especially public sector unions that I believe are doing significant damage to society broadly. For example police unions that shielded Chauvin after a large number of complaints.
> the state grants special asymmetric powers to unions.
I'm in the middle on unions, largely because research has shown that low skill labor is a monopsony market. The state needs to give asymmetric power to unions because employers have an incredible advantage in the low skill labor market. UBI would certainly help here, as we've seen during the pandemic, but I'm not sure it would be enough for people to decide that they just won't work anymore.
> If working conditions and pay suck,
I would say find something else to do, I know plenty of people switching to web development, graphic design, etc... from other industries (accountanting, sales, ...), start your own company, change jobs, ...
I also don't want unions in tech, I understand the need for it elsewhere.
Ok, but you do understand that these are not arguments, they are worries?
And you realize that there has been historically effort and money going into those exact fears being propagated and ingrained in the US worker's mind, because of strong anti-union company practices.
So that leaves us in a very weird place, where the pros and cons of unions become beliefs and opinions, but it should very much be something one can properly analyse from real data.
There's people that think unions are the devil, and they destroy companies. There's people that think unions are perfect and everyone should be in one because they make everything better. The truth is that unions, at least in the US, have positives and negatives and both are significant. Anyone who says otherwise is lying or delusional. How people weight those two things against each other varies by person.
* The corruption in the unions gets a lot of press, now and historically.
* There are lots of stories where union workers can't be fired so they just sleep at their desk.
* We don't have good worker protections. There is no political appetite for it and also no strong public sentiment for it. This sounds counter intuitive but there is this attitude that people get what they deserve. "They could just get a different job", "No one is forcing them to work there". Even look at our vacation policies compare to Europe. There is a mentality that hard work (even being exploited) is a goal to strive for.
If a cop beats the shit out of you for no reason, on camera, against policy and in violation of constitutional rights and doesn’t get fired; you can thank the union.
When the city bureaucracy cant’t process your permit application without an extra 3 months delay, and you wonder why they don’t speed up the process, or work a bit harder to handle things: thank the union.
When you can’t train more doctors, because it is in doctors interest to be scarce: thank the ~union~ guild.
When the factory shuts down, and the town loses its primary industry altogether because it can’t be productive with American workers fighting modernization: thank the union.
I don’t like unions because they do nothing but cause problems and make society less efficient for everyone. We already know how to make life better for workers, which is to run the economy hot (basically one of the few things Trump got right; economy was looking good for marginal workers ~2017-2019) and use labor regulations in the cases where that isn’t enough. Running the organizations inefficiently is not actually necessary to improve conditions for workers.
Except this isn't really true. While it is true that the AMA lobbied to reduce positions in the early 2000's due to an projected surplus, once it became apparent that there was actually a shortage, the AMA reversed its position and now lobbies for more positions.
> I don’t like unions because they do nothing but cause problems and make society less efficient for everyone.
I wouldn’t say “they do nothing but” although they certainly can.
That said …
When companies hamper the efficiency of the markets, they get countered by antitrust laws.
When unions abuse their “market positions” to hamper the efficiency of the market, e.g. block automation thus make the rest of society pay the price in form of the resulting inefficiency just to benefit themselves, who is there to stop them? Serious question.
The Cold War propaganda machine messed with a couple of generations' minds. Thatcher aside, I think maybe such propaganda was not as severe in the UK? You guys did have the community building exercise of rebuilding after the war, where in the US we immediately built the suburbs and began our decent into a Cowboy Individualist fever dream.
Here you'll hear the same things over and over:
"My (friend) was working at (someplace) and had to wait (2 hours | half a day) for a Union Electrician to plug in an electrical cord!" (Who cares! You got a free break! Enjoy the time slacking!)
"Unions are corrupt!" (Ignoring the difference of scale of corruption in the corporate world vs a union)
"I am paid because of my productivity! I am a Super-Worker! I resent the people who simply punch the clock at their CAREER." (Here you have wage slaves who were given a salary+perks and have been swindled into thinking that they have common ground with the Capitalist Class. Dividing workers into hierarchical groups is a old and great way to insure against any movement towards solidarity.)
and on and on... but in the US, every argument against any form of worker solidarity you'll see the complete absence of consideration of the abuses and priorities of the Capitalist Class. It's never workers vs ownership over here. It's workers versus the narcissistic individual "Top-Performer" (self-described).
I remember re-covering the roof of an apartment building for a slumlord I worked for in college. We ran out of tar, so I had to wait an hour while the boss went to get some more. Sitting for awhile in the shade of the roof access entrance was glorious. We were supposed to drag our exhausted, aching bodies to the basement to "tidy". We didn't because that was absurd.
Now I sit on my ass all day long and write code. I make enough now that I'm in the class of worker that's allowed to slack and pretend I don't. Sometimes I slack and post to Hacker News in the middle of the day. No union needed!
My take now that I live in the US is that it's about people's definition of a successful and happy life.
I feel in Europe people dream of having a cottage somewhere cute and pleasant, and just relaxing with good friends, having a drink at the pub, rinse and repeat. That's the "good life". But in America, people dream of being number #1, the best athlete, the richest man, the biggest CEO, etc. That's the "good life".
So in America you want to be the best richest most famous most accomplished, and Unions seem to go against that. You're looking to compete for the top spot, not find a happy compromise, your coworkers are competition.
In Europe, work stands in the way of your dream of leisure cottage life and caring to your hobbies. Unions seem to help with that, by amortizing the job/compensation, you can reclaim some of your time for yourself, have a better pension, work less hours, all things that'll help you have more free time.
One of the most common arguments I see repeated here when unions come up is the idea (not sure if it can be backed by evidence or not) that unions protect underperformers and stifle top performers. Combine this with the fact that most Americans believe they're above average intelligence [0] and you end up where a situation where most people believe that they personally would be worse off under a union.
I suspect that the HN demographic (and I include myself in this) is particularly prone to this sense of illusory superiority [1]. We're a demographic that is more likely than most to have grown up constantly receiving external validation that we're exceptional via good performance in school, getting into elite universities, occupying extremely high paying jobs, and so on.
I think it's important for people to realize that even if your employer treats you well, a union is also still important so that workers can have a seat in the table where decisions are made. Blanket trust in your employer is a bizarre offshoot of corporate kool-aid.
It's all very well to claim that unions are unnecessary for hyper-mobile, extremely well compensated and in high-demand, tech workers (however, that is at present; the future might be different), but the same is not so true for workers who rely on a single physical institution or location for their and their families livelihood. The threat of leaving, or simply moving offshore, enables employers of those workers to squeeze employees into longer hours or into poor working conditions because there is no collective means of pushing back against the employer, and because the employer doesn't have to care about them: they aren't at the decision making table at all.
It's not that Amazon creates nice working conditions now; it's that Amazon can change it arbitrarily without having to care about any of the employees.
> It's not that Amazon creates nice working conditions now; it's that Amazon can change it arbitrarily without having to care about any of the employees.
That said, it's also about the fact that Amazon currently has bad working conditions, across the board and even for tech workers!
I see how poorly public sector works with public sector unions (especially police, but also city government generally) and I wonder if private unions won’t be just as bad for organizations. Private companies do a lot of the work to enable modern living (e.g. producing food, handling logistics, manufacturing, etc). I get that corporate=bad, but do we want them to become more poorly run and inefficient than they are now?
Unions are sort of ok when there aren’t that many of them, because market forces demand some level of competitiveness, but what happens when union shops are the only or the majority option?
Again, just consider how well public sector unions work for society (ime: disastrously) and how that will work applied to the organizations that do the much of the work enabling modern society.
I guess another angle is: look at how dysfunctional politics have become, at how ~50% of Americans would gladly re-elect DJT post-January 6, and ask, do you want those people to hold the industrial economy hostage? Do we really think the average worker is able to produce better outcomes than management?
Maybe I’ve just been traumatized by the public sector unions. I don’t understand why people can’t make the connection between public sector unions, and the inevitable outcomes of private sector unions get too much traction.
Slavery is the most efficient organizational structure.
But the needs of the people producing the goods and services should take precedent over the desire for corporations to sell khaki pants at the lowest price.
I'm not certain how this isn't self-evident on it's face.
The citation would be every civilization which has used slave labor to produce things. I assume they weren't/aren't using slave labor because there are vastly more efficient options but they just didn't feel like doing those.
That a union can lead to negative outcomes is not an argument in favor of no-unions, I think, it's an argument that that union should be improved.
The basic gist of unions (or "collectives" or co-ops), that they offer employees and workers leverage and collective bargaining power to counteract arbitrary changes, still stands as necessary.
I also have experience with public sector unions, and though management might dislike them, I know very very few employees who would choose to be non-unionized instead. It's literally giving yourself up to the whims of your employer for no gain.
> I get that corporate=bad, but do we want them to become more poorly run and inefficient than they are now?
Do we want them to succeed at the cost of basic human dignity, or by dragging people into shitty working conditions? "inefficient" for whom? That human dignity should come at the expense of corporate profits is, I think, always a grotesque position to hold. We can mitigate that out by understanding how profit can co-exist with safe and good working conditions for everyone.
> That a union can lead to negative outcomes is not an argument in favor of no-unions, I think, it's an argument that that union should be improved.
Can't the same be said about companies that aren't non-unionized?
> It's literally giving yourself up to the whims of your employer for no gain.
