Hacker News Reader

Comment by zchrykng | Hacker News Reader

So you are fine with the majority forcing the minority to support something they don't want to support? Never going to get behind that notion myself.

View on HN

The short name for that notion is "democracy".

Tyranny of the majority is considered a pitfall of democracy, or consider how to enforce "the will of the majority while protecting the rights of the minority"

Until law mandates that all labor unionize - and as closed shops, at that - the rights of the minority are hardly impaired when any one shop does so. Open shops exist, as do shops with no union of any sort, and employees need not remain employees at all, of anyone, if they no longer so choose; they are free to start their own businesses, of whatever sort best suits them. Those who decline to join a union, even at a newly closed shop, are constrained only in that they no longer meet the requirements of the job at hand - and the "right to work", so called, does not extend so far as to establish, regarding any given company with a union or without one, a right to work there.

The plea to "tyranny of the majority" thus seems here to conceal a plea for the tyranny of the minority, in that they be allowed to frustrate their colleagues' strongly held and constructively expressed desire to obtain a more equitable balance of power in their workplace by recognizing their shared interest and forming a united bloc to match that which management and ownership present in support of their own shared interest.

One wonders on what basis this sort of tyranny merits more favorable consideration than any other.

"forcing" != "we voted on something"

I'd imagine the 37 people who voted nay didn't even want to take a vote on the matter.

If me and a friend come up to you and say "let's all take a vote to see if I can take your wallet", and you vote "no", it doesn't mean you aren't getting your wallet taken anyway.

Depends. Did you, your friend and I willingly joined a group of "wallet carriers"?

Are we all affected by wallet-carrying management?

Do our choices in wallet-carrying communally affect this wallet-carrying enterprise?

Is corporate wallet-carrying management trying to convince us to carry wallets for longer than the usual 8 hours or wallet-carrying?

There are some glaring problems with federal law behind unions.

1. A union is required to represent all employees. They should t have to.

2. Companies will still have the money, and the employees will just have "work".

A better view is worker owned co-ops. That way the manager is the employee. The stresses of union vs company dissipate. Some others do take hold, but are much less so.

This is literally how democracies work.

Most democracies include, at the very least, a bunch of hand-wringing about oppression of minorities, though.

It would be unusual in the extreme for a modern western democracy that was 75% christian to force the 25% minority to convert.

Being in a union that protects your rights as a worker is more like insurance (which the majority indeed mandates the minority to get) than religion.

That comparison only holds up if you assume all unions are politically neutral. And I would be shocked if you could find any union that was politically neutral on anything.

It's not insurance. It actively changes how you can be compensated and takes very hands-on interference with the operations of the company (in US unions at least).

As opposed to insurance, which has a huge influence on who you can go to and what your options are if you get sick, to the point that your choice of insurance may end up becoming a turning point in your life? I don't think I ever heard of someone's life turning on joining the wrong union.

So no, I don't really see the distinction. But my point was more that sometimes we are "forced" to do things for the benefit of the people around us, even if we don't really want to and don't personally think we need it. Unionizing is one of those things.

True, but most democracies also have some kind of founding document that sets out broad limits on the scope of the democratic or representative powers of government.

And yet you rarely hear about businesses being described as a democracy, except for many coops.

Its the same state that brought Stop and Frisk laws to the main stream. New York government isn't known for caring about minority views

No one is forcing them to work a job they don't want to. They're free to work literally anywhere else that will hire them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com