Having been a part of a union I was mandated to enter when I took the job until the supreme court ruled that wasn't legal, actual unions are a far cry from how they are portrayed as helping the worker.
I would honestly do anything in my power to not have to work in a union again. They are set up as antagonistic between administration and workers, and adds a layer of bureaucracy that I've only seen be negative. I've worked with people who effectively could never be fired and were so bad at their jobs they spread negativity with everyone they encountered.
As long as we’re offering anecdotes, I’m part of a union and I think they have a positive effect on workers and enjoy a generally positive opinion among the employees. This union is probably less powerful than the one you are talking about as no one is mandated to join, and no one is impossible to fire.
Then they should help local unions (not that local unions would be useful for, say Amazon or Walmart) become a thing and give them incentives not to become part of a big union. Otherwise, substituting some compensation with part-ownership makes it so that the interests of big unions align more with the interests of other stakeholders.
> Then they should help local unions (not that local unions would be useful for, say Amazon or Walmart) become a thing and give them incentives not to become part of a big union.
Or, even easier, just pay your workers well, give them decent benefits, and do union busting to prevent them from forming in your company. Why outsource treating workers well to a bureaucratic middleman when you can just treat workers well yourself? (keep in mind this is for small businesses, not mega-corporations)
> Otherwise, substituting some compensation with part-ownership makes it so that the interests of big unions align more with the interests of other stakeholders.
>Or, even easier, just pay your workers well, give them decent benefits, and do union busting to prevent them from forming.
Never going to happen, there will always be a point where the company will try to minimize worker salaries as far as it can get away with.
>Wouldn't that corrupt union leadership over time?
No, you would pay employees using profits in part, and implicate them into the decision-making process. That way the incentives of union-leadership, workers, and stakeholders align. You can also push for union structures that minimize the power of union leadership and instead give it to the rank and file. Basically, making your company a bit more into a worker-coop fixes the issue.
> Never going to happen, there will always be a point where the company will try to minimize worker salaries as far as it can get away with.
I disagree. Not every company is public, first of all. So not every company is beholden to shareholders who demand endless growth at any cost. There are lots of private companies that are content with the size they are at, and with the revenue they are generating and aren't tempted to start squeezing their employees.
But that's not the issue. The issue is competition. Eventually, you have to cut costs in order to be competitive even if you're very nice, and if you read business administration textbooks cutting employee compensation is often the primary way.
Ok, so then how does a unionized company stay competitive if it isn't allowed to cut costs by reducing employee compensation? You are suggesting only unions know the effective secret methods of cutting costs that business-textbook-writers are unaware of?
It's quite simple. They either cut profits, or offer employees equity in compensation for lower wages. That goes against what the owners want, but it helps the workers and maintains the usefulness of the enterprise.
I believe in the competitive scenario, there are no profits to cut. It's not clear to me if equity is worth anything if there are no profits to distribute and the company is not growing.
I think the point is that whether it is a "nice employer" or a union, the company will be less competitive. This strikes me as a tragedy of the commons which would have to be resolved by legislation to force all market participants to offer the same benefits. (Of course, the difficulty then are participants putside of your legal system, but taroffs could hopefully capture this detail.)
Equity is always worth something, because companies own capital, and capital is inherently valuable.
In this scenario, there is no loss in competitiveness. The union bargains for pay when there is profit, and when there is no profit it bargains for capital. At the limit, when the workers own the company entirely, then their own self-interest will be to reduce their salary in order to protect their equity. In this sense, their salaries will fall in line with what they would earn in another company, or slightly higher, but they will have massively more assets and equity than if they didn't have a union.
Of course, in reality, if there was no growth there would be bigger problems, but you get the gist.
I really fail to see how unions in this scenario make the company less competitive, or create worse conditions for the workers than without the union.
As I clearly stated: problems with unions are widespread and there are even quite a handful of examples right on this thread.
"Racism doesn't exist just because one person used n-word! It's just one anecdote!"
... is not an argument.
Anyone with any exposure unions knows they are far from perfect, many of them are quite terrible.
This kind of ideological, wilful ignorance kills any goodwill people might otherwise have among the adult population who will invariably have come up against theses issue probably multiple times in their lives through either personal experiences or acquaintances.
