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Comment by Animats | Hacker News Reader

That's a paper on classic union issues written with no reference to labor history.

There have been companies which really acted like governments to their employees. Ford.[1] Pullman.[2] The US labor movement arose partly as a counter to that. And, for a long time, from about 1930 to 1980, companies backed off on that out of fear of unions and government.

That fear has been lost, and companies are more assertive in employee control. Abuse of non-compete agreements to make low-level workers indentured servants would never have been accepted prior to 1990 or so.

US labor history has been erased from public dialogue in the US almost as thoroughly as Tienanmen Square has been erased from public dialogue in China.

[1] https://www.autonews.com/article/20030602/SUB/306020843/the-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pullman_Strike

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> US labor history has been erased from public dialogue

Or inverted? When I hear people talk of unions in the US, it's about how shitty theyve made everything.

What kind of people are that? Employers and funded media?

Parents, friends, none of which are employers or media

Parents and friends who have been told repeatedly by media that unions are bad. So it does come back to the media and the financial interests that control either the content or the selection of content that is produced by the media.

Sure, but the whole point of this sub thread was that the view of unions has been inverted/subverted, not just completely erased

There has been a heavy selection pressure on American unions by union busting. As a result, the few unions that remain are those that are strong politically. Specifically, those that manage to cling to power in the face of adversity, and resist outside pressures.

Those features help labor relations when things are strained. But it involves very harsh dog fighting that tends to leave both sides wounded.

More people need to challenge non-compete agreements. In the majority of cases (especially for non-management employees) they're illegal and don't hold up.

No, a majority of the time, they are not illegal outside of California.

State legislatures have been doing a great job in preventing non-competes from being banned, because they aren't scared of organized political action by labour.

I said in a majority of cases. The legality doesn't have to do with whether or not they're allowed by the state (they're allowed everywhere, even in California), but whether or not they can apply to the person signing the agreement. Courts uphold non-competes against managers moving to a competitor, workers taking client lists, former equity stakeholders, etc..., but almost never against low-level employees.

It is also interesting game-theory wise that we see countless towns and states trying to be 'the next Silicon Valley' but that is one thing that they never do that could put them in some degree of competition. Especially places with other assets such as having many prominent universities.

Businesses so successful that they have no need to do anything weird to their employees are super rare. And non-competes are one of those things that very weakly impact a bottom line. So some Darwinian process with cities and companies or whatever is never going to select for, "No noncompetes."

The bigger question is if you really believe that the "laboratories" / Darwinian process of cities and regulations and states and whatever idea in the first place. It's a conjecture by some credible, mainstream public intellectuals. The biggest evidence for it is cities/states accommodating tax avoidance, which so directly affects the bottom line that it's basically an apples-to-oranges comparison with anything less concrete like non-competes.

Why would it select for no non-competes when people are willing to sign them and a culture of legal "take anything you can get"-ism among employers pays off in other areas?

That's time consuming and expensive. If you found yourself in a situation where you're signing a non-compete out of desperation, you're lacking in both time and resources.

I was desperate for work and signed a non-compete for a security guard job, one of the easiest jobs to get. If I got a job at a competitor within N miles I would have had to pay $Xtimes1000 to my current employer.

Sheesh.

Presumably you'd just not pay, and the non-compete, being illegal, would never make it to court?

No way it makes it to court. Not to mention, what damages would they claim? Punitive damages for an employee leaving aren't a thing.

Doesn't have to make it to court for them to strongarm you into a settlement. The threat of a lawsuit is enough for many to agree on a settlement just so it doesn't go to court, even if you'd likely win as a defendant. Lawyers are expensive and so is the appeals process.

> Doesn't have to make it to court for them to strongarm you into a settlement.

And what would they threaten you with? Bring that lawsuit before a judge and they'd laugh you out of the building.

They'd probably have their corporate lawyer write a mean sounding letter, you'd ignore, no way anything happens beyond that.

The nasty letter and threat of a lawsuit are the threats. You have to remember that for many Americans, a lawsuit means bankruptcy and that in most states non-compete agreements are lawful.

Exactly. As the cops say, you may beat the rap, but you can't beat the ride. In a court it costs money to win or to lose. If you fight, they can afford to fight more than you can.

Isn't this the problem, why should it be down to you to challenge. If it's illegal why doesn't the government investigate and take the company to court?

If you get stabbed don't the police arrest the person and, the state try and convict them? They don't leave it to the victim to mount a case, surely?

A proper legal system would provide sufficient reward to make it always worthwhile to challenge companies _clearly_ abusing their power in that way.

In some cases of injury, especially involving corporations, the criminal justice system does let civil court system take the lead with wrongful death lawsuits and the like.

And even criminal trials end up in plea bargain settlements. The trial and deliberation isn't necessarily expected.

The issue could be that the potential employer is not willing to hire someone under a non-compete even if the person under the non-compete is willing to challenge it.

That's another case where a union is very useful.

For the individual, challenging a non-compete agreement is probably not worth it. But amortising the cost over everyone who benefits it becomes a very reasonable thing to do.

Just tack on a mandatory individual arbitration agreement and this option is gone, too.

The book does have some discussion of labor, but essentially alleges that the US labor movement is dead and new ways of thinking about the problem will be needed to wrestle with the problems of labor in the modern environment. I tend to agree, although the effort to recast employers as governments feels like a pretty transparent play to engage small-government advocates with the problems labor wants to talk about.

