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
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.