Ohh, hrmm, ya know we have so many warehouses and this one simply isn't profitable. We need to close this warehouse as part of a cost cutting measure. It is sad everyone is out of a job.
> Even if Starbucks and Chipotle are eventually found to have committed unfair labor practices by closing stores, the legal and financial repercussions for the companies will be comparatively light.
> “The nature of our labor law now, it actually makes financial sense for companies to break the union law, stifle the drive, and be found guilty,” says Joe McCartin, a history professor at Georgetown University and the co-author of Labor in America: A History. “The most they have to do is pay these employees back wages minus whatever they’ve earned in the intervening time” if the employees got other jobs after the stores closed. “That’s hardly much of a penalty.”
I will never understand why there isn't something on the order of an article of the Constitution requiring the penalty for any criminal act must meet or exceed the unlawful profits generated thereby.
Because the ones who have the power to make and change the rules are the ones who would lose out from making them stricter. They're hardly going to legislate against themselves.
I lost one of my most convenient Starbucks because it unionized and shortly after that became suddenly and completely unrelatedly needed to close because it had become unprofitable. I assume it'll be back in a few months because the economy has recovered and it looks like a good place to open a nice, union-free Starbucks.
Is it common to have single location unions? Seems to me that this does not add very much negotiation power for the workers.
In my country large unions negotiate for a whole sector, so all café workers regardless of their employer are covered by a collective agreement. You don't even have to be a member for the negotiated benefits (such as minimum wage) to apply: the collective agreement covers everyone in the sector nonetheless.
What I don't get is why these unions need to be limited to a single shop/warehouse/whatever. Why not have a statewide/country-wide union instead? That's how you force a company to talk to you, by ensuring they cannot go around you.
I thought the US used to have profession-based unions, such as the teamsters union, who can have members all over the US?
US still have that, but it’s way easier to bootstrap a small union then expand, as intense lobbying resource (money) is required to have a successful union drive.
Besides, the union ought to be able to fund at least one coffee shop, and show Starbucks how to do it right. Banks also offer loans to start businesses, if the applicant has a decent business plan.
I believe you don't need that much money, actually. The SBA has small business loans that you can get at great leverage. If they wanted, they probably could pool together the money and pull it off for a smaller location. But the practice of the matter is that a non-Starbucks coffee shop is a different proposition entirely to a Starbucks.
Access to the installed app base, the brand, the commercial RE management changes the economics of things.
SalmoShalazar, please explain to the group how Walter Bright's posts are "incredibly juvenile and disingenuous". Is it simply because you disagree with his assessment?
No, they couldn't. Starbucks are not franchises. The corporations owns them, with some complicated exceptions around some Starbucks-branded grocery and bookstores. Starbucks didn't "sell" the business off. It just fired everyone and closed the doors.
And what happens to the retail space with the closed doors? It gets leased to the next business that wants it. (It's also pretty likely that Starbucks outlets are leased space, not owned.) The next outfit leasing it will find it already configured to be a coffee shop - just change the signage, get some equipment, and open as another coffee shop. Starbucks might even cut a deal to take over their equipment.
Hopefully it was replaced by a coffee shop selling half decent coffee and owned by a small business owner locally and you got to enjoy some nice coffee
Starbucks profit for 2022 was $22 billion. A 7% increase over the prior year. That leaves loads of room for unions to negotiate higher salaries and better benefits before there is any risk of that happening.
And unions tend to not drive companies out of business because then there is no need for the union anymore and no paychecks to take union fees from.
The shops are obviously highly profitable. Which is my point. More of that profit could be shared with the workers who generate it. And they would still be profitable. Your scary "unprofitable" is not in sight even after significant raises to workers.
Then they need to be better at business. In american people are not unionizing to slack off, most of them just want better working conditions. If you're company cannot operate without exploiting people, maybe its time to change the business model.
I hope you are joking because this is the worst take I've seen in forever on this topic. It doesn't even address my original point. If the only profitable Starbucks outlet is the ones with bad working conditions then perhaps they shouldn't exist.
You seem to be moralizing them, eg "then perhaps they shouldn't exist," "maybe its time to change the business model", etc. You said "then they need to be better at business" and when they changed their business model to be "better at business" by closing unprofitable stores, it's like you said, "no, not like that" as it sounds like you don't like how they took your advice. The fact is closing unprofitable branches is how many companies make money, they don't run a charity after all.
You again don't engage with my point. If the only profitable stores are exploitative why would society tolerate this? This is not a market issue, it is indeed a moral issue.
But corporations don't have morals, so they'll continue to do as they do currently. If you want to change that, you should have legislation that makes them abide by whatever you think is immoral. Don't confuse your moral standard with that of amoral corporations who are incentivized to simply make as much money as possible.
Hi, and welcome to Hacker News. For good reason, comments like this don't do well here. Please read the site guidelines, and use them to make comments that encourage curious discussion. :)
For those following this saga, today the Phoenix office of the National Labor Relations Board adopted the recommendations the hearing officer made back in September (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32690937). To recap: Amazon alleged that the union made illegal bribes (including distributing marijuana) and that the Brooklyn office put a thumb on the scale during the election (which is why the case was transferred to Phoenix). Today, the NLRB certified the election over those objections, which was the expected outcome.
The next step is an appeal to the full NLRB board, which like the regional office is unlikely to be receptive (particularly for the charge against the NLRB itself). Only after that can Amazon appeal to a neutral body - the Federal Courts of Appeal.
It has now been a little over 9 months since the election took place and it could easily take another year before the legal process runs its course.
In all seriousness, it's messed up how strongly Amazon can fight this, and not have to put up until they've wasted more money than it would've cost them to just accept it in the first place.
As I remember it, which may be a little fuzzy, Kroger warehousing and distribution was unionized. They got around negotiating with them by outsourcing to a third party, non union warehousing company, called Zenith, and promptly sold off their own distribution centers to...Zenith. It read a lot like they just made a sweetheart deal to get rid of the union.
This kind of thing is technically illegal, but happens all the time. We should definitely expect to see lots of tactics that are technically illegal as companies fight back against this unionization push. But it does mean giving up direct control of their warehouse operations, which strikes me as unlikely, at least with only one shop having unionized so far.
That's the fun/smart/evil thing about how Kroger did this...Zenith was regional. Only 2 or 3 state area, KY/IN/OH if I remember right. And Kroger due to its sheer size became their only customer. Or perhaps the company didn't even exist prior, it's hard to actually research. So of course, in reality, Kroger still has direct control.
They can do this in every region, of course, to keep any company from getting too big for its britches.
This is part of what Europe has Transfer of Undertakings laws for. Transfer of Undertakings laws basically say if an employee was working for X, and then supposedly they're now working for Y, but actually it's the same fucking job, then since those employees are doing the same job that's the same contract, any rules about that contract still apply.
Under Transfer rules, Unions transfer too, unless the "same fucking job" is actually integrated somehow as might happen after a merger, so that the group of employees being represented by the union are just some fraction of an otherwise indistinguishable workforce. So the warehouse situation wouldn't trigger that, but e.g. if Walmart bought Kroger, closed all the Kroger stores, but kept 10% of the workers, moving them to a nearby Walmart as employees of that store, those employees lose their distinct nature and any Kroger union doesn't come with them.
If you sell a facility to another company, under labor law that company is a "successor" and is inherits the union & contract. I haven't researched but I suspect Kroger went a little further than just selling their warehouse, e.g. they probably actually shut down a facility and started using a 3rd party with a different facility with new staff.
It's hard to find news on it, the whole thing was shady and the union was -very- angry. They were actively telling Kroger employees to go apply at Zenith.
The US now has nearly a century of union activity. Over that almost-century, labourers have been completely rolled by people who own capital, who have become fabulously wealthy.
I don't think the unionists have assessed the situation correctly. A strategy of co-ops and legal structures to let workers take on more economic risk (like what shares allow) would have gotten much better long term results.
A union is basically a 2 step plan - first, identify the person willing to pay you the most. Second, pick a fight with them. This might be a locally OK strategy, but it isn't workable in the long term.
Except that unions typically form the other way round: workers feeling aggrieved by their employers unionize to apply leverage to improve things. You're probably right that the lot of workers as a whole could be done better, but for an individual that's irrelevant.
Employers often treat their employees as adversaries. Thus the need for unions in those situations...
You appear to be placing blame for the situation on the party with less power in the situation, the employee, rather than the one with more power, the employer. this is a bit silly!
Consider the union negotiating tactics. They don't negotiate, they demand. They carry signs and verbally attack the company. They threaten. They offer nothing in return. It's entirely framed as win-lose by the union. How do they expect the company to want to deal with them?
Consider how businesses negotiate. Each side offers something in return for better terms. They come to a mutually agreeable win-win solution.
That's what I do when I've negotiated with employers. I frame it as a friendly win-win negotiation, and both parties go away pleased with the result.
Uh, have you just not noticed employer tactics? They don't care about it being win-win.
You clearly have extreme anti-union bias to the point you havent noticed how incredibly employee hostile the companies that unions form around are, to an absurd extent. It's gone so far that the magnitude of a win for the employer is so much higher than for the employee that the goal posts have shifted to absurdity.
You're still putting the onus for improving the situation on the party with far, far less power. Which makes no sense.
Sure, for physical goods that may be somewhat true, but LTV presupposes that labor itself has a value beyond what the market would pay, which does not seem to be the case, in capitalism or in other previous systems of mercantile trade.
If a union is a business that sells labor how is it not win-win for companies to be able to buy labor?
