I admit I just don't understand how unions are formed or how they work. Once I saw picketing (not sure if I'm using the term properly) outside of a grocery store. When I asked what their complaint was, I found out they didn't work there and I got confused.
What does "a majority of the workers" mean? Is that a majority in a particular establishment, or employees of a company (across many locations) or an industry?
And if they vote Yes, do they then choose what kind of union to be (Teamsters, etc.) and doesn't it get kind of complicated? What happens to the people that vote No?
It depends on the country you're in but, briefly put...
A group of workers come together. They form a collective known as a Trade Union.
They can say "pay us a better wage or we'll stop working for you". Or "stop managers from sexually harassing us or we won't do any overtime". They use collective bargaining to extract better value or conditions from their employer.
Some unions are tiny - they might just cover a single office. Others are huge - they might cover an entire industry. Because labour laws are complex it is sometimes better for people to be in a large union. There are unions which cover single companies and there are unions which cover industries. There are even "miscellaneous" unions.
Generally speaking, if a majority of workers vote to join a union then the company has to recognise that union (I'm glossing over the detail of what a majority means because different countries have different rules). Recognising a union means (again, depending on the law) that the company has to consult with the employees before making certain changes. It might also mean that the union gets to represent workers when negotiating pay.
In most countries, an individual can choose whether to join a union or not. If they don't join, they don't pay any union fees - but they also don't get the protection of the union's lawyers.
Some countries and industries allow for a "closed shop". That means you must be a member of a union in order to take a job. Normally, that means paying a monthly fee. Other industries are flexible - if you don't pay to become a member you can still do the job. You may even be able to take advantage of collective negotiation. But if you need legal advice, the union may not be able to help you. It's similar to insurance in that respect - you can't take out a policy after your house burns down.
Unions are democratically controlled and member run. They make choices based on what their membership votes for. Sometimes, the members may vote to go on strike e.g. "We will withdraw our labour until you fix this problem."
Some unions can engage in secondary action - in your example, let's say that the grocery store has been underpaying people. Union members might come and protest outside a store they don't work at in order to show support to those workers, to inform customers about the bad behaviour, and to let management know that their actions won't be tolerated.
Unions are necessary because your employer is richer, stronger, and has more lawyers than you do as an individual. In unity there is strength.
> Unions are necessary because your employer is richer, stronger, and has more lawyers than you do as an individual. In unity there is strength.
To me this is the key point, that often gets lost or forgotten. Companies inherently benefit from a power imbalance, proportional to the size of the company, and you represent a cost center to them most of the time. This places you at a huge, and permanent, disadvantage, and one of the only ways to combat it is unify with other workers and bargain.
The only person or group who exists to maximize your well-being is you/your union, not your employer, so it makes sense not to trust the employer to look out for you. They're busy maximizing returns for shareholders.
I have seen many cases where senior union members, who often compose the leadership of the union, will strike deals that benefit older union members over younger union members.
See all the government employee pension plans with tier benefits where older employees in older tiers have higher benefits than younger employees. Or they will accept underfunding for a couple decades since the underfunding will not affect benefits paid during their lifetime.
Yes, unions can be inefficient, ineffective, and even corrupt. They are democratic control over the workplace, with all the problems that brings with it. We elect plenty of shitty politicians after all. But the alternative is no chance of any power in the employment relationship. It is like saying "yeah we elected that president and they were garbage, we should really just let richest ten people in the country get together and decide who is president moving forward."
Benevolent megacorps aren't really real. When WalMart was found to be systematically underpaying and underpromoting women in their stores through rigorous statistical analysis, the CEO did interviews saying that the company needed to do better and then turned around and argued in front of the Supreme Court that all of the underpaid women couldn't count as a class for a class action suit and had their claims dismissed.
>It is like saying "yeah we elected that president and they were garbage, we should really just let richest ten people in the country get together and decide who is president moving forward."
I did not intend to make an anti union statement, just wanted to show how a “union” might not have the best interest of all union members in mind. Similar to how older taxpayers punt costs into future taxpayers.
You missed the part that in some countries, even if they don't join, depending on the union structure, they would still get the benefits from the industry agreements made between the union, government and industrial partners.
This is a key component of the Nordic model. The legislatures in the Nordics choose to not legislate a minimum salary and make a number of labor laws conditional to collective agreements.
The theory is that the threat of legislation is sufficient to prevent imbalance between the parties. The state takes on the role as antagonist, making the unions and employers (somewhat uneasy) partners in trying to self-regulate. If they fail, parliament legislates, which is generally speaking perceived as an undesired outcome by everyone (crucially including most political parties).
From my Swedish point of view the model seems to work for private local employers, but struggles with the globalized tech workforce and for some public sector employees. It also seems to complicate work visa compliance by hiding away some of the terms.
Yes, in many countries in Europe, the industry wide unions negotiate with representatives of the industry employers, and government can declare the deal binding for all companies of a certain size in the industry.
Also if workers go on strike they don't get paid by their job, the union can pay them something instead from fees they received in the past.
Taft-Hartley Act outlawed secondary striking as an "unfair business practice" in the United States, so if a secondary strike does happen, union organizers need to tread carefully; as claiming 're striking in support of another shop' without there being anything to strike over with their current employer is basically admitting to engaging in verboten behavior.
I leave it as an exercise to the reader to decide for themselves whether it is a good thing, or a bad one.
Very cogent explanation, thank you. I hope very much that workers in Amazon warehouses are able to get unions happening on a large scale.
What if I’m just better than the rest? What if I can assemble 45 amplifiers a day when my coworkers can only manage 17? (This actually happened to me, long ago.) it is my impression that a union would not allow me to negotiate better terms for myself. Or am I incorrect?
In the US, you are correct. By default, it is illegal for a company to negotiate terms with any individual covered by a union, even if that individual is not a dues paying member of the union.
Technically, you are allowed negotiate, but it is illegal for the company to accept and it is not legally binding, so it is functionally equivalent to it being illegal to negotiate terms for yourself (assuming you want to negotiate, it is obviously better at preventing unilateral corporate abuse as the corporation would be on the hook for tricking you).
I believe you can negotiate if the union lets you, but by default you can not. Also, you can not unilaterally waive union representation either, even if you are not a member, so if the union does not allow it you would need to convince 50% of the covered individuals to change the rules or dissolve the union.
Some jurisdictions may only allow for a single contract. I don't know where you live, but in my part of the world there's nothing stopping you from negotiating a personal deal. But it can't undercut the union minimum.
The second is the more important part - does the company want to negotiate with an individual? Most places don't. It costs time, money, and effort to do salary negotiations. Companies don't want to set individual contracts for 500 different workers.
"Union" does not automatically mean "everyone doing job X gets $Y/hr, no matter what."
Many unions allow for performance-based pay increases. Furthermore, if you're actually doing better (in a situation like you describe, it should be trivial to prove this), it is likely that the union would help you negotiate a better performance-based pay increase than you would be able to negotiate on your own.
