Tesla Workers Launch Union Campaign in New York | Hacker News Reader

Tesla Workers Launch Union Campaign in New York

bloomberg.com

146 pointshe0001184 comments

An important detail that none of the reporting I've seen has mentioned: Tesla got upwards of $750 million in subsidies from the state of NY for putting the Gigafactory 2 in Buffalo.

The condition was that they had to support 1460 jobs. Last I heard they were around 1500, so it's reasonable to believe the analyst jobs are only located there to avoid paying fines for breach of contract with NYS.

This is exactly what happened.

The Solar factory didn't really take off like expected so to hit that job requirement they staffed it with extremely low skill jobs. The article nicely calls them analysts but they're simple data labelers. They look at a picture, make a box around a stop sign and tell the computer that is a stop sign, then do the same with a speed limit sign, then on to the next item in the picture (curb, deer, tree, lines, etc)... then repeat the same process for the next photo. These people do not need to be in buffalo to do this job, but Tesla does need humans to do it, and primarily Americans where they understand the culture and general rules of the road.

Tesla should take the initiative and bring in a co-operative German-style union or they are going to get stuck with an antagonistic UAW or similar.

This is illegal under US law.

Company unions aren't permitted. But there's an element of this approach in the most recent approaches to undermining unions, where companies create groups for worker voices including ESG and DEI initiatives. I'm not saying companies doing this is necessarily bad, just being descriptive about that at least part of the motivation is to undermine union organizing, as even corporate lobbying groups describe it:

https://theintercept.com/2022/06/07/union-busting-tactics-di... https://www.levernews.com/fear-and-loathing-among-the-union-...

As far as whatever is done in Germany, I can't speak to that since it's outside my area of knowledge.

When / how ?

They are referring to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_union

This is actually the same union that Starbucks workers are organizing with -- Workers United, which is an SEIU affiliate. I wonder if the Starbucks workers in Buffalo are helping this group of workers out.

Also, here's what their website says about whether they are anti-Tesla:

> No! We are pro-Tesla and pro-union. We want to work at Tesla and make it our career. We want Tesla to be the best it can be and a place where we can have successful and sustainable careers. If we didn't care about the company we wouldn't be putting this work into changing it for the better.

https://tesla-workers-united.squarespace.com/faq

I don't think you understand how powerless the UAW is now. Car companies don't need to stay in Detroit.

Isn’t that a contradiction? The union is for the workers, not the company - how could the company make a union? Doesn’t it have to be the workers who organize?

The European model, as I understand it, is that unions have elected representation on the board of directors for the company in question.

Once the union is established the model they're talking about gives the union a seat somewhere in the executive levels sometimes several on the board. It brings the union directly into the decision making process earlier so there's more chances to address things before they rise to the level of a strike. It could be used to co-opt the union but it doesn't inherently compromise it.

> The Buffalo plant has over 800 Tesla Autopilot analysts with starting pay of about $19 per hour, Bloomberg wrote. The workers are reportedly "in non-engineering roles that contribute to Tesla's automated-driving development, including by identifying objects in images its vehicles capture and helping its systems recognize them on the road."

Best of luck to them but they’re in for a wake up call if they think they’re in a position of bargaining power for a job that takes maybe a day or two of training to learn.

Others have noted that Tesla got a big subsidy that requires them to employ a minimum number of workers. This appears to be an curious point of leverage. Tesla can't just shut it down to quash the union, like your Walmart or Starbucks.

If unionizing was an organic reaction to a work environment, i would be less jaded.

However, in most cases, the employees don't initiate the idea of unionizing. The typical scenario involves a union organizer/s stalking the employees, often following them as they leave work in order to approach them. The union organizer is a glorified salesman promoting his product. As such, he makes it sound like being part of a union is amazing and that the employees current situation is tantamount to slave labor. Given the pressure sales pitch and one sided presentation, sheeple (employees) fall for the idea, either believing the stories that are being sold or thinking "what the heck, can't hurt anything right?."

What they don't know until it's too late is how a union quickly evolves until it becomes nothing more than a way to serve a small group of union leaders so they can take advantage of a group of employees. Unions ultimately become parasites of an organization and will eventually hasten it's demise.

