Comment by Barrera | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Barrera | Hacker News Reader

Freakonomics ran a recent episode on unions [1]. A pair of interesting stats were presented near the start: the approval rating for unions stands at 70% in the US (even higher among the young) at the same time that union membership stands at 10%. Both numbers are at multi-decade extremes.

I don't think it's any coincidence that this success at Amazon comes right now. After the GFC all regulatory efforts turned to keeping financial markets solvent. That has meant unwavering support for policies that favor those with assets over those who don't.

The pandemic happened in early 2020 just as the wheels were flying off the US economy yet again. So what would have played out got masked by many other factors, including direct government transfers.

Those stimmie checks of yore are long gone, and it will be a very steep uphill battle to bring anything remotely like that back given the rip-roaring yr/yr increase in CPI and PPI now underway. Those checks are being blamed for the ongoing inflation that more than just the lunatic fringe now thinks is the start of Weimar-style hyperinflation.

So with the 2/10 year yield curve now inverted [2], it's just a matter of time before the economic chickens come home to roost once more. Will it be different this time? Will unions step in to fill the gap that government can not?

[1] https://freakonomics.com/podcast/do-unions-still-work/

[2] https://www.cnbc.com/2022/04/01/us-bonds-treasury-yields-inv...

I like the idea of unions more than the reality.

My first job was earning minimum wage working full-time at Safeway. After working there for about 9 months I quit because I didn't want to pay union dues to join the union. I was already only making minimum wage, it wasn't like the union was improving my salary. The required hour long lunch breaks might have been thanks to the union, but I hated having to take hour long breaks. It left a bad taste in my mouth.

Listening to that episode didn't change my thoughts much. One of the bigger problems I have with unions is that they always want to grow to gain more power/influence. If I'm paying dues I don't want 20% or whatever of those dues to go to what is essentially advertising/marketing.

My ideal union would have low fees, not try to expand into other companies, and would be optional for employees.

Why would a union be company specific? It makes a lot of sense for a union to represent all workers doing e.g. car manufacturing.

This is how the NLRA has been set up unions in the US--generally to make unions weaker. Other countries have sectoral bargaining, which is what you describe

Why stop there? What if we even had a huge tent, available to workers from all around the world...

Yeah. We could hold elections for union reps amd call the dues "taxes" and the union "government".

I see what you're saying but an "optional" union is pretty much bound to collapse inevitably.

Boeing’s other union (SPEEA) is optional and has been for decades.

That’s only because there’s a union to begin with. If the option was union or no union that would be a story - is it possible to not be in the union at all and not pay dues?

But why shouldn't it? No, seriously. If union isn't providing enough value to justify overhead it creates - it's just a parasite and everyone will benefit once it's gone.

A single-company union is generally a weak union, unless the company is gigantic. Expanding to other companies is how unions gain power to negotiate more effectively, the same way that companies gain price negotiation benefits by expanding into new markets.

You cannot have optional and union in the same sentence, that defeats the purpose of a union.

What you are saying is I want the union to do all the work without me being hands on on its function. Unions are useless if the workers just sit idle and wait for the representatives to do all the work.

Participation of all workers is what make a union powerful.

Works for Boeing.

I don't see how the union was doing any worthwhile work for me back when I was making minimum wage at a grocery store. All I saw was that they wanted to skim hundreds of dollars off my meager paychecks every year.

You didn't understand what the benefits of collective action against a hostile employer are. That's the fault of the union for failing to explain what they do for members (unions are about much more than just wages). That doesn't mean there's no benefit though.

a union is not an unalloyed good for the employees. I also worked at a unionized grocery for about 3 months. At our shop, it was clear that the union was set up to protect the senior employees at the expense of the junior employees. There were about 10-ish people on the checkout stands during my shifts, 4 of them were employees who had been working there for 10+ years, and 6 of them were people who had been working there for less than a year. The senior employees worked maybe 15% of their shift when it was particularly busy, otherwise they'd have "meetings" in the break room or hang outside smoking. The junior employees were worked hard and burned out and left.

That has nothing to do with unions though, obviously. If you look at any organisation you tend to see people who have been there a long time without moving upwards or onwards are pretty lazy people who know how to play the system. They don't need a union for that.

A lot of people who are anti-unions appear to think the union is the cause of everything bad without noticing the same things happen everywhere else as well. Keeping shitty staff around is much more a function of employers who don't track how good their staff are than anything to do with unionization.

Also, forming an opinion about unions based on one job that lasted 3 months with 10 co-workers, the majority of who were hard-workers, is appalling. That isn't anywhere near enough information. You really need to try harder.

