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Comment by ryanmarsh | Hacker News Reader

to being treated like a cost center to be manipulated and reduced, forced to hop jobs every 4 or 5 years to even remain at market rate for their skill level

You’re right this is how most people work. Makes me think we should start to unionize office work.

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I'm with you. The company who wants to exchange capital for labor benefits from being able to negotiate separately with each provider of that labor to get the lowest price possible from each person. SOME of the people providing the labor do well out of this too (the good negotiators) and would perceive a union as harmful to them. Employers can exploit this by, say, keeping salaries as close to secret as they can so that more people think they are doing better than average. But it's weird to me that this hoodwink works so well. I have been in both union and non-union roles. I'd go for union every time. All of the labor might as well negotiate with all of the capital, otherwise the power differential has an outsized effect.

And that worked remarkably well for Detroit auto works. They thought once they could leverage they're position as car capital if the world for unionized benefits. Until it became much cheaper to just build better cars elsewhere.

Unionizing SV will likely have the same result, except that with today's comm tech, importing services is much simple than building auto supply chain.

It is already much cheaper to import services and hire people who don't live in SV. But somehow companies continue to locate themselves there. Presumably the opportunities for profit outweigh the costs imposed by the high cost of living etc. Unions might reduce profits a little (or not, depending on the impact on worker productivity) but these companies have shown they will pay big premiums to attract the most capable workers.

But unions must of course think about these things and understand their ACTUAL bargaining power. Detroit sounds like that mark was missed.

You're totally correct. You can collectively bargain yourself out of an employer.

However we still have this problem: Employers see labor the same way, whether it's white or blue collar.

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