You could just as well say you are giving yourself up to the whims of the union leadership, which is just a parallel management structure. Sure they are supposed to represent your interests, but they're also supposed to balance that against the interests of the company and what is practically possible. So is there really much of a difference?
I feel like the bigger problem is the exclusivity. Anytime there is only one option and competition disappears (whether for an employer or for a union), the incentives get corrupted. People shouldn't have to join a particular union. They should have the right to optionally do so, but being obligated means there's no competition incentive.
I have a vote if I'm in a union. I don't have a vote with my employer except to leave, and the process of finding a new job with a new employer is very long, painful, and uncertain.
You have to be careful with this line of reasoning.
In the absence of a social safety net, being "not skilled" or "not valuable" from the perspective of an employer easily becomes being not valuable as a person, they "deserve" what happens to them because they are at fault. When your employer is your source of healthcare, retirement, and livelihood, the idea that it can arbitrarily control the basis of your health and dignity is grotesque.
The line of reasoning seems fine when you are "skilled and valuable" from the perspective of your employer, but you might not be seen that way. Insisting that someone pays some price for that beyond simply not ending up wealthy is needlessly cruel. Despite our focus on it, there is more to life than being subservient to profit.
I know people that are skilled and valuable, but they still don't have the savings to fund their life for an extended period of time. And since they live in a country that doesn't pay reasonable unemployment money, they can only switch jobs when the jobs line up perfectly. Saying "this sucks, I quit" is not an option for them. They have family that relies on them. The employer nearly always has the better negotiation position.
When I leave a company the company loses out on a cog in their wheel. When a company leaves me, they also take from me a way to access healthcare, which is life-threatening given my medical profile. It's not really the same.
This law was passed to address employment gaps as you described.
If you can't get a new job in that time, then it's time to look for a ACA solution for unemployed workers (insurance premiums limited to a percentage of income) or apply for disability or some other issue depending on your circumstances.
Health care insurance is pretty well subsidized for the unemployed and the poor, the issue is that providers zap the middle class with unexpected bills and extremely high bills that are not covered by insurance. E.g. the old losing your savings because of a snake-bite problem, which can hit both the employed and the unemployed.
Back when I lived in SF, SF General famously refused to accept insurance from anyone. Their entire business model was to charge outrageous bills and give free care to the indigent. That's why you'd get these 100K bills for a broken ankle.
"Can't the same be said about companies that aren't non-unionized?"
No, for two reasons. First, a company always has far greater negotiating power than an individual worker. Second, the company's incentive is to spend as little money on workers as they can get away with, in order to maximize profits. As a result non-union jobs almost always pay less and offer fewer benefits than unionized jobs.
So even if a company could be convinced that they should not ask warehouse workers to pee in a bottle instead of taking the time to go to the bathroom, workers still come out on the losing end when they do not have a union.
"You could just as well say you are giving yourself up to the whims of the union leadership"
Workers have a say in union leadership decisions -- at a minimum they elect their leaders, but in most cases there are other ways for people to be involved. So unless the workforce also represents a significant fraction of ownership of the company (very unlikely for any company of significant size) they will have far less say in management decisions than in union decisions.
"People shouldn't have to join a particular union"
That is standard union-busting propaganda. It sounds great to give people a choice but the reality is that it reduces union representation and gives management an advantage over the workers by keeping them divided (among other things, it makes a strike far less effective and far less of a threat). The reason unions demand that the entire workforce be part of the union is to ensure that the union can negotiate with the company on equal footing -- two big parties negotiating, not one big party dealing with many small parties.
As an alternative place workers on the board. Have them be elected by the workers. A lot of places in Europe apparently do this. There's your non union workers representation and brings parity to negotiating power as well.
Except that we are not talking about a political club. We are not talking about an external group that imposes itself on the workers. Unions are formed by workers, the leaders are elected by the workers and drawn from the workforce, and unions serve the purpose of negotiating employment terms for the workers.
If you would rather have an argument about political clubs go find a forum where it is not wildly off-topic...
You've kind of shifted the debate towards over whether any large institution or organization should be allowed to finance or donate or "fund" political campaigns to the degree that they can at present in the US. I would say they shouldn't be able to. Many other liberal democracies do not allow it.
While I support unions in many cases, I would say that many of the arguments against a decision like the one made in Citizens United in favor of unfettered amounts apply to corporations and unions equally. I found Justice Stevens dissenting opinion extremely convincing compared to the concurring and majority opinion. He raised things like: they do not vote, they "survive" the lifespan of the normal human, they disrupt the spirit of democracy and the conceptual underpinnings of liberal democracy, and they manipulate speech into a concept of power and wealth rather than expression and communication.
So, obviously they're political, but in the sense that they are politically active. And so are corporations. Take away the ability to fund, donate to, or finance, politicians and political campaigns from corporations and unions, and you still end up with a situation where unions collectively protect workers from arbitrary change.
...and all of that is true, to a much greater extent, of the corporations whose workers unions represent. Do you think Amazon warehouse workers agree with the views of every politician whose campaign received a contribution from Amazon?
I am a big fan of taking money out of politics and banning campaign contributions from unions, corporations, PACs, lobbying firms, and basically any entity that is not an individual citizen. Unfortunately, until that happens, unions must engage with political campaigns to counter corporate political engagement. Corporations push for politicians to pass union-busting laws and to block pro-union laws; unions push for politicians to block such union-busting and to pass pro-union laws.
As for your other comment, I have to wonder whose interests you think unions are representing when they actually sit down to negotiate pay, benefits, work rules, etc. Do you think that when a union rep says, "No, we need a healthcare plan that has a lower deductible," they are doing so because some politician somewhere benefits from it? Do you think "power people" tell a union that, actually, employees should have their wages adjusted according to both their seniority and the local cost of living? The day-to-day business of a union is its workers' interest, just like the day-to-day business of a corporation is its shareholders' interest, regardless of campaign contributions or support for politicians. If the workers feel that their interests are poorly represented, they can vote for different union leaders; likewise, when shareholders feel that their interests are poorly represented they can elect a different board of directors.
What else did those politicians vote on? If your claim is that the union funded politicians because of their support for the invasion of Iraq, that is an extraordinary claim that demands extraordinary proof. Let's see your proof.
[Edit: At the end of the day, union leaders are elected by union members, and if the members do not like how their contract is negotiated they can elect different leaders or otherwise make their voices heard. Call it "bullying" if you want, but I fail to see how non-unionized workers are not being bullied by the companies they work for, given how one-sided negotiations between individual workers and companies are.]
Why does it matter why they funded them? Why are they funding them all all? What is going on the unions are funding one particular political viewpoint?
Read the post you replied to; unions fund politicians who are friendly toward unions because corporations fund politicians who are antagonistic toward unions (or, if we are being charitable, let's say "politicians who are friendly to corporate interests").
...because the corporations on the other side of the table would never support antisemites [0], white nationalists [1], fascists [2], or political parties that harbor and support such deplorable people [3]. Not that the workers have any say in who their employers make contributions to.
Look, I already explained this in my other comments, but you are just ignoring those and repeating anti-union propaganda. Either you are a troll or you are some kind of paid anti-union consultant; if you actually want an answer to your question, read what I wrote again.
You DO see that politics are inevitably tied up in the root cause/purpose of unions though, right? I mean, often it is nakedly political reasons that unions even come to exist in the first place, or this situation with Amazon, for example. Your explanation of what a union is could easily be rewritten for a society made up of constituents electing a candidate drawn from the community to represent them...
What nakedly political reasons do Amazon workers have? They were being told to use a plastic container instead of a bathroom so that they would spend more time working, they were being ordered to put their health and their coworkers' health at risk with inadequate COVID protection, and after more than a year complaining about their working conditions little action was taken (but the workers who complained the loudest were fired for complaining). Amazon management's only response to the effort to unionize in response to all that was to hire consultants to discourage unionization.
Yeah, you are right, the way union representation works is as democratic as political representation. Shareholders also vote on corporate leadership and typically elect other shareholders to the board. That does not make it "political" beyond the internal politics of the organizations involved, and trying to connect those internal politics to the politics involved with government is dishonest.
Don't B-Corps both (a) show working towards improvement without a union and (b) by their definition consider far more than profit maximization in their core mandate?
You didn't really refute their final point about mandatory union affiliation other than "but that would make it harder for the union". Their point about personal choice stands (and is valid).
Don't B-Corps work for the "public benefit?" That does not necessarily align with the needs or interests of the workers and the profit motive still exists. It is not hard to imagine a B-Corp working for the public interest while still paying its workers too little, offering limited benefits, or even engaging in various abuses of its workforce.
As to the point about mandatory union affiliation, as I said the entire purpose of a union is to allow workers to negotiate the terms of their employment on an equal footing with their company. For the reasons I gave mandatory union membership is necessary; personal choice serves to divide the workers and gives the company an advantage in every negotiation. To put it another way, managers do not have any "personal choice" on their side of the negotiation -- the company negotiates as a collective and the job of individual managers is to negotiate on behalf and for the benefit of the company. So if the workers exercise a "personal choice" to negotiate individually or collectively, the company, which always negotiates as a collective, will have an advantage in every negotiation.
So I suppose it really comes down to whether or not you think it is a problem for a company to have a huge advantage over its workers when negotiating the terms of employment. I personally think it is a problem to give such a large advantage to employers, but I can grant that it is a matter of personal values and worldview, so maybe your values are different. If you do assert that there is no particular problem with companies having such a large advantage, then to be intellectually honest you should not speak of a "market" for employment, because markets do not function effectively when they are so extremely one-sided (see e.g. the failure of the "market" for home ISP service).