That's also a reductive view of unions. The 40 hour work week, weekends off, healthcare, and banning child labor wouldn't have resulted from your characterization.
What tactics do businesses use? Can you name any that you are against?
> The 40 hour work week, weekends off, healthcare, and banning child labor wouldn't have resulted from your characterization.
Healthcare benefits came about in WW2 because Roosevelt instituted a wage freeze. Companies could not offer higher wages to get the best workers, so they found a workaround by offering health care benefits. It turned out to be a big win for workers because the cost of those benefits was pre-tax, rather than post-tax. So it stuck.
Children are not freely consenting adults, which is why they get special legal protection. That's irrelevant to what we're discussing here.
You're disingenuously leaving out the massive role unions played in the 1940s and 1950s in negotiating far better healthcare benefits.
Please explain how you would negotiate as an individual to get better healthcare benefits from Amazon when the benefits are provided as the same exact package to all employees. You can't. It never happens. Give even one example of an employee at a large company that has an individualized healthcare benefits package.
> Children are not freely consenting adults, which is why they get special legal protection. That's irrelevant to what we're discussing here.
And yet many businesses used child labor. These are the business you are claiming negotiate in good faith and fairly.
> Allow me to repeat: Children are not freely consenting adults, which is why they get special legal protection.
You avoided the question about why businesses were fine using child labor before the laws. Your claim seems to be that businesses are nice and negotiate fairly. Why is the special legal protection needed if businesses are nice?
You also failed to explain how you as an individual would negotiate a better healthcare package with Amazon than what is offered now.
> And yet Starbucks and Amazon have had generous health care benefits without unions.
Allow me to repeat: unions negotiated that in the 1950s and now everyone benefits. Without what already happened in the 1950s you can't claim those benefits would somehow magically appear.
And Amazon and Starbucks don't exactly have "generous" healthcare benefits. They have average benefits compared to other US companies. And that aren't nearly as good as what folks in the EU get.
> Unions are part of the free market. A union is a business that sells labor.
Not even that. If a state doesn't have a right-to-work law, then union becomes a monopoly on the labor market for particular company or even the whole industry.
Here's an example. Union says "we have ideas that will cut costs 10%. In exchange, we want half of that in the form of higher wages." Business says, "where do I sign?"
Uh, your thought process is operating on the level of what you as an individual can do. But as a result, you are seeing none of the systemic problems. While your thinking is probably individually beneficial, like that of a salmon knowing to swim upstream, this salmon has no way of addressing the dam that's being built upriver. Regardless of whether the dam is built or not, it is still best to do what you can to swim upriver. But it's better for the dam not to be built and ruin your habitat.
But you're annoyed at other salmon trying to stop it, because they took a break from swimming upriver.
Yoir post reads to me as a non sequitur. The parent mentioned a union making that deal, but you are talking about "what you as an individual can do" which doesn't seem to be what they're talking about, since they're explicitly talking about the union making a deal with the business.
Businesses have such cost-cutting ideas all the time, the problem is that most of those ideas involve firing people. If the deal is: "we will fire 20% of staff, but those who remain will get 5% raise" no union will agree to it.
That is how you get rooted bureaucracies though. I'd rather be able to fire or get fired than sit through layers of bureaucracy simply because it's too difficult to fire people. I would know, I've been on both sides of the table.
With a highly trained management team and an HR department that is the friendly face to a highly trained legal department.
You're either naive or full of hubris to think you're actually ending up with a win-win situation. Try getting the wording of a contract changed for example. Try proposing using your contract instead of theirs. Any contract you sign is in the company's favor to the full extent allowed by local law.
The only thing that has ever changed that is labor negotiating as a team and with their own highly trained legal team.
The reason you think things are win-win is because you've never had to go to court up against the contracts you've signed.
> They offer nothing in return.
They offer their labor in return. That's extremely valuable.
You're far more likely to get what you want by having a well written contract.
You may have gotten contract wording changed with a small company, but the Amazons of the world will not do that. And these are exactly the companies where labor needs unions so they can collectively bargain against a powerful and organized management and legal team. You simply don't have the resources as an individual.
Being polite is always a good strategy but being nice would mean working for free. That would be very nice. Is that your approach?
It's also not nice to take your employer to court. What happened to your be nice strategy there? Why did you threaten with legal action? It sounds like you can't even follow your own advice.
Being polite and nice certainly does not require capitulation. You can be nice, polite, and quite firm in what you want. Ceding things you don't care about helps, too. For example, Starbucks benefits include free college tuition. I'm never going back to college, so I'd be willing to trade that benefit for mo' money.
I'm told time and again that lil' ol' me cannot negotiate. Yet I do it with department stores, doctors, dentists, car dealers, all sorts of "non-negotiable" contracts. Try it some time.
I helped a friend recently negotiate a new car. The dealer started with a non-negotiable price. He settled for about 10% less. It was all very nice and polite and friendly, with lots of joking back and forth. We just made it clear the price had to come down or no deal.
It's the massive employers with huge legal teams where you need a union so you can fairly negotiate with their massive legal team. The subject that started this is unions at Amazon. Not negotiating with your local restaurant about how much they will pay you to wait on tables.
What was the nature of the change? Did you get additional healthcare benefits? The kinds of things that unions negotiate about? Or was it something trivial? The details matter.
If workers can effectively negotiate as individuals then why have wealth gaps skyrocketed in the USA as unions have weakened? The lowest wealth gaps in US history were when unions were the strongest. Wealth gaps in Germany are much lower and unions are much stronger. All evidence points to you being wrong about individuals being good negotiators at getting a bigger share of the pie. And it's just common sense. The idea that most of us are qualified to go up against a big and highly trained legal team is laughable.
> If workers can effectively negotiate as individuals then why have wealth gaps skyrocketed in the USA as unions have weakened?
Let's say I work for a company with big server farms as an engineer. I find a way to make the server software run 1% faster. This saves the company 1% on server costs. Server costs run into the $hundreds of millions. What's that worth to the company? I know software engineers who got pay packages worth a million bucks. None of them used a lawyer to negotiate their compensation.
The WSJ ran an article recently about how Barnes & Noble was going down the tubes, mainly because of competition from Amazon. There was much handwringing about it, and their stock was in the dumpster. B&N was headed for failure. Then, a couple years ago, B&N replaced the CEO. The CEO revamped the way their stores operated, from top to bottom. B&N has surged in profits and value.
That new CEO created $billions in wealth for the company and shareholders. It saved the workers from being tossed out in the street.
How much would you say that CEO was worth paying?
In a free market, people get paid according to the value they produce. Not the value other people produce.
To get more pay, think about how to improve the value you provide. Always be thinking about that.
You avoided the question of whether you've worked for a large employer like Amazon or Target.
Pay packages are not a change to the wording of an employment contract. What I'm talking about is a change to the contract that would have legal implications. You failed to give an example of an employee that has succeeded in doing that with a large employer.
Your example of highly in demand software engineers does not apply to the average worker - the topic is Amazon warehouse employees forming a union.
Your example of a CEO does not apply to the hundreds of millions of average workers.
In the free market labor can organize to get paid according to their collective value.
To get more pay think about being as organized and as powerful as management and the legal team of the company you are negotiating with. Always be thinking about that.
How could you possibly be getting paid minimum wage when you claim to be such a good negotiator? Union jobs almost always pay more than minimum wage. They pay more because collective negotiation works better at negotiation than you did at "winning" minimum wage.
When a company tells a employer to ignore $SAFETY_CODE or to pretend $NORMAL_HUMAN_NEED does not exist, they do NOT negoitate. They tend to go all "my way or the highway" on these things.
The making-demands-phase typically happens after employees and unions argued for a certain thing for years without any changes.
You don't need to demand something if you just asked for it and they said "Yes, but it would be best for the company to do it that way" and you go like "alright, fair enough". If the thing you want is that agreeable, you'd be silly to put in the energy to protest.
Companies are not the victims here, for that you just have to compare the groth of profits to the groth of median salary over the past years.
Unions form when companies take too much. And yeah, unions can be a thorn in a companies flesh after they get active. There is one simple trick to avoid unions: treat your employees in a way they don't need an union to defend their interest.
It doesn't need to be like this. There can be collaboration to find the best solution for all parties. They can become a communication channel for problems including security issues.
And here is Amazon the one that is treating their employees both bad and as adversaries
I don't know any specifics about that case. But in Seattle, the Starbucks employees went on strike to form a union, and they went into the street with signs saying how bad Starbucks was, and how they could afford to pay them more, lots of shouting and hate.
It’s just as easy to tell a story about how the employees tried to be decent, were ignored or silenced, and had to speak out more aggressively. Your view is clearly biased and it’s a take as old as time - if that darn Dr. King didn’t block the streets, he’d get better results. Just calm down and have a chat, says the already wealthy and happy worker.
My story was as reported in the Seattle Times, which is consistently pro-union.
Besides, even the wealthy like to make money. The employees show them how to make more, they'll listen. If the employer won't listen, the usual thing to do is quit, start their own business, and outcompete them. There are lots of small business coffeeshops. They aren't terribly hard to get going.
> If the employer won't listen, the usual thing to do is quit, start their own business, and outcompete them. There are lots of small business coffeeshops. They aren't terribly hard to get going.
After reading through all the comments in this thread, I'm of the opinion that Walter Bright isn't discussing this in good faith. Take his comment quoted above: starting a simple coffee shop requires capital anywhere from $80k - $250k (yes, I have researched this). No hourly wage worker or grouping of workers will have that kind of capital, nor access to it. Walter Bright has argued elsewhere that loans are a thing with a good business plan. Again - it's a bad faith argument because business plans do not fall from the sky - it takes time and knowledge to put one together and if we've learned one thing in America - hourly wage workers do not have time nor education to write one. And oh, Banks do not lend that kind of money simply based on a "business plan", they require collateral, which hourly wage workers do not have.