Why have unions become so scarce (outside of government orgs)? Could it be because they end up putting their employer out of business?

Are there examples of unions that are positive and contributing factors to a company's success? They are few and far between.

Ironically unionizing would probably mean many are replaced with actual robots

Why is that?

As someone who has only worked in "right to work" states, it always strikes me as absurd that people seek "job security" through a 3rd party agency rather than by individual performance and developing personal relationships.

Honestly a big part of why I quit my last job was too many unproductive/unreliable coworkers.

Am I just Stockholm Syndromed?

imo very few industries need unions, and most devolve post union integration. it seems like there's no one size fits all union model and about a million ways to turn it into a kludgy fiefdom.

edit: downvote with your words you nerds

As someone who has never needed "the police" to provide physical security, it always strikes me as absurd that people seek to form governments to "provide security" rather than through individual enforcement of the law through firearm ownership.

Please please think of the Poe's law when writing such comments... we might be HN but we're humans too.

I suspect this comment would benefit from adding a clarifying "/s" at the end.

As someone who has never needed "the fire brigade" to extinguish a fire in my house, it always strikes me as absurd that people seek to form governments to "provide fire services" rather than through individual application of water through bucket ownership.

The idea that "invidivual performance and personal relationships" provides job security is a laughable idea in almost any industry.

The wave of tech layoffs should've made that clear.

The USA's primal hatred of unions will always blow my mind. There's power in a union my friend.

You're talking about specific job security. He's talking about general job security (or at least seems to be based on wording).

A union protects your specific job for a specific employer (or set of employers or subset of industry). Networks and reputation protect your ability to get paid for the thing you do in general. The degree to which either approach is successful is going to depend on one's industry and position/skill-set therein.

Edit: This shouldn't need to be said but the above should not be construed as an endorsement of either approach.

The latter is mostly relevant for specialist, high paid labour.

I'm not in a union, but I'm also roughly in the 1%. If I was anywhere below the top 5% or so, I'd have joined a union in a heartbeat, and like commenters above I find the US resistance to unions utterly bizarre, not least because US unions were instrumental in laying the groundwork for a lot of modern labour protections, to the point of losing lives as part of those battles.

Even May 1st as an international day for labour demonstrations came after a request from the AFL in part as commemoration of the Chicago Haymarket Massacre, and as a renewal of the multi-decades fight for the 8 hour working day.

If ones job at Tesla is to screw on wing mirrors, how should one go about building a network and developing their reputation? A github page? Speak at conferences maybe?

I wish unions were not needed too, then I hear about shitty employers exploiting poor people and I accept that unions are needed.

I'm not trying to say everyone that got let go is a low performer or has poor personal skills. I've seen plenty of good employees fired for bad or no reason.

I guess what I'm trying to say, is that even working with a guillotine above my head feels preferable to having to pick up the slack of people coasting and not meeting their commitments.

If a union protects people who are not doing their job from being made to do it, that is an argument for chosing a different union not against unions in general.

In the US, you don’t really have the luxury of picking a different union. This is one reason unions suck in the US.

You do, sort of (though I get what you mean) even as an individual, even though it's less common and affects the benefits you get from being a member, and you may risk still paying dues to the recognised union (if there is one, and your state allows agency fees).

At the larger scale, your choice is to try to convince your co-workers.

The downside of joining a minority union / members only union is not that different in the US as elsewhere, in that you generally have no legal right to be treated as a bargaining agent or in the case of some such unions they explicitly don't even try get recognition.

But even the US has examples of minority unions being voluntarily given some degree of representation:

https://eu.freep.com/story/money/cars/2014/11/12/uaw-volkswa...

So in other words… we have effective union monopolization in the US.

Not all that much more so than in a substantial proportion of other countries with far more powerful unions, and which often have multiple unions represented in the same companies.

Most places have thresholds to be met before an employer can be forced to recognise a given union. It's not unusual for that threshold to be 50% per unit and for people to still opt to stay members in a minority union, which you can in the US too.