I would go even further:there should be a free market of unions for workers and employees to choose from. If you believe that the virtues of markets are absolute, then having complete freedom for unions should be the norm: they would autoregulate themselves and be beneficials for the workers, the companies and the society. I genuinely believe that if you are against unions, you are more communist than capitalist.
There can never be a true free market for unions because there’s such a big network effect bonus from everyone in your company/industry being in the same union.
but many large companies have too deal with multiple Unions anyway. a metal mill for example will have to deal with the teamsters for their truck drivers, united steel worker for anyone working the floor, Service Employees International Union for security guards and janitor, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers for the electricians the service any of the electrical equipment, and any of a number of unions for the office staff.
> You could just as well say you are giving yourself up to the whims of the union leadership, which is just a parallel management structure. Sure they are supposed to represent your interests, but they're also supposed to balance that against the interests of the company and what is practically possible. So is there really much of a difference?
There's a difference: they are elected by the workers.
Unions are really, really different from collectives, or worker co-ops.
They have in common an implication that capital should not be the sole deciding factor in organizational decision making, but it is really weird to see them lumped together.
Kind of like saying jet engines (or bears, humans, or amphibians) all depend on breathing oxygen!
I only lumped them together because in America all forms of worker organization outside of the dominant system of employee subservience is deemed suspect in a hilariously uniform way. Farmers co-ops, for instance, have been described as "socialist," or "anti-competitive," or "inefficient" or "rent seeking" in the same way that unions have been.
But I do agree, for the sake of specificity, they should be considered separate.
I mean, we don't have to guess, a third of US workers were union members in the 50s and 60s. You can look at the real history of private sector unions and see how they impacted society. I think it's clearly been positive, but it's tough to summarize in a comment. One easy example is the Fair Labor Standards Act, which would not have passed when it did without decades of union activism including massive strikes.
Basically, I don't think the outcomes you're imagining are inevitable because we tried private sector unions for a very long time and those outcomes didn't happen.
I understand why you're traumatized by police unions, but I can just as easily say I don't understand why people can't make the connection between the decline of union membership and the increase of income inequality and all its disastrous effects.
Yeah, many of them were incredibly racist organizations focused on keeping black people from doing jobs. Easy when they cartelize labour and use violence when required.
Yeah they were fantastic for the majority because they allowed the majority to retain a tight grip on work.
If your preference matrix prefers that racist workers get better gigs while other workers don’t get work at all, fine. That isn’t my preference matrix.
That's why I said it's tough to summarize. Obviously there were many negatives including racism, organized crime, corruption, etc. I do not believe that racism or corruption is an inevitable outcome of unions, just like I don't think the positive outcomes are inevitable.
I think we’re on the same page as to the situation. You just believe that curation of the process and vigilance will ensure positive outcomes and I believe that that path is not anti-fragile and will eventually fail.
Unions' interests are not aligned with those of the company. If the company needs to shed a bunch of people or switch business models or _hire different talent_ the union will resist, because their job is to maximize the number and pay of jobs for their members.
The prime example of this being a problem right now is longshoremen in LA and Long Beach resisting automation.
The other issue with co-op like structures is that they don't provide enough upside for company founders and early employees. Founders need the chance to make big money or they won't take big risks (see: Europe for an example of this). One of the reasons the NYC rideshare co-op is failing is because no software engineer wants to work at some rando startup for a fraction of what they could make at Uber & Lyft.
Unions work when the work is highly commoditized and technological improvement is stagnant. I can't say that's the case for a huge percentage of jobs today.
> Unions' interests are not aligned with those of the company.
They are not aligned with those of management. They are aligned with those of the company almost by definition if the union is big enough, because a company is its workforce. If the CEO says the company wants to do something and 80% of the employees disagree, then in fact the CEO wants to do something and the company does not.
It's obviously not hard to find examples of unions causing negative impacts on society, just like it's not hard to find the same for corporate executives. The idea is to find the right balance. Is the the threat of inefficiency worse than the threat of worker abuse and inequality? At some point yes it will be, but I don't think we're anywhere close to that point yet.
The company is not its workforce. Every individual in the company would like more money for less work, but that's not in the company's best interest. If the company goes under because it's paying too much for too little, the employees can get new jobs elsewhere, whereas any money reinvested into the company will provide virtually no direct benefit to any individual employee. A company's interests can be aligned with employees, indeed typically you want good employee retention and high morale which can only come from creating a company where people want to work, but companies do not exist to maximize employment and employee compensation.
A company is nothing more than the collection of its employees. Without employees, the company does not exist. There may be some legal fiction around registration and taxes and similar, but make no mistake, without people those legal fictions cannot make plans, cannot advocate for itself, cannot change direction, _cannot exist_.
Saying a company is its employees, is like saying a bunch of dots randomly placed on a piece of paper would magically create a line. People playing a crucial part in a company, but without founders, well oiled processes and risks taken, these people would not be able to create what a company creates in terms of products and profit.
I think this is a fundamental philosophical difference that we're not going to resolve in a comment thread. For me "a company is its workforce" is almost tautological, I don't even know how to explain it further. I don't know how to argue with your objections either, it seems like you're agreeing. Founders are people, processes are designed by people, risks are taken by people. All these people make up the workforce. That's what a company is.
No, the workers have to have actual ownership (ie stocks) in the company. Work councils are no different from unions in that the members of the council are not working to maximize the success of the company but to maximize employment and wages (and these two things are not always aligned). Until incentives are aligned, there will always be an antagonistic relationship between workers and companies. Putting workers on the BoD just makes the conflict internal rather than external.
Of course this is easier said than done since most workers just want to get paid and would sell their equity stakes as soon as they vest. Designing good incentives is very hard.
Public sector unions are different from private sector unions for reasons I don't know but I can sense.
Just empirically, Finland/Sweden/Norway are famously pleasant places to live while also having very strong private sector unions, as does most of Western Europe.
>I see how poorly public sector works with public sector unions (especially police, but also city government generally) and I wonder if private unions won’t be just as bad for organizations.
I'm not a police officer, so can you provide some insight into how police unions work poorly for police officers (i.e. their members)?
>Do we really think the average worker is able to produce better outcomes than management?
Are we really that concerned with corporate/organizational outcomes, which seem to generally be doing pretty well? Maybe you can explain why we should be more concerned with corporate/organizational outcomes instead of worker outcomes?
>Maybe I’ve just been traumatized by the public sector unions.
I'm genuinely interested to hear more about this trauma, if you're able to share.
>I'm not a police officer, so can you provide some insight into how police unions work poorly for police officers (i.e. their members)?
How about police officers who don't want to be working next to another officer with a history of abuse and excessive violence complaint but can't be fired?
I assume you don't literally mean "working next to," but instead mean police unions prevent abusive and/or violent officers from being fired; but, as far as I'm aware, the bigger problem is that frequently arbitration hearings find in favor of officers that have been fired (and are obviously supported by their union) resulting in reinstatement. Police unions don't have direct control over arbitration though, so arbitration reform seems to be the more pressing concern.
Of course you could easily make the same hypothetical argument that police officers, accused of some type of misconduct, need support from somewhere merely in the name of due process (much in the same way that legal counsel is seen as a right).
Pointing to arbitration seems to be passing the buck. The unions had a hand in negotiating the arbitration rules and criteria.
Of course arbitration could result in just or unjust firing, but if you accept the premise that it currently too hard to fire bad cops, you have to look for what parties advocate for the position.
School teachers are an even more example of this, where it is essentially impossible for management to fire teachers. For example, California employs 300,000+ teachers and fires ~10 year.[1]
> Pointing to arbitration seems to be passing the buck. The unions had a hand in negotiating the arbitration rules and criteria.
And simply pointing to unions, as opposed to the numerous other parties involved or the process itself, is also passing the buck. Do they have a role in the process and its perceived failure? Obviously, yes, but can we blame police unions for the failures of those that they are negotiating against, or that implement arbitration?
> Of course arbitration could result in just or unjust firing, but if you accept the premise that it currently too hard to fire bad cops, you have to look for what parties advocate for the position.
I actually don't accept this premise of what is good from the perspective of police officers (or most police officers), i.e. are police officers generally more concerned with what you raised or more supportive of the job protections that enable it; and this framing was the original ask. It might be clear that "it [is] currently too hard to fire bad cops" from the perspective of the general public, but I'm not sure police officers, who the union protects, would agree - despite your framing. I think it's unreasonable to expect unions to protect every interest among its members.
The same is obviously true for your example regarding teachers...
>Obviously, yes, but can we blame police unions for the failures of those that they are negotiating against, or that implement arbitration?
This seems like a weird take, but maybe I don't understand. Are you saying that the other parties are equally at fault for failing to prevail in negotiation against the unions?
>I actually don't accept this premise of what is good from the perspective of police officers (or most police officers), i.e. are police officers generally more concerned with what you raised or more supportive of the job protections that enable it; and this framing was the original ask.
Most cops would believe it is too hard to fire other "bad cops" and simultaneously too easy to fire "good cops" like themselves.
I am not claiming that unions are a net detriment to police union workers, simply that there are tradeoffs.
>I think it's unreasonable to expect unions to protect every interest among its members.
By their very nature of representing all workers, some workers will benefit more than others, and some will see more detriments than others.
> This seems like a weird take, but maybe I don't understand. Are you saying that the other parties are equally at fault for failing to prevail in negotiation against the unions?