I call <cough> bee <cough> es on Walter Bright's arguments.
People start businesses all the time, including coffee shops. Yes, they get loans to start them.
> hourly wage workers do not have time nor education to write one
There are endless books and online resources to help with that. Besides, as a worker in a coffee shop, you have a great opportunity right in front of you to study how the business works.
Besides, it doesn't have to be a coffee shop. There are endless businesses that need little to no capital to start. You can even start with a portable coffee cart, which doesn't cost much to lease.
> isn't discussing this in good faith
It's sad you feel that way. Opportunity in America is all around you. It's why millions of destitute people are desperate to get over the border. What do they see that you don't?
Or, to put it another way, I have a positive point of view.
Prove it. Walk away from your wealth, take a job as an hourly worker in a coffee shop, live as they do, start with the zero assets that a typical coffee shop worker has, make no use of your connections or wealth for the duration of the experiment, and we'll agree that your age has contra-compensated your higher IQ and education level. And let's negate your existing knowledge of how to write business plans by stipulating that no plan will be written for 4 months, and that any loan taken must be under the name of a co-worker similarly situated (no assets, no credit history) and cannot have any guarantors including yourself. Any loans must be from an FDIC-insured Bank or NCUA Credit Union or a regulated institution. This experiment must be done in a tier-3 mid-western or southern city or rural area in a red state and you can move if you wish to, but within those location parameters. These last two stipulations are to negate the advantages of better public infrastructure or public services.
Oh, and you cannot rely on public services such as social security - your only source of income for the experiment must be your wage work or assets acquired through the experiment, any medical services must be either free to indigents or through your work or work insurance or paid for through experiment income or assets, and must not be medicare and the like that you're eligible for. You can reference your previous work and life, but only in generics, and not in any manner that conveys an advantage immediately or over time. If any advantage is proffered based on your prior life, education or knowledge, you must decline. Needless to say, taking advantage of your credit history would be a no-no.
Obviously, you'll need some stuff, coffee shop workers have families too, so say 7 sets of clothes worth no more than $60 per set; a feature phone for safety and your IDs. If a smartphone is taken, it cannot be traded or sold. I'm debating whether or not you're allowed a car with current value less than $1000 and purchased where you decide to experiment. Since you said destitute people are desperate to get across the border without analyzing why, let's say not. You cannot lie or cheat, nor make promises to people based on your non-experiment assets, including your name.
Any family or friends that accompany you are subject to the same terms. The number of companions cannot exceed 1. Any travel or life during the experiment must be supported only by income from within the experiment.
How long would you like to run this experiment for?
Replying here because it looks like responses to the GP comment are closed. I just realized something amusing in Walter Bright's arguments. It started as:
> There are lots of small business coffeeshops. They aren't terribly hard to get going.
After pointing out capital asks of $80k - $250k and how hard it is to get loans without collateral, that Coffee Shop became:
> Besides, it doesn't have to be a coffee shop. There are endless businesses that need little to no capital to start. You can even start with a portable coffee cart, which doesn't cost much to lease.
Behold: a Coffee Cart!
Following that trend line, where will our fearless optimistic American Entrepreneur actually start? Perhaps, Sir, may I present: a Coffee Cup! or this Bag of Coffee!
I do believe there is an official term for this: "Pulling Oneself Up By The Bootstraps".
In the meantime, something was trending in the other direction: "Lots of small business coffeeshops" became "endless businesses that need little to no capital to start".
Now because I'm just curious now, how many bootstrap cups of coffee would have to be sold to get to our aspirational coffeeshop ($100k capital)? My French Roast morning coffee costs about $0.5 in material costs and electricity. Let's say our fearless optimist manages to sell it for $1 - it's no Starbucks drink, after all, and even Tim Hortons sells it for $1.5 or thereabouts, and we're hawking it from the trunk of our jalopy. That's 200k cups of coffee. If we sold a 100 cups a day, it would take 2000 days or 5.5 years.
I suppose our Bootstrapping Entrepreneur could probably get away with munching on Coffee instead of meals, and they surely have a magical coffee machine that never breaks down or needs to be replaced. See, bootstrapping is totally doable, only takes 5.5 years!!!
That's a common talking point, and I have no doubt it matches what you've seen, but as a counterpoint to "always" - I've only seen unions deal with management twice, and both times it was productive and mutually respectful.
Negotiations like "The industry has moved and we are going to be out of business if we don't cut costs" lead to unions asking for concessions like voluntary redundancies (before involuntary ones to make up the difference) and on-site cross-training.
In return, the employers got buy-in from staff, which meant smoother knowledge transfer from departing employees.
Thank you, that is a good example of the right way to do things. Normally what I see, and what is abundantly clear in this thread, is unions are going for win-lose deals.
So, the other thing to bear in mind is that in a jurisdiction like the USA a union can’t meaningfully exist without a threat, because there needs to be something they can offer before a negotiation makes sense.
Where I live, the government sets quite a few conditions on employment, but many of them can be bargained away by a union, meaning there’s meaningful incentive to negotiating with one.
Employers tend to view their employees at adversaries first. Nobody wastes time with an union if their employer aims to treat them in a way that both sides win.
You unionize, when your employer fucks you over once too much.
Employers typically do all of that to extract more value than is rightfully theirs from their employers or to make their own lives easier at the expense of their employers (e.g. by ignoring safety regulations).
So unions naturally form when employers go to far. A clever employer who is after an actual win-win situation might anticipate this and skip the entire thing by providing actual countermeasures against the tendency to fuck over ones employess themselves.
> If employers do that, then the employees need to report them to the regulators. Don't need a union for that.
Good luck on thst. The regulator is in the same country club as your boss. On top of that most of the worker rights and safety rules that regulator is meant to check came to be because unions fought for them.
Read on the history of these rights and regulations in the dawn of worker movements. This is not some new unknown topic, but something people have fought for over centuries. The incentives of the regulators and governing bodies will rarely align with workers rights, hence the need for those people to organize for their own good.
Don't get me wrong here I do not suggest that employers are always evil and unions always good, this is not what history shows. Far from it. Yet historically whenever workers lives improved, there is a big chance unions were involved as a driving force.
I'd love to see a world where companies would treat their employees in such a way, unions don't need to exist. But that is not how companies operate in most cases.
The high road doesn't pay the rent. It doesn't feed your kids.
You're in an incredibly privileged position Walter, and unlike the vast majority of people you have actual bargaining power and the ability to negotiate terms. Most everything you've written in this thread is incredibly out of touch with the situation many workers, especially ones that would find themselves working at an Amazon warehouse, find themselves in.
I come from a lower middle class family. I went to public school. My parents paid for half of my college, I did the other half. These days anyone can get a loan for the full ride. My parents financed my other endeavors with exactly $0. I'm bald, not tall and nobody has ever called me handsome.
Starbucks offers to pay full college tuition for their employees.
I suspect the salient difference with me is I see opportunity everywhere in America, where others do not. All I'm doing here is pointing out that opportunity.
Note that the millions who try to sweep over the border into America seem to see that opportunity, too.
And you don't stop to consider why everyone doesn't see the same opportunities you did? That maybe something has changed since you took advantage of them?
> Starbucks offers to pay full college tuition for their employees.
No starbucks offers tuition reimbursement, for the online programs only, at one school, for some degrees, if you complete the entire degree while working at starbucks. Almost no one is actually able to take advantage of that. It's for their customers to feel better about supporting starbucks not for their workers to go to college.
This is actually a great opportunity for you to pull your head out of your ass and see how the world actually is, instead of how it was for you or how you think it should be.
> That maybe something has changed since you took advantage of them?
Some things have indeed changed:
1. it's easy to get a loan for the full cost of college
2. pay for STEM engineers is a lot higher
3. you can start a business and reach a worldwide audience for free
4. you can start a business and hand over the logistics of shipping world wide for free (i.e. pay as you go, no upfront costs)
5. you can learn anything you want, via the internet, instantly for free
6. you can start investing in stocks for only a few bucks, with ZERO commission fees
7. you can reach collaborators for your business all over the world, for nothing
8. you can get funding via gofundme.com or kickstarter.com. Wow!
9. if you run an online business, nobody needs to know your name, background, race, religion, age, gender, whatever, unless you choose to tell them. Even then, you can just make it up, because nobody checks or cares
None of this was available in my youth.
Want a ticket from poverty to the middle class? This works:
a. stay in school
b. pay attention in school and learn the stuff
c. get a loan and go to college, selecting a lucrative major
> 1. it's easy to get a loan for the full cost of college
And then spend the next few decades paying it off, having it as a constant stress.
> 2. pay for STEM engineers is a lot higher
Not everyone can be a STEM engineer. Not everyone wants to be; Society would be pretty terrible if all we had was STEM engineers.
> 5. you can learn anything you want, via the internet, instantly for free
Only for some skills. Watching some youtube videos will not make you a competent woodworker.
> 9. if you run an online business, nobody needs to know your name, background, race, religion, age, gender, whatever, unless you choose to tell them. Even then, you can just make it up, because nobody checks or cares
Until a lawsuit comes your way, or the local tax man decides to come by. As soon as your business becomes mildly successful, that easy anonymity starts to disappear.
