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Comment by umvi | Hacker News Reader

It's reasonable to be wary of unions in the US given what happened with them the first half of the 20th century.

I don't think anyone wants suffering, but solutions are never as simple as they appear to be when poverty is involved.

Unions appear to give the capabilities for workers to protest poor wages. I've heard positive things from my grandpa about unions when he needed to find work. Everything has negatives but I'm unsure why workers wouldn't want those positives.

Unions have the same exact problems as any organizational problem/solution pairing (such as car manufacturer/dealership pairing): the Shirky principle[1].

[1] https://kk.org/thetechnium/the-shirky-prin/

Unions have a few positives, but, especially in the US, unions have a reputation for historically becoming corrupted by organized crime, strangling businesses into oblivion, and/or making it impossible for companies to fire incompetent/lazy workers. I know it's not like that in some places in Europe, but the US has been burned by truly egregious unions that have set back progress for decades.

Unions are lousy but they also force employers to treat their employees with some minimum levels of respect. People literally die and get maimed when governments and unions don't force employers to act better. Apples Chinese plants have suicide nets around them

I tend to agree, but I think they should be a last resort after regulation and other means have failed to improve working conditions.

Workplace fatalities were decreasing every decade before labor regulatons and widespread unionization came into force. There was no critical shortcoming in the market economy that justified passing laws that gave unions total control over their employers' labor practices.

In fact, both wages and life expectancy were improving faster before labor laws came into effect.

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