Well, first, we've not actually been discussing any specifics about arbitration. The most specific we've been is acknowledging that arbitration is a point of failure, and that police unions are involved in negotiating over the arbitration framework. Neither of those things points explicitly to police unions as a point of blame. For example, arbitration problems often stem from lack of evidence, lack of consistency in application, and lack of increased punishment for repeat problem officers; none of these problems are directly related to the contracts negotiated by police unions (obviously they are indirectly related). Blaming police unions, simply because they represent officers, which is their mandate, is an oversimplification.
Additionally, systems like arbitration, or the arbitration framework contract negotiation, is predicated on the idea that both interested parties represent their position adequately, in good faith, and without conflict of interests (among other things); this is not always the case, but is the side that is representing their position adequately and in good faith (i.e. police unions, making it harder to fire "good" officers) to blame? Another example, in other terms, many people are punished unnecessarily by judicial systems because of inadequate defense (i.e. ineffective assistance of counsel), but is the prosecutor always to blame?
It's not that other parties are necessarily at fault for failing in negotiation, but that assumes that those parties adequately represented their interests (in this case, one of those interests would be the public interest), which is certainly not a given.
> I am not claiming that unions are a net detriment to police union workers, simply that there are tradeoffs.
With this in mind, I guess I should've rephrased my initial question. I should've said "can you provide some insight into how police unions work poorly for police officers generally (i.e. their members)?" Obviously there are cases where police unions (and other unions) work poorly for individuals, but I meant where they work poorly for their members overall. This is why I think your reply fails to fit my intended framing and I was rejecting the premise from that perspective.
>Additionally, systems like arbitration, or the arbitration framework contract negotiation, is predicated on the idea that both interested parties represent their position adequately, in good faith, and without conflict of interests...
IT sounds like you are more familiar with the termination arbitration process, and I cede that there are likely processes that the non-union parties could implement to make the process more effective. I do wonder the degree to which these processes are also battlegrounds for conflict and negotiation. You bring up the interesting topic of equal footing adversarial systems, particularly around the adequacy of representation. The point I find interesting is defining what constitutes adequate representation, and the impact of the base rules of adversarial systems. System design can be uneven and determines the relative power of each party to impose costs, implications of loss, and 'skin in the game'. Such differences go beyond the competence of counsel, or even resources available.
A good example of system influence is negotiation between a prosecutor vs criminal defendant. For example, the law provides the prosecution huge systematic leverage in plea bargain negotiations. The defendant carries nearly all of the risk if negotiations fail, while the prosecution has relative risk and little at stake. I think there are analogs labor law, where there are a vast number of systemic factors involved in negotiations beyond union terms and the business cost to provide those terms (e.g. legal liability if an impasse is reached, restrictions on ability to source alternative labor, ect)
>With this in mind, I guess I should've rephrased my initial question. I should've said "can you provide some insight into how police unions work poorly for police officers generally (i.e. their members)?" Obviously there are cases where police unions (and other unions) work poorly for individuals, but I meant where they work poorly for their members overall. This is why I think your reply fails to fit my intended framing and was rejecting the premise from that perspective.
I think the simplest generally applicable failing is the retention of low performing or loose cannon officers. My understanding is that there are low performing individuals who are retained and make the job more difficult and less efficient for the rest of workers. There is a tradeoff between the ability of job security for all, and the ability to weed out such individuals that unions and their counterparties have been able to resolve. This does not preclude that the status quo may still present net benefit overall to general union members, or that the status quo is worse than the alternatives.
That said, I do think the vast majority of unions work well for most of their members. Living in California, I wholeheartedly wish that public union counterparties were more effective in negotiations, and more effective stewards of the public funds, and the work quality provided by the unions.
This makes a false equivalency between no unions or decades old, powerful, public sector unions.
Between those two ranges, the following nuance is important:
- will a union of $15/hr Amazon employees, in aggregate, have the same power in the short term as a union of police or firefighters.
- mid-term, will those union bosses for Amazon become as powerful as the PD/FD/teachers union bosses?
- Are there lessons learned from when a private sector union like the Teamsters under Hoffa got out of control?
The answers to all of those, and likely more, are necessary to evaluate the outcomes of letting Amazon unionize. And from there, ya interesting discussions start - well, we do use Amazon for a lot. What if the local warehouse strikes? And so on.
Another way to evaluate it is the gut feeling about this: when an Amazon contractor sprints to your door, drops off a package at 8pm, apologizes for "being late," and sprints away to the next apartment.
You keep saying that "public sector unions" are bad for society without giving any specific reasons why we should think so. What is so disastrous or traumatic about public sector unions?
From my perspective, unions come with plenty of problems, largely the same problems as any large organization, but on the whole workers are better off when they have a union that represents them. Society as a whole benefits when people do not have to put off seeing a doctor because their employer decided to give them a garbage health plan. Society as a whole benefits when the wealth gap is kept under control. Unions, historically and currently, negotiate compensation and benefits in ways that individual workers cannot -- because an individual negotiating with a large organization is at a disadvantage (and corporations know this, which is why they try to prevent workers from forming unions). Society benefits when the people we rely on to sort and deliver packages are not being told to pee in a bottle just to save some time. Unions have been particularly important in dangerous occupations where cutting corners or working multiple roles can result in death or permanent injuries -- which is why unions formed in the first place and why unions remain strong in certain industries (railroads, etc.).
Market forces work poorly when one side of the market has greater negotiating power and a greater ability to externalize costs than the other. Corporations have been known to rely on the welfare system instead of paying workers the minimum wages needed to live in a given region or provide effective health and retirement plans. Corporations work hard to avoid compensating workers for injuries and have faced few penalties for discrimination, harassment, and other abuses.
Almost all the complaints about public-sector unions are based on myths or at best unusual and extreme examples. Things that work well often go unreported, and unions typically work well.
That is relevant to the actual article, which is about Amazon warehouse workers unionizing in response to various abuses, including being told to pee in a bottle.
Yes, most corporations are not asking people to pee in a bottle. On the other hand, as I said, individual workers have little negotiating power with a corporation, even a relatively small corporation, and the difference between union and non-union jobs is clear. It is not at all unusual or extreme for corporations to give non-union workers lower wages and lower-quality benefits because the corporation has outsized power to negotiate the terms of employment with individual workers. Non-union workers are more vulnerable to abuses and abuses are more common among non-union workers -- not extreme abuses, but mundane abuses that generally go unreported.
There is a fundamental difference between public sector unions and private unions. Public sector unions often have outsized power with management because, with such a large number of employees, politicians want to curry their favor to get re-elected. It's basically as if public sector unions can negotiate from both sides of the table.
That dynamic doesn't exist with private sector unions because management has much more independent goals than the union does.
It feels like North America hates unions enough that we got the very worst of them. In Europe, there isn't the same societal conflict over unionization, but at the same time they aren't any more in love with the idea of industrial labour monopolies like the UAW than we are.
Where unionization works well, it's been because the government regulated to create competitive unions. In Germany, once a company unionizes, the union has special rights and privileges within the company, including access to the company's books and executive meetings. And things like union-busting are illegal. There's a lot of legislation in place to prevent the sort of abuses that North America has always seen with "company unions". But they can't join together with workers at other companies to form industrial labour monopolies either, so you still get market competition.
> Do we really think the average worker is able to produce better outcomes than management?
As a long time HN reader who works in a factory, I often hear the sentiment that management is clueless MBA's and workers are better off left on their own in WFH situations. Strange I see this is a highly upvoted comment. Maybe it has something to do with this:
> look at how dysfunctional politics have become, at how ~50% of Americans would gladly re-elect DJT post-January 6, and ask, do you want those people to hold the industrial economy hostage?
I'm just curious why you think "those people" don't deserve the right to fight for better wages, work life balance, better benefits just as the skilled tech class does. Does some of them voting for a politician you don't like have to do with this bias perhaps? Switching jobs to up your comp by 30% isn't an option for most of "those people". Unions are likely the only option they have to bring themselves leverage in negotiation.
Public employees also by and large receive better benefits and work boundaries. The just in time logistics model, for example relies on abusing employees. So yea, government isn't going to be as fast as amazon, because they treat there employees way more like humans.
Back before Covid, if I stopped during my work day and looked at my fellow colleagues, I’d pretty quickly come to the conclusion I don’t want 20-40% of them having a say in how the company is run. I can barely get them to reply to an email or think strategically beyond “let’s do what we did last time”.
If I asked them how we should be compensated as a group it would quickly be apparent they vote for the lowest common denominator.
Yeah, and for most people the answer is obviously yes, because as an individual they have close to zero leverage and as a group they have a fair amount. That may not be true for you specifically, but it is true for the majority of workers.
Isn't the idea to arrive at a salary that is fair to all parties? If you are good at negotiating, then perhaps you can be a voice for your workplace as a whole, instead of leaving the less gifted negotiators lacking. Even if you completely despise your co-workers, the idea and support for unions is about systematic worker influence rather that "everyone will get a raise".
In practice (I have experience with union labour), it depends. The older workers will usually step forward in negotiations and secure plum benefits for themselves, very often at the expense of younger workers.
Don't get me wrong - I think everyone does better with union negotiations (even managers to some extent - at least with a union contract, everyone's expectations are clear). But it definitely pays to be represented there at the negotiating table. It's a challenge to convince the younger workers to take an interest in this.
"The right question is - would my colleagues do a better job negotiating my compensation than I would?"