> Want a ticket from poverty to the middle class? This works:
You forgot one more point:
f. get extremely lucky to never suffer financial setbacks. Be lucky to have parents who aren't so overworked that you're forced to spend your time taking care of siblings. Be lucky to have parents that can even work into their older age. Be lucky to never suffer a major health problem that financially ruins you. Be lucky to never be injured or hurt such that you can work.
You know you can just say "I don't care about inequality and people who are doing worse than me deserve it" or even just "I got mine who cares about the rest." It's not illegal. Some people might not respect you much but we don't respect whatever this is either.
Speak for yourself. While it might be harder these days, the people I've seen that followed Walter's plan above were all able to get good jobs and support their families, including people who, like the sibling says, are poor, had to take care of siblings, had overworked parents, and so on. Yes, systemic inequalities exist, but well, an individual can't do much by themselves if they use that as the yoke on which they exist, they are not going to solve their problems or their family's poverty within a few years via voting or protesting, more immediate solutions exist. One must not fall into the trap of learned helplessness, and at some point, one has to cast off the yoke of bondage and begin to solve one's problems.
Free markets have vaulted more people out of poverty, by far, than any other system yet devised. The historical record on that is pretty clear.
I've run into a couple Afghans who I got to talk with (at different times). Both had escaped and arrived here with nothing but their skin when the US pulled out. Both had founded businesses and were thriving.
A third had arrived some years ago, and had become a deca-millionaire.
Have you considered that you might be subject to a kind of selection bias here? You ran into people that were successful enough to thrive here. What about all the others that did not succeed? That had to go back to wherever they came from because their visa ended and they could no longer stay in the country?
>Free markets have vaulted more people out of poverty, by far, than any other system yet devised. The historical record on that is pretty clear.
And unions are part of that free market. I don't know how much more free market one can get than people coming together to offer their labour in an organized fashion.
> Why? When has taking the high road ever worked out for the ones with lesser power?
Oh, it's worked plenty well.
It's worked well to get a lot of: "there are more pressing issues right now, let's solve this one tomorrow", where that "tomorrow" in many cases ended up being 150 years later.
What is inhumane about it? I've read your other comments too, it doesn't really seem like you're arguing in good faith when you state superlatives like "this is the most inhumane thing I've read today" or "this is the worst take I've seen in forever on this topic" or "I am going to be incredibly rude now." Please make your points without resorting to such extreme language.
Extreme language does not take away from any of my points I have written an entire essay worth of points and got zero engagement on it. Why will I try to write more?
A win win relationship can only occur when both parties start from the same position. When one party is starting from not even having basics in their favor (pay, working hours etc.) the other side has to give a lot more. You cannot start with all the bananas and then declare all new bananas will be split evenly as a win win.
> A win win relationship can only occur when both parties start from the same position.
I'm so sad hearing people believe this. Your power is the value you provide. That is worth money. Negotiating is a matter of convincing the other party that you will provide more value.
I am going to be incredibly rude now. This comment is so out of touch with reality I wonder if I'm falling for a troll. I am probably in the same boat as you. I've negotiated my contract with biggest monopolies in my industry. That was done despite the existence of a thankfully good union. Unions only negotiated for basic stuff, pay, hours, healthcare etc. Perks were negotiated by me. But if you think for a second we are in the same boat as a Starbucks barista or Amazon warehouse worker, I'm sorry but you need to sit down with some of these people and hear their stories. If money is your language, then think of it like this, it takes close to hundred thousand euros to replace me while it takes orders or magnitude less to replace labor in a warehouse. Or maybe think about how if a store closes down it doesn't put that much of a dent in Starbucks' 7billion dollar bottom line, but workers can lose homes and sometimes healthcare. In what universe is this an equal position to start from? They are arguing over most basic things like pee breaks man, do you really think management is arguing in good faith if this is a talking point? I know I'm not going to change your mind on an internet forum, but you probably have this issue (also just like me) where it's hard to imagine other people's life situations. That's why I talk with people before judging their movement. Posting a marketing link to show what Starbucks advertises as perks (doesn't even address the low pay) is at best a bad argument and at worst deliberately insulting to a lot of people.
I don't think that's an accurate description of the history of the labour movement in the US. For one thing, it's been around for quite a bit longer than 'nearly a century'.
Over that almost-century, labourers have been completely rolled by people who own capital
8 hour work day, not child labour, worker safety, etc, etc, etc
A union is basically a 2 step plan - first, identify the person willing to pay you the most. Second, pick a fight with them. This might be a locally OK strategy
> 8 hour work day, not child labour, worker safety, etc, etc, etc
1. That is a list of issues that have legal complications. That goes to my core point - organising to effect political change is far more effective than the typical union.
All the workers on Straten Island would be just as politically effective whether they have union representation on their day job or not.
2. I'm not sure what you are trying to say with the Hoffa article, but note that the union is called the teamster union. The obsolescence of draft animals and, by extension, the end of teamstering as a profession did more for their working conditions than the union did.
3. That list is made up of pretty pathetic achievements vs what the capitalists have managed. Wealthy capitalists have doubled and doubled their wealth in the same time. I'd work 10 hours a day in exchange for that sort of money. And the capitalists don't need to take risks they are uncomfortable with because they own the business. Not sure about the child labour thing.
The unions won what they asked for, and it turned out what they were asking for wasn't very clever. They should have been asking for ways to build an ownership stake in businesses, taking some of the risk and reaping some of the reward.
1. That is a list of issues that have legal complications. [...] organising to effect political
What does that mean? Labor unions have always been political organizations. I feel like it's my core point that's being confirmed here - your description of labor movement history is pretty much wrong making the basis of your argument wrong. You didn't even address the national agreement I linked, a specific policy goal of one of the most influential US unions. It flatly contradicts your narrative about 'local changes'. It also happened 60 years ago.
It means that anything labour unions achieved in their capacity as unions they could also have achieved in other means. Eg, in the linked article talks about a tussle between a National Labor Relations Board, struggles to get footholds in warehouses, elections by workers.
None of those activities are particularly useful for achieving the things you listed as wins for unions. In fact, they are all distractions from achieving those outcomes.
Seriously, you've got workers trying to organise against an entity that is more influential than they are, has more resource and controls their life for a fair chunk of their waking hours. And the most willing entity to give them money that the workers can find. The more they struggle against that the more they will lose, it is strategically untenable.
Humans, as an advanced form of monkey, have an instinct when they get stressed that makes them band together and fight stuff. It feels really good. It also usually makes the people fighting worse off - the long term winners are usually the ones that best avoid fighting (particularly fighting more powerful and better organised companies). We've got about a century of experience in this field, the people who spent their time figuring out how to unionise aren't the ones who are seeing their living standards rapidly improve.
Don't I, as a free man, have the right to negotiate as I see fit with my employer? Why should that right be taken away by a vote of others?
Or let's put it another way. The Dems are for purple cars, the Reps are for yellow cars. We all get to vote on what we get! Is that freedom? What if I want a purple car, and the vote went yellow? What if I want a red car?
Yeah, that is how it works in Europe. In Europe we protected workers against unions, so workers don't have to be as afraid of unions. In USA they protected unions against workers, so that unions don't have to be afraid of workers, no wonder unions aren't popular then...
Right, I misunderstood which vote were were talking about, sorry. I thought we were talking about voting on union action (e.g. to strike, or to accept a specific deal in a negotiation)
EU has right to work, that is a major one. I think the reason you don't see people talk about that online is that the left don't want to admit that right to work is pro workers, and the right don't want to use EU as a positive example.
EU legislation establishes individual rights for all workers, with a maximum working week of 48 hours, paid annual leave of at least four weeks per year, rest periods and rules on night work, shift work and patterns of work.
Who needs unions with great labor laws already in place? Of course the right in the US want none of that.
A lot of EU law already in place is a wish list for US employees who join a union.
But that just makes right to work seem even better, EU where workers don't need to pay unions to get rights still pay their unions and are way more willing to join unions. So to me demonising right to work doesn't make sense, California could add those worker protections if they wanted, I see no reason at all why they need workers to give up their rights so that unions can take their money.
You need the strong labor laws first which the US does not have. Right to work in the US is popular in states with the worst labor laws and mostly the poor states.
Right to work could be good under the right conditions. Which the EU already largely has. In fact many EU countries have far stronger labor laws than the EU laws themselves. That's the context within which right to work starts to make sense.
If you have the power to take away right to work from your workers then you also have the power to give them good conditions like paid vacation instead. I see no reason ever why you would remove right to work in that situation instead of just legislating proper worker rights, except to feed unions.
> I see no reason ever why you would remove right to work in that situation instead of just legislating proper worker rights, except to feed unions.
The massive wealth gaps in the US tell the actual story. Corporations have a huge influence over US law and the laws mostly benefit the corporations over individuals or unions. That's one of the dangers of massive wealth. You can just buy the government. Which has already happened in the US.
It's complicated. Unions do what their members want. But "what the members want" can be pretty different from what turns out to be a good idea in hindsight. Should children work down the coal mine? The view of somebody who wants that extra income from their 12 year old working in the mine may be quite different...
I support many union actions at my employer, for example I joined their recent strike, withholding my labour (and consequently getting paid less) because the employer and indeed their entire sector, refuses to make sensible pension and pay provisions - but I won't join the union itself because I don't agree with all their positions and I'm content with the trade off that results.
Are you sure that unions are responsible for the EU laws? Can you give any sources for that? I'm truly curious about it because the EU comes up with a lot of good consumer protection and worker laws and it's not obvious what motivates them to do so. Just as example, the law about universal phone chargers. Industry certainly didn't push them for that. Quite the opposite. So where did it come from other than it being a big plus for consumers and in reducing waste?
