
I was skeptical of unions. Then I joined one - throw0101a
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/8/19/20727283/unions-good-income-inequality-wealth
======
Communitivity
As a child of two news people I grew up hearing union horror stories, such as
typesetters in a newspaper that spend almost all day playing cards because
their job has gone but the union still forces the paper to keep them on.

Then I married my wife, who worked in a union at a college library, and I
learned I had only heard one side of the story. Initially we had a few
interesting, and heated, debates about unions. Over time though I have slowly
come over to the idea that unions as a concept, and in many implementations,
are a good thing.

I still think some unions wind up getting too much power and abuse that power,
but they are generally a good check in a world that resembles more and more
the world of the Cyberpunk 2020 game I used to play [1].

Curiously, this is the second time I've been reminded of Cyberpunk 2020 this
month. The first time was the 'Satoshi' reveal last week, which brought up
memories of Hal Finney [2]. I always equated with Spider Murphy [3], the top
digital rights activist/info broker/info breaker in Cyberpunk 2020.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_2020](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_2020)

[2]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_\(computer_scientist\))

[3]
[https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Spider_Murphy](https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Spider_Murphy)

~~~
RugnirViking
Unions can be bad or corrupt or too large in exactly the same way companies
can be bad or corrupt or too large. The existence of such bad actors however
does not mean that the very concept of companies or unions is bad.

~~~
49531
Unions are no more or less corrupt than any organization of humans (the
businesses they work inside of especially).

~~~
jhoechtl
Absolutely. They are the counterweight to corporations. Otherwise there would
be no natural counterpoise to the interests of companies. I do not believe in
the invisible hand resulting in the best possible state of equlibrum.

------
umvi
My only question with unions is: what checks and balances will be in place
this time around to prevent unions from:

\- Rampant corruption (i.e. Teamsters in the 60s is the most egregious
example, but probably even a lot of current unions are rife with corruption)

\- Racketeering (i.e. like what happened when Theranos tried to move offices)

\- Protecting bad/lazy workers (i.e. impossible-to-fire poor performing
employees that do nothing yet collect a paycheck every week)

\- Blocking strategic decisions in the name of protecting employees (i.e.
"Sorry, we won't let you automate X; too many people would lose jobs")

I see how unions benefit workers in the case of terrible corporations that
exploit workers, but as a small business owner I'm afraid a union would morph
into a parasite that hinders the business and engages in all sorts of
undesirable activity (in the case of industry-wide unions).

Like I read a few years ago at some convention in NYC some organization
couldn't get their booth up and running because they weren't allowed to plug
in their own equipment because "that's union work" and they had to wait for a
card-carrying union member to come plug in their TV or something ridiculous.

~~~
jdhendrickson
It's much like a HOA or any other political organization. The check and
balance is YOU. If you are involved in the Union, and other workers are
involved, there is seldom a problem. If like the current U.S. political
landscape, people abdicate their responsibilities because it's harder and more
work, you end up with less than ideal people in the leadership roles.

~~~
brianwawok
I was in a condo with like 8 units. Got in the HOA board, because it wasn't
that hard (3/8 owners get membership). I could pretty much stop stupid stiff.

Now let's say I work for a hypothetical Walmart union. 1 million members or
whatever. What can I do to check and balance anything? How can I bet anything
except a tool to be used for various warring factions to extract more money
from each other.

~~~
smacktoward
_> Now let's say I work for a hypothetical Walmart union. 1 million members or
whatever. What can I do to check and balance anything?_

You misunderstand how unions work. Unions aren't monolithic organizations, but
rather organized around _locals_ (see
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_union](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_union)),
with a local being the unit of the union representing a single workplace.
While locals are affiliated with a larger union, they also have some degree of
independence (exactly how much depending on a variety of factors), including
electing their own leadership.

For most union workers, while they are technically members of a much larger
union, almost all of the ways they interface with that larger organization are
through their local. So they're not one among a million members, they're one
among (say) a few hundred, all of whom are people who work with them and live
in their community. And if you're part of such a group and want to change its
direction, you can run for a leadership position in the local, just as you
would in the HOA.

~~~
brianwawok
I'm not sure thats the right comparison.

Eletricians tend to work within a city, at a given job site. So they are
fairly autonomous.

A walmart union would not. For example, look at United Auto Workers. How much
control does the average UAW union member have over his life?

Compare to the average software engineer. How much control does he have over
his working conditions and pay?

------
hackeraccount
Unions are just monopolies. I don't really have a huge problem with that - as
long as they are not given the backing of state power. Having a law that
enforces closed shops is not something I'd support.

That and government sector unions. Those things are toxic because the unions
end up supporting providing political support for the people they're employed
by i.e. that's like me and my co-workers voting on how much we'll be paid.

~~~
Fordec
Uber etc. raise millions and billions in the idea that if they scale enough
they can capture a market and monetize it once captured. A market monopoly.