How many amplifier companies actually enable their factory workers to negotiate individually effectively in ways that they couldn't with a union? Why couldn't a union negotiate terms that guarantee pay for performance in the way you want? In software, people often complain about doing the work of a certain level but not being able to be paid at that level. Union contracts could mean a seat at the table on promotion decisions.
And sure, there will probably be some people who are in unusual positions where they can negotiate more effectively by themselves. Similarly, there are people who would improve their status in the United States if we had a Putin-esque autocracy. Even if someone personally benefits from this scheme, I consider it to be pretty bad for uber wealthy individuals to sabotage our democracy so that they maximally increase their wealth.
Some people think that, I guess. I'd rather have somebody who is explicitly advocating for me in the room rather than a faceless committee that is almost completely unaccountable.
In some countries it goes even further. There's a thing called sympathy strikes where workers in the same "federation" of unions join in. So if you as an employer screw over your employees, your business will come to a halt. Everybody working within that same "federation" will refuse to service you. So no mail, no trash pickup, no goods delivered, no maintenance work etc. You are essentially shut down until you play ball.
This is all good in theory so here is my question: since unions are essentially a power structure at its core what happens when they try to abuse their positions? What is the check/balance or counter to that?
Members can vote against those changes. They can vote in new leadership. Or they can stop paying dues and / or join a different union.
In my last workplace, there were a choice of 3 different unions I could have joined. I picked the one which aligned best with my needs, took part in how it was run, and could have stopped if I thought they weren't acting in my best interests.
No I am asking for a situation when the unions have an agenda of extracting maximum benefits out of the company while actively encouraging its members to put in the absolute bare minimum of effort. This will in a few years time will make the company's products prohibitevly expensive due to the associated cost inflation. As a result of which the company's products are no longer competitive in the free market unless heavily subsidized by tax payer dollars (think UAW and its role in gutting American car mannufacturing. These days except for states in rural US, cars made by American car companies: GM, Ford, Chrysler are mostly considered as jokes all over the world).
I mean the very simple question is: who pays? What protects the shareholders, management and the employees?
I'm not from the USA - so I don't know about that specific case.
But let's take your premise and reword it.
What happens if shareholders have an agenda of extracting maximum benefits out of the company while actively encouraging its demise?
We see that all the time with private equity groups loading up on debt so they can make a huge profit and then letting the company go bust.
What happens if senior managers have an agenda of extracting maximum benefits for minimum effort?
Again, how many CEOs get golden parachutes after wrecking a company?
Who protects the workers in those situations?
You'll find (in some cases) unions do take a long term view. They want to secure long term benefits rather than a short term bump. That's because they're working for people who need a regular pay cheque. So you'll see compromises being made in order to secure longer term employment.
So you have basically decided not to answer the relevant question but to parrot an idiotic left wing garbage narrative.
Okay! in that case, I rest my case that unions can actually be very harmful due to it being a power structure and particularly if they are not subjected to any check and balances.
> So you decided not to answer the relevant question but to parrot and idiotic left wing garbage narrative.
No, he had answered your first question and then you came up with an absurd hypothetical as a rebuttal, so he responded with an extension of your hypothetical which demonstrates its absurdity.
> I rest my case that unions can actually be very harmful due to it being a power structure and particularly if they are not subjected to any check and balances.
Sure, but the topic was if having unions was better than not… anything can be harmful given some abnormal premises, so you’ve made no valid point.
As a side question, is your objective to ‘win’ the argument, or be correct? To me, it sounds like the former.
> As a side question, is your objective to ‘win’ the argument, or be correct? To me, it sounds like the former.
My objective here is to get to the truth - nothing more and nothing less. Unions can be "every bit harmful" since they are a power structure and power corrupts. Unrestrained, unfettered, corrupt unions can do more harm than good. They are not a cure all remedy for all problems a modern "evil" corporation might have [1].
> What protects the shareholders, management, and the employees?
When you say protect these entities, what risk does each of these entities endure by being part of the company?
The employees usually put their entire livelihood with the company, and, at least in the US, an employee is dependent upon the employer for pretty much all sources of income and healthcare.
The managers could be classified into two groups: one who is also beholden to their employer, much like an employee and has little to no agency in their job (low/mid level management), and the other who has an ownership-stake or large compensation which prevents a loss-of-livelihood style coercion from their employer.
Often, the second class of management blends into the shareholder group, and their will dictates the policies and objectives of the company. A rapid change in this group (e.g., through a buyout, key member dying), results in rapid changes to the livelihoods of its employees.
The shareholders risk one thing: capital. While capital is important, and can affect one’s life significantly, the shareholder has no other risk.
Personally, I’d rather protect the employees at the risk of the shareholders.
> No I am asking for a situation when the unions have an agenda of extracting maximum benefits out of the company while actively encouraging its members to put in the absolute bare minimum of effort.
Sure, in this is specific situation a company would fail. Something to note, however, is that the objective of a union is never to stop its members from making money. Doing things which would harm the company into not being competitive would necessarily harm the union’s members.
Two key differences here between a union and the owners of a company doing this (which you scoffed at in your other reply), are:
1) if performed by the owners, the profits from this maximum-extraction would go to the owners, but if performed by the union it would be self-destructive, and
2) the decision to do so would’ve been done by an elected group and never potentially at the whims of an owner (for instance, an activist investor with a desire to strip it down for parts and make more than the purchase price).
> This will in a few years time will make the company's products prohibitevly expensive due to the associated cost inflation.
There is no evidence that this would be the case, because no union has ever acted like your hypothetical union.
> think the UAW and how in gutting American car manufacturing
This isn’t true, and you’ll need to provide some evidence for me to take this claim seriously; it is much more time consuming for me to clear up B.S. than it is for someone to make it up.
> Personally, I’d rather protect the employees at the risk of the shareholders.
Sorry, but thats not how capitalism operates. Modern corporations are created for the benefit of share holders and they operate for only one reason and one reason only i.e. "to maximize" shareholder value [1].
Honestly, you seem to be living in some alternative "la la la la" land where you perceive reality in a very different way or at least want reality to be what you want it to be than what currently it is. I am not quite sure how to argue with people who hold beliefs similar to yours. Please note, we are not arguing here as to what is fair or not (read my response carefully) as per some definition of fairness.
> Sorry, but thats not how capitalism operates. Modern corporations are created for the benefit of share holders and they operate for only one reason and one reason only i.e. "to maximize" shareholder value [1].
Sure, but we should quote Friedman a bit more completely… “there is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits so long as it stays within the rules of the game, which is to say, engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.”
The key caveats to maximizing shareholder value are that this maximization happens ‘within the rules of the game’ and when the business ‘engages in open and free competition without deception or fraud.’ A market’s ‘rules of the game,’ so to speak, are set by the government which has the power to enforce those rules.
Part of those rules include what can and cannot be made into a contract, and, in particular, what types of contracts wouldn’t be enforceable because of coercion. If an employee would lose their house because of a business’s decision (and the business has no objective incentive to warn the employee of this potential), I’d argue that most parts of the employer/employee relationship are coercive. A union can mitigate that somewhat by providing a real cost the business for not negotiating in good faith.
