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Comment by karaterobot | Hacker News Reader

Half the reason I'm ambivalent about unionization is that I was involved with the graduate student union when I was in school. The nominal reason for it was to improve working conditions and pay for grad students. In practice, it improved very little, and added a modest amount of overhead, in the form of a union apparatus which fed itself by taking a little bite out of those paychecks every month. To be clear, the net result was still higher pay overall, but not a lot. All in all, it really had only a small overall effect on us students, and didn't hurt the university much. It felt like the real winner was the UAW itself, which is the source of my mixed feelings.

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You had an unusually positive experience with UAW. They own the UC system contract, and negotiated pay caps, lowering grad student pay on some campuses.

They also negotiated to discontine coverage for various women's health issues.

Just before COVID, UC Santa Cruz went on a wildcat strike because the union negotiated pay for that campus below the cost of living. A bunch of foreign students lost their visas as a result.

In the second two cases, the grad students tried, but failed to organize against the union.

Most obvious routes to correcting the situation are illegal. In particular, organizing a strike against the union, or organizing a replacement union would have been illegal.

It is amazing that unions get a legal monopoly in this manner, and it is not surprising that, with such rights, they fail their constituents, preferring to amass money and power for a corrupt leadership.

Imagine a world with two or three unions per employer and you could actually pick which one you were under. They’d actually have incentives to deliver!

But we’ll never have that because it means less lobbying money and smaller campaign contributions to our representatives in government.

This is a bad idea for a number of different reasons. I'll highlight one.

The actual "competition" wouldn't be among which union the employees joined - rather they would compete to undercut each other on contract negotiation, which would only bolster the employer's hand.

There are good reasons why this is not common practice - but there is also no law preventing multiple unions.

Unions are competing both for contracts with employers, but also for employees among other unions. If Union A is demanding but gives good pay, Union B is more laid back but has less reward, and Union C is both demanding and gives poor bay then it will fail as A or B grows.

If there are no competing unions and you're in union C, then you've got no options but to quit or try and topple the union (impossible, effectively).

Aren't a bunch of little unions equivalent to independent employees advocating their own interests?

Maybe not, because (a) each union can still aggregate the interests of hundreds or thousands of workers and (b) it's much easier for a few unions to collaborate with each other than for hundreds or thousands of individual workers to do so.

This depends, of course, on how exactly the new unions are allowed to form. It seems unlikely that the NLRB would implement policy in a way that allows dozens of unions, each with a handful of workers; but I guess if that happened, it would end up just like what you're saying.

In recent years, some decisions from the NLRB are leaning in the direction of multiple unions: https://laborblog.vorys.com/2014/07/articles/nlrb/how-many-u...

The idea is that different kinds of workers could be in different unions. A department store might have, for example, cosmetics specialists, tailors, accounting staff and so on; and these groups are distinct enough, from the NLRB's perspective, to have their own unions.

Your comment doesn't make sense to me.

> the union negotiated pay for that campus below the cost of living

...and the graduate student workers voted to approve the contract? Every negotiated contract goes back to the members for approval.

What would this have looked like in the absence of a union? You are saying that with negotiation, UC Santa Cruz got pay below cost of living, but if they didn't have that negotiation, management would have freely paid them more than cost of living? What was the negotiation over?

> In particular, organizing a strike against the union, or organizing a replacement union would have been illegal.

What do you mean? Just get 30% of your members to sign a petition and you can hold an election to change unions. That is literally what organizing is.

If you can get 30% of your members to go on a "wildcat strike" against UC Santa Cruz & UAW, then you can get 30% to sign a union replacement card.

> What do you mean? Just get 30% of your members to sign a petition and you can hold an election to change unions. That is literally what organizing is.

> If you can get 30% of your members to go on a "wildcat strike" against UC Santa Cruz & UAW, then you can get 30% to sign a union replacement card.

Are you speaking based on California public sector union law or the federal National Labor Relations Act? The federal NLRA doesn't apply to state public sector workplaces, including UC Santa Cruz, with that being handled by state law.