The core of a union is bad for workers that excel You won't get paid what you are worth and will get held back when you want a raise. In almost all unions that I've encountered, if you want a raise, it's as a collective.
They also prevent technological advances and it only makes things more expensive for the consumer (Who do you think is fighting Uber and Lyft in major cities? Taxicab unions that were fleecing customers for decades and didn't need to add any convenience to customeers due to massive monopolies and the medallion system).
We also can't forget the police unions, which very system contributes to not firing bad cops..which results in brutality. This is never mentioned in our current discussions on race because the progressives in this country love unions and don't want anything to prevent their mass acceptance.
Unions are great for low-performing workers that get guaranteed raises and can't be fired for complete and utter incompetence.
> The core of a union is bad for workers that excel
You should really let go of that folclore because it makes absolutely no sense at all and has absolutely zero connection to the real world.
First of all, it's widely known that Amazon already has a rigid employee structure that pays according to the internal pay scale. This alone shuts dispels the "omg unions keep top performers down", because internally your only shot at a pay increase is to run through their promotion obstacle course.
Unions are about employee representation and negotiating power. They are the only way to create change such as limiting working hours and demand safe working conditions and cut down on arbitrarily firing people for no reason. Without unions you have zero power. With an underperforming union you have some power. Sounds like even a bad union is progress.
And, coincidentally, should you ask a person making such statements I am confident that they will place themselves firmly in the "excel" category. Ignoring, of course, that self-categorization does little good when Jobs is calling up Schmidt (wait, calling would be the smart move; they documented it in email instead) to say, "hey, you don't hire our workers, and we won't hire yours. Win, win!" Where's your meritocracy now? I'm not going to say a union would have prevented that particular incident, but a union would carry more weight saying, "remember that shit you and $OTHER_COMPANY pulled last year? Yeah, well, to prevent such things in the future..." than some IC in her manager's office where the manager holds all of the cards.
Great point—every company I've worked at, people have complained about lack of transparency about who gets promoted. HR and company leaders always respond "oh we're trying, it's hard, trust us", etc. But with a union workers would have a seat at the table to change the process.
"You should really let go of that folclore because it makes absolutely no sense at all and has absolutely zero connection to the real world."
You mean the 3 decades I dealt with unions?
"Unions are about employee representation and negotiating power."
In theory, they were there to help employees. In practice, they are just as corrupt as any large organization and only hurt companies that have to deal with them.
"They are the only way to create change such as limiting working hours and demand safe working conditions and cut down on arbitrarily firing people for no reason."
The only way? Please. We have federal and state employment laws that protect all works. No unions required.
"Without unions you have zero power. With an underperforming union you have some power. Sounds like even a bad union is progress."
If you are a good employee, you have plenty of power. If you are bad and under performing, you need the protection by the unions.
In countries that have really string unions, it's getting to the point where you won't get hired at all without experience because firing an employee involves a court case and lots of red tape. This resulted in protests/riots in Sweden about 5 or 6 years ago.
It also makes a company less competitive in the international marketplace. Now that the Internet has opened up commerce internationally, companies that pay unskilled workers 4x what they are actually worth don't do so well.
It's difficult for me to change my views on this when I've seen the rampant corruption first-hand and the cancerous like effect unions have on a company over time.
> The core of a union is bad for workers that excel
SAG-AFTRA represents both movie stars and B-list actors you've only ever seen in infomercials.
> Unions are great for low-performing workers that get guaranteed raises and can't be fired for complete and utter incompetence.
SAG-AFTRA represents every American movie star, the same movie stars that can command multi-million dollar contracts with their own terms with the help of the union.
Couldn't this just be because unions can have a deteriorating effect on meritocracy?
Say you have 10 workers - 2 are rock stars and make $50/hr, 6 are average and make $20/hr, and 2 are bad and make $10/hr (min wage - because they are never promoted).
Average "non-union" pay is: $24/hr
Now say you unionize and the union forces you to start paying the bad employees $20/hr like all the other average ones. So now you pay the 2 bad employees $20 each. Well, you still want to incentivize good work so you bump average employees to $25/hr. But dang, that's a lot of money, time to reign in rock star budget a bit. Now rock stars make $30/hr, average make $25/hr, bad make $20/hr.
