Comment by Communitivity | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Communitivity | Hacker News Reader

As a child of two news people I grew up hearing union horror stories, such as typesetters in a newspaper that spend almost all day playing cards because their job has gone but the union still forces the paper to keep them on.

Then I married my wife, who worked in a union at a college library, and I learned I had only heard one side of the story. Initially we had a few interesting, and heated, debates about unions. Over time though I have slowly come over to the idea that unions as a concept, and in many implementations, are a good thing.

I still think some unions wind up getting too much power and abuse that power, but they are generally a good check in a world that resembles more and more the world of the Cyberpunk 2020 game I used to play [1].

Curiously, this is the second time I've been reminded of Cyberpunk 2020 this month. The first time was the 'Satoshi' reveal last week, which brought up memories of Hal Finney [2]. I always equated with Spider Murphy [3], the top digital rights activist/info broker/info breaker in Cyberpunk 2020.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyberpunk_2020

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Finney_(computer_scientist...

[3] https://cyberpunk.fandom.com/wiki/Spider_Murphy

Unions can be bad or corrupt or too large in exactly the same way companies can be bad or corrupt or too large. The existence of such bad actors however does not mean that the very concept of companies or unions is bad.

Makes me think that the way to encourage unions is to figure out how to regulate away the bad ones.

Unions are no more or less corrupt than any organization of humans (the businesses they work inside of especially).

Absolutely. They are the counterweight to corporations. Otherwise there would be no natural counterpoise to the interests of companies. I do not believe in the invisible hand resulting in the best possible state of equlibrum.

Absent an existential threat, a union drawing membership fees is marginally most profitable by doing exactly nothing. This is economically perverse as a limiting case.

For companies there is competition. If a company is significantly more corrupt than its competitors, then it may not be competitive (unless it has some other significant advantage) and perhaps will go bankrupt. That is another reason why monopolies and oligopolies are bad (as this anti-corruption mechanism does not work for them).

Although it is in principle possible to have multiple competing unions, it is often forbidden (either by law or union contract) and many companies are anyways small enough market.

I would think of company corruption in the opposite direction. It's pretty stupid to steal from the company you work for, better use your position in the company to steal from others.

Corruption makes you more competitive (e.g. Uber ignoring local taxi laws) and the chicken shit judiciary is extraordinarily hesitant to charge companies (think of the jobs!).

The perfect crime in modern times is to think up some convoluted fraud with your company making sure that it's too difficult for a jury or layperson to explain in terms where it is obviously wrong (e.g creating derivatives several layers of abstraction away from mortgages and exaggerating their risk profile). The prosecutors just aren't pursuing cases which aren't easy wins.

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