Probably. We often tell ourselves that we are better able to negotiate on our own behalf than anyone else, but the truth is that unionized workers usually receive better compensation than non-unionized workers.
To put this another way, if you said you were thinking about quitting, would your employer respond by offering a raise? If you were embroiled in some kind of scandal and had to either quit or be fired, would you receive a severance? If not, then you are not important enough to have any real leverage to negotiate your compensation. As an individual you are probably easy to replace, and certainly much easier to replace than the entire workforce -- which is why unions usually negotiate better compensation than individuals.
> The threat of leaving, or simply moving offshore, enables employers of those workers to squeeze employees into longer hours or into poor working conditions because there is no collective means of pushing back against the employer
Wouldn't the formation of a local union make an employer more likely to leave a location? Seems like it would increase the size of the cost differential between staying and leaving.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 236 ms ] threadHow do you know this though? Did you read a couple of articles about the poor working conditions and someone having to urinate in a bottle? Or have you actually gotten out and talked to some of the workers?
I've done the latter and my take (along with that of the workers I chatted with) has been that the media and press are doing what they do best, and exaggerating the issue or at the very least making rare circumstances appear to be the norm.
The media does this all the time depending on what kind of message/agenda they want to push. It's a form of deception. Reporting on a rare circumstance should require a disclaimer at the very top: "Note: This particular circumstance has only been recorded to happen 5 times nationwide" vs. falsely implying it happens all the time and falsely implying that the problem is endemic.
"Yet another lightning strike kills couple in Wyoming leaving behind 2 kids as politicians gridlocked on lightning policy."
"Yet another alcohol-related crash kills family of 5 as politicians gridlocked on alcohol policy."
"Yet another <tragic event> happens due to <guns/covid/abortion policy/drug war/etc.> as politicians gridlocked on <agenda> policy."
If the employers can unionize and the union works well, then good on them - they deserve to claw as much of the surplus value they produce back from their employer as they can negotiate.
In both cases former employees were more willing to discuss working conditions than current ones.
I've also spoken to Whole Foods employees. Those who were working at the time of the Amazon acquisition universally despise the new management, and those hired since the acquisition are indifferent. But everyone's afraid to actually discuss this inside the store -- they believe they're being closely monitored.
It would be interesting to see what difference retail employers are like, especially considering how fungible they are and how similar their profit margins are.
I would be curious to know how many workers you spoke with, relative to the number of employees in their warehouses. I would also be curious if the employees you spoke with all worked in the same facility/region, or if they were scattered throughout the country/world.
It's one thing to talk to a few people from the same spot, it's a completely different thing to speak to a good sampling of people that is more reflective of Amazon as a whole.
Actually, I don't wonder that, because I know what the answer is.
A friend of mine had to move to a new city on short notice when his wife got a new job. He applied at an Amazon warehouse while he applied to longer term jobs.
He expected the worse given all of the news stories, but then he started working there and it was fine. He said it was the most well-run warehouse job he’d had. Still a warehouse job, but nothing like the horror stories in the news.
Obviously only an n=1 anecdote and it’s entirely possible that other locations are worse, but it wasn’t the dystopian job that we’ve all read about in every news article about Amazon lately.
I'm not anti-union, but I'm amazed that so many people view them as 100% pure agents of good in all cases.
I genuinely don't think there's a single person on the planet who believes this.
Current day unions are fee bonanzas for lawyers paid for by the workers, the corporation, and the shareholders. The New Deal is often misinterpreted by current day leftists who incorrectly conflate their own views with FDR-era progressivism and the legal reality that it created. They like the fantasy idea of unions in the same way that we can admire the elven kingdom of Lothlorien, and do a lot to avoid perceiving the bureaucratized reality of contemporary unions in favor of nostalgia LARPing.
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/1/22463132/amazon-injury-rat...
Amazon delivery providers report injury rates even higher but don't get reported by amazon because they are technically hired by other companies.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/06/01/study-amazon-workers-injured...
> The SOC found that these DSPs reported injury rates of 14 and 13.3, respectively, per 100 workers. Additionally, the majority of injuries reported by DSPs in 2019 and 2020 were severe, requiring employees to take time off work to recover, the SOC said.
Comparing against the industry averages and against competitors is not the media exaggerating anything - its how you would understand what is normal or not.
edit: can't reply because hackernews is limiting my posting rate but for the poster below who asks maybe its because amazon is so good at reporting, the evidence suggests otherwise and there is no evidence to suggest they are reporting better.
It could be but the evidence suggests otherwise, so unless you have some evidence to the contrary all you're doing is conjecture. A higher injury rate is just be a higher injury rate unless there's evidence to suggest otherwise, which you don't seem to have.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/09/29/amazon-reportedly-downplayed...
>Amazon may also be underreporting warehouse worker injuries. A physician who inspected Amazon warehouses for the Occupational Safety and Health Administration found that workers at some Amazon facilities were being discouraged from reporting injuries and seeking outside medical care, according to Reveal.
>Another company initiative designed to curtail "lost-time injuries," or those requiring time off work, ended up preventing them from being counted as lost time, according to Reveal, directly contradicting Amazon executives' framing that such injuries were down due to enhanced safety measures.
With no evidence to support your claim, I don't see how to conclude anything other than a higher injury rate === more dangerous work conditions.
Barring better information, I can't really say one way or the other. Ot isn't a terribly unreasonable hypothesis- running warehouses is basically Amazon's core business model, paired with AWS.
Amazon will report a sprained ankle while small mom and pop warehouse operations won't report anything that didn't require an ambulance.
also see my edit to the post you replied to.
Trying to minimize the severity of the injuries is very questionable. You can't force someone to walk 10-20 miles a day after they injure their ankle. Reporting accidents resulting in missed work or doctor visits is completely normal, saying that Amazon follows the law and nobody else does is a little rich for me.
Different structures like union protection or looser production requirements provide a lot of slack. Even averaging the same production over months/years, it allows for working slowly or more carefully in situations that demand in it. Going slower because your back is feeling off is an escape valve; a fistful of Ibuprofen and hitting your hourly quota might mean a recordable injury 2 days later.
It all comes together to "yup, a union seems reasonable". Not a conviction that Amazon is the devil, nor do you need condemning evidence for collective bargaining to be a good idea.
What is it about trades unions that's so objectionable?
Is it the legal framework, union culture, being scared it means you'll make marginally less when your potential unicorn IPOs?
And are those objections inherent to unions, or just the way that unions are usually run when you've encountered them in the past?
As such, fully 50% of the country thinks that any measure that prevents them from being fully competitive in the worker-exploitation race-to-the-bottom that is business in most commodity markets (such as minimum wages, unions, more than 2wks mandatory vacation, etc.), will mean that they’ll fail to launch that phase of their career, and have to go back to flipping burgers.
Of course, 50% of Americans will never be small business owners. It is thought by some that large corporations push this vision as propaganda, because voters who think of themselves as small business owners, vote for things that end up benefitting these large business owners.
And government unions aren’t a concern to them either, because this type of person also could never imagine themselves working for the government.
(Few seem to have the inferential capacity to realize that they are nevertheless a shareholder of their government, and a marginal dollar saved in taxes is the same as a marginal dollar gained in dividends. One might in fact call taxes a dividend that’s usually net-negative.)
Would people object to prosecuting the Jan 6 perpetrators unless they feel police shouldn't be interfering in right wing attacks?
So sadly, someone with a 1099 job at Amazon or McDonalds is much more likely to have anti-union sentiment, because they are much more likely to have been exposed to a "union education" pamphlet or "educational" video at work.
I often see people promoting or defending unions who have never worked for/been a member of a union, which is interesting.
First, culturally, US Americans are much more individualist than most Europeans. (Obviously I am painting with broad strokes here, but it’s true in a general sense, on average). US Americans are somewhat less likely to feel solidarity or a sense of common cause with coworkers, and more likely to value the freedom to negotiate their contract on their own.
They are also much more likely to distrust large organizations and bureaucracy, sometimes to an extreme extent that would be puzzling to Western and Northern Europeans. Rather than being on their side, many would perceive the union as just one more large bureaucracy trying to screw them.
Third, there are many current examples of unions in the US that have made industries meaningfully less efficient. And highly-paid US Americans are less likely to see themselves as oppressed by their employers and more likely to see themselves as making common cause: after all, they have a common goal of making a lot of money. If my company, say, found it harder to fire low performers (an almost certain consequence of a union), it would be less efficient, make less profit, and be less able to pay me my current high salary.
The fight for employee rights probably had a lot of bloodshed and now that we generally enjoy decent protection, we have forgotten the need for a union.
All these factors add up.
As an English person I have to disagree, there's certainly a level of cynicism towards bureaucracy in much of our society. Just look at a lot of British comedy, The Thick of It, Yes Minister, The League of Gentlemen, swathes of Monty Python, The Office, and many other examples couldn't have come from a culture where there's genuine deference to institutions and authority.
Large unions become huge political contributors, and affect policy decisions to an extent that often outweighs any influence they could get without that money, and that rubs people the wrong way as well.
Many of them do not understand the need of a union because they don't work in a milieu to which unions were previously prominent, nor do they understand their purpose. They see anything that could affect the above conditions as unnecessary or "bad".
There has also been decades of corporate promoted anti-union propaganda. A simple google search shows that companies like Amazon will go to extremely intrusive lengths to control the narrative around unions by employing tactics like mass texting and communication campaigns, mandatory anti-union information meetings, etc. Do that enough and you get people who begin to earnestly support an anti-union sentiment, even if the union would help them.