Average "union" pay is: $25/hr
So yes, the "average pay" will be higher for "the worker"... but at a cost. Your average high performers will now be paid less, and your average low performers will now be paid more... which creates perhaps undesirable incentive structures ("why work my butt off to get ahead when it really won't make that much of a difference? I'd rather switch to a non-union company where my pay is directly tied to my output").
I'm not sure what companies you've worked for, but salary is almost never based on a 'meritocracy,' it's based on the minimum amount an employer thinks they can get away with. That value has nothing to do with an employee's output, and everything to do with minimizing costs.
Well, speak for yourself and the companies you've worked for, but that hasn't been my experience at all.
At both of the companies I've worked at we got a yearly "merit-based" increase depending on how your manager ranks you vs. your peers. The increase is anywhere from 0-5%, and the manager can only recommend their top employees for the high (5%) merit-based increases. This is on top of other increases (such as promotion-based increases), btw. I've gotten several pretty high merit-based increases back-to-back, and those +5% really start to compound with other forms of increase (promotions, bonuses, etc) after a few years.
That isn't paying by merit, it is a leadership style with financial incentives. An obnoxious one in my opinion, but some people like it. Very common in sales.
If you were paid by "merit", you would be paid by your contribution to the revenue of the company. That is mostly restricted to owners.
I disagree. Unions tend to favor seniority-based promotion over merit-based promotion[0] for obvious reasons (unions can't tell how much merit an employee has without deferring judgment to company managers/execs, but unions can tell how long someone has been working without deferring judgment to anyone).
Some people like unions, I think because they're lucky enough to have had a good experience, or to be part of a union that was not decayed by age or special interests.
Unions should not be needed... the governments who represent the people working should provide the necessary protections for workers without unions being needed.
Unions are a way for some people to get what all workers should have by default.
The government will never be as in tune with the needs of the workers as the workers themselves.
I think organized labor is a very good idea. We can see in the US how workers have been put in ever more precarious situations since the labor unions were significantly weakened 30-40 years ago.
But actually I don’t think having a normal corporation with a board of directors and then a union at odds with that board really makes sense. To me, worker owned cooperatives make a lot of sense.
I am coming to appreciate that there is however no one size fits all solution. So I look at this like “more of X would help Y”. And I do think more organized labor as unions or coops would help workers (in the USA where this is an issue). In the USA workers generally need better health care, maternity and paternity leave, predictable working hours and better pay.
I did however recently learn that in Germany apparently the big companies have representatives from labor in the board, and then they have another board that supervises them which is half labor. I’m fuzzy on the details but it was described in the linked lecture below which is pretty good!
I think worker-owned cooperatives do make a ton of sense and bridge the interest gap between employers and employees. When the interests of the unions align with the interest of society at large in that we want to promote productivity, it fixes a lot of things.
Who supports these pro-worker politicians and holds them accountable? In the US, both parties are very cozy with corporate interests, because that's where the money (and thus ability to mobilize voters) is. Historically, unions played a major role in holding politicians accountable, and supporting those who were more pro-worker. The parties have become more corporatized as union membership has declined. Without the base of support from organized labor, this is a likely outcome.
The average person doesn't have any power over their government. You know who does? Their employers. Given this power imbalance, who exactly do you expect the government to "represent"?
Nice anecdata. Unions are necessary to ensure fair negotiations between employees and their employer, though. Any negotiation between a single employee and their employer is inherently unfair, as the latter holds far more power. Unions are a tried and true concept almost everywhere in the world, the Nordic Countries being a particulary good example. It'd seem that being unable to provide basic rights for workers is part of the fabled American exceptionalism -- together with the inability to provide universal healthcare, the monthly school shooting, and war in perpetuity.
> Any negotiation between a single employee and their employer is inherently unfair
wow! what a statement.
you are of course entirely wrong. you are generalising when in reality your statement is true only for some employees in some jobs.
i think the time for these kinds of statements died in the 80s. the more we progress thru time the less we need unions because of all the new wealth that is created via the internet.
>>Any negotiation between a single employee and their employer is inherently unfair
>wow! what a statement.you are of course entirely wrong.
Dude, it's basic mathematics. Suppose you have company X that has 100 employees, and each of those employees only have the one employer - company X.
If company X fires employee Y, then X loses 1% of its employees, whereas Y loses 100% of its income.
It's pretty clear that when it comes to power, on average X can afford to lose 1% of its income more than Y can afford to lose 100% of their income. Which is to say, X has more leverage than Y.
