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Comment by wolverine876 | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like an odd negotiating tactic in business (or anything): 'I'll take whatever you say, just please don't leave!'

People want to better pay and benefits, more power over what they do with their lives 40+ hours per week. You can't be afraid to push for yourself in any negotiations, and you need leverage to get as much as you can. Without a union, you have all the leverage of a lone individual.

What's crazy to me is seeing Boeing treated like a god coming down to bless the land with their beneficence, whom we must please and obey. They are a business who will use whatever leverage they have to get what they can; you need leverage too.

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The workers simply have a lot less leverage than you think. Globalization and automation has made work less scarce than labor. The pandemic reduced the supply of labor, and accordingly, wages for low-skill workers have skyrocketed, which proves that the market is working as intended.

Unions don't magically create leverage out of thin air. They steal it from those outside the union by constraining the the supply of labor. The most effective unions are those that do this to the greatest extent. For example, SAG-AFTRA forces productions to give speaking roles to union members and also restricts union eligibility to those that receive these speaking roles.

> SAG-AFTRA forces productions to give speaking roles to union members and also restricts union eligibility

SAG does not force productions to do anything. The production can either use union or not use union. What they can't do is use cherry pick talent. Your best talent is going to be a SAG member. And since it's a union you either get all or none.

>SAG does not force productions to do anything

I'm merely applying the same language people use here to attack corporations.

>And since it's a union you either get all or none.

Everywhere else this would be a clear violation to antitrust.

> Everywhere else this would be a clear violation to antitrust

What?

"You either sell only laptops with intel CPU's or we will ship no CPU's to you at all!"

Sounds like a clear antitrust case to me.

Exclusivity clauses like that are perfectly legal except in a few rare cases where companies have an unusually high amount of market dominance.

"Your best talent is going to be a SAG member." Sounds like market dominance to me.

"Union" and "trust" even mean the same thing.

> Unions don't magically create leverage out of thin air. They steal it from those outside the union by constraining the the supply of labor.

That sounds like a perspective from one of Amazon's workplace signs. Union leverage is based on two things (off the top of my head, and afaik): significant control of the labor supply, and the political power of many votes and of many people to advocate for candidates. However, people can join the union; they aren't exclusive clubs.

Much of management's power comes from controlling the job supply and the political power of money, and they use that leverage to their advantage. When we live in a happy world where management stops doing that, I'll agree that unions shouldn't either.

> They steal it from those outside the union by constraining the the supply of labor.

Can you explain how this works? In Europe Unions just represent the rights of those the Employer chose to hire. The employees are not required to be members of a Union, and usually they won't join until they have already started working.

Many regions in the US have been hit hard by globalization and manufacturing job loss. The choice isn't necessarily viewed as union vs non-union, but unemployment vs non-union. It seems they are choosing the jobs.

They are competing against other parts of the world in terms of labor supply. I don't know how you overcome that without either demonstrably higher productivity or protectionism.

The US southeast has been 'anti-union' since long before globalization. I read a history of the Great Depression, and in the 1930s the same reactionary anti-communist propaganda was used to defeat unionization.

> This sounds like an odd negotiating tactic in business (or anything): 'I'll take whatever you say, just please don't leave!'

Remember the Amazon HQ2 race to the bottom?

If it weren't Bezos I'd say it were intended as an art piece to demonstrate how bad the problem is, even between states inside a single country. That said, Virginia ended up paying about $27k per job generated while the second office in NYC was given about $75k per job generated.

So a taxpayer subsidy from everyone in the region in order to produce 25,000 jobs at the above prices. Worth it? Not really sure, it seems to me like Virginia might end up fairly well off but I have a harder time imagining that creating another 25,000 jobs in NYC is worth $75k a piece to the city given that they are already out of housing. Kind of seems like it might be better put into other things on balance.

Pitching it all as a public auction really accentuates the point that this is a race to the bottom with competition between people that should instead be natural allies. It would be brilliant if it were an intentional commentary on how much harm we are doing to ourselves by letting companies pit entire states against each other for profit.

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