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Comment by goodluckchuck | Hacker News Reader

So will NYT be a union shop / the union will have a monopoly, have multiple unions, or have a mix of union and non-union work?

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I can't speak for this situation, but before I moved to tech I worked in a heavily union industry, and all the union shops had in their bargaining contract that the employer could not hire anyone who wasn't in the union.

For people in the union it was great. For people not in the union, it sucked. And before somebody says, "well just join the union" (do you really think I'm that stupid not to have thought about that?) joining the union was really, really hard. You basically had to wait for somebody to either retire or die, because nobody ever left for other reasons, and because employees were super expensive and impossible to fire, union shops were extremely conservative with hiring. Union employees got paid double what non-union did and had 1/4 of the work to do, plus they slacked off like crazy and never got in trouble for it. The union was (or at least looked to us) like it was great for the employees. I'd hate to be the employer though.

That sounds very inefficient. How did that whole industry not get their lunch eaten by other states / countries?

A lot of union businesses also benefit from regulatory capture and have the inside track on government contracts as their main source of income. There's no effective competition for these types of industries.

Exactly. This industry is highly regulated and the unions help write the laws and regulations. Because of that it's mostly large players and very, very few small ones. The large ones all have agreements with the unions because at their scale it's impossible not to, and to get that agreement they have to agree to only hire union.

Also a lot of the materials producers that supplied us were union, and many of them didn't want to provide services to a non-union shop. I don't know if they had any formal policies against it (probably they didn't) but anytime we called or places orders, etc we were a super low priority for them.

> they slacked off like crazy and never got in trouble for it.

The heirs receiving dividends from the New York Times company slack off to the extent of never working a day in their life, yet receiving massive amounts of money from those doing the work and creating the wealth at the New York Times company.

The union works so that the workers creating the wealth send less of it to these lazy, slacking "job creator" parasites.

For roughly $45/share you can too: https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/NYT

Notice that employees can also buy shares. Ownership and employment don't have to be disjoint.

In a large and varied company like the New York Times you’re going to have multiple Unions representing different workers. The printers won’t usually be in the same union as the tech workers.

You’ll always have a mix of union and non-union work since managers can’t be in the union and certain types of work may not be covered by one of the current unions.

Thanks for the response. I’m surprised that managers generally aren’t allowed in unions. But then I guess that’s probably a case by case thing with different criteria for different unions. Still, there are 20+ million “managers” according to the AFLCIO, excluding professionals who manage staff, e.g. some engineers, doctors, etc. Probably 10–20% of all workers.

https://www.dpeaflcio.org/factsheets/the-professional-and-te...

At least the unions I've been around, managers were the ones the unions were there to keep in check. It would have been very undermining to the union if the managers were part of it.

The whole point of unions is to create an us vs them setup in which "management" is the enemy and "workers" are the poor oppressed victims. You can't have a union with managers in it for that reason, such an organization would be the same thing as the company itself.

One reason unions make no sense in the tech world is that the line between "workers" and "managers" is often very blurry. What is a tech lead, for example? And of course the whole notion of class warfare being something to encourage is just an obsolete and very dangerous early 20th century Marxist idea. Most sensible people have disposed of it a long time ago, but no surprise the New York Times never let it go given the extremism and bias of their staff.

> since managers can’t be in the union

can there be an union of managers then?

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