Not starting out adversarial with management is a big part of it. Unions in the US feel like they need to have strict rules because otherwise management will take advantage. Management in the US is often very strongly anti-union. This is a situation where social conventions and government regulation could yield better outcomes than an adversarial system. But Americans love adversarial systems.
People get really confused when I say I am pro-union, but anti-american-union.
Workers deserve representation and protections. But American unions are still closely tied to organized crime and are effectively a form of rent-seeking (you must pay us a percentage of your earnings or you can't work here). As recently as 2017 the FBI arrested members of the Lucchese crime family and members of the LIUNA Local 66 for applying a "mob tax" to new construction projects. SDNY settled RICO charges against the Teamsters in 2015.
I think everyone understands the historical good unions did for the average worker. But, particularly for workers who most often frequent sites like HN, unions have not had much of a positive impact, contemporarily.
Perhaps that’s less about unions becoming less good, and more about the collapse of unionization rates? Union membership is at an all time low, Occam’s razor says that the fact that most people aren’t in a union is the most likely explanation for why unions haven’t don’t people anything good recently.
Possibly, but since we’re hypothesizing: it could potentially be that unions are better suited for aiding those working in some professions and not others.
Perhaps highly educated knowledge workers can better manage salary/benefits and quality of work life better than a slate of hired guns?
Maybe because the skill sets and work output is generally more unique, knowledge workers can more easily move jobs than those who work in traditional union shops?
> it could potentially be that unions are better suited for aiding those working in some professions and not others.
Possible, but unionization rates are also down in industries that used to be unionized, such as manufacturing. This strongly implies that the issue is less “unions are bad” and more “unions were good, so bosses fought to get rid of them”. Companies wouldn’t need to hire anti-union firms if unions weren’t at least attractive to laborers, right?
After all, it’s not like life in those sectors has gotten so comfortable that laborers don’t think they need unions anymore.
> Perhaps highly educated knowledge workers can better manage salary/benefits and quality of work life better than a slate of hired guns?
Huh?
I think you’re calling union reps “hired guns”, which is deeply ironic given the history of bosses hiring actual men with actual guns to actually shoot labor activists.
> Maybe because the skill sets and work output is generally more unique, knowledge workers can more easily move jobs than those who work in traditional union shops?
I mean, unequal professions do unionize all the time. Take a look at professional sports. Unions are extremely useful in negotiating between labor and capital about things other than just pay. Length of contracts, benefits, safety regulations, etc.
Regardless, it’s pretty silly to argue that unions are useless because “they’ve had no impact” for this crowd when this crowd has never really had the opportunity to join a union. Hell, even quitting software and finding a union shop to join would actually be very hard in any field, given the low rates of unionization in this country.
> unions were good, so bosses fought to get rid of them
It's also worth noting that "unions were good" doesn't necessarily mean "unions are good". It's entirely possible that most of the things unions can do to help works has already been accomplished and enshrined in law (osha, breaks, overtime, etc). While I believe that there's still good unions can accomplish, the cap on how much good is much lower than it used to be.
That’s plausible if you ignore pay. Pay is the one area where it’s self evident that something has gone horribly awry, which makes it hard to accept the “labor won” argument. Obviously other factors can be at play here, but it’s certainly not the case that everything is honky dory and that’s why workers stopped unionizing. The decline of union membership over this time frame is not conclusive, but it’s something worth investigating!
Well that and there’s Frito Lay workers striking to end “suicide shifts” that literally killed people from exhaustion. It’s kind of hard to argue that labor won these issues when they’re dragging the corpse of a worker off the assembly line of the potato chip factory after working 12 hour days for weeks on end without a day off finally killed them. That it took a strike to fix that also implies that labor law needs some more work.
Workers didn't "win". It's just that the conditions for workers are MUCH better now than they used to be in the past. So unions are able to do less for workers. That doesn't they're obsolete, just that the line for the decision for "are they worth it in _this_ situation" has moved.
The Frito Lay workers issue is a prime example of "in _this_ situation" mentioned above. Some places are greatly benefited by unions, some are/would not, some are gray areas. And, to a large extent, there's a personal opinion component to it, too.