The main way the US distinguishes itself in terms of unionisation is by low union membership, and as such the lack of significant minority union locals in the US is more a factor of few people joining a union unless they'd be paying agency fees anyway.

A lot of years ago, before entering college, my father was working in an aluminium melting plant in western Norway for a year. Being young and fit, he was able to work quite fast.

Shortly after starting, he was approached by the local Union bosses, and sternly told to slow down. Not only did he make everone else look bad, if people worked that much, that would lead to layoffs.

Not wanting trouble with the Union, he and his pal switched to only working about 4 hours each night (it was usually night shifts) and then sleep the remaining 4 hours of the shift.

It's not clear to me whether you see this as an argument for being part of that union or for picking another one. Protecting the workforce against expectations that might be unreasonable for many workers is an essential part of the functions unions serve. Your dad might have been happy to have worked faster and longer when he was young, but if he'd remained in that job he'd soon be happy the performance expectations were not set so high that he'd start struggling to meet them. Having grown up in Norway and now living in the UK, I massively prefer the work-life balance and workers protections high union participation has created in Norway over the UK (and the US is far worse than the UK in this respect).

Pretty sure Jern og Metall (Metallurgy union) would not have accepted competition at that workplace at that time. :)

> I massively prefer the work-life balance and workers protections high union participation has created in Norway over the UK

Sure, though it comes at a pretty significant cost in terms of efficiency and of the ability of the more productive part of the workforce to generate income for themselves.

Over time, this kind of setup tends to lead to loss of competitiveness, often resulting in fewer jobs / layoffs, lower salaries or to requiring the rest of society to pay subsidies, trade barriers and/or for consumers to pay more for their products.

Case in point would be Norwegian agricultural unions.

And maybe worst of all, a society dominated by unions may cause some of the most productive citizens to seek better opportunities abroad ;)

> Pretty sure Jern og Metall (Metallurgy union) would not have accepted competition at that workplace at that time. :)

While there have at times been overzealous union people and I obviously can't know the conditions specifically at your dads old workplace, closed shops have typically been far more unusual in Norway than e.g. in the US, and the few attempts there have been have increasingly faced legal opposition and are now considered illegal in part based on interpretation of the freedom of association in Council of Europe's social charter from the 1960s. The main exception in the past have been for employees of the unions themselves, and even there closed shops became unusual a long time ago. But of course you won't make many friends at a workplace if you actively place their working conditions and employment at risk.

> Sure, though it comes at a pretty significant cost in terms of efficiency and of the ability of the more productive part of the workforce to generate income for themselves.

Health and safety and the general wellbeing of workers tends to come at a cost, yes, it doesn't come from nothing. The question is not whether or not to do so - not a single country in the world allow employers free reign in deciding workers conditions - but where to draw the line.

So then you have a choice of how much of your own well-being you're willing to sacrifice for the sake of maximising profits for someone else. Of course there is a point beyond which pushing working conditions and salaries up becomes net detrimental. But given Norway tend to rank near the top on almost all quality of life metrics, it does not seem Norway has hit it (and in case you drag up oil: Denmark and Sweden tend to rank equally well)

> Over time, this kind of setup tends to lead to loss of competitiveness, often resulting in fewer jobs / layoffs, lower salaries or to requiring the rest of society to pay subsidies, trade barriers and/or for consumers to pay more for their products.

Come to the UK and experience the life of an average worker here and see how fucked up their situation is compared to the average Norwegian, and see if you consider the trade-off worthwhile. Høyre would be considered far-left extremists by UK standards, with policies in their program more radical than what Corbyn proposed (they support more generous parental leave policies for example, and Solberg stood up for continued government ownership policies that'd see her branded as a communist here). And we live the result. The UK tends to rank well below the Scandinavian countries on most quality of life metrics.

> And maybe worst of all, a society dominated by unions may cause some of the most productive citizens to seek better opportunities abroad ;)

I didn't leave for the salary, and I stayed for family reasons. We need to earn far more here for the same standard of living as in Norway because we need to compensate for a welfare system that is far less generous, despite the fact we on average work far longer hours. Yet the average worker here earns less than in Norway. For me, at a far higher salary than average, it's close to a toss up, but had I been on an average salary I'd be back in Norway in a heartbeat rather than put up with the shitty conditions most people here deal with. For my part, I intend to leave the UK well before I retire, because while money can compensate for the direct impact on me personally, it can't compensate for the negative effect on the society surrounding me.