15 day PTO and the 40h week was brought by a conjunction of union work, general striking, and the first elected socialist government in France.
I dunno when the EU laws were created, but the 4th and the 5th week of PTO were also brought by unions (one with the help of q socialist government). The other 14 days (we have 39 total PTO in France, 14 of those can be redeemed as money basically) i don't know where they came from.
> and the first elected socialist government in France.
So that's the missing piece I was looking for. I think you'll find something similar in Italy.
The big difference in the US is that Americans have never elected a truly labor friendly government. These laws in the EU are not just the result of strong unions. You need government to be on board too and that requires the voters.
> I'm truly curious about it because the EU comes up with a lot of good consumer protection and worker laws and it's not obvious what motivates them to do so.
This is less directly related to unions.
The EU was founded as two basic principles - free movement of goods, free movement of workers. The idea was to achieve a common comercial block that could compete in the era of superpowers.
What we’ve come to realize is that those basic principles end up almost building a country from the ground up:
You can’t have workers from france outcompeting germans by selling lower quality meat because the French don’t have to follow German animal health standards. So, common health standards for everyone.
You can’t have an Italian company outselling Spanish companies because the Spanish lose money repairing defective products and the Italians don’t have to. So common consumer laws.
keep going and we’ll eventually have an army to protect our interests, etc. and we’ll become a federal country of sorts.
That explains why the EU creates standards. We all have to compete under the same rules.
As for why set the standard as “improving rights for everyone” rather than “lowering rights to the minimum for everyone”, it is always going to be more popular to raise the standards, rather than be an institution that takes rights away from citizens of the member nations. If the EU was seen as the big guys that force you to work and live in worse conditions it would not last long.
Common misconception, also seen among many of the replies. Unions are not opt-in, unless you consider "taking a union job" opt-in.
If this vote goes through (and a contract agreed), and you take a unionized job in the unionized warehouse, you will be covered by the union contract. If management violates the contract in a way that harms you, the union will be filing a grievance on your behalf. If you ask for a union rep to be in the room when discipline is discussed, they must send a rep. You will vote on a proposed contract. In short, the union has the responsibility to represent you, based on your being in a union job.
A "right to work" state is one where the union cannot sign a contract with the employer forcing you to pay union dues in order to get the representation you are entitled to. So, you have the right, in a "right to work" state, to avail yourself of the union representation without paying dues. That's exactly what "right to work" means, and no more.
So what’s your alternative? At the end of the day, certain things can only work if we align everyone. You can’t have half the electorate paying 10% tax but no police service and half the country paying 15% tax but getting police
That's under the government's purview. It has nothing to do with employees vs business. Unless you're arguing that businesses should be operated by the government.
> Or let's put it another way. The Dems are for purple cars, the Reps are for yellow cars. We all get to vote on what we get! Is that freedom? What if I want a purple car, and the vote went yellow? What if I want a red car?
The reasons for people to band together in the form of government to collectively hire police and to band together as a union to collectively bargain with employers are the same, namely to protect members of society from those who would cause them harm.
The idea of “freedom” from government as a frame of reference here is bullshit. The entire concept of a corporation is a government created legal fiction, and an arbitrary one. Corporations are required to do hundreds of thousands of things.
Jeff Bezos can rent a warehouse and talk people into going there and do whatever the fuck he wants. But if he wants limited liability, access to the roads and waterways the society creates and manages, enforcement of property rights, and the permission to enter a joint stock partnership to fund it he needs government permission, also known as the permission of society.
The fact of Amazon even existing at all is a privilege granted by the state that can be revoked at any time.
I don’t have the freedom to negotiate as I see fit with my employer. I also don’t have the freedom to punch Jeff Bezos in the nuts for not paying fair wages and I am not allowed to be a hairdresser if I don’t pass an exam or sell securities without registering them or pork that I’ve been storing in my attic all week.
We regulate every single aspect of commerce, it’s a choice we’ve made as a society.
This is correct. All modern corporations are extensions of the state and should be viewed no differently than government agencies. Privately owned and operated entities are a different matter, as these have existed long before the state and continue to exist today in stateless zones.
> The reasons for people to band together in the form of government [...] to protect members of society from those who would cause them harm.
Or to exploit and rob minority members of said society. The "good willed" government does not exist and has no reason to: it owns the ultimate monopoly, on violence. Most governments today on the planet are evil. The list of atrocities perpetrated by governments is as long as civilization's history and completely dwarfs the list of bad things done by corporations.
> The fact of Amazon even existing at all is a privilege granted by the state that can be revoked at any time.
States tried getting rid of corporations. Their citizens starved. The truth is, most value created by companies is captured by the society at large (the value we get from the stuff we buy is much larger than the cost we pay), not the company owners or employees.
Businesses have always been dictatorships. It's only governments that are democracies.
The will of the voters that matters in this case is the voters who voted for labor laws. (Or rather, voters who voted for politicians, who voted for labor laws.) And, of course, the voters who voted for the Supreme Court, who gets to singlehandedly say what those laws actually mean. (Again, they don't vote directly; they vote for a President who nominates and a Senate who approves.)
The vote of a union only matters in light of those labor laws. And the company has the right to appeal those, under those same laws.
It would be nice for the company to also take the responsibility to respect the intention of the law, rather than hoping they'll get some body (elected or otherwise) to give them the answer they wanted. But our whole system is deliberately adversarial: everybody fights as hard as they can for what they want, regardless of what would actually be right. That's a big chunk of the reason we have unions in the first place.
It's a terrible system, the worst one, except for all of the others. Me, I'm voting with my feet: I'm using Amazon as little as I can get away with, even when it costs more to use an alternative. They can fix that by ceasing to be douchebags... but that seems pretty unlikely.
I'm not buying it. Monarchy was the best system ever tried until democracy gained prominence.
Voting with feet and voting with dollars has always been a way to make workers and consumers(often the same) feel like they've got a say without actually giving them one.
The problem is that the territory of the conflict is attempting to be constrained ie: within the current legal structure. What isn't allowed here is the conflict to spill into the province of arguing about the rules of the game itself. We've never had a static legal landscape and never will, and yet arguments like these assume it.
Workers should have a shot at workplace democracy because it's a fundamental right of self-determination. Carve-outs of that right like in workplaces are only as natural as we make them.
Hey, I don't disagree. I'm just explaining how it works: just because a bunch of people get together to vote on something doesn't make it binding. Maybe it should, but it doesn't.
There's a million things I'd do differently if I were in charge. But not only am I not in charge, what little power I do possess has been systematically diluted to the point of effective nonexistence.
I always find the anti-union stance interesting. Unions are, by and large, typically in your self-interest if you're an individual and sell your time for compensation in anyway. It doesn't matter if you're a Hollywood screen writer, professional athlete, or warehouse worker. As an individual you have significantly less power/leverage in negotiations than whomever is employing you with rare exceptions where you're quite close to irreplaceable.
Yes, unions can run amuck and like any structure can be abused, but the abuse is typically (not always) in the direction that benefits you as a laborer. This is counter to the current state of affairs where most all abuse in the labor market is one sided, against you. Typically your only real leverage is irreplacability and mobility across the labor market (or overall financial independene to stop working entirely). Outside of that you're at the mercy of whatever level of business manager sets atop you and take whatever they can legally (and sometimes illegally) get away with.
Pretty easy and the exact mirror of the unionization process. You petition the NLRB and they run a "decertification" election. E.g in Nov 2022, there were 15 decertification elections (vs 108 certifications) and 87% of them resulted in decertificaton [1].
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 233 ms ] thread[0] https://qz.com/2191767/are-starbucks-and-chipotle-union-bust...
> “The nature of our labor law now, it actually makes financial sense for companies to break the union law, stifle the drive, and be found guilty,” says Joe McCartin, a history professor at Georgetown University and the co-author of Labor in America: A History. “The most they have to do is pay these employees back wages minus whatever they’ve earned in the intervening time” if the employees got other jobs after the stores closed. “That’s hardly much of a penalty.”
In my country large unions negotiate for a whole sector, so all café workers regardless of their employer are covered by a collective agreement. You don't even have to be a member for the negotiated benefits (such as minimum wage) to apply: the collective agreement covers everyone in the sector nonetheless.
I thought the US used to have profession-based unions, such as the teamsters union, who can have members all over the US?
https://www.starbucks.com/careers/working-at-starbucks/benef...
This even includes college tuition.
Besides, the union ought to be able to fund at least one coffee shop, and show Starbucks how to do it right. Banks also offer loans to start businesses, if the applicant has a decent business plan.
How much the workers get paid.
-- sez google
>For Large Employers (501 or more employees)
> $18.69/hour
- https://www.seattle.gov/laborstandards/ordinances/minimum-wa...
(I have no idea where the specific Starbucks upthread is supposed to be, so I don't know how relevant Seattle even is).
You're blatantly ignoring the point that they are not paid enough to be able to afford to do that.
Access to the installed app base, the brand, the commercial RE management changes the economics of things.
> incredibly juvenile and disingenuous posts
You might think so (others might not), and if so, downvote, and if they're unpopular enough posts, then they become dead.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Bright
You've done this recently in at least one other place: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34118393. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0TRpGP8yH4
And unions tend to not drive companies out of business because then there is no need for the union anymore and no paychecks to take union fees from.
But corporations don't have morals, so they'll continue to do as they do currently. If you want to change that, you should have legislation that makes them abide by whatever you think is immoral. Don't confuse your moral standard with that of amoral corporations who are incentivized to simply make as much money as possible.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The next step is an appeal to the full NLRB board, which like the regional office is unlikely to be receptive (particularly for the charge against the NLRB itself). Only after that can Amazon appeal to a neutral body - the Federal Courts of Appeal.