> Workers didn't "win". It's just that the conditions for workers are MUCH better now than they used to be in the past.
Only if you ignore pay. Most workers pay has remained flat adjusted for inflation, while housing, education, and medical costs are growing faster than inflation.
> So unions are able to do less for workers. That doesn't they're obsolete, just that the line for the decision for "are they worth it in _this_ situation" has moved.
You’re ignoring the other possibility: the fear that unionizing will draw retaliation from the bosses that’ll make life worse. It’s not like we haven’t seen plants close down and move in response to unionization before.
Of course if that’s true, it implies that unions could help and bosses fear that.
> The Frito Lay workers issue is a prime example of "in _this_ situation" mentioned above. Some places are greatly benefited by unions, some are/would not, some are gray areas.
Right, but the original thesis was “labor activists got all their non-pay related demands codified into law, making unions less desirable”. The frito lay situation obviously disproves that.
Most highly educated knowledge workers also get stock options, which at best compensates them for business success, but at worst can trick workers into thinking that the business’ interests are the same as their interests.
I think there’s a persuasive story to be told about the slow change of how startup options work and the changing mood of the tech scene.
I don't think Occam's razor says any such thing. I see, all the time, first hand accounts of unions acting in ways that cause harm to nearly everyone except those in the union, and only actually benefit a select few. Examples like
- not being allowed to plug in your monitor at conference center or vacuum your area; instead needing to pay a union member a minimum of 30 minutes of time for 2 minutes of work.
- union members verbally and even physically abusing people that are just minding their own business, trying not to get involved; you're either with them or against them.
Unions have done great good for the American worker, and continue to do so in many cases. But they also do great harm and, when leadership is looking out for itself over it's members, can provide very little practical benefit.
It's a rough topic because it's VERY polarizing. It seems like the vast majority of people fall into 1 of 2 camps; they either love everything about unions and can't see the negatives, or vice versa. It's very hard to improve on the situation when that's the case.
I’m sorry that you’ve had some bad experiences, but a few personal anecdotes are not persuasive about such large scale concerns. Obviously seeing someone physically abused by a union member is bad, but “unions are bad” does not logically follow from that experience.
The American union is pretty bad it seems to represent the lobby arm and is totally out of touch with employee needs. It’s not a local org of your peers it feels like just another rent seeking corporate entity.
Personal experience. All our local unions got sold out by union headquarters when it came time for contract negotiations. They did things like surprise votes over holiday weekend and negotiating contracts without involvement from local reps
How many unions are we talking about here? One, a dozen, a hundred? Is it enough to draw a reasonable pattern from, or are we in “I had a bad experience with a union therefore all unions are bad” territory?
Teachers union got sabotaged, machinist union got sabotaged, engineers union same deal. Different kinds of tricks but it seems pretty consistent story. Big Union hq negotiates a contract that’s not great for local members but skirts by at 51% vote under suspicion conditions.
I’m not anti union. I mean union do provide slightly better pay conditions for members but they seem to be super corrupt as well. They are like a mafia, they provide services for members and Mafia members do slightly better but it no co-op.
Unions in the US (with some small exceptions) have to negotiate better working conditions which benefit all workers, regardless of whether they are a part of the union or not [1]. If there was no mandatory fee, then unions would likely suffer from the free rider problem and be suboptimally funded.
Of course, this doesn't mean that all unions' fees are justifiable for the value they produce, nor does it mean that all unions which impose mandatory fees improve working conditions for all workers. But I think it's hyperbole to call mandatory fees "rent-seeking" when there might be a perfectly rational explanation in some instances.
Mandatory fees are rent-seeking either way, it's just possible that imposing the rent is justified.
Off-hand, I'm not convinced. I'm leaning more and more against systems designed to prevent free riders—our culture is so primed to value "fairness" that we're willing to impose significant net harm to achieve it. I usually think about this in terms of public policy (free public transport, subsidizing the unemployed/homeless/etc...) but I think it applies here too.
