But could you imagine if we spoke about corporations in this manner? "I've worked for corporations and they are a mixed bag. In practice, they often abuse their employees. I've personally witnessed bosses who contributed nothing for years and just played politics."
For some reason we hold unions to an incredibly high standard of "no problems, ever" but this is never used to discourage all participation in the labor force because employers are often shitty.
Unions are democratically controlled worker organizations. Like democratic nations, they can contain abusers, they can be inefficient, and they can fail to solve problems effectively. But like democratic nations, they provide a powerful resistance to authoritarian abuse and on balance improve the quality of life for their people.
> But could you imagine if we spoke about corporations in this manner? "I've worked for corporations and they are a mixed bag. In practice, they often abuse their employees. I've personally witnessed bosses who contributed nothing for years and just played politics."
We definitely talk about corporations in this way. All the time, in fact!
The point which i don’t think was articulated well by the GP is that depsite these objections to corporate power nobody (ok,few people) in HN threads ever seems to endorse getting rid of corporations.
On the other hand, we rarely see HN threads about contractors in which corporations are argued to be a panacea for problems faced by busy well paid contract developers, and anybody suggesting any potential downsides of contractors moving onto payroll is assumed to be a dupe of propaganda pushed by Big Tim Ferriss.
(We can take that comparison further: people on HN sometimes do suggest that Uber drivers might be better off if they could only be hired as salaried employees but almost never say that about highly paid freelance developers. It's pretty similar when we're looking at the respective cost/benefit of collective bargaining arrangements for local bus drivers vs highly skilled developers earning two orders of magnitude more than bus drivers in an job market that offers practically unrivalled opportunities for people with their skillset.)
Corporations creates enormous amounts of value, as far as we know modern society cannot function without those structures. Unions however are optional, even if they help they still aren't nearly as important as corporations.
Edit: For those who disagree, how many modern societies are there without corporations running a majority of the economy? Not a single one. So as far as we know it doesn't work. It can work in theory, but it has never worked in practice. There are however many examples of modern economies with very little union influence, USA is an example, and USA is a better place to live than most countries. Unions can help, but countries that focused on strengthening unions and banning corporations did much worse than for example USA. Strengthening corporations and weakening unions however might have had some small negative effects but nearly not at the same level.
> There are however many examples of modern economies with very little union influence, USA is an example, and USA is a better place to live than most countries.
The US is arguably pretty subpar in terms of quality of life compared to other developed nations (little vacation, really expensive school system, poor health system for the masses leading to a lower life expectancy, high criminality rate, etc.). Of course, not all of it is due to unions, but they are all the consequences of policies being “pro business” instead of “pro people”.
I didn't argue otherwise. USA is however not subpar compared to any country hostile to corporations, which is the important part. A country being hostile to unions isn't nearly as bad as a country being hostile to corporations.
Bucketing countries into the false "hostile to unions vs. hostile to corporations" dichotomy is IMO disingenuous; it makes unions sound scary and unable to exist in a healthy corporate landscape.
Taxes are "hostile to corporations", but you wouldn't categorize a country as "hostile to corporations" based solely on the corporate tax rates. There's much more to the corporate landscape than just taxes.
Canada, the UK, Sweden, Germany [1]— there's plenty of countries that have higher union membership than the USA and are also arguably better places to live.
> A country being hostile to unions isn't nearly as bad as a country being hostile to corporations.
This is a very subjective conclusion that is likely very dependent on what economic class you fall into. Many folks on HN (myself included) fall into the category white collar or professional workers. For many other parts of the labor market, you're literally trading sweat and toil for money.
Add to this that labor intensive jobs tend to lead to a lot of physical wear and tear with less medical benefits than white collar professionals typically receive, then just by quality of life and welfare alone most people doing physical labor would come to opposite conclusions re: pro union vs pro cooperation economic/governmental policies.
Not sure you understand, but every single developed nation has pro-corporation policies. Some of them also have pro-worker policies. But none of them are hostile towards corporations like for example Soviet or old China was. There are plenty of billionaires in Scandinavia etc.
"Every single developed nation" is a very broad generalization that I'd be skeptical of being true. I'd also dispute that all countries are pro-corperation and instead state that most countries are pro-economy.
Corporations are just a vehicle for organizing work and profit around a venture. There are many other ways to organize work that have nothing to do with corporations or unions. Consider partnerships, sole proprietorships, cottage industries, co-ops, and more specific arrangements within those vehicles like profit sharing, limited partnerships, and employee ownership (not to be confused with stocks/options, though they are similar in concept).
Capitalism can take many forms, and not all of them require we turn the way we organize work and wealth generation into a zero-sum game between entrepreneurs and laborers. It's just the first thing we've found that's worked out in the environments it's been attempted in. I think there's room for businesses and economies to try out novel models for organizing work, and I suspect many of them could get us better or more efficient trade-offs between profit, productivity, and general welfare for all parties involved.
