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Comment by jseliger | Hacker News Reader

Also, support for unions is waning. Here in Philadelphia, union support is at an all time low. They were rendered toothless in recent elections for the first time ever, and a series of bad press (arson, assault, and destruction of property by union members) and continued ties to organized crime have worn thin sympathies.

For good reason. They prevent accountability among police: http://reason.com/blog/2014/08/14/police-unions-produce-rule....

They also prevent educational innovation: https://www.amazon.com/Special-Interest-Teachers-Americas-Sc... and pr event urban schools from even functioning.

As the topic article points out, construction unions are attacking the housing supply.

Should it be a surprise that anyone who pays attention is unhappy with unions?

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I think any discussion of the good and bad side of unions needs to distinguish between public and private sector ones.

In the private sector, union negotiations are naturally constrained by the knowledge that if the company isn't profitable, everybody loses. I think there are cases in the private sector where unions make a lot of sense (e.g. mining towns where there's one dominant employer).

In the public sector that doesn't apply. The union's incentive is to demand all that it can. You're not going to put the government out of business.

Unless it's Detroit. Or Puerto Rico.... or....?

I suggest you watch John Oliver piece on Puerto Rico.

Detroit is still there. And so are unions.

That's exactly correct. Public unions aren't as easily accountable to the market. The incentives are disaligned. While private union incentives are generally aligned with business except in more extreme cases such as subsidized industries.

Maybe its because the public looks down upon unions that the middle class is slowly sliding into destitution? [1] [2]

I'm definitely not a fan of unions, but besides the movement to push minimum wage up to $15/hr across the country, I don't see any organized groups continuing to push the salary threshold at which overtime pay is required, reducing the number of hours in a work week (which is f___ing insane we're still working ~40 hours a week with how much productivity has grown since the 60's), and so forth.

Either unions or political activists must fight for these labor protections; pick your poison.

[1] http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2015/12/09/the-american-middl...

[2] http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/12/09/459087477/...

The 40 hour work week isn't a productivity related number... It's a cultural construction born from early 20th century union political efforts.

For instance in Denmark, the work week is typically 32 hours and has been this way for decades... Works fine for them... Not sure how well it would work in a culture like America where working as hard as possible is considered a good thing... Regardless of how stupidly obvious it is that this screws up work life balance, individual stress levels and by extension individual health, in the country with the most fucked up health care system in the western world...

37, not 32.

http://www.eurofound.europa.eu/observatories/eurwork/compara...

There are particularly many part-time workers in Denmark, and flexibility of labour market is high (including close to zero protection from layoffs), and this has resulted in Danes working fewer hours per worker than other Western nations (1490 hours per year per employee on the average) but on the other hand the labour marker participation rate is very high, so Danes work more hours per capita than any Western nation.

When I interned for the Federal Government in Canada my wages were for 37.5 hours per week (7.5 hours per day, 30 min unpaid lunch was the implied structure).

It's the same 37.5 hours with all office jobs where I live, Finland. Blue-collar jobs are 8 hours per day (1 hour unpaid lunch implied), they then accumulate more holiday days so that the annual working time is roughly the same.

> The 40 hour work week ... [is] a cultural construction born from early 20th century union political efforts.

This is unabashed union propaganda.

Which isn't to say that unions weren't involved, but there were plenty of other factors involved. I refer you to work such as The Shortening of the American Work Week: An economic and historical analysis of its context, causes, and consequences (Whaples, 1990) which place the shift in a broader context of "wages, gender, ethnicity, religion, age, urbanization, unionization, and legislation" issues, to say nothing of "industrial structure and technology".

One should treat it like the pronouncement that Al Gore created the internet: definitely give the unions some credit, while taking their self-serving praise with a few grains of salt.

The $15 minimum wage push by unions is shockingly unethical when they also include a clause allowing for a wage to be negotiated lower than minimum wage as part of a union contact.

It's basically an effort to force the lowest paid most vulnerable workers to have no choice but to join a union if they want to be able to work at all.

Your own source [1] says the middle class is not slipping into destitution at all (look at the graphs, not the mood affiliation). It's slipping into the upper class. We have become wealthier than ever before, it's just that some of us have experienced higher growth rates of wealth.

> We have become wealthier than ever before, it's just that some of us have experienced higher growth rates of wealth.

Wealth inequality in the US is at its greatest levels ever since recording began six decades ago; the top 3 percent of Americans control 50 percent of the country's wealth.

You aren't disagreeing with me at all.

I generally agree with what you are saying, but I should point out that private-sector and public-sector unions are very different animals.

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