I would not be surprised if a union that had to justify its dues to workers would be more effective for workers than one with mandatory dues because there would be more direct pressure for the union to be transparent and effective. I am not entirely confident in this though, in large part because I don't understand the politics around unions in practice! Mandatory dues do seem like a viable point of leverage against union-busting attempts from management, which could be a more important effect.
You are not using rent in the conventional, economic sense. Rent is specifically a payment made to an manufacturer of goods or services that is higher than what is necessary for that manufacturer to bring those goods into existence; (i.e. higher than the profit margin that would have incentivized that manufacturer to produce the good in the first place).
For a trivial example, if a union makes no profit and its actions provide more utility to its employees than their mandatory payments, then it is not receiving any economic rent.
> I'm leaning more and more against systems designed to prevent free riders—our culture is so primed to value "fairness" that we're willing to impose significant net harm to achieve it.
I'm not sure if you fully understand what free rider problems are. The whole point of preventing free riders is that by imposing a tax or mandatory payment, you increase net utility. If imposing a tax truly imposed significant net harm, then the problem wouldn't be a free rider problem by definition!
Free rider problems are really coordination problems. Essentially, there are situations where if everyone cooperated, then everyone would be happier. But there is no incentive for any one person to cooperate because they can choose to defect, yet still receive the benefits of cooperation.
> free public transport, subsidizing the unemployed/homeless/etc...
First of all, these are not solutions to free rider problems. Second of all, it is not clear that they impose significant net harm. For example, you might claim that welfare reduces the incentive to work and or educate themselves. This is the typical conservative market-fundamentalist argument.
But practically speaking, humans need to take care of basic needs before they can start working or learn. The positive effect of nutrition, taking care of basic needs, etc. might overwhelm the negative effects from reduced incentive to work. So you need a lot of sophisticated analysis on real data before you can claim that these policies actually impose net harm.
I've been listening to the Oral History of the Kickstarter Union and I don't believe the charge of rent seeking or the implication of close ties to organized crime is accurate.
Rent seeking usually refers to creating new income streams for yourself without providing any benefit by acting as a middle person, and unions do provide benefits to workers, in the form of collective negotiation for individual benefits, but also a seat at the table when it comes to how the business is run.
I also get the sense that the organized crime connections of unions are overblown. Like that settlement was I believe a way to end the consent decree that's been in existence since 1989.
And the arrest of the Lucchese crime family in 2017 didn't seem to include any members of liuna local 66. I believe the mob tax is actually a reference to crimes that happened back in the late 90s involving the Scalamandres brothers. If they were doing anything with the union it was exploiting it, and blaming the victim doesn't seem fair.
You know who else is tied to organized crime? Major financial institutions.[1]
Corruption happens everywhere, including every major corporation and every government. Singling out unions for the same problems is a smearing tactic, not a moral stance.
This is an underrated point actually. I've thought about this for a while and there's a case to be made both for and against some of the adversarial and arguably antisocial aspects of American ethos.
You can end up with insane rules that ultimately benefit no one. An old boss of mine told me about a time he was working for a big auto manufacturer. They were rolling an update to a major system. It looked like everything went well, so people started to go home.
Pretty soon though, the team started to see issues with the update, up to and including a major LoB system going down. They immediately rolled back the update but found they had a problem- they needed some servers restarted to pick up the update, and the sole person who by union rules could restart the server had left for the day and wasn't picking up the phone.
Now there were people who technically had permissions to restart the server, but they couldn't cross the union rules. They spent over an hour (with the major LoB, business critical system down) trying to get in touch with the people who were allowed to restart the server until they finally convinced the physically datacenter ops people (who were still on duty) go physically unplug and replug the servers in question.
He couldn't disclose the total cost of the outage, but I was lead to believe it was in the millions of dollars.
A functioning owner/management/worker relationship might fight over how the earnings of a company might be split, and even how or what to invest in, but they should all be working to making a company successful as a whole. An adversarial relationship prevents the sort of cooperation and good-faith assumptions that allow the different parties to collaborate and work to everyone's benefit.
That being said, that non-adversarial relationship is a two way street, and ownership+management need to be participating in good-faith as well.
It’s not really clear to me why all the blame for the adversarial nature of American unions is placed on the unions themselves. Shouldn’t some of the blame be also blamed on American businesses too? It does after all take two to tango.