Plus, there's a game theory side of this - if one worker demands a raise and the company hurts themselves to hurt the worker demanding a raise, then other workers will be less willing to demand a raise themselves. Again, this doesn't have to do with productivity but merely power games.
Add on to this the fact that most large companies are much more financially stable than most employees - I don't think it's controversial to say that most employers can afford to lose 1 employee without any serious financial turbulence, whereas plenty of employees can't afford to lost their jobs without financial turbulence.
In other words, a worker not being able to afford losing their job gives more negotiating power to the employer without necessarily making the worker any more/less productive.
There's no denying that the employer inherently has a power advantage over the employee. A few way-above-average employees will have so much more productivity to bargain with that they still hold power, but by definition most employees don't.
By the way, note that this doesn't just apply to wages/money - it also applies to employee negotiations on safety and corruption/ethics.
I think there are two important not-union-related things to learn here.
1. This means that the more financially stable everyone is, the more money they earn as a direct result of their additional bargaining power.
2. This also means the more financially stable the average person in society is, the more capable people are of whistleblowing on corruption.
> You are of course entirely wrong. you are generalising when in reality your statement is true only for some employees in some jobs.
I am not wrong:
"According to Nielsen data, the American Payroll Association, CareerBuilder and the National Endowment for Financial Education, somewhere between 50 percent and 78 percent of employees earn just enough money to pay their bills each month. Should they miss a paycheck, some of those bills would go unpaid." -- https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/08/17/breakdown...
> I think the time for these kinds of statements died in the 80s.
They are as relevant as they were in 1776:
"It is not, however, difficult to foresee which of the two parties must, upon all ordinary occasions, have the advantage in the dispute, and force the other into a compliance with their terms. The masters, being fewer in number, can combine much more easily; and the law, besides, authorizes, or at least does not prohibit their combinations, while it prohibits those of the workmen. We have no acts of parliament against combining to lower the price of work; but many against combining to raise it. In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate." -- Adam Smith
Isn’t this kind of separate from Amazon’s actions though? Unless you’re positing that Amazon is actually acting in the interest of their employees, or thinks they are?
False dichotomy. Two things can both be true: Amazon is not acting in the interest of their employees, and unions are also not acting in the interest of the employees.
It's possible for unions to be bad for both the employees and the employer, and only good for professional middlemen bureaucrats and national parent union leadership.
They treat part timers the worst. You get to pay dues but get little of the benefits.
As a professional interacting with with unions has been frustrating too. No, sorry, I can’t turn that screw for you. The union guy left and won’t be back till Monday, sorry. Yes, yes, I know it’s only turning a screw, but I’m not allowed to do it. It will have to wait till Monday.
Would you agree that there are some corrupt market-based economies in our world? Would you say that the fact that there are corrupt and inefficient market-based economies means that all market-based economies result in negative outcomes?
Saying that support of organized labor = support of corrupt unions is a pretty weak strawman.
What I love are unions that set abnormally high union initiation fees, only offer payment plans on people who sign dues check off forms, then include language in that dues check off form that keeps you from cancelling it unless you do so during a 15 day window every year.
As long as unions can forced on empolyees, unions can not be a market-based economy, it can not ever act against the interest of the empolyees it serves.
Why is it harder for a workplace to leave a union that is no longer serving its interests (to none or another union) then it is for the union to form in the first place?
> Why is it harder for a workplace to leave a union that is no longer serving its interests (to none or another union) then it is for the union to form in the first place?
That's the case with essentially everything. Legally, it is much harder to get divorced than get married; it is much harder to break a lease than sign a lease; it is much harder to recall a judge than elect a judge, ...
Unions are not the exception in this regard, this is pretty much the norm in everything.
Is this argument in any way distinguishable from someone saying 'Nobody is forcing you to work a non-union job. You're free to quit and take a union job any time you want'?
It's always interesting to see the anti-union arguments on threads like these. Half the people say that unions are anarchist thugs who beat people up and bash their heads in with bricks, and half say they're gray bureaucratic paper pushing middlemen.
Different unions are different, just as different companies are different. Plenty of companies have positive, constructive relationships with unions; you have no particular reason to say that the union is what made the relationship antagonistic and not the employer, except for an implicit assumption that companies have a right to exist and push for their interests while unions don't.