> I didn't leave for the salary, and I stayed for family reasons.

He. I suppose it's pretty common for expats to keep the mentality they had from their country of origin, and even romanticize it a bit.

I'll not quibble with you a bit, just bring my own anecdote:

About 15 years ago, I was called in to help an Accenture team that was about to fail a software project for Posten. When I arrived, the situation was kind of critical.

The Accenture project was led by an architect/PM from London, and staffed by a couple of devs (one of them lead dev) from Norway, and a larger number of devs in India.

Every afternoon around 15:45, all the devs would be gone, and it was just me and the architect from the UK remaining, trying to sort out all the issues in the code.

As we were working into the evening night after night, we got to know each other a bit. As it turned out, he felt like he was trapped in a hell hole, with a team that was not willing to put in any extra effort even though the project was about to fail. I kind of gave him the story that you gave me above.

But he insisted that live was MUCH better in London. Not only was Oslo dark and freezing cold (this was during the winter) and lacking the kind of cultural attractions of a city like London, for someone like him purchasing power was also much better.

While his peers in Oslo had to leave the office before 4pm every day to fetch the kids from daycare, in London he was able to keep a nanny to both provide more personalized care and also provide more flexibility to the parents. In Oslo, families that can afford that usually make significantly more than a software architect.

My point isn't that one system is better than the other, rather that the patriotism can go in both directions.

And for countries trying to be as agalitarian as Norway without the oil revenue, the downsides are even more pronounced, of course. Norway may be the closest to a social democratic Utopia one can get.

> I guess what I'm trying to say, is that even working with a guillotine above my head feels preferable to having to pick up the slack of people coasting and not meeting their commitments.

Really? I'd far rather not have a guillotine above my head if the trade-off is a few lazy colleagues. Why should that be my problem?

I mean, the current situation is that you get to work with a guillotine above your head and pick up the slack of people coasting because they can suck up to upper management and puff up their work better than you. Or worse, they lay off the people that did the work, promote the slackers and then you're doing 3x the work for 1x the pay.

Which means that the slackers are better at networking and whatnot, exactly what the OP was recommending as alternative to unionizing. Isn't it ironic, slackers winning either way. Or maybe the slackers-based argument isn't that sound?

Why do you associate unions with people coasting and not meeting their commitments? For example, two unions striking here in UK recently have teacher and nurse unions. They’re some of the hardest working professions I’ve seen, but they get compensated poorly for it, and in the case of nurses they have to work ridiculously long and busy shifts because they are severely understaffed.

Unions have a place for fighting against unfair dismissals of an individual, but they are primarily for when everyone is being treated badly.

> Why do you associate unions with people coasting and not meeting their commitments?

American public sector unions are cartoonishly bad. Recent example from San Francisco. Fourth grader hasn’t learned math in six months. Their math teacher had a concussion and can’t work. The substitute doesn’t teach math. (?!?) The original teacher can’t be replaced. (They deserve disability, but students deserve instruction.) Substitutes must be drawn from a list, on which there were two options, and the other person didn’t want to do it.

So students get babysat while their peers learn math. Because every stopgap, including another teacher dropping in, or a parent volunteering, or hiring an off-list sub or even temp, or telling the sub they have hired to knock it off, it’s grade school math, they can probably find a decent YouTube series, is contractually prohibited.

You just described collective bargaining as if it were like an individual hiring a salary negotiator. I suppose we can debate whether some jobs are better off with or without unionization but it doesn't sound like a genuine argument when you describe it that way.

Sadly I think we can honestly say that the unproductive coworkers exist in many different professions and a significant drawback of unions is that they can thrive there.

Wouldn’t Tesla build quality go up with a union that can make demands? If so, how can we say Tesla’s system is working and management isn’t unproductive and unreliable?