In addition, the ‘rules of the game’ are changed by the government, which itself is affected by large market players.
Outside of that: this is a rather one-sided discussion. I’ve given rather full responses and you’ve provided nothing other than ‘no you’re wrong, here’s a partial quote,’ and ‘what about this ridiculous hypothetical?’ Do you have any rebuttal to what I said, or is the ‘personally, I’d rather protect the employees at the risk of shareholders,’ the extent of what you can argue against?
> pay us a better wage or we'll stop working for you
unfortunately it's illegal to fire a group of people who strike, so if you're wondering why companies don't just say "sure, stop working then", that's why.
Good explanation. But it should be noted that though democratic, unions have had and some still have issues with corruption. This is one reason why workers may be against a union.
> When I asked what their complaint was, I found out they didn't work there and I got confused.
Do you ever go help out a friend who needs it? Same thing, but two unions.
> And if they vote Yes, do they then choose what kind of union to be (Teamsters, etc.) and doesn't it get kind of complicated?
A union is just an organization of people, like a company in many ways. The union forms with some basic governance rules, and the union decides to join up with some bigger organization if they want to.
> What happens to the people that vote No?
I believe it depends on the state's laws, but broad strokes either basically they're in the union anyway, or they can choose to be or not.
>Do you ever go help out a friend who needs it? Same thing, but two unions.
I'd hope to understand what help my friend needs in that case. But I guess there is also something admirable about someone who is there to help without question, especially in this day and age.
What happened in your first sentence was ruled impermissable in the USA due to Taft-Hartley in 1947 as I understand it, strikers can only picket where the company they are striking against does business. So you really need to be less vague.
I think you need to be careful translating the comment.
We only know they were picketing. We do not know if they were carrying out a prohibited action under Taft-Hartley.
All we know is that chmod600 got confused upon learning the picketers don't work there.
You can picket a place without being employed there. For example, "Arab American leaders demonstrated Thursday outside the Walt Disney studio against two Disney films that the protesters said contain insults to Arabs." https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1996-08-23-fi-36982-...
> Picketing to force an employer to recognize - or employees to select - a union is permitted under certain circumstances. As with secondary boycotts, the law here is a bit complex.
> Section 8(b)(7) of the Act makes it unlawful for a labor organization or its agents "to picket or cause to be picketed, or threaten to picket or cause to be picketed, any employer where an object thereof is forcing or requiring an employer to recognize or bargain with a labor organization as the representative of his employees, or forcing or requiring the employees of an employer to accept or select such labor organization as their collective-bargaining representative, unless such labor organization is currently certified as the representative of such employees: (A) where the employer has lawfully recognized any other labor organization and a question concerning representation may not appropriately be raised under Section 9(c); (B) where within the preceding 12 months a valid election under Section 9(c) has been conducted; or (C) where such picketing has been conducted without a petition under Section 9(c) being filed within a reasonable period of time not to exceed 30 days from the commencement of such picketing: ...
There are three different things. Creating a new union where there was none before. Having a workplace's workforce represented by that union. An individual joining a union.
We can safely ignore the first of the three for your question (no one wants to talk about how the Teamsters union was formed) and the last one (a trucker fills out paperwork).
For the second part, some employees work with an existing union to fill out cards indicating they want to join and be represented by that existing union. Once enough workers (by percentage) have filled out such cards, a vote is held among the affected workforce. (For instance, just the janitorial staff may have to fill out cards and vote to unionize the janitorial staff, or an entire Starbucks may unionize). The government sets regulations on the vote and/or oversees it, but both the company and the union get to make their cases in the time before the vote. Then, majority wins. (The company can just agree and start working with the union without the vote)
Specific to your question about what a majority means, it certainly isn't by industry. I've heard of individual stores holding votes for Starbucks or Walmart, but also company wide votes for less retail oriented businesses. I'm not sure if that's because each location is a separate llc or because it can be by location.
Everyone, regardless of vote, can then join the union or not. Some states prevent unions from negotiating an "only union employees" clause in their contracts, others do not. Note that even if it's "only union employees", that just means all employees must join the union for the term of their employment, not that they have to be a member to get hired at all.
Unions are form of collusion/price fixing where employees attempt to gain a monopoly on labor and raise wages/rents above market rate. However, this form of antitrust is not illegal because corporations, were they people, would be psychopaths that actually behave even more badly. And, all things being equal, groups of people deserve wealth more than corporations do.
The word is spot on for a union, see https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/collusion.asp: "Collusion occurs when entities or individuals work together to influence a market or pricing for their own advantage."
"Collusion is a non-competitive, secret, and sometimes illegal agreement between rivals which attempts to disrupt the market's equilibrium. The act of collusion involves people or companies which would typically compete against one another, but who conspire to work together to gain an unfair market advantage. The colluding parties may collectively choose to influence the market supply of a good or agree to a specific pricing level which will help the partners maximize their profits at the detriment of other competitors. It is common among duopolies."
Normally, workers are rivals who are competing to sell labor to the market. A union occurs when these workers agree not to compete and "work together to influence a market or pricing for their own advantage."
What is secret about a union? Also the word carries a context, hence the mention of duopoly. So no, not spot on.
Also you failed to mention that capital works to actively disrupt market equilibrium for wages. So by “colluding” the union is merely attempting to counteract that.
Union relationships are always secret? News to me. Taft-Hartley even has:
> Sec. 211. (a) For the guidance and information of interested representatives of employers, employees, and the general public, the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the Department of Labor shall maintain a file of copies of all available collective bargaining agreements and other available agreements and actions thereunder settling or adjusting labor disputes. Such file shall be open to inspection under appropriate conditions prescribed by the Secretary of Labor, except that no specific information submitted in confidence shall be disclosed. - https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/COMPS-8190/uslm/COMPS-81...
So by your definition, the members of that union are not colluding.
Labor providers and labor consumers are not rivals, and they do not compete with each other.
You need to demonstrate how it is an "unfair market advantage". Simply saying it is so it not enough. It could be a fair market advantage.
"workers are rivals who are competing to sell labor to the market"
Ohh, that a funny one. You've just claimed that all trade associations are a form of collusion too.
The Orange Growers of Florida - made of rivals! - get together to promote Florida Oranges so are colluding to take market away from Californian orange growers. Well clutch my pearls!
You also think Microsoft is colluding with HCL, Accenture, TCS, and Chinasoft because Microsoft has negotiated a preferred status with them to find contract workers, rather than be open to the entire market of possible contract workers.
If it makes you feel better, think of the union as a co-op owned labor provider who made a multi-year contract with a company as the exclusive provider of a certain type of labor. Would that be "collusion"?
> when these workers agree not to compete
You've confused two different issues. 1) "workers are rivals who are competing to sell labor to the market" refers to all people who could be hired. Most of these people are not in a union, as we clearly see when the company hires scabs.
2) "A union occurs when these workers agree not to compete" generally refers to the people already working for a company. At least, I have not heard of a union started by people who were not employed and decided to use collective action to improve the market salary rate. Thus, they are not in the same market as #1.