> Consider partnerships, sole proprietorships, cottage industries, co-ops, and more specific arrangements within those vehicles like profit sharing, limited partnerships, and employee ownership (not to be confused with stocks/options, though they are similar in concept).
None of those have proven to work at scale though. So as far as we know corporations is how you have to do it. You can believe that there are other ways, but you cannot know that there are other ways as nothing else has proven to work.
It's worth pointing out that in many countries small companies under governance models as the ones listed make up a large portion (or even the majority) of the overall GDP. For example in Germany the "Mittelstand" employ 63.7% of all employ and contribute 54,4% of the total economic activity (sorry not sure how that is defined exactly) [1]. So saying they don't work at scale is not quite correct I'd argue, things are definitely more complicated.
John Lewis & Partners, an employee-owned cooperative and the largest and most successful high end chain of department stores in the UK, springs to mind as a larger scale success story for alternative models.
I agree, though I suspect viability of models is heavily driven by the economic/regulatory/cultural environment.
In the US, we have:
1. A poor social net, meaning employers need to take on the onus of providing many basic benefits like health care.
2. A political environment that conflates communism/socialism/collectivism, which really muddies the waters around organizations that aren't hierarchical.
3. A work culture that prizes profits over all else. Orgs do not have to be this way, and if you look at expectations/obligations of similar entities in other countries they're expected to balance profitability with things like social welfare.
I think you're right in that within the US, corporations have shown the best ability to scale, but I believe this is a consequence of the economic/regulatory/political environment of the US than inherent superiority of corporate governance.
> USA is however not subpar compared to any country hostile to corporations
There are too little countries hostile to corporations remaining today to compare, but I'd still argue that today's US has subpar QoL compared to France in the 80s which was arguably on the anti-corporation side (with price control and a state-owned monopoly for most economic activities – or, when it wasn't a monopoly, the biggest actor was state-owned)
Anyway, I'm not arguing that we should get rid of corporations, but we should dramatically reduce their power and influence on the economy, which is now at a level far above what's desirable.
>USA is however not subpar compared to any country hostile to corporations
The comment you're replying to didn't say anything about hostility to corporations, just hostility to unions, which are categorically not the same measurements. Germany, for example, is extremely pro-union while also being very pro-corporation. Their quality of life metrics are generally much higher than the US as well.
That is a lie, labor movements shaped those long before there were a legal concept of unions. Unions != labor movements. Unions are often a result of labor movements, but they are not the same thing. For example, the 8-hour work week was demanded by labor movements who weren't organized as modern unions are organized.
Edit: Labor movements often called themselves unions though, but that was just a group of people getting together to protest and demand rights and has nothing to do with how modern unions works.
I would say that an organized group of workers that calls itself a union and advocates on behalf of those workers for labor rights is a union, and I think most people and dictionaries would agree with me. If that's not what you meant by the word "union", I think the burden is on you to provide an alternate definition for this discussion.
A union is recognized by the NLRB and has certain statutory entitlements regarding strikes and the ability for employers to fire striking workers. "Labor movements," writ large, do not require those statutory entitlements. Modern unions can be understood in terms of their ability to collectively bargain without fear of direct reprisal in terms of employment. Otherwise, collective bargaining has always been an option (it's just humans acting in concert), and long predated the concept of "unions."
I feel confident that most people would say a formal organization of workers that engaged in collective bargaining and strikes without legal protections was a union, even if it existed before the NLRB. If what you really want to talk about is "modern legally-recognized unions" then just say that.
Maybe, but when they say union membership is down, they mean NLRB recognized unions. We do not have good stats on labor movements writ large. To the OP’s post, Google’s not tackling a labor movement. They’re tackling “unions” with statutory privileges.
So you would call a labor party a worker union? Labor seems to be able to organize just fine regardless if there are unions or not, as long as they are allowed to vote.
If it's a party composed of workers and it advocates specifically on behalf of the interests of the members, then yes I would call it a union. If party membership is open to anyone and labor issues are only some of the planks in its platform, then no I would not call it a union.
Honestly I think this is just continuing a very uninteresting semantics discussion - now we have to decide what "labor party" means. The point here is that you seem to have a different definition of "union" than the average person, which is fine, you should just be aware of that and watch out for misunderstandings when you're discussing with someone so you aren't talking past each other.
I'm not from the US so I'm probably misunderstanding this whole conversation. What's the difference between "a group of people getting together to protest and demand rights" and a union apart from the union being a legal entity?
What you wrote in your edit is what a Union means in Europe, it's just formalized as an entity.
Would you say that a labor party is a union? I wouldn't. A labor party is a labor movement though. If you call labor parties unions and say we should be thankful to them, then I agree, but that is totally different from workplace unions.
> how many modern societies are there without corporations running a majority of the economy?
Playing devil's advocate, what you say is probably true on the supply side. However, the other side, consumer demand, is mostly driven by people unaffiliated with corps. That is, families arguably drive the majority of the economy. (That said this argument feels more than a little pedantic, but it must be made!)