I have seen no evidence of build quality being higher in the unionized GM and Ford than the non-unionized Toyota, Hyundai, and Honda plants in the US. The opposite may even be true.

I was referring to panel gaps and other quality issues which are quite egregious with the Tesla brand.

Is there any evidence that Toyota (etc) have worse cosmetic panel gaps than Ford and GM? Overall, Toyota (etc) have excellent quality.

If there's lots of competition over labor in the area, unions aren't necessary but if there isn't much the workers need some kind of leverage that they can't achieve individually. That's when unions are useful IMO, don't know if that's the case here

Your individual performance may be fine when your company is small enough that your boss works for the CTO directly. When you are in a company with thousands of employees it makes no difference.

Job performance making no difference is my chief complaint. It leads to poor average performance which is a toxic work environment imo.

You think all these tech layoffs are sorting by performance and slicing that way? Ignoring the fact that performance measurements are barely possible at a granular level to allow such an ordering

One could argue about job perf making no difference in union shops (as if people don’t have some pride in their work since they’re spending a third of their life there and the vast majority of people are not trying to work in bad faith) but I think the implicit idea that non-union places have more than the most fat fingered and office politics dependent perf rivals is something to think about. We all know the coasting founder and the absentee manager

I think that during layoffs in a union shop at least management has to think a lot harder about cuts, and how to do them.

Plenty of us feel the same way. Also, I hate bureaucracy. When you have a union, you have another bureaucracy to deal with. Granted, a good union is probably worth the added effort-- especially when you're in a field where the lack of a union leads to egregious abuses. I've never worked a job where a union felt like it would be a value add to me.

> Honestly a big part of why I quit my last job was too many unproductive/unreliable coworkers.

Unproductive? Then you must really be exercised about the heirs who own the majority of stock, who can and often do siphon off the created wealth of those working and creating wealth, via dividend profit of expropriated surplus labor time.

Oh, I see no such complaint. Just some co-workers who are "unproductive".

Why is it only the heirs? Shouldn’t your issue be with all future stockholders beyond the original founders and venture capitalists? Although I assume you’d feel similar about the venture capitalists?

You wouldn’t happen to own any stocks, would you?

Don't forget that many workers end up with stock too, either via options, grants or other mechanisms. Or maybe they just buy the stock because they things going well at the company.

Have you seen the margins on businesses old enough to be owned by heirs? They're only "siphoning off" a few percent.

Edit: I misunderstood. I thought the complaint was that the heirs were taking a lot of created wealth from each worker. Not simply that they were wealthy.

Those heirs are the richest people in Europe, owning everything from VW and Porsche to BMW and a bunch of other household names. And those few percent are coming off from quite huge figures...

Yeah, the lack of new businesses is a big problem in Europe. Regulations and taxation kill them or drive them out of Europe.

But I was speaking from a US perspective (since I'm from the US and this story is about the US), and our biggest, most profitable businesses are mostly under fifty years old, not over.

And most of them are also started by heirs of generational wealth.

Just because the companies change doesn't mean the owners do.

Who specifically are you thinking of? Every founder I can think of was born in the middle or upper middle class.

Elon Musk's dad was a South African millionaire.

Bill Gates' mom was on the board of directors of a bank and gave him an intro to IBM execs. [0]

Bezos parents invested 250k to fund Amazon. [1]

Upper middle class is generational wealth already if it passes a generation.

[0] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/05/how-bill-gates-mother-influe...

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/02/how-jeff-bezos-got-his-paren...

Yeah those parents are all upper middle class. None of them are at all comparable to the owners of a company like VW, Tesla, or Amazon.

And none of them were "heirs who own the majority of stock" nor support your claim that "just because the companies change doesn't mean the owners do".

Edit to reply: You don't need to tell me about the social mobility of people living in poverty. I was born into a family of construction workers, and escaped poverty by learning to program. I know from experience that new businesses create opportunities to escape poverty, even if that isn't measured or sufficiently weighted by the index you cited.

You can call it "upper middle class" all you want, but to the vast majority of the population those folks would simply be "rich".

I'm not as concerned as you with the various strata of richness and the mobility between them.