If businesses simply acquiesce to employee demands unions would not be necessary. However and instead, the moment organized employees submit their demands, they are met with resistance so both sides have to engage mono a mono until the entirely unnecessary conflict is resolved.
I mean, bosses literally hired armed thugs to shoot labor organizers. There’s a damn good reason why labor activists don’t trust the bosses; they shouldn’t.
By this logic, the average person shouldn't trust union bosses, as there are incidents where union bosses commit violence to achieve their ends (the mob/racketeering history).
If you can prove that violence among labor organizers was more prevalent than violence by bosses towards workers, I’d like to see it. I personally am quite dubious.
This sounds more like someone who just wants to blame a series of poor management decisions on those damn unions.
It's management's responsibility to make sure they have the right people on hand when they roll out an update to a major system. It's also their responsibility to come out of union negotiations with the right contracts, which would have at the very least included some sort of force majeure clause to account for technical disasters.
It is impossible to account for every edge case without infinite resources. Being flexible is very important when resolving things that you didn't consider.
> but they should all be working to making a company successful as a whole.
Unless workers own equity this is not at all as much of a truism as it sounds. Could be rephrased as “but they should all be working to enrich their bosses”.
Alternatively, it could be rephrased as "if the company pays its workers an amount they [the workers] are happy with, then working to keep the company successful is in the the workers best interest, because they are likely to continue to be payed well". Alternatively, "If a company is paying you well and help cause it to fail, you are sabotaging yourself".
Why is it appropriate for a union to determine who has the right to accomplish specific tasks (you can't restart the server, but you can unplug it or you can plug in a lamp but you can't change a light bulb)? That's not a management failure. Sounds like they had people who were trained and had the technical ability. It was bureaucracy that caused the problem.
> Why is it appropriate for a union to determine who has the right to accomplish specific tasks (you can't restart the server, but you can unplug it or you can plug in a lamp but you can't change a light bulb)? That's not a management failure.
On the contrary, that's a two-sided negotiation and if management have failed to protect their interests then that's on them. I've heard plenty of stories like this where it turned out the real reason was that management's own rule was that anyone who touched that server without that certification became personally liable for damages, and management had been warned about their lack of certified people but refused to send more people on the xyz server training course, and or something on those lines.
First, as others have mentioned, the union did not unilaterally choose how the job specs at this plant were written.
But to answer your broader question, the reason unions sometimes point for seemingly narrow job specs is to prevent management picking and choosing titles in a way to keep pay and membership down.
Let's say that in this situation, you have 5 Server Janitors and 1 Sysadmin, with corresponding pay rates of course. Maybe the janitors have the skills to turn on the server, but the spec says only the sysadmin can. Whose fault is it that there's just one sysadmin? And if the job spec says anyone can turn the server on, why give anyone the sysadmin title?
Exactly the scenario I had in mind with my comment. A lot of places are now "two tier" where the newer employees have no path to the higher rate. You have one guy hanging who can press the button for $43/hr, and anyone who replaces him will top out at $32/hr.
Not to mention the history of labor battles (actual fisticuffs) and police departments in many parts of the country... talk about adversarial!
Because otherwise your boss could tell you to sweep the floors while your software was compiling.
The negotiation of specified work duties resulted in an agreement between the company and the union representing the employee. If that doesn't matter, then why negotiate at all? Do employees get to decide that they're not going to do something because they don't feel like it?
If you want flexibility, you negotiate flexibility. You don't negotiate the reduction of work duties against wages, and then demand that employees do whatever they have the technical ability to do. If I have the technical ability to do accounting, but I'm employed as a bus driver, can my employer demand that I balance the books?
Employers don't own employees. There's a contract that promises specific wages for specific work.
> Because otherwise your boss could tell you to sweep the floors while your software was compiling.
And if the floor was really dirty and he had a good reason (showing off the office to a visitor and nobody else was available), I'd be like "sure thing, lets get the place nice for the visitor; I'm not busy". Or, if he was just a neat freak and constantly asking people to do work they weren't hired to do like that, I'd say no.