It does look like an attempt to hammer labor theory into something that pushes the right buttons in modern academia.

What employers today seem to want is a workforce which is available and disposable. "Just in time" employees. This is not like being a government. It's being the dominant player in a market. Which, in some ways, is worse. It's power without responsibility. Employers don't want to be bothered with worker control.

Classically, this is Marx's "reserve army of labor".[1] This is why homelessness is useful to business - it's a reminder that, no matter how bad a job is, there's worse.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_army_of_labour

> What employers today seem to want is a workforce which is available and disposable.

As opposed to a past period when they wanted a workforce that wasn’t available and disposable? I’m glad you mentioned Marx, because he was calling that out as primary desirable criteria for labor pools in general. A constantly available reserve army of labor and disposable workers is exactly what capital depends on to keep labor costs low. Hence the fundamental need for labor to organize and cooperate to counter the inexorable push of wages to zero (or its subsistence equivalent), or unemployment.

I’ll admit I’m probably unnecessarily nitpicking you saying, “employers today”, though. I don’t think I’m voicing a fundamental disagreement here. I do, however, really like your phrasing of JIT employees.

This feels like it was written by someone who’s only knowledge about history comes from Howard Zinn books.

Unions haven’t fallen out of favor because of evil powerful people, they fell out of favor because they ultimately hurt employees more than they help them

Varies enormously by country.[1] Government policy and labor law enforcement has a very strong influence over union membership.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/niallmccarthy/2017/06/20/which-...

>>US labor history has been erased from public dialogue in the US almost as thoroughly as Tienanmen Square has been erased from public dialogue in China.

These kinds of conspiracy theories about the alleged defeat of the unions at the hands of corporations are on par with anti-vaxxerism. They rely entirely on the instinctive belief that we live in a zero-sum world where the establishment encourages norms to exploit the masses, and that therefore contrarianism empowers the underdog.

The truth is the US Labor movement took complete control over major US industries, from Big Auto, to US Steel, to the passenger rail service, and drove them into bankruptcy or Outsourcing. With the laws that they put in place the U.S. is very inhospitable to manufacturing. Amazon and Tesla, two firms succeeding on a global stage with US-based production, are next on The Chopping Block, as activist types promote putting them under the monopolistic control of unions.

As for the history of the labor movement, people like you conveniently gloss over the extreme violence that was at the heart of it. The labor unions were closely linked with organized crime and on numerous occasions murdered replacement workers and used threats of violence to enforce picket lines. The propaganda that you're promoting now is just a continuation of the campaign of lies that empowered the labor unions in the first place.

>As for the history of the labor movement, people like you conveniently gloss over the extreme violence that was at the heart of it. The labor unions were closely linked with organized crime and on numerous occasions murdered replacement workers and used threats of violence to enforce picket lines

Companies have also had ties to organized crime and use intimidation to prevent workers from striking. Plus, a history of hiring "soldiers" to slaughter workers.

Much less so. Companies had law on their side. All they had to do is exercise their freedom to contract, by firing those workers that they did not want to associate with anymore.

Where they did use violence they were usually entirely legally justified, in reacting to illegal violence by unions like picket lines that were violently enforced or trespassing on company property or any other number of thuggish intimidation tactics used by unions.

It is the unionists who needed to violate the right of employers to freely associate with whoever they wanted.

That's why the unions engaged in so much illegal activity and that's why they aggressively advocated to institute laws that restricted the right of employers to freely contract. Unions depend entirely on subverting and restricting the free market. They are rent-seeking institutions and can only gain public support by lying about their history and the nature of a freely agreed to employment arrangement, using rhetoric where Marxist concepts like wage slavery, expropriation of surplus value and other inflammatory demagoguery predominate.

I've rarely seen such a one sided representation. How about a less ideologically colored view? Both unions and corporations have histories of violence, lack of efficiency, monopolistic actions, choking off of competition, etc. In fact, you can spread that out to any human institution and add organized religion, sports, government, HOAs, what-have-you to the mix.

When a human group gets too much power in their area, abuses arise. In fact, that was the core historical analysis of the founding fathers of the US, hence the separation of powers. By separating powers in the US Constitution, they intentionally added all sorts of inefficiency in order to allow for checks and balances.

Unions certainly introduce inefficiency into the free market enterprise, but without them, abuses can and have arisen. Figuring out the right balance of power between unions and corporations should be the goal, but instead we have the current political environment, where unions are demonized because of one sided representations of abuses they led to.

>Unions certainly introduce inefficiency into the free market enterprise, but without them, abuses can and have arisen.

This is the false dichotomy promoted by unions.

While obviously there are instances of unions counteracting corporate abusive, unions by-and-large subvert the right to freely contract and the right to private property and therefore increase abuse.

They do not combat the main forms of corporate abuse like lobbying to restrict competition via regulatory barriers, licensing restrictions, etc.

The NEA for example supported the bank bailout that was a massive subsidy to banking corporations in the form of socializing their losses and risks.

Unions are designed specifically to acquire monopolies over labor forces. They are not like corporations where there are good ones and bad ones. Unions are almost all harmful to the freedom to contract because that's what the union organizational structure was designed to do.

>The labor unions were closely linked with organized crime

The Teamsters (one specific union dealing with shipping) was linked with organized crime, yes, but it's hardly fair to claim that most unions had anything to do with them.

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