If working conditions and pay suck, I much prefer a UBI so people can work less. It has none of the downsides of the below.
- I want my underperforming colleagues to be fired quickly. It's unfair and annoying that laggards are protected and free riding off their colleagues' (my) effort, and it leads to ineffective orgs.
- I don't want seniority or rank to be rewarded. It's unfair to young people (me) who are more competent and ambitious, and it leads to ineffective orgs.
- I want to negotiate individually because I believe I will make more money as an outperformer. I don't want a centralized handicapper to blunt my compensation.
- I don't like that unions are rent seeking in nature.
- I don't like that unions often are exploited by organized crime.
- I don't like that unions interfere in the broader political process and democracy via activism and political pressure (e.g look at the fact that the new EV subsidies will be going to everyone except Tesla, it's a perversion).
- I think people should be free to organize, but I don't like that the state grants special asymmetric powers to unions.
- I don't like especially public sector unions that I believe are doing significant damage to society broadly. For example police unions that shielded Chauvin after a large number of complaints.
I'm in the middle on unions, largely because research has shown that low skill labor is a monopsony market. The state needs to give asymmetric power to unions because employers have an incredible advantage in the low skill labor market. UBI would certainly help here, as we've seen during the pandemic, but I'm not sure it would be enough for people to decide that they just won't work anymore.
And you realize that there has been historically effort and money going into those exact fears being propagated and ingrained in the US worker's mind, because of strong anti-union company practices.
So that leaves us in a very weird place, where the pros and cons of unions become beliefs and opinions, but it should very much be something one can properly analyse from real data.
* The corruption in the unions gets a lot of press, now and historically.
* There are lots of stories where union workers can't be fired so they just sleep at their desk.
* We don't have good worker protections. There is no political appetite for it and also no strong public sentiment for it. This sounds counter intuitive but there is this attitude that people get what they deserve. "They could just get a different job", "No one is forcing them to work there". Even look at our vacation policies compare to Europe. There is a mentality that hard work (even being exploited) is a goal to strive for.
When the city bureaucracy cant’t process your permit application without an extra 3 months delay, and you wonder why they don’t speed up the process, or work a bit harder to handle things: thank the union.
When you can’t train more doctors, because it is in doctors interest to be scarce: thank the ~union~ guild.
When the factory shuts down, and the town loses its primary industry altogether because it can’t be productive with American workers fighting modernization: thank the union.
I don’t like unions because they do nothing but cause problems and make society less efficient for everyone. We already know how to make life better for workers, which is to run the economy hot (basically one of the few things Trump got right; economy was looking good for marginal workers ~2017-2019) and use labor regulations in the cases where that isn’t enough. Running the organizations inefficiently is not actually necessary to improve conditions for workers.
Doctor unions wield no power, thankfully. Source: wife’s a doc
Those organizations help foster that.
I wouldn’t say “they do nothing but” although they certainly can.
That said …
When companies hamper the efficiency of the markets, they get countered by antitrust laws.
When unions abuse their “market positions” to hamper the efficiency of the market, e.g. block automation thus make the rest of society pay the price in form of the resulting inefficiency just to benefit themselves, who is there to stop them? Serious question.
Here you'll hear the same things over and over:
"My (friend) was working at (someplace) and had to wait (2 hours | half a day) for a Union Electrician to plug in an electrical cord!" (Who cares! You got a free break! Enjoy the time slacking!)
"Unions are corrupt!" (Ignoring the difference of scale of corruption in the corporate world vs a union)
"I am paid because of my productivity! I am a Super-Worker! I resent the people who simply punch the clock at their CAREER." (Here you have wage slaves who were given a salary+perks and have been swindled into thinking that they have common ground with the Capitalist Class. Dividing workers into hierarchical groups is a old and great way to insure against any movement towards solidarity.)
and on and on... but in the US, every argument against any form of worker solidarity you'll see the complete absence of consideration of the abuses and priorities of the Capitalist Class. It's never workers vs ownership over here. It's workers versus the narcissistic individual "Top-Performer" (self-described).
This is exactly the mentality that demonstrates everything wrong with unions.
Now I sit on my ass all day long and write code. I make enough now that I'm in the class of worker that's allowed to slack and pretend I don't. Sometimes I slack and post to Hacker News in the middle of the day. No union needed!
There was an article on HN a couple of days back about how the ports of LA being some of the least efficient on the planet.
Much about why Unions are a plague on the economy can be found in there.
A Union in Europe and a Union in the US are not the same thing! They have the same name, but they are not the same type of organization.
That's why you are confused. European style Unions do not exist in the US.
One huge difference is in Europe the employee picks their union, while in the US there is a single union for the employer.
I feel in Europe people dream of having a cottage somewhere cute and pleasant, and just relaxing with good friends, having a drink at the pub, rinse and repeat. That's the "good life". But in America, people dream of being number #1, the best athlete, the richest man, the biggest CEO, etc. That's the "good life".
So in America you want to be the best richest most famous most accomplished, and Unions seem to go against that. You're looking to compete for the top spot, not find a happy compromise, your coworkers are competition.
In Europe, work stands in the way of your dream of leisure cottage life and caring to your hobbies. Unions seem to help with that, by amortizing the job/compensation, you can reclaim some of your time for yourself, have a better pension, work less hours, all things that'll help you have more free time.
I suspect that the HN demographic (and I include myself in this) is particularly prone to this sense of illusory superiority [1]. We're a demographic that is more likely than most to have grown up constantly receiving external validation that we're exceptional via good performance in school, getting into elite universities, occupying extremely high paying jobs, and so on.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6029792/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illusory_superiority
or teachers refusing to get vaccinated and prioritizing themselves over children
It's all very well to claim that unions are unnecessary for hyper-mobile, extremely well compensated and in high-demand, tech workers (however, that is at present; the future might be different), but the same is not so true for workers who rely on a single physical institution or location for their and their families livelihood. The threat of leaving, or simply moving offshore, enables employers of those workers to squeeze employees into longer hours or into poor working conditions because there is no collective means of pushing back against the employer, and because the employer doesn't have to care about them: they aren't at the decision making table at all.
It's not that Amazon creates nice working conditions now; it's that Amazon can change it arbitrarily without having to care about any of the employees.
That said, it's also about the fact that Amazon currently has bad working conditions, across the board and even for tech workers!
Unions are sort of ok when there aren’t that many of them, because market forces demand some level of competitiveness, but what happens when union shops are the only or the majority option?
Again, just consider how well public sector unions work for society (ime: disastrously) and how that will work applied to the organizations that do the much of the work enabling modern society.
I guess another angle is: look at how dysfunctional politics have become, at how ~50% of Americans would gladly re-elect DJT post-January 6, and ask, do you want those people to hold the industrial economy hostage? Do we really think the average worker is able to produce better outcomes than management?
Maybe I’ve just been traumatized by the public sector unions. I don’t understand why people can’t make the connection between public sector unions, and the inevitable outcomes of private sector unions get too much traction.
But the needs of the people producing the goods and services should take precedent over the desire for corporations to sell khaki pants at the lowest price.
Is it?
Citation needed, at the very least.
The citation would be every civilization which has used slave labor to produce things. I assume they weren't/aren't using slave labor because there are vastly more efficient options but they just didn't feel like doing those.
The basic gist of unions (or "collectives" or co-ops), that they offer employees and workers leverage and collective bargaining power to counteract arbitrary changes, still stands as necessary.
I also have experience with public sector unions, and though management might dislike them, I know very very few employees who would choose to be non-unionized instead. It's literally giving yourself up to the whims of your employer for no gain.
> I get that corporate=bad, but do we want them to become more poorly run and inefficient than they are now?
Do we want them to succeed at the cost of basic human dignity, or by dragging people into shitty working conditions? "inefficient" for whom? That human dignity should come at the expense of corporate profits is, I think, always a grotesque position to hold. We can mitigate that out by understanding how profit can co-exist with safe and good working conditions for everyone.
Can't the same be said about companies that aren't non-unionized?
> It's literally giving yourself up to the whims of your employer for no gain.
You could just as well say you are giving yourself up to the whims of the union leadership, which is just a parallel management structure. Sure they are supposed to represent your interests, but they're also supposed to balance that against the interests of the company and what is practically possible. So is there really much of a difference?
I feel like the bigger problem is the exclusivity. Anytime there is only one option and competition disappears (whether for an employer or for a union), the incentives get corrupted. People shouldn't have to join a particular union. They should have the right to optionally do so, but being obligated means there's no competition incentive.
In the absence of a social safety net, being "not skilled" or "not valuable" from the perspective of an employer easily becomes being not valuable as a person, they "deserve" what happens to them because they are at fault. When your employer is your source of healthcare, retirement, and livelihood, the idea that it can arbitrarily control the basis of your health and dignity is grotesque.
The line of reasoning seems fine when you are "skilled and valuable" from the perspective of your employer, but you might not be seen that way. Insisting that someone pays some price for that beyond simply not ending up wealthy is needlessly cruel. Despite our focus on it, there is more to life than being subservient to profit.
https://www.healthcare.gov/unemployed/cobra-coverage/
This law was passed to address employment gaps as you described.
If you can't get a new job in that time, then it's time to look for a ACA solution for unemployed workers (insurance premiums limited to a percentage of income) or apply for disability or some other issue depending on your circumstances.