It has now been a little over 9 months since the election took place and it could easily take another year before the legal process runs its course.
As I remember it, which may be a little fuzzy, Kroger warehousing and distribution was unionized. They got around negotiating with them by outsourcing to a third party, non union warehousing company, called Zenith, and promptly sold off their own distribution centers to...Zenith. It read a lot like they just made a sweetheart deal to get rid of the union.
They can do this in every region, of course, to keep any company from getting too big for its britches.
Under Transfer rules, Unions transfer too, unless the "same fucking job" is actually integrated somehow as might happen after a merger, so that the group of employees being represented by the union are just some fraction of an otherwise indistinguishable workforce. So the warehouse situation wouldn't trigger that, but e.g. if Walmart bought Kroger, closed all the Kroger stores, but kept 10% of the workers, moving them to a nearby Walmart as employees of that store, those employees lose their distinct nature and any Kroger union doesn't come with them.
Here's one short article I found - https://www.mhlnews.com/archive/article/22045596/kroger-outs...
I don't think the unionists have assessed the situation correctly. A strategy of co-ops and legal structures to let workers take on more economic risk (like what shares allow) would have gotten much better long term results.
A union is basically a 2 step plan - first, identify the person willing to pay you the most. Second, pick a fight with them. This might be a locally OK strategy, but it isn't workable in the long term.
You appear to be placing blame for the situation on the party with less power in the situation, the employee, rather than the one with more power, the employer. this is a bit silly!
Consider how businesses negotiate. Each side offers something in return for better terms. They come to a mutually agreeable win-win solution.
That's what I do when I've negotiated with employers. I frame it as a friendly win-win negotiation, and both parties go away pleased with the result.
You clearly have extreme anti-union bias to the point you havent noticed how incredibly employee hostile the companies that unions form around are, to an absurd extent. It's gone so far that the magnitude of a win for the employer is so much higher than for the employee that the goal posts have shifted to absurdity.
You're still putting the onus for improving the situation on the party with far, far less power. Which makes no sense.
I am not anti-union. I am anti the tactics they use.
Unions are part of the free market. A union is a business that sells labor.
One creates value for many people, the other for few. The ethics on this one is not hard.
If you believe in the LTV, which many don't. Many instead believe in the subjective (market) theory of value.
You tend not to see somebody sell a gold watch for less than the gold that's in it. Especially so if there's profit being made on the watch
That's also a reductive view of unions. The 40 hour work week, weekends off, healthcare, and banning child labor wouldn't have resulted from your characterization.
What tactics do businesses use? Can you name any that you are against?
Healthcare benefits came about in WW2 because Roosevelt instituted a wage freeze. Companies could not offer higher wages to get the best workers, so they found a workaround by offering health care benefits. It turned out to be a big win for workers because the cost of those benefits was pre-tax, rather than post-tax. So it stuck.
Children are not freely consenting adults, which is why they get special legal protection. That's irrelevant to what we're discussing here.
Please explain how you would negotiate as an individual to get better healthcare benefits from Amazon when the benefits are provided as the same exact package to all employees. You can't. It never happens. Give even one example of an employee at a large company that has an individualized healthcare benefits package.
> Children are not freely consenting adults, which is why they get special legal protection. That's irrelevant to what we're discussing here.
And yet many businesses used child labor. These are the business you are claiming negotiate in good faith and fairly.
Allow me to repeat: Children are not freely consenting adults, which is why they get special legal protection.
> unions played in the 1940s and 1950s in negotiating far better healthcare benefits
And yet Starbucks and Amazon have had generous health care benefits without unions.
You avoided the question about why businesses were fine using child labor before the laws. Your claim seems to be that businesses are nice and negotiate fairly. Why is the special legal protection needed if businesses are nice?
You also failed to explain how you as an individual would negotiate a better healthcare package with Amazon than what is offered now.
> And yet Starbucks and Amazon have had generous health care benefits without unions.
Allow me to repeat: unions negotiated that in the 1950s and now everyone benefits. Without what already happened in the 1950s you can't claim those benefits would somehow magically appear.
And Amazon and Starbucks don't exactly have "generous" healthcare benefits. They have average benefits compared to other US companies. And that aren't nearly as good as what folks in the EU get.
Not even that. If a state doesn't have a right-to-work law, then union becomes a monopoly on the labor market for particular company or even the whole industry.
But you're annoyed at other salmon trying to stop it, because they took a break from swimming upriver.
With a highly trained management team and an HR department that is the friendly face to a highly trained legal department.
You're either naive or full of hubris to think you're actually ending up with a win-win situation. Try getting the wording of a contract changed for example. Try proposing using your contract instead of theirs. Any contract you sign is in the company's favor to the full extent allowed by local law.
The only thing that has ever changed that is labor negotiating as a team and with their own highly trained legal team.
The reason you think things are win-win is because you've never had to go to court up against the contracts you've signed.
> They offer nothing in return.
They offer their labor in return. That's extremely valuable.
I've gotten the wording of employment contracts changed. BTW, you're far more likely to get what you want by being nice than by threats.
> you've never had to go to court up against the contracts you've signed
Yeah, I have. And I won.
You may have gotten contract wording changed with a small company, but the Amazons of the world will not do that. And these are exactly the companies where labor needs unions so they can collectively bargain against a powerful and organized management and legal team. You simply don't have the resources as an individual.
Being polite is always a good strategy but being nice would mean working for free. That would be very nice. Is that your approach?
It's also not nice to take your employer to court. What happened to your be nice strategy there? Why did you threaten with legal action? It sounds like you can't even follow your own advice.
I'm told time and again that lil' ol' me cannot negotiate. Yet I do it with department stores, doctors, dentists, car dealers, all sorts of "non-negotiable" contracts. Try it some time.
I helped a friend recently negotiate a new car. The dealer started with a non-negotiable price. He settled for about 10% less. It was all very nice and polite and friendly, with lots of joking back and forth. We just made it clear the price had to come down or no deal.
What kind of long term employment contract do you have with your doctor, dentist, department store, or car dealer?
You seem to have lost focus on the topic.
I've gotten the wording of employment contracts changed.
At which companies? Amazon? Google? Target? UPS?
It's the massive employers with huge legal teams where you need a union so you can fairly negotiate with their massive legal team. The subject that started this is unions at Amazon. Not negotiating with your local restaurant about how much they will pay you to wait on tables.
What was the nature of the change? Did you get additional healthcare benefits? The kinds of things that unions negotiate about? Or was it something trivial? The details matter.
If workers can effectively negotiate as individuals then why have wealth gaps skyrocketed in the USA as unions have weakened? The lowest wealth gaps in US history were when unions were the strongest. Wealth gaps in Germany are much lower and unions are much stronger. All evidence points to you being wrong about individuals being good negotiators at getting a bigger share of the pie. And it's just common sense. The idea that most of us are qualified to go up against a big and highly trained legal team is laughable.
Every company I've worked for.
> If workers can effectively negotiate as individuals then why have wealth gaps skyrocketed in the USA as unions have weakened?
Let's say I work for a company with big server farms as an engineer. I find a way to make the server software run 1% faster. This saves the company 1% on server costs. Server costs run into the $hundreds of millions. What's that worth to the company? I know software engineers who got pay packages worth a million bucks. None of them used a lawyer to negotiate their compensation.
The WSJ ran an article recently about how Barnes & Noble was going down the tubes, mainly because of competition from Amazon. There was much handwringing about it, and their stock was in the dumpster. B&N was headed for failure. Then, a couple years ago, B&N replaced the CEO. The CEO revamped the way their stores operated, from top to bottom. B&N has surged in profits and value.
That new CEO created $billions in wealth for the company and shareholders. It saved the workers from being tossed out in the street.
How much would you say that CEO was worth paying?
In a free market, people get paid according to the value they produce. Not the value other people produce.
To get more pay, think about how to improve the value you provide. Always be thinking about that.
Pay packages are not a change to the wording of an employment contract. What I'm talking about is a change to the contract that would have legal implications. You failed to give an example of an employee that has succeeded in doing that with a large employer.
Your example of highly in demand software engineers does not apply to the average worker - the topic is Amazon warehouse employees forming a union.
Your example of a CEO does not apply to the hundreds of millions of average workers.
In the free market labor can organize to get paid according to their collective value.
To get more pay think about being as organized and as powerful as management and the legal team of the company you are negotiating with. Always be thinking about that.
The making-demands-phase typically happens after employees and unions argued for a certain thing for years without any changes.
You don't need to demand something if you just asked for it and they said "Yes, but it would be best for the company to do it that way" and you go like "alright, fair enough". If the thing you want is that agreeable, you'd be silly to put in the energy to protest.
Companies are not the victims here, for that you just have to compare the groth of profits to the groth of median salary over the past years.
Unions form when companies take too much. And yeah, unions can be a thorn in a companies flesh after they get active. There is one simple trick to avoid unions: treat your employees in a way they don't need an union to defend their interest.
And here is Amazon the one that is treating their employees both bad and as adversaries
Who wants to partner with people who do that?
Besides, even the wealthy like to make money. The employees show them how to make more, they'll listen. If the employer won't listen, the usual thing to do is quit, start their own business, and outcompete them. There are lots of small business coffeeshops. They aren't terribly hard to get going.
