
Workers involved in union activities say Tesla is illegally intimidating them - dpc59
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/04/25/workers-involved-in-union-activities-say-tesla-is-illegally-intimidating-them.html
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Aloha
I think a union is something you earn - not something foisted upon you. If you
dont want workers to join a union, treat them well, pay them significantly
above market rates, give good benefits.

~~~
almostApatriot1
the major appeal of the union is that you can't get fired or laid off. This
type of job security is crucial because it gives you massive leverage when it
comes to fighting for those other things. No matter how good the pay is, you
can probably get better via striking, etc.

~~~
ThomPete
No one choose a job based on the union. How many unions in the private market
can really claim you wont get fired.

~~~
metaphor
>> No one choose a job based on the union.

Unfortunately, that's an overreaching statement. I personally know a few
people who have accepted pay cuts to leverage the type of job security
afforded by certain unions.

>> How many unions in the private market can really claim you wont get fired.

Certainly none, but does it really matter? There's exists a threshold where
the difference between _won 't get fired_ and _very difficult to get fired_
are pragmatically indistinguishable.

~~~
ThomPete
So was the one I was responding to. And I doubt that whatever personal
anecdotes you have can be applied to unions in general as parent did.

And yes it matters as the parent wanted to dismiss unions based on these false
claims.

Unions are neither good nor bad. Some of them have too much power, others have
too little. Some should have a union (like uber drivers) etc.

My own father tried to start a kind of union for a group of self-employed
drivers working for one company. The result was that the company he worked for
simply stopped his contract and scared everyone else off from backing him and
a few others up.

I have seen unions be both really bad, really good, unnecessary and not
existing where they should.

They are no different than consumer interest groups and other collections of
people trying to reach some sort of balance.

In many industries today they aren't needed but in some they still are.

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Safety1stClyde
> Tesla CEO Elon Musk ... promised to install both a roller coaster and free
> frozen yogurt machines throughout the facility.

I had to double-check that I was not reading a satirical website after reading
the above statement.

~~~
vacri
I get an even bigger laugh imagining the same sentence being used in an
article about a different industry. Imagine "A nurses' strike today was
averted when management agreed to install a rollercoaster and free frozen
yoghurt machines"...

~~~
emodendroket
Well, in fairness, it does not seem to be the case that that mollified the
workers.

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exabrial
Unions annoy me. Working conditions 75 years ago were truly deadly, and unions
served a major purpose to humanize the work force.

Nowadays we have "tax the robots" bills being sponsored by Unions and people
somehow think it's "ok" to force someone to join a union to feed their family.

When I see articles like this, I know what the right answer is but it's hard
to empathetic at the same time.

~~~
jxf
_> Unions annoy me. Working conditions 75 years ago were truly deadly, and
unions served a major purpose to humanize the work force._

Just because a company isn't literally trying to kill you or introduce
hazardous conditions for the sake of maximizing profits doesn't mean that
unions aren't useful. In a lot of cases, their very presence is inhibitory to
regressions in the rights of employees.

Do unions have problems? Yes, absolutely, and we shouldn't neglect those
either. At the same time, scrapping them would be a very bad idea.

~~~
ThrowawayR2
> _Do unions have problems? Yes, absolutely, and we shouldn 't neglect those
> either. At the same time, scrapping them would be a very bad idea._

Existing unions are not taking much in the way of steps to address those
problems or clean up their image in the eyes of the public. Until unions can
once again demonstrate openly and conclusively that their primary concern is
the welfare of the worker rather than just being another power player
jockeying to get their share of the pie, scrapping them would be a very good
idea.

~~~
verbify
You could say the same about many other public institutions. To demonstrate:

The media seems more interested in sensationalist irrelevant news than
informing the public (it pays better).

Until the media can once again demonstrate openly and conclusively that their
primary concern is informing the public rather than just being another power
player jockeying to get their share of the pie, scrapping them would be a very
good idea.

~~~
ythn
> Until the media can once again demonstrate openly and conclusively that
> their primary concern is informing the public rather than just being another
> power player jockeying to get their share of the pie, scrapping them would
> be a very good idea.

I... I agree with that statement...

~~~
freehunter
Good, let's just throw away the first amendment. Only government-sanctioned
news can be broadcast from now on, and the sitting administration gets to
appoint who heads up the department that determines what real news is.

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0898
Why has nobody made a union you join through an app?

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Jabanga
If collective bargaining wasn't mandatory, and employers were free to decide
who to hire and fire, the manufacturing sector in the US would be vastly
larger, and offer millions more jobs to Americans.

There is very little that does more damage to society than the so-called
labour movement.

~~~
gnu8
Without the labour movement we'd have Triangle Shirtwaist fires and Ludlow
massacres every week. I don't blame you for not knowing that, because our
educational system is designed to produce obedient workers, not class
agitators. You might want to pick up a history book though.

~~~
chimeracoder
> Without the labour movement we'd have Triangle Shirtwaist fires and Ludlow
> massacres every week

It's a little disingenuous to conflate the labor movement with NLRA-regulated
unions, especially in the context of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and
the response to it. They're not one and the same, although modern unions have
done their best to erase that distinction from the historical narrative.

You might also want to consider the other things unions of the time were
involved with. Early 20th century unions passed bylaws excluding non-white
members from their ranks, and then (successfully) lobbied for federal laws
excluding them from the country altogether.

Without the AFL, we may not have had the Chinese Exclusion Act, and we might
not have stripped Americans of Chinese and Indian descent of their naturalized
citizenship, seized the homes they legally bought with the money they earned,
and then given the land to white Americans.