A corporation in the US is a legal fiction that creates a pseudo-person distinct from the owners, providing privileges to operate and legal protections for the owners. A corporation does not require many employees, which you seem to imply are required. The owners are the main component of a corporation not the employees.
By the way corporate personhood is not a legal fiction as in the term of art, it's a legal principle. More like a fact of law than a fiction.
I know in context you don't intend that but just a pejorative based around the fact corporations are a legal structure. Although I'm always puzzled by what the actual problem with this is. And I'll go on a tangent from the topic.
The legal system is fictional in basically the same way a corporation is. So is all other aspects of a government. Even the legal rights that a real person has are just about as far removed from flesh and blood as the legal entity of a corporation is from the brick and mortar and people that make up a corporation (for those corporations that have such corporeal bodies).
Having almost no appreciation for legal systems or their history, I would also guess that the idea a stroke of the pen suddenly gives birth to corporations which spread their ruin across the earth is backward, or at least much more complicated. Usually it is the legal system catching up with reality, solving problems like regulating existing practice of the time. Laws are shaped by society as much or maybe more than society is is shaped by laws, in my opinion.
I mean, argue specific problems of corporate law, but the general disparagement of "legal make-believe" I don't understand. The entire legal system is built on it, there's a lot of good things that are done with it.
I appreciate your comment, but I'm not sure what your point is. Corporate personhood is literally a legal fiction due to the granting of personhood in order to fall under the umbrella of existing law. This personhood is accepted as true, even though it is objectively untrue; this is a textbook example of a legal fiction.
Maybe I have the wrong understanding. I thought the legal concept of a "person" can be said to be a legal fiction https://www.jstor.org/stable/1342652, but a corporation is not. It's a real thing that is created and exists according to corporate law. That might happen to use legal fictions as part of its definition, but the corporation is not a legal fiction.
But even if I was right there, I would agree I was trying to be overly pedantic and ended up distracting from the point I was trying to make.
Thanks. I understand now what you meant. I see that I should have worded my comment better, now that you have pointed that out to me. A corporation is a legal creation which has the legal-fiction of personhood associated with it.
A corporation doesn't require any employees. Like you said, it's a legal fiction. My point was that the corporations that "create enormous amounts of value" (GP's words) are those same corporations that have employees, and the "value" described therein is really the value of the labor of those employees.
There's no metaphysical Lockean value production going on inside of a corporation. When it produces value, the value it produces is the value that its employees produce. Waxing poetic about the value of corporations is thusly mostly a game of smoke and mirrors that obscures the real source of that value (the humans doing the work), and detracts from the actual advantage that comes from incorporation (i.e., solving the coordination game and thereby extracting more value from workers).
> from the actual advantage that comes from incorporation (i.e., solving the coordination game and thereby extracting more value from workers).
In my experience the value of incorporating has not been to hire people but the legal protections and ability to create certain tax structures for retirement planning that benefit the owners.
> A corporation doesn't require any employees.
In reality some employees are required in order to keep the corporate designation that allows the use of certain retirement plans.
Corporations are a structure of workers. Both the structure and the workers are essential. Workers without structure doesn't produce much value leading to a poor society. Politically created structure leads to bad outcomes so also leads to a poor society. Capitalist created structure creates a lot of value and leads to rich societies. There might be alternatives, but so far capitalism is the only known way to create such structures at scale.
I don't understand the argument in this response: unions exist within capitalist systems, and are an integral part of our capitalist system. Our concept of a "union" does not apply to non-capitalist systems. Extolling the virtues of capitalism is, at the absolute best, completely orthogonal to the legitimacy and value of unionization.
Likewise, unions aren't "politically created structure": they're not created in a top-down manner by the state. They're a form of collective organization and bargaining, the sort that is singularly responsible for the quality of life and workplace protections that we all take for granted.
> Likewise, unions aren't "politically created structure": they're not created in a top-down manner by the state.
Then why are you so upset that people don't want to create the "politically created structure" version of unions? Why not just organize as workers and call yourself a union? Can even create a workers party, like they have in basically every other single other developed country, and then that workers party can stand up for your rights. But that workers party isn't a union. Basically every single developed country except USA has labor parties. Democrats aren't a labor party, they are a party of mostly lawyers.
> Then why are you so upset that people don't want to create the "politically created structure" version of unions?
I'm not. I'm not a communist, and I don't think I asserted that I wanted a state-enforced union anywhere. Stronger protections for collective organization and bargaining would suffice in my book.
Edit: And, for what it's worth, you can't just create a union in the US. You need to be recognized by the NLRB for any collective action to be considered legitimate and protected under the law.
It is also ownership of said structure. If you have a thousand workers. One person can own the output of those workers. Those workers can produce 10 billion dollars in revenue and the owner gets owns all the profit and the workers pocket 1 billion in aggregate.
It's fair trade in the beginning because of high risk during the founding of the company but the tradeoff becomes less fair as the risk lowers and the company becomes more mature.