The union for #2 acts as a single economic actor, just like you interpret the company as a single economic actor even though many managers may be involved ("collude") in setting new salary levels.
I already pointed out how the definition "collusion" doesn't fit most union agreements. You have not shown there is collusion. Instead, you double down and say it's a cartel.
> A cartel is a group of independent market participants who collude with each other in order to improve their profits and dominate the market.
If there is no collusion, there is no cartel.
Where is the collusion?
If 7-11 and Coca-Cola reach an agreement for Coca-Cola be the sole cola supplier to 7-11 in exchange for a reduced price, that is not collusion, that is not a cartel, that is not anti-competitive.
Yet if 7-11 and labor organization reach an agreement that the labor organization be the sole supplier of a certain type of labor, that is collusion, a cartel, and anti-competitive?
If employers refuse to negotiate with employees individually, and set a fixed maximum price for labour, that is clearly unlawful, collusive, cartel behaviour. If they enforced this by refusing to honour their contracts and refusing to pay employees or give them work, this would also be unlawful.
If employees do the same then the left pretends it is normal.
Note that unions had to be made legal by legislative fiat. At common law, unions were illegal associations in restraint of trade.
Words - what do they mean? Maybe your comments are a collusive act. Maybe you and I have formed a cartel together. I don't know. If only there were some way to learn what how words are commonly used. Words? Words? What are words?
> If employers refuse to negotiate with employees individually, and set a fixed maximum price for labour, that is clearly unlawful, collusive, cartel behaviour.
Even if we accept your (cringe?) example, you must surely notice that you are using "employer" here to mean a collective, abstract economic entity, and not the people in the company who can make decisions about the employees in the company.
If the managers at the same company set a fixed maximum price for labor, and refuse to negotiate with employees individually, that's considered standard practice.
By your logic then, if employees at the same company set a fixed maximum price for labor, and refuse to negotiate with employers individually, that should also be fine.
So your complaint isn't about unions per se, but about multi-corporation unions.
In any case, if unions are "clearly unlawful", what law do they break?
While we can point to the law Apple, Google, Intel and Adobe broke in their illegal non-compete collusion.
If you can't point to a law being broken, it's not unlawful. (That's one of those cringe definition things, I know.)
> "The left pretends it is normal"
How do you know they are pretending? Do you pretend that women suffrage is normal?
How long does it take for something to become normal? Recognized, legal unions in the US have been around for longer than the nationwide right for women to vote.
What does left/right have to do with it? When President Reagan, famed for not being on the left, declare:
"By outlawing Solidarity, a free trade organization to which an overwhelming majority of Polish workers and farmers belong, they have made it clear that they never had any intention of restoring one of the most elemental human rights — the right to belong to a free trade union."
was he pretending too? If he meant it, when did the right start pretending?
> Note that unions had to be made legal by legislative fiat.
Let's examine this proposition, and set aside for now the cringe question of what "fiat" means.
Corporations were made legal by legislative fiat. You don't seem to have a problem with incorporated corporations, or with limited liability, so why would you have a problem with unions?
What legislative fiat do you refer to? In the US, the intrinsic legality of unions under the Constitution was established by Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842), which would be from the judicial system, not legislative.
That case directly addresses common law, and points out how earlier cases usually involved a union doing something illegal, like The King v. Journeymen Tailors of Cambridge, 8 Mod. 10 where the tailors wanted to raise "wages above the rate fixed by a general act of parliament. It was therefore a conspiracy to violate a general statute law".
It give a working definition of conspiracy (how cringe!)
"Without attempting to review and reconcile all the cases, we are of opinion, that as a general description, though perhaps not a precise and accurate definition, a conspiracy must be a combination of two or more persons, by some concerted action, to accomplish some criminal or unlawful purpose, or to accomplish some purpose, not in itself criminal or unlawful, by criminal or unlawful means. We use the terms criminal or unlawful, because it is manifest that many acts are unlawful, which are not punishable by indictment or other public prosecution; and yet there is no doubt, we think, that a combination by numbers to do them would be an unlawful conspiracy, and punishable by indictment."
and later concludes that unions are legal, so long as they use legal methods:
"We think, therefore, that associations may be entered into, the object of which is to adopt measures that may have a tendency to impoverish another, that is, to diminish his gains and profits, and yet so far from being criminal or unlawful, the object may be highly meritorious and public spirited. The legality of such an association will therefore depend upon the means to be used for its accomplishment. If it is to be carried into effect by fair or honorable and lawful means, it is, to say the least, innocent; if by falsehood or force, it may be stamped with the character of conspiracy."
You'll note the strong contrast between that legal decision and the viewpoint you espouse.
I imagine you might now claim that unions were made legal through judicial fiat. Shrug. Then your issue is with how laws are created, not unions. You like laws which protect capital, but not ones which protect labor. Got it.
None of your bizarre rant has anything to do with what we were discussing. As always, people like you drag out discussions on minor asides and random disputes about word choices rather than focusing on the actual issue being discussed.
If you cannot see that unions are price-fixing conspiracies then you can only be described as wilfully blind. Where you claim that it is just the same as multiple hiring managers working for the same firm.. It just boggles the mind.
Maybe it needs to be spelt out really simply for you: a union is not a firm. You don't hire a union. You hire employees. Unions do not want you to hire non-union employees and would make doing so illegal if they could. Unions want to "represent" an entire industry. They do not want competition.
So don't go round claiming it is just like a firm with multiple employees. That is nonsense.
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If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Usually we warn people before banning them, and often many times, but sometimes an account has been breaking the site guidelines so badly and so frequently that we just ban them. When I scrolled through your comment history I saw so many cases of this that you fell into the latter category.
> If you cannot see that unions are price-fixing conspiracies
Of course I do not. It doesn't meet the definition of conspiracy, and back in 1842 Commonwealth v. Hunt established that unions were not a conspiracy, in the context of common law, and even addressed and dismissed your "price-fixing" argument - in text I already quoted. The courts since then have never determined that unions are a conspiracy, and that's with judges from the left and right.
My "bizarre rant" contains the materials to support my answer to exactly the topic you addressed.
I don't know why you willfully ignore the last 180 years of history.
You are the one who eschews definitions, but that doesn't mean you can redefine well-understood terms without expecting general confusion.
The claim that unions couldn't exist without active government intervention is a claim I've only heard from ill-informed libertarians who view everything through a very ideological lens. Your responses are not dissuading me that you fall into that category.
You have yet to point to any external source which supports your arguments. I have pointed to primary sources demonstrating that your specific claims are invalid and your understanding suspect.
You make other claims like "the left pretends it is normal" without attempting to explain why your ideologically extreme viewpoint is correct, or meaningful, much less explain how the right - start with Reagan - is any different.
> So don't go round claiming it is just like a firm with multiple employees. That is nonsense.
I did not. Are you referring to my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37274569 were I wrote "If it makes you feel better, think of the union as a co-op owned labor provider who made a multi-year contract with a company as the exclusive provider of a certain type of labor. Would that be "collusion"?"