I'm much more concerned with the social mobility of people living in poverty, which is pretty bad in the US compared to Europe. [0]

Key factor in that? Unions.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Social_Mobility_Index

The thing you're linking doesn't even measure social mobility, it just calls itself a social mobility index.

Zuckerberg went to Phillips Exeter, a high school which costs at least $47,000 a year.

Zuckerberg bought Instagram from Kevin Systrom who went to Middlesex high school, which costs at least $55,000 a year.

At this point it becomes a parlor game of who is rich, and who is "upper middle class", which apparently means spending $55,000+ a year on your kid's high school.

You're really moving the goalposts. From "the heirs who own the majority of stock" to "spending $55,000+ a year on your kid's high school."

Edit: Zuckerberg's parents were a psychiatrist and a dentist. Well paid jobs but still jobs. I'd hardly call it generational wealth.

If your parents can afford to spend 60k a year on your high school, then that is generational wealth.

Do you think the child of a poor single mother trying to make ends meet is given the same opportunities?

It's not as easy, certainly, but I know of several founders who grew up poor.

Steve Jobs father never graduated high school and fixed cars for a living.

Larry Ellison grew up in an apartment in the South Side of Chicago.

Starbucks founder Howard Schultz grew up in a public housing project.

He's not talking about the founders. He's talking about the funders.

OH 1000000% I mean can you even name a single business that has started in Berlin in the last 25 years? You cant. Because not a single business has started. Taxes have killed all brand new business ideas in the German tech start up scene.

That is an interesting way to read my comment so.

It is not regulation nor taxes that make it hard for "tech" start ups in Europe. It is harder access to Venture Capital and smaller adressable markets, overall the European Market is huge, but harder to access due to language barriers.

If you have thousands working and creating wealth, and then a handful of heirs not working, and siphoning off expropriated surplus labor time of those who do work, then the heirs have a pretty good deal going for themselves. A couple percent of the created wealth of a few thousand workers just for one person? That adds up quick.

Working in Europe I have never been a member of a union but enjoy plenty of the achievements fought over in previous decades. Right now my strong market position as someone in a sought after field and with some experience under my belt I am able to negotiate an individual contract that exceeds collective bargain agreements (that's possible in most companies here).

Members of my immediate family don't have that luxury. They are hardworking and diligent people at physically demanding jobs. Yet they get treated way worse than I in my cushy office job.

Individually they don't have much bargaining power but as a group they can get a better outcome and negotiate eye to eye with business owners. It makes sense to carry a few underperformers with you if the benefits outweigh the costs.

In the end market realities still require the company to make a profit or nobody gets paid. But there is no reason why workers/unions shouldn't demand a greater share of that profit.

Look at almost any German International company for a working examples. All Auto manufacturers are heavily unionized and still manage to be innovative and make a very healthy profit. During the Euro crisis in 2008 Unions and business owners worked together to reduce hours and workforce because everyone understood the dire situation.

Considering that some "union" jobs in Germany (there are collectively negotiated terms and conditions per industry which apply to everyone working at a company covered by those conditions whether or not being an actual union member) can go up to as much 120k per year for a 40 hour work week, and increase by a couple of percent every other year so, well, those jobs are a lot more attractive than people think.

Added benefit: working at rather stable companies with more or less solid financials.

I don't think you're Stockholm Syndromed, but I definitely think you're lacking in empathy. Think about it this way -- do you think you have been always productive and reliable, 100% of the time?

If not (let's say, 5% of the time you weren't), then you were the the unproductive or unreliable coworker, possibly due to factors in your life that you could not control. The idea of a union is that it insulates you from being instantly punished for factors you might not be able to control a little better than the market is doing right now. Look for news about new parents who were part of the layoffs recently.

Out of "individual performance and developing personal relationships", the "developing personal relationships" part of the equation is slowly fading. When was the last time you got a job purely on the basis of your personal relationships without having to jump through hoops to show your skills?

I am a little hesitant about unions too, but I'm at least willing to give them a chance based on the hack-and-slash behavior from industry leaders seeking to please their investors.