Corporations are a pattern of relations (social and economic) that are socially reproduced and codified by the legal system. The current body of law is a strange attractor for among other things, the reproduction of corporations as they exist today[1]. The way capitalism is coded is at the expense of experimenting with other systems[2]. Instead of experimenting with alternative systems of economic organization, we see an ongoing attempt to level all forms of alternative economic organization. In effect, the notion of "capitalism is the only known way" becomes a prescriptive rather than descriptive - a normative statement rather than a observational one.
If we were truly looking for more advanced forms of organization beyond the status quo, I would expect that economic imperialism would not exist. Instead, even more aspects of basic society are capitalized and in recent decades also codified using the inflexible mechanisms of computer code. The last remaining hold outs do so at their own expense[3]. So no, I don't think we're exploring the possibility space of superior economic technology, we're stagnating.
3. Market, political, cultural, economic forces all contribute to the complete and total capture of universal capitalism. Those who wish not to comply face political, social, and economic sanctions from the individual to national levels.
Those were thanks to labor movements, not unions. They are not the same thing, labor movements happens thanks to Democracy. Democracy is crucial, I agree, it lets groups organize, protest and fix problems with how society works. But what we call unions today are not that.
I'm all for labor engaging in politics, but they can do that without paying union dues for working at a company. The problem USA's workers face today isn't lack of unions, it is lack of proper representation in their democracy.
>Those were thanks to labor movements, not unions.
Ahahaha, do you also think that voting rights and anti-segregation laws were due to the 'civil rights movement', and not civil rights activists such as MLK jr or civil rights organizations such as the NAACP?
Labor movements are made up of people, yes. Not sure how that is related to unions. Labor organized in every single democracy regardless if there were unions or not. Labor movements tend to create unions, so unions are often a result of labor movements and not the source of labor movements.
And so if the people in these movements made smaller organizations to advance the goals of the movement at their workplace, in their local communities, and the national level... we might even credit those organizations, yes? Just like we do with the civil rights movement?
>Labor organized in every single democracy regardless if there were unions or not.
Some economies skipped steam power too, but every early industrial economy had labor unions predate modern labor standards.
Not a single one of those unions had legal backing though, they were just political movements and people working together. Not sure why you say they have anything to do with the theatre that are modern unions. Rather the concept of modern unions limits worker power, since it created a lot of laws preventing workers to organize as they wish and instead have to fit the very narrow framework that are modern unions. Workers had more power back then when they were free to organize without the limitations of modern unions.
For example, why even have a vote? Why have enforced term limits for unions that you can't kick them out before the limit is up? Why no bargaining as a group without a vote?
Organizations have bylaws largely because without them, chaos reigns.
A movement that hopes to continue must become an organization, that is, a collection of humans who agree to engage with each other according to an agreed upon set of rules.
Your whole “movement != union” is a distinction without a difference.
Socialist movements which pushed for workers rights in Europe are more based on Marx than unions. Most modern worker parties has their roots there, but of course some of the more extreme socialist policies has been dropped in favor of capitalism.
I never said that unions makes things worse. I am saying that corporations are more important than unions. Scandinavia's economy is still run by corporations and has among the highest concentration of billionaires in the world.
The purpose of Unions is a check on corporate and government power.
Just like the US has three branches of government there are really four fundamental organizations in society: government, corporations, religion and unions.
They work best by keeping each other in check. Right now unions have been decimated and corporations have bought out the government and religion.
Unions aren't optional, we're just slowly and corrosively finding out why, despite their flaws, they need to exist (and they don't work if people aren't involved in them).
> For those who disagree, how many modern societies are there without corporations running a majority of the economy?
"running a majority of the economy" doesn't seem to necessarily be the relevant metric to be optimizing for. But I'll cede that many of the largest countries in the world do not have solid union rights.
Isn't it by force of the US nuclear arsenal that modern societies must have corporations? You can do something else, but Americans will always try to assassinate you, and make sure you don't have access to resources
There's reasons other than being an absolute requirement for why everyone's currently using something
Not so much on HN (perhaps because its a forum sponsored by a VC and filled with people that either own their own business or hope to one day), but one of the fastest growing subreddits - r/antiwork - is dedicated to precisely that premise.
As important HN may be it is big world out there, so why wouldn't someone simply try eliminating at least a single corporation of medium size (200-1000 people) with plain union organization for employment. I am sure it wouldn't need HN approval.
Partly this is a consequence of the relatively small number of unions compared to corporations (which is by design). For example, if you work in the auto industry, there are a lot of different corporations you could work for but only one major union. It also means that you generally have more choice in your employer than your union representation.
Moreover, the market often takes care of corporations that contribute nothing. Especially of the private ones. For the public ones, there's no "union" that protects their stock price on the stock market.
I am very pro-union, but I feel like a part of situation you are describing is because we needs businesses. We don’t necessarily need unions. Without unions, businesses would still be here. Without businesses, where would the unions be?