My only experience with unionization is at private universities in Massachusetts, so I guess I am unfamiliar with how state law plays in for these public sector unions in California.

UAW set it up so that the entire UC system votes on these contracts. This leads to situations where you have large student protests at union meetings followed by students at other campuses voting to ratify the contract, and then entire campuses holding unauthorized strikes in protest of the contract they just "voted for".

If things were department wide, or even campus wide, the UAW wouldn't last a year in the departments I'm familiar with.

Instead, what you're proposing would require a statewide campaign against one of the most powerful political groups in California. The UAW is well aware of this, and has no incentive to act in its members' interest.

>> You had an unusually positive experience with UAW. They own the UC system contract, and negotiated pay caps, lowering grad student pay on some campuses.

This is pretty normal with all unions. They negotiate higher pay and benefits for journeymen-level members at the expense of apprentice-level incoming members. Management then does their best to purge the journeymen while bringing on tons of apprentices.

Management and union leaders work in concert to ensure the above scenario happens a predominant amount of the time. See also: MLB, UPS, other entrenched and long-running union shops.

It's great if you're a tenured member. Not so much if you're new.

Hey, wait a minute... that sounds a lot like academia now with more steps...

> To be clear, the net result was still higher pay overall, but not a lot.

Then I don't understand your ambivalence. Who would complain about getting more money?

Because it probably cost a lot more to the institution than it brought to the intended target. A middleman takes the bulk of the additional investment, without providing that much value in itself.

And that money came from somewhere, probably partly from profits, but also from other investments (buildings, teaching material, ...). Overall teacher got a little bit more, but both the org and the students lost a lot, comparatively.

At many universities, there's a massive stash of funds: the Athletics Department, which is a completely different organization and therefore off the table.

Also, university administration lover building pyramids of hierarchy. When you add a level to the pyramid, everybody gets a raise. Executive salaries are ludicrous -- and similar to the bank execs in the '08 bailouts, they cut themselves bonuses for "saving money" on handling disasters of their own creation.

By and large, university endowments are treated as separate investment vehicles and are no longer used to ease times of hardship.

Universities have largely been sold out. What was once a venerable public institution is now run like a profit-driven business. Welcome to wal-mart.

It's like class-action lawsuits: sure, maybe you get $2.43, but the lawyers are really the beneficiaries. The individual is just used to justify the whole thing.

No, the lawyer's job in a class action is to hold the someone accountable to prevent recurrences. They did a job, so they ought to be paid.

If some company habitually breaks the law and causes damages to a large group of people you can either pray that the Attorney General takes the case (but they won't, they want to advance their political career) or a law firm will take the case out of pure financial interest. I'll go with the law firm.

Students voted for this union because of major issues with the entire academic training process, not to get a small salary bump. The presence of the union at other schools has not led to any real attempts to fix the systemic issues, yet it adds another layer of bureaucracy to deal with for any students that want to face these issues.

> The nominal reason for it was to improve working conditions and pay for grad students. In practice, it improved very little

It might be interesting to consider how much worse the pay or conditions could have gotten in the union's absence.

As a UAW steward I represented (with lawyers provided by the UAW) students in arbitration who were being treated unfairly by the UC (breaking their own rules). It was a positive experience.

As a former UC grad student, thank you for your labor.

As long as human beings run a union, the union will be self serving.

As long as a tyrant is unchallenged, they will remain a tyrant.

What does this reply even mean? Are you seriously comparing the privileged plights within the ranks of academia to victims of a tyrannical ruler?

It's germane.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petty_tyranny

* https://www.researchgate.net/publication/247717438_Petty_Tyr...

Who is running the university? Robots?

Fwiw, UAW has recently had a major shake up, where the corrupt leadership of the overall union just got prosecuted, and actual one person one vote is being voted on, so I expect you (and I) caught them at the worst possible time. I'm definitely more weary of large cross sectoral unions than before my time at UC though.

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