That was meant to show how union "collusion" could be implemented in a corporation model, leading to similar economic results for the co-op owners, but demonstrably not seen as a collusion when done by companies like Adecco.
I did claim that you confused the abstract concept of "employer" with the concrete concept of "employee", leading to a failure in your analogy. It means you see a company as a distinct economic entity (created by government fiat) from the managers who make employer decisions. By analogy, a union is a distinct economic entity (yes, supported by government fiat) from the employees.
A union is not a firm, and claiming so would be counter to centuries of history dating back to the medieval guild era.
I think this is what the difference between “right to work” states and not is. In “right to work” states, unions cannot stop someone from working at an employer. In non-right to work states, unions have more power to determine that, but I don’t understand how exactly.
Personally I find it pretty hard to reason through this. On one hand, right to work seems utterly reasonable, how can a third party tell an employer and employee that they can’t conduct business to their mutual satisfaction? But at the same time, it’s clear that right to work will gut unions. So if you feel that employers have too much power over employees and unions are a good answer to that, but also think it’s absurd to allow a third party to block an employment contract, then it seems like there are no options left.
Federal law allows for arrangements where employees can be required to join the union after being hired, or can choose to not join but have to pay the union a fee for their representation.
"Right-to-work" states change this and don't allow those arrangements: employees are free to not join and not pay.
The "closed shop," where only members of the union are hired, is illegal everywhere in the US under federal law.
- Closed shop - must belong to union to be hired. Outlawed in US in 1947.
- Union shop - must join union after being hired. Not allowed in right-to-work US states.
- Open shop - can optionally join union.
- Yellow-dog contract - forbidden to join union. Outlawed in US in 1932. Violated by some US employers.
US labor law dates from an era of strong unions, and basically outlines a set of rules under which management and labor can battle it out. Management won. In 1954, about 35% of US private sector workers belonged to a union. Today, that's about 6%. In Canada, 14% of private sector workers belong to a union today. In Germany, about 50%.
Yeah good luck working a job where everyone else is union and you’re not though, you’ll find your lunch missing and people will be total jerks to you at every possible turn…
> But at the same time, it’s clear that right to work will gut unions.
Not inherently. If a union is providing clear value to the employees, they'll presumably want to be a member. If an employee doesn't want to be a member, presumably they don't feel it provides them with commensurate value.
The small issue with reviving Joy Silk is that the Supreme Court is the one that abandoned it.
As such, the NLRB, despite what they may want, doesn't actually have the authority to revive it.
They are just hoping the facts in this case are egregious enough that a court lets it slide.
That may or may not happen - the NLRB traditionally does not have the greatest success in court, even in days where unions were much more supported in the US than they are now.
One outcome in fact is that the courts decide to gut the power of the NLRB
And I imagine trust in the supreme court is at an all time low. I know part of the point of the SCOTUS is to be shielded from popular sentiment, but that used to include not taking large bribes from corporate entities and corrupt cabinets.
The level of public support unions and the NLRB have is material, because it could influence SCOTUS justices. The amount of trust in the Supreme Court doesn't have the same materiality, because one of the most fundamental ideas in American civics is that the courts are meant to be insulated from public opinion.
true, but insulation isn't equal to being completely isolated from the public. Judges are still ultimately human and bound to the same overton curtain as any other member of society. Even if a particular justice wants to repeal the 13th amendment, they know better than to say or even write that out loud, despite it not affecting their job security (or at least, they should).
The only thing I have ever thought of that could provide balance without unions is making standardized work shifts and forbid full time work. That way to work full time you wouldn’t have have to have two part time jobs. That would give jobs to employees a similar level of fungibility as employees to employers and leaving or changing one of your two jobs wouldn’t be as challenging.
Provably false. You don't even have to look far -- there is no "labour shortage," what there is a shortage of is "desperate people and suckers." That has not led to higher wages, only enough for people to bite.
If there was balance, then you'd be getting paid your labour's worth, which would never happen as that's where all the money lies. You might have a good product, but if nobody assembles it? If nobody makes the parts? If nobody makes or maintains the machines that assemble the parts? Nothing, and therefore, no value.
When the supply of employees is high, you still want competition between employers to establish wages. Setting wages to above that rate reduces profit rates to below what the economy needs to get optimal investment levels.
That is a pretty mild form of collusion and is an outlier from an otherwise extremely competitive employer market where the hunt for talent pushed Silicon Valley engineer compensation to over $200,000 a year.
And the status was a doubling of wages for unskilled labor between 1870 and 1900, and this despite a massive increase in the supply of labor due to record high immigration rates.
yet all through history of capitalist countries there are never ending stories of corporations abusing workers with slave wages and exceptionally long hours to keep them beat down, especially when said company is an oligopoly and they know they can get away with horrendous conditions because the government turns a blind eye. Often the only way was to form a union and punch where it hurts, in the wallet. Said companies would often hire goons to beat strikers, naturally the strikers didn't like that, so they game back the next day with guns and baseball bats of their own
Workers flocked to the most free market economy in the world in the 19th century, because it offered by far the highest wages. People fled East Germany for West Germany, Cuba for Florida and North Korea for South Korea.
>Said companies would often hire goons to beat strikers, naturally the strikers didn't like that, so they game back the next day with guns and baseball bats of their own
What this absurd propaganda leaves out is that the striking workers would regularly beat up and even murder replacement workers who crossed their picket line. They called them "scabs" to give themselves a moral license to deal out this violence. They were a violent mob, and were in fact thoroughly infiltrated by the mob, as well as aggressive socialist activists who sought to bring Soviet style mass murder to the West.
The companies never had a need to initiate violence against the unions. The unions had no power in a free market. Their only power was in their goons assaulting competing workers and blockading the company to prevent it from moving goods/services.
This new rule is simply a power grab for leftists. It will be cheered on by everyone too dimwitted to realize there are huge negative externalities to unions and minimum wage laws, which ironically affect the working class the most.
Labor has _always_ been a liability for rich amoral capitalists. Should one assume by you saying this in response to this story that labor should race to the bottom, becoming just as cheap and disposable as a machine? Sounds like a bad world to live in, and it also wouldn't even work.
Exactly. Companies will replace human workers with AI or robots or whatever else as soon as it's possible no matter what happens. Even if companies paid their workers nothing at all (slavery) it would still be worth it to get rid of their human employees because AI won't want vacations or family leave or call in sick or infect coworkers. Robots never show up late, or steal, or end up dragging the company into sexual harassment lawsuits. Machines don't have to sleep and most importantly they don't say no.
All human workers should fight for a living wage. Times are likely only going to get harder and when the robots do finally and inevitably replace us lowly human workers we'll be much better off after having fought for fair wages.
Capitalists acquire capital and, in a capitalist system, acquire power over others through doing so.
Laborers generate capital (among other forms of value), but capitalists, by virtue of the power they exercise within capitalism, capture what labor generates.