Edit: I would like to reiterate that I am pro-union. I am just saying that unions are optional, but businesses (or the government as some have pointed out) are more necessary from the standpoint you don’t usually form a union and then start a business. I like unions, but they are technically optional and I think that fact is what leads to people being more critical of them. When businesses/government sucks, there’s kind of a “well that’s how it is I guess.” When a union sucks, there’s a “why even do this then?”
Yeah, I think talking about the benefits of "unions" in the abstract is a little weird because - at least in the US - unions are highly regulated by laws that were written primarily envisioning the model of early-20th-century manual labor. That is to say, unions were designed in a way that fit not just for-profit businesses but very particular types of for-profit businesses.
So you need to separate the more conceptual parts of unions - that maybe we should value sustainable and secure employment over shareholder value, that laborers should be able to negotiate collectively and not individually, that you can do good work that is beneficial to the public by prioritizing happy laborers - from the very specific implementation of unions that we happen to have. Without our current model of for-profit businesses, the implementation of unions would not be a coherent concept (and admittedly they are a bit less coherent now and when applied to e.g. tech companies than they were in the past for the businesses for which they were designed - which isn't to say they're the wrong answer, just that they're an awkward fit). But the values are still valid.
As a sibling comment said, worker-owned cooperatives are one model here. Another similar option is very small companies: the concept of a solo founder unionizing makes no sense, but the solo founder of a bootstrapped "lifestyle business" has most of the benefits one generally wants from unions, and communities of such businesses can choose to federate for a better voice in the market. There are certainly a lot of other options besides the idea of a large business owned by its founders or publicly traded.
But really developers would be better off with something along the lines of a trade guild. Something that enforces standards on employers and employees.
The Saturn corporation had a labor-management partnership which did exactly that for standards, and was a subdivision of GM. Unfortunately it's stressful for corp and union leadership when high standards are set, so it eventually lost support despite high worker approval.
I'd argue that if you hop into other threads about how everyone is worried about financial/societal collapse in the US that it is the end result of decimating unions in the 80s.
You just don't notice right away that you need unions when you lose them, corrosively much later you notice that society has gone off the rails.
I think that has much more to do with legislation in the US (not from there). Unions make sense for professions with a large amount of workers with very similar conditions. This is what brings members together and especially low wage workers have not much room to bargain. Tech paints a completely different picture.
Support and call center staff? Certainly can use a union. Developers? Far too diverse conditions.
I guess we dont necessarily need child labor laws or the weekend...
Remember when the cacophony of calls to "End the Olympics Now" when the IOC was found to be grossly corrupt? No, me neither. The investor owned media called for reform. As it will for literally any other institution.
I feel like the first line is kind of a little hyperbolic. I know that unions gave us a lot of the luxuries we take for granted today and I will state once again, for the record, that I am pro-union. I’m just saying that they are in a position where it is easy to criticize and reject them if they do something wrong. For better and for worse.
Do we need child labor laws? In countries that are reach enough to have various forms of social security there is no need to send little Timmy to work in a coal mine. In countries that aren't - they do help their parents with sustenance farming and those laws, even if they exist on some level, don't change anything.
A lot of people don't know just how corrupt the IOC is, I suspect if this was common knowledge there would be a hugely increased number of people calling for boycotts of the Olympics.
And those police unions are exactly why in many cases, an officer gets to see ALL evidence and video about a situation, with a required rep or lawyer, before making an official statement in many jurisdictions. Something you and I certainly don't get. In fact, they often try to trick suspects.
I mean, police unions do exist solely to protect police officers which means their incentives are sometimes opposed to the public they serve, and so they should absolutely not be in charge of things like self investigations and time-limiting records of abuse, etc.
But that's not inherent to a union. Cities shouldn't cede these extraordinary powers to the union in the first place, and if they already have, they should take them back.
> But could you imagine if we spoke about corporations in this manner? "I've worked for corporations and they are a mixed bag. In practice, they often abuse their employees. I've personally witnessed bosses who contributed nothing for years and just played politics."
Who doesn't talk about corporations in this manner? Doesn't everyone?
> Unions are democratically controlled worker organizations. Like democratic nations, they can contain abusers, they can be inefficient, and they can fail to solve problems effectively. But like democratic nations, they provide a powerful resistance to authoritarian abuse and on balance improve the quality of life for their people.
Democracy doesn't make sense in every situation. It makes sense for countries because we are born into citizenship. If you dislike a company you can just leave.
In situations where you can't "just leave," unions may make sense. Google is not an example of this. Everyone who works at Google could leave and find a job elsewhere tomorrow.
> "Corporations are usually horrendously corrupt so we should abolish them all?"
People voluntarily don't work for corporations whose mission or behavior is incompatible with their values; they do not have that option with unionization.
If the union allows workers to not join the union, not charge dues for being an non-member, and not support them, then nobody would have a problem with them.
FWIW in the UK it's a legal right not to join or support unions (closed shops are outlawed), and unions can't charge non-members dues (no agency shops either). Lots of people (both company-owners and ordinary citizens) have problems with them anyway. Somebody in my industry recently left the union angrily and publicly, then subsequently criticised the union for not representing their interests after they'd gone. There's no accounting for folk.