Health care insurance is pretty well subsidized for the unemployed and the poor, the issue is that providers zap the middle class with unexpected bills and extremely high bills that are not covered by insurance. E.g. the old losing your savings because of a snake-bite problem, which can hit both the employed and the unemployed.
Back when I lived in SF, SF General famously refused to accept insurance from anyone. Their entire business model was to charge outrageous bills and give free care to the indigent. That's why you'd get these 100K bills for a broken ankle.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/7/18137967/er...
That's the big nightmare scenario for healthcare patients in the U.S.
No, for two reasons. First, a company always has far greater negotiating power than an individual worker. Second, the company's incentive is to spend as little money on workers as they can get away with, in order to maximize profits. As a result non-union jobs almost always pay less and offer fewer benefits than unionized jobs.
So even if a company could be convinced that they should not ask warehouse workers to pee in a bottle instead of taking the time to go to the bathroom, workers still come out on the losing end when they do not have a union.
"You could just as well say you are giving yourself up to the whims of the union leadership"
Workers have a say in union leadership decisions -- at a minimum they elect their leaders, but in most cases there are other ways for people to be involved. So unless the workforce also represents a significant fraction of ownership of the company (very unlikely for any company of significant size) they will have far less say in management decisions than in union decisions.
"People shouldn't have to join a particular union"
That is standard union-busting propaganda. It sounds great to give people a choice but the reality is that it reduces union representation and gives management an advantage over the workers by keeping them divided (among other things, it makes a strike far less effective and far less of a threat). The reason unions demand that the entire workforce be part of the union is to ensure that the union can negotiate with the company on equal footing -- two big parties negotiating, not one big party dealing with many small parties.
Unions are just another group of people trying to take the little bit of power workers have, to use it for their own ends.
If you would rather have an argument about political clubs go find a forum where it is not wildly off-topic...
And they obviously offer to represent your interests but really of course they end up representing their own and powerful people’s.
While I support unions in many cases, I would say that many of the arguments against a decision like the one made in Citizens United in favor of unfettered amounts apply to corporations and unions equally. I found Justice Stevens dissenting opinion extremely convincing compared to the concurring and majority opinion. He raised things like: they do not vote, they "survive" the lifespan of the normal human, they disrupt the spirit of democracy and the conceptual underpinnings of liberal democracy, and they manipulate speech into a concept of power and wealth rather than expression and communication.
So, obviously they're political, but in the sense that they are politically active. And so are corporations. Take away the ability to fund, donate to, or finance, politicians and political campaigns from corporations and unions, and you still end up with a situation where unions collectively protect workers from arbitrary change.
I am a big fan of taking money out of politics and banning campaign contributions from unions, corporations, PACs, lobbying firms, and basically any entity that is not an individual citizen. Unfortunately, until that happens, unions must engage with political campaigns to counter corporate political engagement. Corporations push for politicians to pass union-busting laws and to block pro-union laws; unions push for politicians to block such union-busting and to pass pro-union laws.
As for your other comment, I have to wonder whose interests you think unions are representing when they actually sit down to negotiate pay, benefits, work rules, etc. Do you think that when a union rep says, "No, we need a healthcare plan that has a lower deductible," they are doing so because some politician somewhere benefits from it? Do you think "power people" tell a union that, actually, employees should have their wages adjusted according to both their seniority and the local cost of living? The day-to-day business of a union is its workers' interest, just like the day-to-day business of a corporation is its shareholders' interest, regardless of campaign contributions or support for politicians. If the workers feel that their interests are poorly represented, they can vote for different union leaders; likewise, when shareholders feel that their interests are poorly represented they can elect a different board of directors.
And powerful people in unions can have regressive ideas. For example pay based on seniority is ageist.
At the end of the day a union is a group of bullies like any other.
[Edit: At the end of the day, union leaders are elected by union members, and if the members do not like how their contract is negotiated they can elect different leaders or otherwise make their voices heard. Call it "bullying" if you want, but I fail to see how non-unionized workers are not being bullied by the companies they work for, given how one-sided negotiations between individual workers and companies are.]
Imagine if for example you were a Green or a Liberal. The idea of funding Labour could be seriously offensive to you.
[0] https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/marjorie-tay...
[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/members-of-congress/steven-a-kin...
[2] https://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/contributors?id=n00023864
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republican_Party_(United_State...
Yeah, you are right, the way union representation works is as democratic as political representation. Shareholders also vote on corporate leadership and typically elect other shareholders to the board. That does not make it "political" beyond the internal politics of the organizations involved, and trying to connect those internal politics to the politics involved with government is dishonest.
The workers don’t, but the union leaders do.
That’s the point.
You didn't really refute their final point about mandatory union affiliation other than "but that would make it harder for the union". Their point about personal choice stands (and is valid).
As to the point about mandatory union affiliation, as I said the entire purpose of a union is to allow workers to negotiate the terms of their employment on an equal footing with their company. For the reasons I gave mandatory union membership is necessary; personal choice serves to divide the workers and gives the company an advantage in every negotiation. To put it another way, managers do not have any "personal choice" on their side of the negotiation -- the company negotiates as a collective and the job of individual managers is to negotiate on behalf and for the benefit of the company. So if the workers exercise a "personal choice" to negotiate individually or collectively, the company, which always negotiates as a collective, will have an advantage in every negotiation.
So I suppose it really comes down to whether or not you think it is a problem for a company to have a huge advantage over its workers when negotiating the terms of employment. I personally think it is a problem to give such a large advantage to employers, but I can grant that it is a matter of personal values and worldview, so maybe your values are different. If you do assert that there is no particular problem with companies having such a large advantage, then to be intellectually honest you should not speak of a "market" for employment, because markets do not function effectively when they are so extremely one-sided (see e.g. the failure of the "market" for home ISP service).
There's a difference: they are elected by the workers.
They have in common an implication that capital should not be the sole deciding factor in organizational decision making, but it is really weird to see them lumped together.
Kind of like saying jet engines (or bears, humans, or amphibians) all depend on breathing oxygen!
But I do agree, for the sake of specificity, they should be considered separate.
Basically, I don't think the outcomes you're imagining are inevitable because we tried private sector unions for a very long time and those outcomes didn't happen.
I understand why you're traumatized by police unions, but I can just as easily say I don't understand why people can't make the connection between the decline of union membership and the increase of income inequality and all its disastrous effects.
E.g. https://www.sfgate.com/sf-culture/article/charlie-walker-mov...
Yeah they were fantastic for the majority because they allowed the majority to retain a tight grip on work.
If your preference matrix prefers that racist workers get better gigs while other workers don’t get work at all, fine. That isn’t my preference matrix.
Hope that’s accurate.
The prime example of this being a problem right now is longshoremen in LA and Long Beach resisting automation.
The other issue with co-op like structures is that they don't provide enough upside for company founders and early employees. Founders need the chance to make big money or they won't take big risks (see: Europe for an example of this). One of the reasons the NYC rideshare co-op is failing is because no software engineer wants to work at some rando startup for a fraction of what they could make at Uber & Lyft.
Unions work when the work is highly commoditized and technological improvement is stagnant. I can't say that's the case for a huge percentage of jobs today.
They are not aligned with those of management. They are aligned with those of the company almost by definition if the union is big enough, because a company is its workforce. If the CEO says the company wants to do something and 80% of the employees disagree, then in fact the CEO wants to do something and the company does not.
It's obviously not hard to find examples of unions causing negative impacts on society, just like it's not hard to find the same for corporate executives. The idea is to find the right balance. Is the the threat of inefficiency worse than the threat of worker abuse and inequality? At some point yes it will be, but I don't think we're anywhere close to that point yet.
A company is its people. Full stop.
Solvable via work councils with reserved seats on the BoD, similar to the German Betriebsräte.
Of course this is easier said than done since most workers just want to get paid and would sell their equity stakes as soon as they vest. Designing good incentives is very hard.
Just empirically, Finland/Sweden/Norway are famously pleasant places to live while also having very strong private sector unions, as does most of Western Europe.
I'm not a police officer, so can you provide some insight into how police unions work poorly for police officers (i.e. their members)?
>Do we really think the average worker is able to produce better outcomes than management?
Are we really that concerned with corporate/organizational outcomes, which seem to generally be doing pretty well? Maybe you can explain why we should be more concerned with corporate/organizational outcomes instead of worker outcomes?
>Maybe I’ve just been traumatized by the public sector unions.
I'm genuinely interested to hear more about this trauma, if you're able to share.
How about police officers who don't want to be working next to another officer with a history of abuse and excessive violence complaint but can't be fired?
Of course you could easily make the same hypothetical argument that police officers, accused of some type of misconduct, need support from somewhere merely in the name of due process (much in the same way that legal counsel is seen as a right).
Of course arbitration could result in just or unjust firing, but if you accept the premise that it currently too hard to fire bad cops, you have to look for what parties advocate for the position.
School teachers are an even more example of this, where it is essentially impossible for management to fire teachers. For example, California employs 300,000+ teachers and fires ~10 year.[1]
https://www.mercurynews.com/2013/01/25/firing-a-tenured-teac...
And simply pointing to unions, as opposed to the numerous other parties involved or the process itself, is also passing the buck. Do they have a role in the process and its perceived failure? Obviously, yes, but can we blame police unions for the failures of those that they are negotiating against, or that implement arbitration?
> Of course arbitration could result in just or unjust firing, but if you accept the premise that it currently too hard to fire bad cops, you have to look for what parties advocate for the position.
