Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dmix | Hacker News Reader

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People always paint these as some conspiracies against unions but there's plenty of genuine discontent with unions amongst the public and there's some legitimate concerns with them.

You can see it today with police unions being the biggest hawks blindly defending any police abuse and protecting them for ever being fired. This elephant in the room often gets ignored in public discourse. And the police aren't the only ones.

I grew up in a small town where unions were used like mini fiefdoms riddled with nepotism where you had to know someone to get a job. Theres also a long history of racism in unions, the original forming of them in the US were to exclude low wage black workers from 'stealing' white jobs.

It seems to work well at first before slowly morphing into a rigid protection racket for current employees, locking a company down to its current structure (which only makes sense for a few slow moving homogeneous industries like factories - until of course they simply automate or move to Asia or shut down).

It's also notable people always use historical nostalgic examples to hype up some golden age of unions for jobs that no longer exist for some reason...

They've also long been covers for corruption and back room political influence.

I personally believe unions are long overdue for reform and modernization. I'd maybe support something like unions-light, but today they always come with tons of other baggage like preventing bad workers from being fired, adding tons of bureaucracy and hoop jumping, crippling companies ability to adapt to market changes, forcing people like comedians and small indie bands to hire 30 different people for individual jobs (like paying a guy $40hr to pull a cord to open the curtains and nothing else which happens in NY clubs) creating inefficiencies which hurt company growth and customers and therefore employees/economies/taxes, completely shutting down small businesses who simply can't afford to support unions, not applying well to companies with a variety of different job roles, etc.

It's like a sledgehammer when most people just want to make more $$.

> It's like a sledgehammer when most people just want to make more $$.

Except the Epic dispute is not about money, it's about working conditions.

Epic workers are fairly well compensated. They're not demanding to be paid more. What they want is to not be forced to return to the office in the middle of the pandemic, a very reasonable demand.

Pretty ironic that this is being done by a company that makes healthcare software.

> I grew up in a small town where unions were used like mini fiefdoms riddled with nepotism where you had to know someone to get a job.

Yeah same. I grew up in a town with a large union presence (auto workers) and it was unbelievably corrupt. I’m not against unions conceptually, but they can be implemented very badly in practice.

Power corrupts.

The decline of unions has pushed much of this corruption up the food chain to the offices of the wealthiest people.

This has not benefited the working class.

Build labor organization systems that resist corruption through robust transparency, governance, and accountability.

I am aware the words are easy but the work is excruciatingly hard.

The problem with unions is they reward seniority over merit.

The problem with at will employment is most industries remove the reward for seniority in favor of merit.

There are still industries that value experience over cost for performance but they tend to have their own walled gardens (looking at you American Medical Association).

I once thought unions the bane of the free markets existence but I’m now starting to believe that unions are the best tool available to keep Capital in check.

We forget how out of control capital distribution has gotten these days. It can help to use time instead of dollars to measure things.

1 million seconds is 11 days.

1 billion seconds is 32 years.

Wealth inequality is a good thing.

Extreme wealth inequality is destabilizing.

The problem with unions is they reward seniority over merit.

Some unions do, some unions don't. It's not an inherent property of union-ness.

Case in point: all Hollywood unions.

> The problem with unions is they reward seniority over merit.

I've never seen a company, union or non-union, that doesn't have a relatively narrow salary range and progression for non-management positions. Of course the base salary tends to be much higher in tech companies, but how much non-seniority "merit pay" do non-manager software engineers actually get? The bigger the company, the more well-defined and bureaucratized the salary progression, even when there's no union. AFAICT it seems largely a myth that large amounts of non-seniority merit raises exist in software engineering. Some engineers can advance through the "rankings" more quickly than others, but overall it doesn't seem much different from union scales. The differences due to "merit" are overall small in the whole scheme.

The two best ways to increase your salary in a tech company are still seniority and promotion to management, which is no different than union shops.

Of course stock compensation can be a big factor in tech companies, but the stock price rises or falls due to market forces rather than individual employee merit.

I agree with more or less everything you've said. However I still think adding a union to the balance of power is the lesser evil in a good number of cases.

> I personally believe unions are long overdue for reform and modernization.

Are you thinking legislative or otherwise? Also, what do you think of the German model (labour representation on the board, etc)?

this is still drastically better than no union which results in massive exploitation once there is a decent amount of qualified workers available. We see this less in software in general because the demand for competent developers is so high, when unions first started coming about in the US they were met with bloody resistance, people were killed just for striking, so your bringing up of nepotism and unfairness seems rather out of place when it was addressing a system that literally murdered people for asking for more money. One of the few unions I can't get behind is police unions but there is no history behind police unions like you do with most workers unions. Cops just picked it up because they realized it gives them a massive amount of power, organized strikes by police will result in almost all their demands being met, city with no police makes people uneasy.

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