Yes, the UK has never been a place with strong freedom of speech and contract protections, so it makes sense they would outlaw business owners from voluntarily entering into security clause agreements with their employees.
? This seems like a perfectly symmetric arrangement to me.
> People voluntarily don't work for corporations whose mission or behavior is incompatible with their values
And so if that corporation has signed a security clause agreement with a union, they are free to not work with that corporation.
Unions do not force workers to join a union shop, just as those people are free to not work for corporations whose mission is incompatible with their values, they are also free to not work for corporations subject to a union security clause that their owners voluntarily signed.
>> For some reason we hold unions to an incredibly high standard of "no problems, ever"
Because they are democratic institutions. They can be held to a no-problems standard because every time a problem occurs then those involved can be sacked and replaced. The level of acceptable corruption is set by the membership. Rules should therefore focus on openness and member participation in leadership selection. Everyone who hates unions because of X or Y, to them I say join the leadership and run the union the way you think it should be run. Tearing down the system doesn't fix anything.
If you don't want anything to do with them you absolutely have the right to go somewhere the union doesn't exist. You do not have the right to ask the union to make your life easier. That's not their job.
> Why isn't it valid to say you don't like unions and so don't want anything to do with them?
Because you can't possibly have personally experienced every union, and the media isn't good at covering unions generally, so whatever bias you're (or anyone else making this statement is) presenting here feels unearned.
This is similar to the bias of racism or homophobia, right? Like, "I saw a Black person steal something, so now I think that all Black people are untrustworthy." Or, "I saw a gay man hit on a straight guy and now I think all gay men are sex pests." These are declarative statements about all people in those groups based on a small amount of information and on societal bias.
And these biases rarely go the other way – do you also end up saying, "I don't like corporations and don't want anything to do with them?" Corporations are, by far, have a vastly worse record on theft, corruption, anti-environmental practices, etc.
Subtly juxtaposing not wanting to be a union to being racist or homophobic there - very low blow choosing the most incendiary things possible to suggest it's similar to.
And nobody has to earn the right to decline to be pulled into a political organisation they don't want anything to do with. If someone doesn't want to join your club the right response is to think about how to attract them, not to ask them to justify why they don't want to join. Otherwise do you join every single political party? They all claim to represent your interests!
I'm not realistically able to live my life without working with a corporation. I am demonstrably able to live my life without a union. So the bar for the union entering my life, adding that extra complexity, taking some of my money and borrowing the little power I have, is of course far higher.
It's right to be extremely skeptical of anyone who claims to want to represent your interests. Because usually they really want to use your power to represent their own interests.
Your comment assumes a baseline belief of "obviously corporations are reprehensibly undemocratic" that I don't believe most people who hold unions to high standards would agree.
I think that the difference here is a matter of principles.
A lot of people view corporations in a justifiably negative light (very few people say that corporations are an unalloyed good, and I have never heard anyone wish that they could work for an LLC). But a corporation is chartered to make money - we expect it to act accordingly and for the most part companies do make money (when they fail to make money, they cease existing and the general consensus is 'good riddance').
A union on the other hand is chartered to advocate for the rights and needs of workers. The standards and expectations for a union are fundamentally different than for a corporation. It depends on the union, but a lot unions don't really carry out their core function and there are no consequences for this failure. Given that Unions claim a democratic mandate to advocate for labor, people are justifiably upset when they see their union doing nothing to represent their interests.
>But a corporation is chartered to make money - we expect it to act accordingly and for the most part companies do make money (when they fail to make money, they cease existing
They are supposed to serve a higher purpose than just make money.
If you were being equivalently fair to unions you would say that their sole purpose is to take dues.
>a lot unions don't really carry out their core function and there are no consequences for this failure
>And they often use violence or threat of violence to try to stop this - see their reaction to 'scabbing'.
If it's a competition for who has managed the most extreme violence in relation to an industrial dispute in America the prize would go to the manager of a coal mine in west virginia who brought in a private air force to bomb strikers (battle of blair mountain).
I somehow doubt youll find a union that has managed that level of unbridled violence.
The most extreme violence isnt in defence of livelihoods, it's in the service of profit.
That was in the 1920s - that's not something I'm legitimately worried about.
But it is a routine occurrence to have picket lines in industrial disputes today, and to deliberately harass people who choose to go into work.
In the coal mining strikes in the UK in the 80s it got to the point where union members literally killed a taxi driver for taking a worker past a picket line.
Google aren't going to kill an Uber driver for taking me to work at Facebook instead.
Google would absolutely employ violence to defend its profits if it felt that its profits were seriously under threat and it thought violence was a viable tactic. It isnt. It's very far away from that. These things are a nuisance to them no more.
The united fruit company paid for paramilitaries to assassinate strikers in Central America.
This is a world away from dropping a brick on a taxi because your livelihood is under threat.