Laborers generate no capital. They sell services to capitalists who are the ones generating the capital. A person who works may also be a capitalist, who invests their surplus income into building a business, which is a form of capital.
There isn't a way that it is incorrect. It just isn't. It is like asking "how is it incorrect to say Wubble Bubble Jibble Quibble." It is a bunch of words placed together to form nonsense. He didn't give any reasons to support any of what he said.
>There isn't a way that it is incorrect. It just isn't. It is like asking "how is it incorrect to say Wubble Bubble Jibble Quibble." It is a bunch of words placed together to form nonsense. He didn't give any reasons to support any of what he said.
well it's not his problem you don't know what the words mean. what he said is simply objective reality - your "argument" is essentially identical to disagreeing with someone saying "apples are not oranges" because you don't know what an apple or orange is and the person didn't give any reasons to show that apples are not oranges
It is an element of the original description of capitalism in which the system got its name (and it is the central element for which the system is named.)
(That description happens to be contained in a socialist critique of capitalism as an actual existing system, but the particular element described is not the cornerstone of socialism, which is, after all, a prescriptive system, and not merely a critique of capitalism. It is the cornerstone of capitalism as an actual existing system, though.)
There is no such thing as "capitalism". That is a smear-word created by socialists to mis-describe the "system" (which isn't a system at all) wherein people are able to freely trade with each other. Commerce isn't a system, it's a human activity that has existed for all of human history.
So yes it is a cornerstone of socialism to falsely claim that (evil, greedy, immoral) "capitalists" exist, who "acquire capital" and in doing so "acquire power" as opposed to the (noble and virtuous) workers who are actually the ones that generate all the value, but who suffer at the hands of the evil greedy capitalists who exploit them and steal all that value.
Somehow we're meant to believe that despite these noble and virtuous workers generating all the value and far-outnumbering the evil, greedy capitalists, that the fact they haven't revolted and changed the system is because they're so oppressed and powerless (even though apparently they generate all value? what?).
It's just an incoherent mess of ideological nonsense. It puts people into two categories, even though actually most people are in both categories. Everyone with retirement savings (vast majority of people) is a "capitalist" and everyone with a job (vast majority of people) is a "worker".
> That is a smear-word created by socialists to mis-describe the "system" (which isn't a system at all) wherein people are able to freely trade with each other.
No, its not, and the “not a system” you describe is neither what we call “capitalism”, nor anything that has ever existed. Restrictions and limits on trade exist in all real-world economic systems and conditions. “Capitalism”, is, at root, a particular structure of property rights.
> So yes it is a cornerstone of socialism to falsely claim that (evil, greedy, immoral) "capitalists" exist
People who own capital exist, and I never made the moral claim that you make. (Leaving aside whether it has anything to do with socialism or not.)
> It's just an incoherent mess of ideological nonsense. It puts people into two categories, even though actually most people are in both categories
Actually, the socialist description of the structrue of capitalism does not have two categories; it recognizes a continuum of conditions, in which there are three main broad classes useful for discussion: those whose support is predominantly from renting out labor (proletariat/working class), those whose support has significant contributions from both labor and capital, as by applying their own labor to their own capital, though there are other patterns (petit bourgeois/middle class), and those whose support is predominantly through capital to which rented labor is applied (haut bourgeois/capitalist class).
You were promoting the socialist narrative, that is premised on the claim that free market exchange whereby a worker sells his labor is not in fact a free market exchange as a result of alleged duress the "system"—enacted by an alleged conspiracy of capitalists—subjects the worker to. That's why you used the word "acquire" instead of "create" to describe the capitalist's acquisition of capital. By framing the worker as the creator of capital, you are trying to lend credence to the Marxist narrative that the act of profiting from employed labor is expropriation of the surplus value generated by the worker.
Why of course they do! When I buy shares in a company, it's me that's generating all the capital, not those idle workers who just sit around making things!
When you buy stocks, you are in fact directing resources, in the form of goods/services, into building a company, which is a form of capital.
This effect is the ultimate outcome of a long chain of reactions that originates with the exchange of your money for the seller's stock. If you had spent your surplus income buying consumer goods instead of the stock, that chain of reactions—and the outcome of new capital they produce—wouldn't have happened.
Where does that return come from? It doesn't materialize from thin air. That money was generated by a laborer before it was shuffled to the various shareholders.
It comes from directing resources to generating capital. Those resources will be some combination of goods and services bought from others or provided by the investor themselves.
We’ll come to tax the automation next as a society. As long as democracy functions and the fiat hits a regulated endpoint (ie a bank), the majority can wag the minority seeking to maximize returns with automation and offshore labor.
Attempts to evade these mechanisms could use punitive measures resulting in exclusion from a market.
I think it is fascinating how employers have the gall to call themselves "job creators" and talk about their contribution to society through employment while this is so obviously happening.
This is a hilarious comment. It's exactly the comment that was made in the 70s when workers had a larger share of national income and when average salaries could afford a house.
Indeed, soon thereafter in the late 70s we saw rounds of union busting, neoliberalism, Thatcherism and Regan and drastic cuts to taxes and employment security.
Inequality spiked, wages stagnated, many millionaires and billionaires produced and the growing frustration and malaise in the working classes generating the rise of nationalist and populist movements the world over.
It's becoming a bipartisan realization we went too far with both Republicans and Democrats calling for reshoring, investment in industry and yes, worker protection. The most minimal watered down corporate friendly worker protection. This is 10% of what any radical would wish for.
And already this comment. The reactionary spirit has been embedded deeply.
Those things were reactions in many cases to overreach and an oversized role of the state, and a status quo that failed to innovate. Now we're (for good reason) going to go the other way.
I think its a natural cyclic cycle, the market is now out of good new ideas, and now we need innovation from someplace else, and to rebalance social equity too
So the standard way that this works out is that an employee testifies that he was improving coerced to sign a card, and the company challenges the nlrb and the court reaffirms the sc decision. So this strikes me as political grandstanding at taxpayer expense; Congress needs to change the law and the nlrb doesn't have the authority to do it unilaterally
tldr: the election only happens after significant organizing and demonstrated worker interest in forming a union.
Currently it’s a two step process: get a threshold % of workers to indicate interest in unionizing, then hold an election over all workers to see if a majority want a union. The ruling makes it so that if the company interferes with the election, the NLRB deems that initial interest level sufficient for allowing a union to form and recognizing its authority to collectively bargain on behalf of all covered workers.
But that's not how English works. When you pull some words out of a sentence and exclude others, you often get another sentence with a different or nonsensical meaning.
It's "company must [ (1. voluntarily recognize union) or (2. hold election) ]". Choosing option 1 is voluntary because option 2, which you elided completely, exists and may be chosen instead. The "must", on the other hand, denotes the overarching mandate to select from the enumerated options.
The part that the ruling the article is about changes is after that, BTW. The penalty for interfering with (2. hold election) is no longer a redo of the election, but rather imposed recognition of the union and a mandate to bargain with it. The previous penalty wasn't much of one and thus provided no deterrent for companies.