After reading through all the comments in this thread, I'm of the opinion that Walter Bright isn't discussing this in good faith. Take his comment quoted above: starting a simple coffee shop requires capital anywhere from $80k - $250k (yes, I have researched this). No hourly wage worker or grouping of workers will have that kind of capital, nor access to it. Walter Bright has argued elsewhere that loans are a thing with a good business plan. Again - it's a bad faith argument because business plans do not fall from the sky - it takes time and knowledge to put one together and if we've learned one thing in America - hourly wage workers do not have time nor education to write one. And oh, Banks do not lend that kind of money simply based on a "business plan", they require collateral, which hourly wage workers do not have.
I call <cough> bee <cough> es on Walter Bright's arguments.
> hourly wage workers do not have time nor education to write one
There are endless books and online resources to help with that. Besides, as a worker in a coffee shop, you have a great opportunity right in front of you to study how the business works.
Besides, it doesn't have to be a coffee shop. There are endless businesses that need little to no capital to start. You can even start with a portable coffee cart, which doesn't cost much to lease.
> isn't discussing this in good faith
It's sad you feel that way. Opportunity in America is all around you. It's why millions of destitute people are desperate to get over the border. What do they see that you don't?
Or, to put it another way, I have a positive point of view.
Oh, and you cannot rely on public services such as social security - your only source of income for the experiment must be your wage work or assets acquired through the experiment, any medical services must be either free to indigents or through your work or work insurance or paid for through experiment income or assets, and must not be medicare and the like that you're eligible for. You can reference your previous work and life, but only in generics, and not in any manner that conveys an advantage immediately or over time. If any advantage is proffered based on your prior life, education or knowledge, you must decline. Needless to say, taking advantage of your credit history would be a no-no.
Obviously, you'll need some stuff, coffee shop workers have families too, so say 7 sets of clothes worth no more than $60 per set; a feature phone for safety and your IDs. If a smartphone is taken, it cannot be traded or sold. I'm debating whether or not you're allowed a car with current value less than $1000 and purchased where you decide to experiment. Since you said destitute people are desperate to get across the border without analyzing why, let's say not. You cannot lie or cheat, nor make promises to people based on your non-experiment assets, including your name.
Any family or friends that accompany you are subject to the same terms. The number of companions cannot exceed 1. Any travel or life during the experiment must be supported only by income from within the experiment.
How long would you like to run this experiment for?
> There are lots of small business coffeeshops. They aren't terribly hard to get going.
After pointing out capital asks of $80k - $250k and how hard it is to get loans without collateral, that Coffee Shop became:
> Besides, it doesn't have to be a coffee shop. There are endless businesses that need little to no capital to start. You can even start with a portable coffee cart, which doesn't cost much to lease.
Behold: a Coffee Cart!
Following that trend line, where will our fearless optimistic American Entrepreneur actually start? Perhaps, Sir, may I present: a Coffee Cup! or this Bag of Coffee!
I do believe there is an official term for this: "Pulling Oneself Up By The Bootstraps".
In the meantime, something was trending in the other direction: "Lots of small business coffeeshops" became "endless businesses that need little to no capital to start".
Now because I'm just curious now, how many bootstrap cups of coffee would have to be sold to get to our aspirational coffeeshop ($100k capital)? My French Roast morning coffee costs about $0.5 in material costs and electricity. Let's say our fearless optimist manages to sell it for $1 - it's no Starbucks drink, after all, and even Tim Hortons sells it for $1.5 or thereabouts, and we're hawking it from the trunk of our jalopy. That's 200k cups of coffee. If we sold a 100 cups a day, it would take 2000 days or 5.5 years.
I suppose our Bootstrapping Entrepreneur could probably get away with munching on Coffee instead of meals, and they surely have a magical coffee machine that never breaks down or needs to be replaced. See, bootstrapping is totally doable, only takes 5.5 years!!!
F***
Negotiations like "The industry has moved and we are going to be out of business if we don't cut costs" lead to unions asking for concessions like voluntary redundancies (before involuntary ones to make up the difference) and on-site cross-training.
In return, the employers got buy-in from staff, which meant smoother knowledge transfer from departing employees.
Where I live, the government sets quite a few conditions on employment, but many of them can be bargained away by a union, meaning there’s meaningful incentive to negotiating with one.
You unionize, when your employer fucks you over once too much.
Employers typically do all of that to extract more value than is rightfully theirs from their employers or to make their own lives easier at the expense of their employers (e.g. by ignoring safety regulations).
So unions naturally form when employers go to far. A clever employer who is after an actual win-win situation might anticipate this and skip the entire thing by providing actual countermeasures against the tendency to fuck over ones employess themselves.
Then take the high road first.
> e.g. by ignoring safety regulations
If employers do that, then the employees need to report them to the regulators. Don't need a union for that.
Good luck on thst. The regulator is in the same country club as your boss. On top of that most of the worker rights and safety rules that regulator is meant to check came to be because unions fought for them.
Read on the history of these rights and regulations in the dawn of worker movements. This is not some new unknown topic, but something people have fought for over centuries. The incentives of the regulators and governing bodies will rarely align with workers rights, hence the need for those people to organize for their own good.
Don't get me wrong here I do not suggest that employers are always evil and unions always good, this is not what history shows. Far from it. Yet historically whenever workers lives improved, there is a big chance unions were involved as a driving force.
I'd love to see a world where companies would treat their employees in such a way, unions don't need to exist. But that is not how companies operate in most cases.
The high road doesn't pay the rent. It doesn't feed your kids.
You're in an incredibly privileged position Walter, and unlike the vast majority of people you have actual bargaining power and the ability to negotiate terms. Most everything you've written in this thread is incredibly out of touch with the situation many workers, especially ones that would find themselves working at an Amazon warehouse, find themselves in.
Starbucks offers to pay full college tuition for their employees.
I suspect the salient difference with me is I see opportunity everywhere in America, where others do not. All I'm doing here is pointing out that opportunity.
Note that the millions who try to sweep over the border into America seem to see that opportunity, too.
> Starbucks offers to pay full college tuition for their employees.
No starbucks offers tuition reimbursement, for the online programs only, at one school, for some degrees, if you complete the entire degree while working at starbucks. Almost no one is actually able to take advantage of that. It's for their customers to feel better about supporting starbucks not for their workers to go to college.
This is actually a great opportunity for you to pull your head out of your ass and see how the world actually is, instead of how it was for you or how you think it should be.
Some things have indeed changed:
1. it's easy to get a loan for the full cost of college
2. pay for STEM engineers is a lot higher
3. you can start a business and reach a worldwide audience for free
4. you can start a business and hand over the logistics of shipping world wide for free (i.e. pay as you go, no upfront costs)
5. you can learn anything you want, via the internet, instantly for free
6. you can start investing in stocks for only a few bucks, with ZERO commission fees
7. you can reach collaborators for your business all over the world, for nothing
8. you can get funding via gofundme.com or kickstarter.com. Wow!
9. if you run an online business, nobody needs to know your name, background, race, religion, age, gender, whatever, unless you choose to tell them. Even then, you can just make it up, because nobody checks or cares
None of this was available in my youth.
Want a ticket from poverty to the middle class? This works:
a. stay in school
b. pay attention in school and learn the stuff
c. get a loan and go to college, selecting a lucrative major
d. don't do drugs
e. don't do crimes.
And then spend the next few decades paying it off, having it as a constant stress.
> 2. pay for STEM engineers is a lot higher
Not everyone can be a STEM engineer. Not everyone wants to be; Society would be pretty terrible if all we had was STEM engineers.
> 5. you can learn anything you want, via the internet, instantly for free
Only for some skills. Watching some youtube videos will not make you a competent woodworker.
> 9. if you run an online business, nobody needs to know your name, background, race, religion, age, gender, whatever, unless you choose to tell them. Even then, you can just make it up, because nobody checks or cares
Until a lawsuit comes your way, or the local tax man decides to come by. As soon as your business becomes mildly successful, that easy anonymity starts to disappear.
> Want a ticket from poverty to the middle class? This works:
You forgot one more point:
f. get extremely lucky to never suffer financial setbacks. Be lucky to have parents who aren't so overworked that you're forced to spend your time taking care of siblings. Be lucky to have parents that can even work into their older age. Be lucky to never suffer a major health problem that financially ruins you. Be lucky to never be injured or hurt such that you can work.
Speak for yourself. While it might be harder these days, the people I've seen that followed Walter's plan above were all able to get good jobs and support their families, including people who, like the sibling says, are poor, had to take care of siblings, had overworked parents, and so on. Yes, systemic inequalities exist, but well, an individual can't do much by themselves if they use that as the yoke on which they exist, they are not going to solve their problems or their family's poverty within a few years via voting or protesting, more immediate solutions exist. One must not fall into the trap of learned helplessness, and at some point, one has to cast off the yoke of bondage and begin to solve one's problems.
I've run into a couple Afghans who I got to talk with (at different times). Both had escaped and arrived here with nothing but their skin when the US pulled out. Both had founded businesses and were thriving.
A third had arrived some years ago, and had become a deca-millionaire.
Isn't freedom great?
>Free markets have vaulted more people out of poverty, by far, than any other system yet devised. The historical record on that is pretty clear.
And unions are part of that free market. I don't know how much more free market one can get than people coming together to offer their labour in an organized fashion.
Why? When has taking the high road ever worked out for the ones with lesser power?
Oh, it's worked plenty well.
It's worked well to get a lot of: "there are more pressing issues right now, let's solve this one tomorrow", where that "tomorrow" in many cases ended up being 150 years later.
I'm so sad hearing people believe this. Your power is the value you provide. That is worth money. Negotiating is a matter of convincing the other party that you will provide more value.