The problem is that the needle for "particularly bad" gets moved every year if there's no countervailing force. Short (<3hr) shifts and JiT scheduling were "particularly bad" a few years ago. Now they're probably the norm in the service/retail industry. The new innovation(s) thanks to Amazon seem to be unpaid security screenings and hidden performance metrics. How long until these are just SOP for all large retail companies?
I live in France, being a union member here is incredibly dull, all day long people come with their employment contract, and you pore over the labor code and the various unions contracts to check the legality of various allegations.
at the top level the workers unions manage the unemployment insurance with the employers unions, and talk to the government before labor laws are changed.
a lot of useless bureaucracy that culminates in yearly standstills via strikes. no wonder unions in France are slowly losing members:
> A survey published by France’s human rights defender, an independent administrative authority, revealed that a “fear of reprisal” was cited as the most common reason for employees’ low-engagement in trade unions.
A large majority of those surveyed said their trade union activities had a negative impact for their professional growth and said they felt discriminated against by their employers.
The survey highlighted the main causes for the decrease of trade union membership in France since the 1950's, which is now one of the lowest rates of unionised employees in the European
The fact is that there are effective unions. There are also corrupt unions. The problem is that each side will only acknowledge one of those sentences as being correct.
> actual unions are a far cry from how they are portrayed as helping the worker.
But that's life. Real capitalism is also a far cry from the fairy tale capitalism presented by many popular economics books and articles (e.g. the beautiful self-regulating system where everyone is better off in the end by definition).
> They are set up as antagonistic between administration and workers, and adds a layer of bureaucracy that I've only seen be negative. I've worked with people who effectively could never be fired and were so bad at their jobs they spread negativity with everyone they encountered.
You could say the same about democracy. Wouldn't it be better to replace our actual democratic system with an idealized autocracy? There'd be far less interpersonal strife over politics, and we wouldn't have to waste our time with voting or political participation, and could devote our energies to more productive things instead!
The union debate is weird like that. There's all kinds of negative discussion about specific instances of unions, considered in isolation. But that's rarely balanced against the specific problems unions are meant to solve or mitigate, so the effect is to compare the negatives of unions against an unspecified but implied positive management/shareholder-led status quo.
I am no fan of unions, but I think they were necessary to force business owners to treat workers decently - to make them pay better than starvation wages, and have decent working conditions. Then came the Cold War, and business owners had an extra incentive to treat workers decently: it undercut communist propaganda, and business owners did not want communism in the country where they owned a business. And so workers didn't think unions were necessary, because they were getting a decent enough deal.
Then the Cold War ended. And about the same time, union membership went into a steep decline. And the business owners have been slurping up all the money in the economy, and paying workers closer and closer to starvation wages. (And there's the working conditions at Amazon, which are... not treating employees decently.) This sounds more and more like the conditions where unions grew strong, because the workers found them to be necessary.
I've heard nothing but bad things about American unions from both management and many (but not all) workers. I strongly believe that we need labor organization, but I also wonder if someone needs to (cliche alert!) disrupt the space with a new model or just new unions that are not run by bureaucratic chair warmers or the mob.
The biggest thing that always blows me away about unions is the work rules. Person A can't so much as lift a finger to do something outside their designated work area, etc. I can't even imagine running an organization with that kind of bureaucracy. How could you optimize process? It's a wonder any union shop with that kind of elephant on its back can get anything done, ever.
One of the biggest problems is honestly that. The existing unions are trying to expand into other industries. It only brings the existing mess, ducktapes on some new layers and fucks up more things. They aren't even expanding for the workers at that point, but to increase revenue for their administrative salaries.
Rather than a new union specifically tailored for a industry/environment/location/job.
And don't get me started about NY unions which are literally run by mafias as part of a long con.
The LIRR union head (with suspiciously mafia ties) threw a shit fit because "HOW DARE" the LIRR have a modern time card system that requires an employee to scan a finger so to confirm they are actually present to avoid the billion dollar abuse of physical timecards they were replacing.
I would honestly do anything in my power to not have to work in a union again. They are set up as antagonistic between administration and workers, and adds a layer of bureaucracy that I've only seen be negative. I've worked with people who effectively could never be fired and were so bad at their jobs they spread negativity with everyone they encountered.