Why can't industry workers do the same? Once software has eaten the world,
what's to stop software people monetizing the employment market they have
captured?

~~~
taffer
That is why there are anti-trust laws, and we should apply them much more
rigorously against companies like Uber.

------
commandlinefan
I have a tough time with this one myself. My father was a police officer and,
as he rose through the ranks, he had to deal with police officer union
corruption at every level - he can tell you horror story after horror story of
the problems driven by the police officer’s union. On the other hand, now that
I’m working myself, in the very non-unionized field of computer programming, I
can at least see why people began to realize that collective bargaining was so
important.

~~~
cagenut
There are a bunch of reasons why police unions are somewhat of a special case.
Enumerating them can get dragged into a lot of disagreements, but its
important to remember they're an outlier and not the common-case for labor
unions.

~~~
umvi
What makes police officer unions so different from the others?

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6gvONxR4sf7o
This might be a naive union question:

Competition is good, and we always want a choice of where to shop. I imagine
the same goes for unions. Is there anti-monopoly and antitrust law around
unions? E.g. protecting consumers against there being only one union for
widget makers. I would guess that unions would be less controversial with a
healthy ecosystem of competition on both the employer and labor sides, but I
don't know much about unions.

~~~
rhinoceraptor
It seems like that kind of defeats the purpose of the union: to create a
unified bargaining entity for the workers. If there are two or three unions
for the same type of work, then their negotiation power isn't as strong.

~~~
6gvONxR4sf7o
I imagine it as a spectrum. One union has all sorts of power. Two or three
unions have less, but still have way way more bargaining power than one union
per worker, which we have today. There should be a balance.

~~~
ido
In Israel school teachers have 2 competing unions.

------
mixmastamyk
Unions are like companies and other organizations of humans. Some are
fantastic, some are terrible, with most in between. It's unfortunate so many
push to brand them all with one description for ideological reasons.

------
egypturnash
> I saw unions as a balancing act to corporate interests, offering protections
> to lower-skilled workers who, without collective action, didn’t have much
> power over their bosses. [...] But not high-skilled industries like digital
> media, where workers could, on their own, use their skill sets as leverage
> over their bosses.

This is every dismissive comment about unions on HN ever, right here.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
And is it not true?

~~~
devoply
No... it's not true. In the end I have heard employees be terminated for all
sorts of frivolous reasons. Unless you are a very senior developer, the
chances of you being replaceable especially at a well funded company are very
high... In fact all businesses are set up to make all their employees
replaceable.

> Isn’t that just smart? Why would I, the hypothetical investor risking my
> money on a venture, tie that money to a specific employee? That’s putting
> all of your eggs in one basket.

Similarly, why would as a hypothetical employee work without the protection of
a union?

> 1) Payscale -- a professional is in a better position to have a substantial
> emergency fund, to get through a sudden layoff.

It would be higher yet with unions.

> 2) Demand -- Some professional skills are also in high demand, which makes
> changing employers easier.

Easier, yes, but not easy.

> 3) Upward and lateral mobility -- In a union shop, mobility is often rigidly
> defined by seniority, whereas in many professional services, the employee
> can be more in control of their career. Contrast this to something like the
> airline pilots union, where a pilot has to start over as a rookey if they
> change airlines. When I started my last job, I was able to negotiate more
> weeks PTO because of my years of experience in the field.

Yes except in tech you are an old man by 40, so yes enjoy your 5-year senior
developer status... And enjoy your retirement at 40. It's a mythology that you
are better off in tech because of the lack of unions because of the super high
salaries, etc., which are only to be found in a small segment of the industry.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
But then you get a better job somewhere else. Highly skilled, remember?

~~~
blub
You reply would only make sense if we didn't have a new thread every month
about how broken tech interviews are, where even experienced/senior engineers
are complaining how exhausting it is to get a new job.

You need to think about others, not just your particular case in order to
understand what drives people to support the idea of union.

~~~
ufmace
The noise doesn't match the reality IME. Tech interviewing trends are less
than ideal sometimes, but finding jobs as an experienced and articulate
professional developer is not hard in my own experience and that of everyone
I've worked with.

------
i_am_proteus
> A union isn’t just right for Vox Media, but for everyone.

At least the author sets the hyperbolic tone up front.

------
selimthegrim
What about the unions at that Shell plant where Trump spoke and the workers
had to stay unpaid at first? Why did they roll over?

[https://twitter.com/spettypi/status/1161360126361710592](https://twitter.com/spettypi/status/1161360126361710592)

~~~
throw0101a
They had a choice:

* go to work

* not go to work

It's just that their 'assigned duties' for that day, if they went to work,
were to attend an internal company-sponsored function. If the company wants to
pay people to mill about, that's its prerogative.

I'd file a grievance for the lunch thing though.

~~~
moate
That is a bad faith, gross oversimplification of what happened. Their
employers used them as part of a political optics campaign and threatened to
dock their pay if they didn't play along. Saying "I'm going to shoot you if
you don't leave your desk" and "Tomorrow we have a scheduled weapons test that
will be concentrated around your desk area" are technically describing the
same event. The illusion of free will doesn't mean there's a choice.

These people didn't have "attend political campaign rallies" as part of their
job description.

------
samd
This post got flagged off the homepage almost as soon as it made it there.