But membership is mandatory if there is a union at that corp. A union is like a service they can't ever unsubscribe from without changing jobs.
For government work especially, unions can start to take over management functions. So employees end up wanting a second union to protect them from abuses by their main union.
Technically untrue, but if you are required to pay union dues then membership is effectively mandatory. It depends on State Law here. Some states are "right to work" so people can opt out, but this effectively destroys the Union. The Wagner act does not allow multiple unions or compete/cooperate so the issue in the US is framed in pretty all/nothing terms.
Well bailouts were called out a million times. And to think of it bailouts were about "oh what about these thousands of employees and community they lived instead of think of executives and their million dollar bonuses."
> But could you imagine if we spoke about corporations in this manner? "I've worked for corporations and they are a mixed bag. In practice, they often abuse their employees...
One Slight Difference - Corporations are supposed to serve their owners' financial interests. Unions are supposed to serve their members. How 'bout we speak just as harshly of mission-failure unions as we do of mission-failure corporations?
OTOH, I certainly agree with your 4th para - "...Like democratic nations, they can contain abusers, they can be inefficient, and they can fail...".
There are things I do not want to be democratically controlled.
My ability to negotiate salaries with my boss is one of them.
The scope of my job (some unions get to decide what you are allowed to do).
Who should get fired (teachers unions make it impossible for bad teachers to be fired, so students are forced to put up with them)
If you should be allowed to work. Some unions forbid you to work during strikes. Often by force and by threat.
Some unions manage to lobby for regulations that make it harder to get into a job. Then you need certifications and/or degrees to even consider a job.
Unfortunately many use the "democratic union" argument to control your ability to make personal decisions. Unions that get to channel power from the government (commonly through regulations) can easily abuse their power. When unions are not voluntary they easily become HOAs for jobs
> There are things I do not want to be democratically controlled.
> My ability to negotiate salaries with my boss is one of them.
> The scope of my job (some unions get to decide what you are allowed to do).
If you are an at-will employee in the US, your ability to do any of that is entirely at the discretion of your employer. You have no rights to do any of the above. You might have more leverage or better treatment in specific scenarios, but again, the hard truth is that all of this is entirely at the whim of management.
Is there any reasoning that you'd like to share about why those things shouldn't be democratically controlled, or did you just make a list of the things that unions do?
Those are things I care about and do not want to give away for a union to decide for me or to have power over me. And some things just piss me off. In NY you are forced to pay unions dues just to be a teacher. It does not matter of you do want to participate or not. They have government like powers to charge you for something you do not want.
In addition, it's quite possible that in the future someone like me could not get my current job due to regulation. I know people in the same line of work as me that is forced to pay union dues because of his degree. The unions associated with the undergrad course he took forced him to pay union dues unless he can prove his current job does not relate to his degree. This is just absurd but still happens. I'd rather not have other people have even more control over me, no matter how much the word "democratic" is added to the argument
Why do you prefer these things to be controlled by management and HR?
To be clear - I absolutely agree that these are all important and these powers need to be exercised wisely. But without democratically controlling them, every single one of them is controlled by management/HR. Why do you feel that management/HR is going to do a better job of controlling those things?
> For some reason we hold unions to an incredibly high standard of "no problems, ever" but this is never used to discourage all participation in the labor force because employers are often shitty.
That's not the standard. The standard is "are unions worth the trouble they cause?". I've worked in industries, as a union employee doing manual labor, where I would say yes. I don't think unions are worth the trouble for tech workers.
> But like democratic nations, they provide a powerful resistance to authoritarian abuse and on balance improve the quality of life for their people.
The fact that I can easily switch employers is a more effective protection against an abuse than a union ever could be.
> but this is never used to discourage all participation in the labor force because employers are often shitty.
There are approximately 93 million adults (civilian noninstitutional population) that don't work[0]. I'm sure it's not all because of the employers themselves, but surely a lot don't want to deal with the politics and culture imposed on them by managerial talent [maybe some study on this portion of the population's reason for not working would be useful].
> There are approximately 93 million adults (civilian noninstitutional population) that don't work
Which includes retired people, people with disabilities who can't work, stay at home spouses (who arguably are working, but not for an employer), students. Those reasons have nothing to do with avoiding "politics and culture imposed on them by managerial talent"
> maybe some study on this portion of the population's reason for not working would be useful
If unions could, they would regulate the working hours of robots and would represent robots in any discussion regarding work and would want a monetary cut of their productivity —if they could.
Businesses create value. That's not universal -- there's regulatory capture, monopolies, tragedy of the commons, etc. -- but it is fundamentally why capitalist economies have raised billions of people out of poverty.
Unions fundamentally redistribute the value that's been captured. That's not universal -- there's unions that make workers happier and result in more productivity, unions that are not adversarial and take on an HR function that's more in tune with employees -- but it is fundamentally why there can be successful companies with no unions, but of course no successful unions with no companies. Arguably, U.S. unions are more adversarial than European unions, and in many manufacturing, automobile, shipping industries have prevented their parent companies from adopting new technology, rolling out new practices, etc. to the extent that said parent companies were no longer competitive.
