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Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

The working class will get a larger chunk of the pie only if they organize into powerful unions and directly negotiate with the wealthy to dramatically reduce corporate profits. Right now all that pie that should go to workers goes to investors.

Without that dramatic shift in power, you'll just get what we have: worker pay rising half the speed of inflation. Good luck with that.

Until the corporations stop posting record profits and we stop pumping the stock market to dramatic new highs every year, you're not going to see the working class better off.

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This is talking about the public sector. Public sector unions are a disaster, with the police unions being the the star example. Unlike the private sector, you can't capture profits from the owners because there is no profit to begin with. Instead, the money comes from the more junior employees and in the form of taxpayer debt. Thanks to unions, 40% of Chicago's education budget goes towards paying pensions. Meanwhile, younger teachers are stuck in dead-end part time roles because that's all the city has budget for.

> Thanks to unions

That's more like thanks to disinvestment in retirement funds to build capital for future payouts.

To make the irony worse, the pension returns are dependent on allocating their capital to monopolies which are able to capture excess returns. Re-allocating profits from shareholders to workers de-funds the pensions (and retirees more broadly.)

Unions don’t work the way you think they do. If they are large unions they actually actively negotiate against the workers as well. Take a look at the railroad union as an example.

Only smaller local unions are effective at negotiating wages and benefits

ok, lets go with smaller unions then.

Using one union as a stand-in for all is pretty silly... Should we understand large corporations entirely on the basis of Enron?

It’s pretty systematic, look at state wide teachers strokes of nurses. Any big union

Ha you say that in jest but Enron is a good model for large zombie corporations. We know a lot more about the inner workings of Enron that we do about many corporations as well.

It's ironic that you mention the railworkers union to defend your claim that I don't understand unions, when the rail industry in America got everything they wanted from the workers.

Your point is basically "the worst union imaginable is the same as no union".

That's not the own you think it is.

You are misinformed.

The railroad union got screwed. For one they didn’t get an actual contract. As far as I can tell they got Tentative deal that was used as a procedural trick to delay the strike till after the midterms. It’s not even clear that there was anything in this “tentative deal”. More importantly the strike wasn’t about pay as much as it was about absolutely terrible scheduling practices. Employees were on call 24/7/365 had to show up at very short notice, couldn’t take vacation or sick leave etc. There was no promise of actually fixing any of the problems in that deal.

This happens a lot in union strikes, workers want better work conditions but instead the union negotiates like 1-2% more pay and the media reports it as greedy unions getting overpaid. Even though that’s not what the workers even wanted.

I wish all the “record profits” reports were in real terms and not nominal terms, which are impossible to evaluate objectively, especially in a high inflation environment.

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