Right. It's more that a company already had the option to voluntarily recognize the union. This says, if they aren't willing to take that option of voluntarily recognizing it, they must do something else (hold an election).
The Vice journalist who wrote this has an ethical duty to disclose that she herself is unionized, and thus benefits from these contract liberty suppressing government actions in favor of unions.
> They forget to mention the corruption, the ties to organized crime, the sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia
These are odd criticisms to bring up, because they apply just as well to companies and governments. It's not like unions should be rejected for failing to be an improvement in every possible dimension.
The problem is that they overlap. If one company is sexist and another isn't, you go and work for the non-sexist company. But then that company gets a sexist union and you're screwed.
And this is worse the more consolidated an industry is because you have fewer chances to find unencumbered employment, but those are the industries where unions tend to show up. So it's much better to break up those companies so their employees have lots of employers to choose from and therefore more bargaining power, than to consolidate the workers into their own monopoly that concentrates the harms of every bureaucracy.
This feels like a very unlikely scenario. More likely, both the employer and the union are sexist, and it's an orthogonal concern. I could equally ask, what about a sexist company, and a non-sexist union? Unionizing is a double benefit, then!
> you go and work for the non-sexist company. But then that company gets a sexist union
The union would primarily be people already at the company who unionized, so it wouldn't make sense to claim your coworkers became sexist by unionizing when they weren't before.
> This feels like a very unlikely scenario. More likely, both the employer and the union are sexist, and it's an orthogonal concern.
That is possible, but so is the other thing. And having both a sexist union and a sexist company is still worse than only having a sexist company, because their activities still overlap. The hiring manager avoids hiring women or only hires them when they're pretty or massively overqualified, the union excludes them from union leadership roles where they might advocate for maternity leave etc. while also precluding them from negotiating directly with the company, including different managers who may not be as sexist.
> I could equally ask, what about a sexist company, and a non-sexist union?
Then you would still have to work for the sexist company, about which the union may do nothing even if they're not overtly making it worse, and if they do focus on that it requires them to burn your negotiating leverage doing something about that when you would have been better off to go work at the non-sexist company. Which is much easier when more such companies exist because the industry is less consolidated.
> The union would primarily be people already at the company who unionized, so it wouldn't make sense to claim your coworkers became sexist by unionizing when they weren't before.
"The company" in this case refers to management. It's completely possible to have non-sexist management and sexist workers. In blue-collar occupations this may even be more common. It's also possible for predominantly non-sexist workers to elect sexist union bosses for reasons unrelated to sexism.
I don't expect modern unions to be as viciously racist as they once were, or to get captured by the mafia again, but you shouldn't expect them to be a workers paradise either. Their history is not unblemished, and their future will not be either.
Rather than taking Stephen Dubner's word for it, who may not know how collective bargaining work, do you have a source for the claim that the newspaper union limited their members' salaries? Because I have not heard of unions that disallow members from negotiating better deals with employers.
> Unions have arguably been good for straight white native born men.
Where "arguably" means "it's trivial to claim but I have absolutely no supporting evidence."
Dubner was simply wrong (which is par for the course if you've ever tried following Freakonomics and realized that it was just poorly researched pop sociology that sounds good in a podcast but doesn't hold up to any sort of scrutiny).
For starters, there is no such thing as the "Newspaper Guild;" the News Guild represents staffers at the NYT and a number of other newspapers. While it does set minimum wages based on seniority, it does not mandate lockstep wages or anything else like that; guild members are free to negotiate higher packages than the minimum, and many (like Maureen Dowd) did.
> Racism, couched as union solidarity, has always been a part of the trades – embedded in their founding stories, their mythology. Their very success, some historians argue, was built on the exclusion of Black workers.
[snip]
> The local building trades have refused to share demographic data on the workers they represent. But the most recent available data from 2012 show that the industry’s union workforce was 99% male and 76% white in a city that is nearly 44% Black, and where other major labor unions are predominantly African American.
Can you point me to any unions where it's common for workers to get paid according to merit? Yes, I'm sure it's possible for workers to negotiate a separate deal with employers, but does that actually happen regularly in practice?
Of course I can, if you first define what "merit" is. Meanwhile, in Europe, it is very common for unionized employees to negotiate higher salaries than the "floor" that the collective bargaining agreement stipulates. So yes it does happen regularly in practice.
European unions and American unions are very different. American unions tend to be far more adversarial and treat their relationship with firms as a zero-sum game.
But Europe also has a lot of problems that the US doesn't it's unemployment rate is nearly double that of the US, and its GDP per capital is about 70% of that of the US. I won't say that's all due to the higher union participation, but you can be sure that when firms discuss international expansion plans, the prevalence of unions in Europe gets brought up.
The difference being, those unemployed have state support, instead of being left to their own misfortunes.
Yes they definitely need education on European work laws, I have had the pleasure to explain multiple times how it goes over here, to clueless bosses trying to overdo their power outside work hours.
US international firms should also take care some day Europe might play a China move, and refocus on internal markets.
All the ongoing conflicts show how globalisation is slowly reaching its end.
It’s little unfair to generalize about unionization from an anecdote about the NYT. I don’t think retail, factory, construction, and fast food workers are concerned with ‘merit based’ salary
> Unions have arguably been good for straight white native born men. Everyone else who has had to pay higher prices or has had to deal with worse products and services has lost out.
I criticize unions all the time, but your comment is so incredibly ahistorical and out of touch it makes me rethink my position because I don't want to be confused with people as clueless as you are.
Nothing in US history has come remotely close to improving race relations like the union movements of the 1930s and 1940s. The ruling class deployed racism to divide working people and unionization brought them back together, making the civil rights movement viable. People like you who spout nonsense they know nothing about disgust me and I hope your employees unionize ASAP.
Right, it is a way to gatekeep people in the industry and allows those who are better at politics to rise up than those who are simply good at their job.
I don’t see how this differs from current state. You believe people getting to the top of corporate structures aren’t there because of politics and their network?
Workers support unions (71% of Americans, the highest amount in 60 years) because they’re tired of having the shit kicked out of them by the American employment arrangement. Workers who are members of labor unions in the United States make 18% more than their nonunion counterparts, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' annual report on union membership.
> The survey also found about one in six Americans live in a household where at least one resident belongs to a union.
> Of the union members surveyed, 65% cited better pay and benefits as the top reason for joining a union. The second-most-chosen reason was employee rights and representation.
Your profile indicates you work at a FAANG company. I recommend some perspective on median working conditions and compensation for the average American.
> You believe people getting to the top of corporate structures aren’t there because of politics and their network?
There are people who get there by a network and people who get there by merit. But unions regularly eliminate even the possibility of merit-based advancement or compensation by demanding systems that assign rewards based on seniority.
> Workers who are members of labor unions in the United States make 18% more than their nonunion counterparts, per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics' annual report on union membership.
> The comparisons of earnings in this news release are on a broad level and do not control for many factors that can be important in explaining earnings differences.
But unions regularly eliminate even the possibility of merit-based advancement or compensation by demanding systems that assign rewards based on seniority.