Workers labor mixed with capital creates value. Businesses are just a way of organizing that interaction that, if it succeeds, makes the interaction more efficient.
The businesses through the ownership of capital are the ones doing the redistributing of value, they are the ones writing the checks. Unions just negotiate that the redistribution allocates more of the pie to labor rather than the owners
I think we're roughly in agreement. Businesses are composed of the capital providers, the organizers (who decide how to deploy the capital), and the workers.
Capital providers colluding to set a loan rate is illegal. We shouldn't allow them to collude legally; they are a small number of experienced actors operating with information asymmetry already.
Organizers (i.e. senior management) colluding is--I don't know the legality--just unnecessary. They often are paid based on value add (equity, bonuses, etc.), so they are already reasonably aligned and need no further protection.
Workers can exist and do exist with or without collusion (i.e. unions). As a society, we've reasonably decided that colluding is legal, because workers often add a lot of value but have individual low value-over-replacement (hard to organize because of numbers, often inexperienced, etc.). Unions exist to help raise individual value-over-replacement closer to value-add.
What's being discussed here is the pluses and minuses of unionization. What I disagree with is people in this thread--not specifically you--comparing the collusion of workers to the existence of capital or organization (i.e. corporations are sometimes bad! why doesn't anyone discuss that!).
First, obviously people complain about corporations all the time. But second, private companies (capital and organization and workers) add value, and no society has done well without a large component of this.
There are many pluses to unions. But, especially as currently implemented, the minuses exist too, including that many of them focus on raising VOR but wholly ignore value-add, in a way that forces the business into slower and poorer decisions; or shielding some workers from the consequences of adding little to no value.
The capital tied up in any given business is colluding by definition because it moves in lock step. You don’t have multiple managers in a single org making conflicting business deals or bids with workers(for the most part, I’ve heard of a few companies organized this way). Hell even having multiple investors in a single company is collusion of capital owners when the company makes any sort of business deal.
Unions are just the workers colluding in the same fashion to increase their negotiating power
Whether you give me capital at a 1% interest rate of a 50% interest rate; whether you buy 1% of my company for $1,000 or 1% of my company for $100,000,000; are independently determined by each provider of capital. Collusion would be all banks working together to only provide me a loan for 30% interest even if it's obvious I can pay it back.
The use of capital is irrelevant to the question of collusion for providing capital. That's like saying all the workers on a factory line are inherently already colluding because they work towards producing the same car.
The amount invested in the company is provided by each separate investor, but those investors do not then negotiate separate deals with each worker. The investors “collude” together to creat the business and have greater negotiating power than they would on their own.
A union is merely the labor version of joining together to increase leverage and is not any special level of collusion greater than the investors is what I am getting at
And yes saying the workers are colluding because they are working on the same car is what’s happening if you are going to call banding together to negotiate rates is colluding. There is non union labor and other unions
> For some reason we hold unions to an incredibly high standard of "no problems, ever" but this is never used to discourage all participation in the labor force because employers are often shitty.
No, most people are holding them to reasonable standards. Just like people hold medical doctors to not kill people by their negligence. Some might say it is incredibly high standard as well but I do not think so. I am afraid employers are shitty so union can be shitty is not a great advertisement for unions.
> Unions are democratically controlled worker organizations...
It would interesting to understand why these shining democratic organization don't directly provide work to people. Overall wouldn't it be much better than working for grubby capitalists. May be not in USA but other countries can eliminate the concept of corporations/companies and just simply have unions.
'Never' used to discourage all participation? Have you visited /r/antiwork? Also, I think some of the backlash to unions is that they are often described as an unmitigated force for good, but for some it just feels like being squeezed between two beurocracies.
Our unions are in need of reform. They need to serve a modern economy. They continue to act like it’s 1940.
If unions had the same internal checks against abuse: Financial compliance, ability and desire to fire corrupt officials, ability to fire abusive members as well as management, were active in progress (rather than protect against progress), and acted as an arbiter for the best interest for all parties (worker, employer, self (union), and economy at large) I think I’d have a better experience with them. As they are they are parasitic to a significant degree.
That’s in no way turning a blind eye to the reforms they enabled in the first half of the XX century.
They are now like the non-profit whose original reason to be ceased to exist but now want to continue existing for the sake of the management structure who find themselves with an evaporated mission.
But could you imagine if we spoke about corporations in this manner? "I've worked for corporations and they are a mixed bag. In practice, they often abuse their employees. I've personally witnessed bosses who contributed nothing for years and just played politics."
For some reason we hold unions to an incredibly high standard of "no problems, ever" but this is never used to discourage all participation in the labor force because employers are often shitty.
Unions are democratically controlled worker organizations. Like democratic nations, they can contain abusers, they can be inefficient, and they can fail to solve problems effectively. But like democratic nations, they provide a powerful resistance to authoritarian abuse and on balance improve the quality of life for their people.