I'm sorry I didn't cover the industrial and labor relations courses I took in college in my 5 sentence long comment on an online posting board

In Northern Europe we put optional and union in the same sentence, and it works well. But there is social pressure to join, and many places everyone, or almost everyone is union members. And maybe more importantly, the unions are usually big enough that they have power even if not everyone are members.

>It left a bad taste in my mouth.

Buy better food? I don't understand how a person can eat their food and digest it in 30 minutes.

Depends on whether you want to have a long lunch in the middle of the day or get Done with the workday as quickly as possible.

Nowadays when I work downtown I'll sometimes take a leisurely lunch that involves walking to a restaurant, ordering food, waiting for it, eating it, and then returning. That can take me up to an hour if things are really slow.

Back then I worked in the Safeway deli. I'd often make a sandwich for myself and set it aside, walk around the counter and buy it when lunch started, and then finish eating in 15-20 minutes. And then I'd be stuck sitting around in the break room with nothing to do waiting out the remaining 40 minutes.

Sure I usually read books or watched tv on a little Archos media player. But I would have rather finished work earlier and done that in the comfort of my home.

Unions as institutions run by non-workers kinda suck; they're just another hierarchy that exploits workers, and have little knowledge of worker conditions. Most animosity towards unions is towards these ossified institutions.

Unions as worker-led orgs are much better; you have faith that your reps actually know your working conditions, and you often perosnally know the rep in some capacity.

This victory is because of worker-led unions.

There's a big difference and do you approve of the general concept of unit Union and do you personally want to be part of one. Freakonomics is a great introduction but very much pop economics with all of the problems of Journalism. They love to cherry-pick extremes and ignore detail and nuance

If an inverted yield curve means that investors are spooked about the current economy, and thus they favor longer term bonds, does that mean then that the market is not expecting inflation? Who wants to own a 10 or 30yr bond if they expect inflation to soar?

Why do you say the wheels were flying off the economy in 2020?

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_2019_events_in_the_U...

2. https://www.forbes.com/sites/chuckjones/2020/12/31/2019s-yie...

There appears to be technical issues that caused #1, something about timing rather than a cause that points to more serious problems. If so, the analysis in #2 is based on a data point disconnected from those of the trend.

Also the trend in #2 consists if 3 data points. It might be an accurate interpretation, but curves before the '73, '80, '81 recessions didn't follow this pattern. We'd need an explanation for why that's the case, and what changed in the '90s. Without that we're just drawing a bullseye around 3 dots coincidentally close together.

Was there other evidence for a recession? I know that some people were saying we were "due" for one based simply on average timing, but that's no very compelling either if GDP growth had been relatively steady.

Meanwhile, this article [0] indicates that right before the pandemic got huge we weren't checking the boxes on a variety of things that would be warning signs.

[0] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.cnbc.com/amp/2020/03/06/her...

Growth was already slowing in 2019, which is why the fed started dropping rates in June. In fact 2019 was the lowest growth in the entire decade, the lowest since 2008.

https://www.bbc.com/news/business-50234626

That same article, in analyzing the trends, gave the opposite opinion though: that we were less likely to enter a recession than some had thought:

"Wednesday's figures, suggesting resilient consumer spending and strong-than-expected housebuilding, is likely to ease fears that the US will enter recession."

The private sector unionization rate in 2021 was 6.1%.

While productivity increased over the past half century, inflation-adjusted hourly wages are about what they were 50 years ago (it goes up and down - they were slightly lower in 2018 than 1972, a few cents higher in 2019). All productivity gains have been hovered up by the heirs and aristocracy.

As it was in the Silicon Valley wage cartel which collapsed in 2014. So FAANG wages have been high for 8 years, which is a historic anomaly.

Cartel is a pretty strong word for what happened and the fact that wages remained high is likely not an anomaly. E.g. Hedge funds which make similarly large amounts of money have paid their employees just as well for many years.

The FAANGs had soft agreements to work together on labor by not hiring each other's workers. That seems to fit the definition of a cartel:

"group of independent market participants who collude with each other in order to improve their profits and dominate the market"

I suppose we might argue that even the FAANGs together aren't large enough to constitute the full market. Other companies compete over the workforce of FAANG-eligible workers. The long tail of such SV employers with lower employee headcount a is still probably large in the aggregate. Though even apart from no-poaching agreements I've seen it speculated that FAANGs may employ large #s of talented people somewhat unnecessarily purely to keep them out of the hands of current competitors or potential startups that could grow into competition. That's a bit too conspiratorial for me though, at least without more evidence

Notably the F did not take part in the collusion.

A recruiter at Google was fired simply for reaching out to an employee at Apple. Cartel feels like an appropriate word.

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