> Do employees get to decide that they're not going to do something because they don't feel like it?
Generally, you're hired with a job description. Anything outside that description is up for discussion. I mean, I'm a software developer, but if I had to have a union contract that said I wasn't _allowed_ to empty my own garbage when it annoyed me that it was full... I'd go elsewhere.
I don't expect the owner of the company to prioritize my interests over those of the company or his own. But I do expect him to consider my happiness and well being when making decisions that effect me (or, more generally, groups). And, along the same lines, I prioritize my well being over that of the company, but the well being of the company matters to me, and I'm willing to be flexible to help it succeed.
> Why is it appropriate for a union to determine who has the right to accomplish specific tasks
It's just an exclusivity clause. The employees and management willingly entered into a contractual agreement containing a provision that management ostensibly understood and then completely failed to account for.
If I sign an employment contract that explicitly says "I will be your exclusive provider of X service, I am not available on weekends", the employer shouldn't be surprised when I refuse to come in on Saturday and Sunday or sue them for breach when they hire a second service provider.
Alternately: sounds like the point about adversarial relations stands; a more collaborative culture prioritizing the success of the business (the collective interest) might have yielded a less expensive reboot.
If American businesses wanted a collaborative culture then they would share the rewards. As it stands for most work in the US you make the same amount of money whether or not you make the company succeed. The businesses could easily rectify this by including stock as part of compensation so that incentives have aligned.
Tech has realized this and as an industry hands out a good amount of shares of the business to employees. I can’t really empathize with businesses who cry for the need for labor to care about the success of the business but refuse to hand out anything but the minimum of rewards
Say I enter into a contract with a hosting provider who only offers support between 6am and 10pm.
There's an issue with one of my servers at 3am and I'm pretty sure it just needs a physical reboot.
No chance they'll let me into their data centre to fix it myself. Even though in this specific scenario I might be able to solve the problem with no cost to them.
I can also think of a lot of reasons why I wouldn't want just anyone to be able to restart my servers.
Sure this sucks, but maybe I accepted the terms of the agreement because I figured there was a low chance of having the issue and I wanted to save a few bucks.
Sounds like the business wasn't willing to pay vital staff to be on call, so why should the worker have their life outside work be impacted without suitable compensation?
Having 24hr operations without adequate technical support is 100% the fault of management.
This is why on call exists. What if their worker had been drinking, or awake for 36 hours, but decided to head into the office to help out the team? There is plenty of caselaw on this very circumstance when people are killed or get arrested.
Because going into a negotiation with a belief that both parties are expected to be reasonable and negotiate in good faith tends to give you better outcomes.
Whenever I buy nearly anything negotiated (car, house, boat, large software license, other business deal), I simultaneously expect both parties to be reasonable and negotiate in good faith, yet all of those single-trial negotiations are entirely adversarial. It seems perfectly reasonable and fairly efficient to me.
I assume car sellers - especially for used cars - are negotiating in bad faith. It definitely seems to make the process less efficient. Standard advice is to get a car inspected by your own mechanic before purchasing. Dealers disclosing the results of an inspection and being trustworthy would be a more efficient process - it would avoid redundant inspections by multiple prospective buyers, and it would avoid people wasting their time on cars in condition that they didn't want to deal with, and it would avoid people who don't know how to play the game getting ripped off.
Think prisoners dilemma. A car /house/boat purchase is basically a one-off interaction - you’re not likely to be dealing with the same salesperson in 5-15 years when you buy your next car - so the strategy both parties should use is different from the strategy when it’s going to be frequent repeated interactions as in a workplace.
In the case of the car, it's definitely not a one-off purchase. People will go back to the dealer to get the vehicle serviced, and from what I understand this can (mainly for new cars) have a greater total lifetime value than the cost of the vehicle itself.
Even if this weren't the case, if you're ripped off by a used car salesman you will tell every single person you know that they're a snake.
Even if you don't do that, there are arbitration courts you can take them to to both waste their time and force a refund (VCAT where I am, I'm sure there's something similar overseas).
I really don't think it's in a used car salesman's best interests to lie and swindle.
