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Comment by guyzero | Hacker News Reader

Everyone has a good relationship with their employer _until they don't._

And when the relationship goes bad it also becomes very, very one-sided.

From what I can tell, a "bad relationship" with employer particularly in competitive tech fields is a direct result of poor performance by the employee, which actually seems reasonable. I don't think it makes sense to introduce bureaucracy with the explicit purpose of covering for poor performance, as that pummels incentives to actually perform well at work. It seems actively unfair to people that are doing their job well if a union is covering for people that aren't.

Of course, a union can offer other benefits, but the downside of devaluing good performance seems strikingly not worthwhile.

Apparently if you go on maternity leave or extended sick/disability leave the relationship can also go bad. I think there are a significant number of cases where the relationship goes bad because of reasons other than just straight poor performance. But certainly, sure, straight poor performance is a frequent reason.

I don't think that unions like AWU are particularly concerned with the general performance review process.

Early in my career, HR refused to apply me a significant raise that they had written I would get, because I wasn’t old enough. I had support from my managers, great results and feedbacks. And yet it didn’t matter that it was illegal, illogical, and against their own written words, they still refused. I almost quit over it.

In the end one of the unions helped me, and collaborated with my manager to push HR to give me an even slightly bigger promotion based on my more recent results.

I drastically changed opinion on the unions after that, and have subscribed ever since. They’re not perfect, but HR can be worse, even if you make them money.

I was an engineer in Europe in a Fortune 500 company, for the record.

What could you possibly be basing this on, and how are you so sure that this gut feeling is not at all caused by the various campaigns that corporations are provably spending millions of dollars on every year?

Did you really never have a bad manager? Can you truly not believe that bad managers exist? I am really surprised by this comment.

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