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Comment by happymellon | Hacker News Reader

> in the UK you have sector unions, not enterprise unions.

This is not correct, we have both much like the US.

We have unions for a particular company for example, here is the Wikipedia link for the Nationwide Union, a building society. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationwide_Group_Staff_Union

Certainly over time they will consolidate, but that goes back to my point about age. If other warehouses unionise, at some point they will group together to prevent the closure of warehouses just because Amazon doesn't like the people working there.

I understood the US has the same situation, with groups like United Farm Workers or the Federation of Teachers.

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>>We have unions for a particular company for example, here is the Wikipedia link for the Nationwide Union

The question I would then have is do the employee of Nationwide have to join the Nationwide Union or could they if they wanted choose a different union, or no union at all. Practicality or downsides aside is it legal for them do make that choice.

That is not the question, they claimed that the UK doesn't have enterprise unions, but sector ones.

Closed or requirement after hire is both illegal in the UK, and the EU, as well as not popular positions for the unions. In that sense we are not the same but, again, that wasn't the discussion.

I am the person that made the claim, I am pretty sure I understand what I am trying to talk about.

This seems to a terminology / definitional problem we have, something I am trying to get beyond because like I said from the beginning a "union" in the US is not the same as a "Union" in the UK/EU, that is my point from the start

So when we have these international discussions and people from the UK/EU are aghast that anyone in the US would be opposed to Unions they are talking from what they understand from the Unions on their nation, which IS NOT what we have here in the US.

My attempts to convey the differences has failed with terminology issues and technicality gotchas largely due to a massive political bias in favor of unionization so any time anyone tries to convey a negative about a union is gets drowned out either by people not in the US that have no idea what a US Labor union really is like, or by people in the US that only understand the concept of a US Labor union but not the reality of it

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