You're mixing situations. I was imagining a NEW car sale, not used cars. In that case the product itself isn't in control of the salesperson, so there's no room for swindles there - but you have an adversarial relationship in terms of price, features / upsells, etc. That said, you're hardly going to blame the dealership if you get talked or dark-patterned into an upgrade you don't need or even regret. "Caveat emptor" and all that. We're so used to adversarial situations like that we blame ourselves more often than not.
A collaborative approach is a lot more like when you ask you're knowledgeable friend "what kind of bike should I buy?" and they ask you about your needs, goals, and budget then guide you towards specific options. They're helping you make a purchase, without pressuring you into something that's not useful to you.
>adversarial relationship in terms of price, features / upsells, etc.
I get what you mean now. As someone who "does sales" a fair amount in my work (owner of a second-hand video games business) the adversarial stuff is actually really frustrating.
I always try to give the customers the same advice I'd give a friend or family, even "downselling" them from a $100 purchase to a $25 repair if that would be more suitable, yet still so many people are adversarial and distrustful.
From my experience, this distrust hurts (non-expert) consumers even more than it hurts the businesses. Ideally, you'd have an honest salesman pointing out the pros and cons of all the different products so that the consumer can make an informed choice. Maybe that product that costs $50 will last for 20 years of continuous use, whereas the $30 version will break after 18 months.
Instead, because salesmen can't be trusted, they rely on their own instincts and buy products whose prices are completely uncorrelated with quality.
The difference is that you buy or don't buy the car if negotiations fail.
At work you have or done have a job or even revenue if the only thing employer and employees are doing is trying to throw wrenches into the machinery to get the upper hand.
If you're buying a large software license today — and I bet this holds true for at least some houses, cars, other "high-pressure sales situations" too — the vendor definitely won't think of the negotiation as adversarial.
In an unending game of the prisoner's dilemma, either you all win or you all lose.
I wouldn't use the term adversarial for this. Ideally in a house transaction, the main thing is that both parties want the deal to happen - the seller wants the money and the buyer wants the house. They very much have the same goal of getting the deal executed.
Now obviously all other things being equal, I'd rather pay less money (or charge more money)
But in most cases, neither the seller nor the buyer operating in good faith will really try to squeeze the other because losing a multi-hundred-thousand (or even million+) deal by being too anal about $1000 is in neither one's interest.
If a seller got very "adversarial" most buyers would say "fuck you, I'll keep looking."
I’ve heard union leaders say getting workers to “hate the boss” is an important part of organizing. Entering in to negotiations where the goal is to punish the boss as opposed to getting the best deal for the workers is toxic.
Union leaders tend to be rewarded for doing the best thing for the union, which is not always the best thing for the workers. The principal-agent problem is hard to beat.
The quickest way to beat it is to not allow closed shops. Give employees the freedom to join a union of their choosing, independent of their current employer, and you'll fix a lot of (doubtfully all) of America's problems with unions.
To clarify a technicality, closed shops are illegal (hiring o ly those already in the union), and union shops (where you must join upon hiring) are legal.
It isn't businesses that want it, but unions demand it as a power move- power against the workers. By being forced into a particular union, workers lose their recourse against unions that behave badly.
For one thing, it undermines their ability to screw over new hires at the benefit of those with seniority, and allows them more wiggle room in wasting the money they collect in dues on things like retreats to remote islands.
There are a few instances of places throwing off bad unions, but it is a long process, unions will fight back in courts, and you have to be prepared for retribution from your coworkers who disagree.
Having union membership in any way tied to your employer is nothing but a way to abuse you, the worker.
In adversarial systems, the successes of the other party can be seen as a relative loss, even if everyone benefits.
At a friends workplace, the union recently fought management and prevented a prevent work from home policy from being implemented. This was something that both the workers wanted and management wanted, but the union saw it as leverage to push for other demands.
If you're a worker sympathetic to the organizing effort, it's probably not. Depends on your presumed union leaders.
If you're in management, being 'the adversary' probably means being on the back foot in terms of negotiating and probably compliance with local labor laws.
An unenviable place to be (said with a wee bit of sarcasm).