...in fields where "merit" is a meaningless measure, such as factory work, housekeeping, retail, etc.
In fields where merit is meaningful and measurable, like most white-collar and higher-paying jobs, unions set minimums and individual workers are free to negotiate higher pay. (See, e.g., the Hollywood guilds, the newspaper guilds, the video game unions, the sports guilds, etc. But contrast to government unions, where pay is generally lockstep based on seniority.)
> ...in fields where "merit" is a meaningless measure, such as factory work, housekeeping, retail, etc.
In what sense is it meaningless? Factory workers could have higher output, housekeeping staff could be more efficient, retail workers could make more sales. Anyone can make fewer mistakes or identify ways to improve operations.
If there was genuinely no way to do a better job than anyone else then what excuse is there for seniority-based rewards or anything other than perfectly uniform compensation?
> In fields where merit is meaningful and measurable, like most white-collar and higher-paying jobs, unions set minimums and individual workers are free to negotiate higher pay.
In which case the union becomes a gatekeeper excluding new entrants, because it benefits existing union members to keep out anyone who might displace them in well-paying jobs, and the prospective entrants don't get a vote.
Factory workers could have higher output, housekeeping staff could be more efficient, retail workers could make more sales.
No, they couldn't. Factory workers don't control the speed of the line, so it doesn't help if one individual on a line is faster if that speed isn't replicated throughout the line. They'll end up with extra downtime, or with a backlog somewhere else. Similarly, the speed at which housekeeping staff clean depends on the cleanliness of the room before they start cleaning, and many guests, especially post-COVID, are absolutely disgusting pigs. And retail workers don't generally make sales, which is why they're classified as retail workers and not as salespeople.
If there was genuinely no way to do a better job than anyone else then what excuse is there for seniority-based rewards or anything other than perfectly uniform compensation?
That's your strawman. Merit being a meaningless measure doesn't mean that one employee can't do a better job than another, or that experience is irrelevant. It means that attempting to objectively measure merit is meaningless because the factors affecting that measure aren't within the employees' control.
In which case the union becomes a gatekeeper excluding new entrants, because it benefits existing union members to keep out anyone who might displace them in well-paying jobs, and the prospective entrants don't get a vote.
Ironically, that's what people outside of the tech community say about the leet code interviews that are specifically intended to gatekeep.
> Factory workers don't control the speed of the line, so it doesn't help if one individual on a line is faster if that speed isn't replicated throughout the line.
Sure it does. They can give your station more to do if you can still do it in the allotted time.
> Similarly, the speed at which housekeeping staff clean depends on the cleanliness of the room before they start cleaning, and many guests, especially post-COVID, are absolutely disgusting pigs.
It also depends on the efficiency of the staff, and you can measure this on a statistical basis across a period of weeks to smooth out the effects of the initial state of the room.
> And retail workers don't generally make sales, which is why they're classified as retail workers and not as salespeople.
Sales is a subset of retail.
But even if you're talking about workers whose only job is to ring up orders, someone can still do it more efficiently or with higher customer satisfaction.
> Merit being a meaningless measure doesn't mean that one employee can't do a better job than another, or that experience is irrelevant.
But what? Doing a better job than someone else is merit. Experience may be a proxy for it, but you can often measure it directly, or at least measure a more direct proxy.
> Ironically, that's what people outside of the tech community say about the leet code interviews that are specifically intended to gatekeep.
Leet code is an attempt to measure merit. That's the intent, even if it's imperfect. You have to use something to choose between applicants. Plausibly it could be improved.
Unions imposing requirements on membership isn't even an attempt to use merit, it's just an entity with a monopoly on the right to work leveraging that monopoly for its existing members at the expense of other workers who want to be members.
Right, you think hollywood is an example of unions helping out people based on merit. Do you know what kind of connections you need to get into a union? You think it is merit based?
Hollywood unions you generally need to work on 1 or more productions (or for 10 or more days, depending on the union) covered by a union contract (meaning, generally, a major studio production). Some unions include work on non-union productions toward the threshold for union membership.
No connections required.
Indeed, I accidentally qualified for SAG membership purely on the basis being a background extra for fun, and I can qualify for IATSE Local 695 sometime in the next year if I work on another camera crew as a camera assistant when filming resumes. I got my start on the camera stuff by walking up to the camera guys when I was an extra and asking about their cameras. (There was a lot of filming activity pre-strike; they literally didn't have enough bodies and were hiring people with any sort of relevant experience.) If I didn't have a non-film day job I would already have done enough work to join the union.
If the requirements aren't intended to gatekeep then why do they exist? Shouldn't the union want as a member anyone who wants to join?
> Indeed, I accidentally qualified for SAG membership purely on the basis being a background extra for fun
It appears that the SAG-AFTRA "Initiation Fee" is $3000, so if you're an aspiring actress working as a waitress for minimum wage, you need to do more than qualify unless you know someone who can get the fee waived for you (or pay it for you).
> There was a lot of filming activity pre-strike; they literally didn't have enough bodies and were hiring people with any sort of relevant experience.
It sounds like you had an atypical experience as a result of an unusual circumstance. How easy is it to get that kind of work when there isn't a crunch on to get everything in before a strike?
> The report represents one of the over 70 actions implemented by the White House Task Force on Worker Organizing and Empowerment, chaired by Vice President Harris.
They commissioned a partisan report. It opens with the classic move where you put a graph of two things that happened in the decades following WW-II, find a big correlation or anti-correlation between them (because the post-war period moved the needle on nearly every graph of everything), and then imply causation.
Much of the paper is just listing broken things in the economy, like high housing costs, and hand waving a theory that unions could help with that somehow. But that doesn't even work -- if you have housing scarcity caused by restrictive zoning, raising wages without alleviating the shortfall only makes people bid up the existing housing stock and transfers most of the higher pay to landlords. To actually fix it you have to build more housing.
And increasing the pay of only some workers can even make it worse, because it increases the cost of goods and services -- like new housing construction -- which then raises prices for everyone, both the people getting paid more and the people not. Which is made worse because unions are less able to monopolize unskilled labor than skilled labor, so unions will tend to increase the price of skilled labor (in monopolistic industries) while unskilled workers only get higher costs.
But the fundamental point -- and the fundamental problem -- is this one:
> At these firms with market power, unions engaging in monopoly behavior of their own can bargain for workers to share some of the high profits earned by firm owners, executives, and shareholders
Unions can only extract something from companies in uncompetitive markets because competitive markets have slim margins, but uncompetitive markets are bad and those industries need to be broken up, not have the monopoly rents shared only with the workers in those industries while everyone else continues to experience inefficiency and high prices.
And unionizing those industries creates a new lobby to prevent that necessary antitrust action, because those unions will not want the industry to be made competitive if they're extracting part of the monopoly rent being paid by the general public.
What does "a majority of the workers" mean? Is that a majority in a particular establishment, or employees of a company (across many locations) or an industry?
And if they vote Yes, do they then choose what kind of union to be (Teamsters, etc.) and doesn't it get kind of complicated? What happens to the people that vote No?