I actually don't accept this premise of what is good from the perspective of police officers (or most police officers), i.e. are police officers generally more concerned with what you raised or more supportive of the job protections that enable it; and this framing was the original ask. It might be clear that "it [is] currently too hard to fire bad cops" from the perspective of the general public, but I'm not sure police officers, who the union protects, would agree - despite your framing. I think it's unreasonable to expect unions to protect every interest among its members.
The same is obviously true for your example regarding teachers...
This seems like a weird take, but maybe I don't understand. Are you saying that the other parties are equally at fault for failing to prevail in negotiation against the unions?
>I actually don't accept this premise of what is good from the perspective of police officers (or most police officers), i.e. are police officers generally more concerned with what you raised or more supportive of the job protections that enable it; and this framing was the original ask.
Most cops would believe it is too hard to fire other "bad cops" and simultaneously too easy to fire "good cops" like themselves.
I am not claiming that unions are a net detriment to police union workers, simply that there are tradeoffs.
>I think it's unreasonable to expect unions to protect every interest among its members.
By their very nature of representing all workers, some workers will benefit more than others, and some will see more detriments than others.
Well, first, we've not actually been discussing any specifics about arbitration. The most specific we've been is acknowledging that arbitration is a point of failure, and that police unions are involved in negotiating over the arbitration framework. Neither of those things points explicitly to police unions as a point of blame. For example, arbitration problems often stem from lack of evidence, lack of consistency in application, and lack of increased punishment for repeat problem officers; none of these problems are directly related to the contracts negotiated by police unions (obviously they are indirectly related). Blaming police unions, simply because they represent officers, which is their mandate, is an oversimplification.
Additionally, systems like arbitration, or the arbitration framework contract negotiation, is predicated on the idea that both interested parties represent their position adequately, in good faith, and without conflict of interests (among other things); this is not always the case, but is the side that is representing their position adequately and in good faith (i.e. police unions, making it harder to fire "good" officers) to blame? Another example, in other terms, many people are punished unnecessarily by judicial systems because of inadequate defense (i.e. ineffective assistance of counsel), but is the prosecutor always to blame?
It's not that other parties are necessarily at fault for failing in negotiation, but that assumes that those parties adequately represented their interests (in this case, one of those interests would be the public interest), which is certainly not a given.
> I am not claiming that unions are a net detriment to police union workers, simply that there are tradeoffs.
With this in mind, I guess I should've rephrased my initial question. I should've said "can you provide some insight into how police unions work poorly for police officers generally (i.e. their members)?" Obviously there are cases where police unions (and other unions) work poorly for individuals, but I meant where they work poorly for their members overall. This is why I think your reply fails to fit my intended framing and I was rejecting the premise from that perspective.
IT sounds like you are more familiar with the termination arbitration process, and I cede that there are likely processes that the non-union parties could implement to make the process more effective. I do wonder the degree to which these processes are also battlegrounds for conflict and negotiation. You bring up the interesting topic of equal footing adversarial systems, particularly around the adequacy of representation. The point I find interesting is defining what constitutes adequate representation, and the impact of the base rules of adversarial systems. System design can be uneven and determines the relative power of each party to impose costs, implications of loss, and 'skin in the game'. Such differences go beyond the competence of counsel, or even resources available.
A good example of system influence is negotiation between a prosecutor vs criminal defendant. For example, the law provides the prosecution huge systematic leverage in plea bargain negotiations. The defendant carries nearly all of the risk if negotiations fail, while the prosecution has relative risk and little at stake. I think there are analogs labor law, where there are a vast number of systemic factors involved in negotiations beyond union terms and the business cost to provide those terms (e.g. legal liability if an impasse is reached, restrictions on ability to source alternative labor, ect)
>With this in mind, I guess I should've rephrased my initial question. I should've said "can you provide some insight into how police unions work poorly for police officers generally (i.e. their members)?" Obviously there are cases where police unions (and other unions) work poorly for individuals, but I meant where they work poorly for their members overall. This is why I think your reply fails to fit my intended framing and was rejecting the premise from that perspective.
I think the simplest generally applicable failing is the retention of low performing or loose cannon officers. My understanding is that there are low performing individuals who are retained and make the job more difficult and less efficient for the rest of workers. There is a tradeoff between the ability of job security for all, and the ability to weed out such individuals that unions and their counterparties have been able to resolve. This does not preclude that the status quo may still present net benefit overall to general union members, or that the status quo is worse than the alternatives.
That said, I do think the vast majority of unions work well for most of their members. Living in California, I wholeheartedly wish that public union counterparties were more effective in negotiations, and more effective stewards of the public funds, and the work quality provided by the unions.
Between those two ranges, the following nuance is important:
- will a union of $15/hr Amazon employees, in aggregate, have the same power in the short term as a union of police or firefighters.
- mid-term, will those union bosses for Amazon become as powerful as the PD/FD/teachers union bosses?
- Are there lessons learned from when a private sector union like the Teamsters under Hoffa got out of control?
The answers to all of those, and likely more, are necessary to evaluate the outcomes of letting Amazon unionize. And from there, ya interesting discussions start - well, we do use Amazon for a lot. What if the local warehouse strikes? And so on.
Another way to evaluate it is the gut feeling about this: when an Amazon contractor sprints to your door, drops off a package at 8pm, apologizes for "being late," and sprints away to the next apartment.
From my perspective, unions come with plenty of problems, largely the same problems as any large organization, but on the whole workers are better off when they have a union that represents them. Society as a whole benefits when people do not have to put off seeing a doctor because their employer decided to give them a garbage health plan. Society as a whole benefits when the wealth gap is kept under control. Unions, historically and currently, negotiate compensation and benefits in ways that individual workers cannot -- because an individual negotiating with a large organization is at a disadvantage (and corporations know this, which is why they try to prevent workers from forming unions). Society benefits when the people we rely on to sort and deliver packages are not being told to pee in a bottle just to save some time. Unions have been particularly important in dangerous occupations where cutting corners or working multiple roles can result in death or permanent injuries -- which is why unions formed in the first place and why unions remain strong in certain industries (railroads, etc.).
Market forces work poorly when one side of the market has greater negotiating power and a greater ability to externalize costs than the other. Corporations have been known to rely on the welfare system instead of paying workers the minimum wages needed to live in a given region or provide effective health and retirement plans. Corporations work hard to avoid compensating workers for injuries and have faced few penalties for discrimination, harassment, and other abuses.
Almost all the complaints about public-sector unions are based on myths or at best unusual and extreme examples. Things that work well often go unreported, and unions typically work well.
Haven't you just done the same with complaints about corporations?
"Society benefits when the people we rely on to sort and deliver packages are not being told to pee in a bottle just to save some time."
Is this really the norm in corporate America, or "an unusual and extreme example"?
Yes, most corporations are not asking people to pee in a bottle. On the other hand, as I said, individual workers have little negotiating power with a corporation, even a relatively small corporation, and the difference between union and non-union jobs is clear. It is not at all unusual or extreme for corporations to give non-union workers lower wages and lower-quality benefits because the corporation has outsized power to negotiate the terms of employment with individual workers. Non-union workers are more vulnerable to abuses and abuses are more common among non-union workers -- not extreme abuses, but mundane abuses that generally go unreported.
That dynamic doesn't exist with private sector unions because management has much more independent goals than the union does.
Where unionization works well, it's been because the government regulated to create competitive unions. In Germany, once a company unionizes, the union has special rights and privileges within the company, including access to the company's books and executive meetings. And things like union-busting are illegal. There's a lot of legislation in place to prevent the sort of abuses that North America has always seen with "company unions". But they can't join together with workers at other companies to form industrial labour monopolies either, so you still get market competition.
As a long time HN reader who works in a factory, I often hear the sentiment that management is clueless MBA's and workers are better off left on their own in WFH situations. Strange I see this is a highly upvoted comment. Maybe it has something to do with this:
> look at how dysfunctional politics have become, at how ~50% of Americans would gladly re-elect DJT post-January 6, and ask, do you want those people to hold the industrial economy hostage?
I'm just curious why you think "those people" don't deserve the right to fight for better wages, work life balance, better benefits just as the skilled tech class does. Does some of them voting for a politician you don't like have to do with this bias perhaps? Switching jobs to up your comp by 30% isn't an option for most of "those people". Unions are likely the only option they have to bring themselves leverage in negotiation.
If I asked them how we should be compensated as a group it would quickly be apparent they vote for the lowest common denominator.
You don't think that their answer to "how much should we be paid" would be more directionally aligned with yours than with your employer's answer?
The right question is - would my colleagues do a better job negotiating my compensation than I would?
Don't get me wrong - I think everyone does better with union negotiations (even managers to some extent - at least with a union contract, everyone's expectations are clear). But it definitely pays to be represented there at the negotiating table. It's a challenge to convince the younger workers to take an interest in this.
Probably. We often tell ourselves that we are better able to negotiate on our own behalf than anyone else, but the truth is that unionized workers usually receive better compensation than non-unionized workers.
To put this another way, if you said you were thinking about quitting, would your employer respond by offering a raise? If you were embroiled in some kind of scandal and had to either quit or be fired, would you receive a severance? If not, then you are not important enough to have any real leverage to negotiate your compensation. As an individual you are probably easy to replace, and certainly much easier to replace than the entire workforce -- which is why unions usually negotiate better compensation than individuals.
Wouldn't the formation of a local union make an employer more likely to leave a location? Seems like it would increase the size of the cost differential between staying and leaving.