There also seems to be a popular misconception that unions prevent you from negotiating for yourself. Unions set salary and benefit floors, not ceilings. If you think you are a superstar negotiator, you're free to demand a higher wage than that floor.
Actors and football players have unions, yet also have an incredible wage disparity between the top and bottom end of the pay scale.
- Unions add more politics to an already increasingly political environment. I don't want to spend an hour or more every month in a meeting to vote on stuff I usually don't care about.
- Unions cost money, and while 200$/2 weeks (which is what one big union in my country charges) might seem reasonable to you, I don't like being forced to do anything.
- Unions usually end up with rules regarding who gets promoted and who doesn't. Broke your back working OT to help out the company? Well tough luck Martha came in one month before you and has priority on promotions.
- Unions make it harder to fire under performing employees. While that might fit in your ideal society, I prefer working with overachievers.
- Unions often ignore individuals because "the majority aren't affected by that scenario"
Would you prefer these decisions to be made unilaterally, without any input from you? Because that's the status quo. If you are happy with these decisions being made unilaterally, don't vote. If you aren't, you have more of a lever than you do without a union.
> - Unions cost money, and while 200$/2 weeks (which is what one big union in my country charges) might seem reasonable to you, I don't like being forced to do anything.
I'm assuming most of that money is going into a strike fund. Having a strike budget makes your negotiating position much stronger, just like how if you don't live paycheck to paycheck, your negotiating position is much stronger.
If most of that money goes into administrative expenses, you may want to consider voting to reduce those expenses.
> Unions make it harder to fire under performing employees.
Unions require management to follow a process to fire employees, under-performing or otherwise. My wife worked in a union for 8 years, and plenty of poorly performing employees were fired during that time. The difference is that they weren't fired arbitrarily. You'd appreciate protection from that, if you were to ever be fired for political, personal, retaliatory, or just purely fabricated reasons.
If your management can't figure out how to document how an employee is underperforming, and to give them notice to shape up, I'm not sure your management can be trusted with anything.
> - Unions usually end up with rules regarding who gets promoted and who doesn't. Broke your back working OT to help out the company? Well tough luck Martha came in one month before you and has priority on promotions.
Did the union make those rules, or did management make those rules in an effort to control costs, and then blame it on the union?
Unions are democratic, by the way. If you don't like tenure-based promotion, vote to change it. You have no such recourse with a manager who arbitrarily promotes people they like.
- Voting on stuff monthly? Seems to be a really active union. Must be getting ready to strike and if that's the case why wouldn't they check to make sure they have broad support for one. Also, no one is literally holding a gun to your head. You can vote, vote no, or not vote.
- Don't know what union this is but dues I've seen are 1-2%. Whoever is getting paid $5000/week I'd like to join that union, too. Fine, maybe it's a really good union that charges 5%. I'd still want in because someone is taking home $2000/week.
- The word is seniority and this has nothing to do with unions. It's how factories from the very beginning have doled out promotions. Job for life and all that. Since most people don't want to be working the shit stirring tank how do you get promoted out the shit stirring tank? A simple metric the factories and offices came up and the union workers agreed to.
- Unions don't control this. But if someone gets fired for underperforming you know who's going to get a labor lawyer? The worker who's been paying dues to collectively have a lawyer on retainer. You see if I get fired, I get told I was a poor performer with no evidence. If the worker in the union gets fired there lawyer is going to want to see the evidence. And you'd be amazed at how poorly most companies document this. See the union doesn't keep someone from being fired. But it does make sure the firing is fair.
And if you’re a software engineer, it’s usually not hard to be frugal enough to save up enough to have the luxury of saying that.
We really need country-wide social safety nets, not attempts to force companies to retain people they don’t want.
Good. I don't want promotion to be a race to the bottom for whoever works the longest hours. If you're gonna try to get ahead of me by doing OT, screw you.