Over that almost-century, labourers have been completely rolled by people who own capital
8 hour work day, not child labour, worker safety, etc, etc, etc
A union is basically a 2 step plan - first, identify the person willing to pay you the most. Second, pick a fight with them. This might be a locally OK strategy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jimmy_Hoffa#National_Master_Fr...
1. That is a list of issues that have legal complications. That goes to my core point - organising to effect political change is far more effective than the typical union.
All the workers on Straten Island would be just as politically effective whether they have union representation on their day job or not.
2. I'm not sure what you are trying to say with the Hoffa article, but note that the union is called the teamster union. The obsolescence of draft animals and, by extension, the end of teamstering as a profession did more for their working conditions than the union did.
3. That list is made up of pretty pathetic achievements vs what the capitalists have managed. Wealthy capitalists have doubled and doubled their wealth in the same time. I'd work 10 hours a day in exchange for that sort of money. And the capitalists don't need to take risks they are uncomfortable with because they own the business. Not sure about the child labour thing.
The unions won what they asked for, and it turned out what they were asking for wasn't very clever. They should have been asking for ways to build an ownership stake in businesses, taking some of the risk and reaping some of the reward.
What does that mean? Labor unions have always been political organizations. I feel like it's my core point that's being confirmed here - your description of labor movement history is pretty much wrong making the basis of your argument wrong. You didn't even address the national agreement I linked, a specific policy goal of one of the most influential US unions. It flatly contradicts your narrative about 'local changes'. It also happened 60 years ago.
None of those activities are particularly useful for achieving the things you listed as wins for unions. In fact, they are all distractions from achieving those outcomes.
Seriously, you've got workers trying to organise against an entity that is more influential than they are, has more resource and controls their life for a fair chunk of their waking hours. And the most willing entity to give them money that the workers can find. The more they struggle against that the more they will lose, it is strategically untenable.
Humans, as an advanced form of monkey, have an instinct when they get stressed that makes them band together and fight stuff. It feels really good. It also usually makes the people fighting worse off - the long term winners are usually the ones that best avoid fighting (particularly fighting more powerful and better organised companies). We've got about a century of experience in this field, the people who spent their time figuring out how to unionise aren't the ones who are seeing their living standards rapidly improve.
Why do we take it for granted that we live in a democracy, but tolerate that businesses are directed like dictatorships?
That's insane.
Don't I, as a free man, have the right to negotiate as I see fit with my employer? Why should that right be taken away by a vote of others?
Or let's put it another way. The Dems are for purple cars, the Reps are for yellow cars. We all get to vote on what we get! Is that freedom? What if I want a purple car, and the vote went yellow? What if I want a red car?
That isn't freedom.
In the car analogy, you're missing the "free to not have any car at all even though you would like one" option.
EU legislation establishes individual rights for all workers, with a maximum working week of 48 hours, paid annual leave of at least four weeks per year, rest periods and rules on night work, shift work and patterns of work.
Who needs unions with great labor laws already in place? Of course the right in the US want none of that.
A lot of EU law already in place is a wish list for US employees who join a union.
Right to work could be good under the right conditions. Which the EU already largely has. In fact many EU countries have far stronger labor laws than the EU laws themselves. That's the context within which right to work starts to make sense.
The massive wealth gaps in the US tell the actual story. Corporations have a huge influence over US law and the laws mostly benefit the corporations over individuals or unions. That's one of the dangers of massive wealth. You can just buy the government. Which has already happened in the US.
That's kinda like asking 'who wants vaccines when we have this wonderful herd immunity?'
Unions are the reason those labor laws are there in the first place.
I support many union actions at my employer, for example I joined their recent strike, withholding my labour (and consequently getting paid less) because the employer and indeed their entire sector, refuses to make sensible pension and pay provisions - but I won't join the union itself because I don't agree with all their positions and I'm content with the trade off that results.
I dunno when the EU laws were created, but the 4th and the 5th week of PTO were also brought by unions (one with the help of q socialist government). The other 14 days (we have 39 total PTO in France, 14 of those can be redeemed as money basically) i don't know where they came from.
So that's the missing piece I was looking for. I think you'll find something similar in Italy.
The big difference in the US is that Americans have never elected a truly labor friendly government. These laws in the EU are not just the result of strong unions. You need government to be on board too and that requires the voters.
This is less directly related to unions.
The EU was founded as two basic principles - free movement of goods, free movement of workers. The idea was to achieve a common comercial block that could compete in the era of superpowers.
What we’ve come to realize is that those basic principles end up almost building a country from the ground up:
You can’t have workers from france outcompeting germans by selling lower quality meat because the French don’t have to follow German animal health standards. So, common health standards for everyone.
You can’t have an Italian company outselling Spanish companies because the Spanish lose money repairing defective products and the Italians don’t have to. So common consumer laws.
keep going and we’ll eventually have an army to protect our interests, etc. and we’ll become a federal country of sorts.
That explains why the EU creates standards. We all have to compete under the same rules.
As for why set the standard as “improving rights for everyone” rather than “lowering rights to the minimum for everyone”, it is always going to be more popular to raise the standards, rather than be an institution that takes rights away from citizens of the member nations. If the EU was seen as the big guys that force you to work and live in worse conditions it would not last long.
If this vote goes through (and a contract agreed), and you take a unionized job in the unionized warehouse, you will be covered by the union contract. If management violates the contract in a way that harms you, the union will be filing a grievance on your behalf. If you ask for a union rep to be in the room when discipline is discussed, they must send a rep. You will vote on a proposed contract. In short, the union has the responsibility to represent you, based on your being in a union job.
A "right to work" state is one where the union cannot sign a contract with the employer forcing you to pay union dues in order to get the representation you are entitled to. So, you have the right, in a "right to work" state, to avail yourself of the union representation without paying dues. That's exactly what "right to work" means, and no more.
> Or let's put it another way. The Dems are for purple cars, the Reps are for yellow cars. We all get to vote on what we get! Is that freedom? What if I want a purple car, and the vote went yellow? What if I want a red car?
you weren't talking about government here?
The idea of “freedom” from government as a frame of reference here is bullshit. The entire concept of a corporation is a government created legal fiction, and an arbitrary one. Corporations are required to do hundreds of thousands of things.
Jeff Bezos can rent a warehouse and talk people into going there and do whatever the fuck he wants. But if he wants limited liability, access to the roads and waterways the society creates and manages, enforcement of property rights, and the permission to enter a joint stock partnership to fund it he needs government permission, also known as the permission of society.
The fact of Amazon even existing at all is a privilege granted by the state that can be revoked at any time.
I don’t have the freedom to negotiate as I see fit with my employer. I also don’t have the freedom to punch Jeff Bezos in the nuts for not paying fair wages and I am not allowed to be a hairdresser if I don’t pass an exam or sell securities without registering them or pork that I’ve been storing in my attic all week.
We regulate every single aspect of commerce, it’s a choice we’ve made as a society.
Or to exploit and rob minority members of said society. The "good willed" government does not exist and has no reason to: it owns the ultimate monopoly, on violence. Most governments today on the planet are evil. The list of atrocities perpetrated by governments is as long as civilization's history and completely dwarfs the list of bad things done by corporations.
> The fact of Amazon even existing at all is a privilege granted by the state that can be revoked at any time.
States tried getting rid of corporations. Their citizens starved. The truth is, most value created by companies is captured by the society at large (the value we get from the stuff we buy is much larger than the cost we pay), not the company owners or employees.
The will of the voters that matters in this case is the voters who voted for labor laws. (Or rather, voters who voted for politicians, who voted for labor laws.) And, of course, the voters who voted for the Supreme Court, who gets to singlehandedly say what those laws actually mean. (Again, they don't vote directly; they vote for a President who nominates and a Senate who approves.)
The vote of a union only matters in light of those labor laws. And the company has the right to appeal those, under those same laws.
It would be nice for the company to also take the responsibility to respect the intention of the law, rather than hoping they'll get some body (elected or otherwise) to give them the answer they wanted. But our whole system is deliberately adversarial: everybody fights as hard as they can for what they want, regardless of what would actually be right. That's a big chunk of the reason we have unions in the first place.
It's a terrible system, the worst one, except for all of the others. Me, I'm voting with my feet: I'm using Amazon as little as I can get away with, even when it costs more to use an alternative. They can fix that by ceasing to be douchebags... but that seems pretty unlikely.
Voting with feet and voting with dollars has always been a way to make workers and consumers(often the same) feel like they've got a say without actually giving them one.
The problem is that the territory of the conflict is attempting to be constrained ie: within the current legal structure. What isn't allowed here is the conflict to spill into the province of arguing about the rules of the game itself. We've never had a static legal landscape and never will, and yet arguments like these assume it.
Workers should have a shot at workplace democracy because it's a fundamental right of self-determination. Carve-outs of that right like in workplaces are only as natural as we make them.
There's a million things I'd do differently if I were in charge. But not only am I not in charge, what little power I do possess has been systematically diluted to the point of effective nonexistence.
Kind of like dark-pattern subscriptions, some things are much easier to sign up for than to get rid of.
Yes, unions can run amuck and like any structure can be abused, but the abuse is typically (not always) in the direction that benefits you as a laborer. This is counter to the current state of affairs where most all abuse in the labor market is one sided, against you. Typically your only real leverage is irreplacability and mobility across the labor market (or overall financial independene to stop working entirely). Outside of that you're at the mercy of whatever level of business manager sets atop you and take whatever they can legally (and sometimes illegally) get away with.
[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/sites/default/files/attachments/pages/n...
That said, I doubt the causation between unions and pay etc.
I hope these guys get rewarded for all their efforts.