>> The idea of a union is that it insulates you from being instantly punished for factors you might not be able to control a little better than the market is doing right now (look for news about new parents who were part of the layoffs recently).

Since when has this been the idea of the union? Recall that nearly all union rules are set by seniority, not personal factors like having a bad day or having a child.

> Recall that nearly all union rules are set by seniority, not personal factors like having a bad day or having a child.

I'm unable to understand what you're saying here. Of course, union rules are not set by personal factors. I meant that they make it less easy to fire you for personal factors due to the heavier emphasis on due process in unionized workplaces.

In most non-union workplaces in the US, you can get fired because your boss had a bad day, or (practically) if you announce that you're pregnant. The latter case is theoretically protected, but it's very hard for an average person to get an appropriate lawyer, show a pattern and sue the workplace.

Pick a better objective metric that correlates well with job performance that can't be twisted by management to promote the ass kissers and snitches.

Unions will be delighted to adopt it.

> The idea of a union is that it insulates you from being instantly punished for factors you might not be able to control a little better than the market is doing right now.

Most people have good days and bad days. Any manager who's crazy enough to punish someone for having one bad day isn't a good manager. If that happens it's likely a manager specific issue

> When was the last time you got a job purely on the basis of your personal relationships without having to jump through hoops to show your skills?

This isn't a bad thing. More merit, less favoritism. People are hired based off of qualifications alone (ideally)

> Most people have good days and bad days. Any manager who's crazy enough to punish someone for having one bad day isn't a good manager. If that happens it's likely a manager specific issue

How about 2 bad months due to an illness? US companies are pretty much set up so that people in those situations often end up being let go. It's not a "manager specific issue", it's a broader cultural one.

> This isn't a bad thing. More merit, less favoritism.

Sure, but then the OP's point about personal relationships is neutralized, which is why they (if not you) might want to consider unions if they want to protect themselves from the stark meritocracy that you posit.

> People are hired based off of qualifications alone (ideally)

Yep, and kept employed based on the same, and let go immediately if there might be someone cheaper or if market conditions change even slightly and "It's good for the business!". This is raw capitalism. What we have been discovering in the past couple of months of layoffs is that not everyone has the taste for it. Those folks, including OP, might want to consider unionizing.

> which is why they (if not you) might want to consider unions if they want to protect themselves from the stark meritocracy that you posit.

Why would you prefer a system under which you have to know someone to get a good job instead of a system under which you just have to master a skill?

It's not just about being unproductive or unreliable. It's about being taken advantage of, even if and when you are fully productive and reliable. Hard work and individual productivity can and do get individually rewarded in many cases, but overall you are still entirely at the whims of your employer in an asymmetric power relationship. The entire purpose of collective bargaining and unions is to balance the power relationship.

The relationship between unions and company are as tenuous and they fulfil a dual role of parasite and symbiosis where from time to time they are symbiotic to the worker while being parasitic to the company and worker at different times. In ideal conditions they would not be necessary; however, companies at times become too powerful and forget or diminish the value of their workers giving unions an in.

In the end, in the US at least Unions induce inefficiencies and add drag to a company. Yes, on the one hand companies don't voluntarily want to provide more benefits than the bare minimum but on the other hand they want to avoid the straightjacket that Unions tend to bring.

I'm not saying we don't need unions but I am saying they are a very uneasy relationship for all parties but the union bosses.

I've been working along side(not in) an IT union for 15 years, what an interesting ride.. If you ever want to see how unproductive and lazy people can be this is the place!

I've only ever had one union job, and ever non-union job I've been in has had about the same number of unproductive lazy people.

The unproductive lazy people at the union job didn't have to kiss ass and bullshit quite as much. That's it.

P.S. Oh, and we had significantly better health care benefits at the union job.

The viability of your approach varies a lot depending on the type of job. For creative or technical jobs, sure. For people just on an assembly line doing boring repetitive work, you don't have those levers. Not everyone is a warrior poet who is going to network, and if we all could do that, then it wouldn't work anymore.

Aren’t you the same person who was worried your “voluntary” retirement might be held against you when/if you look for a job?

You are in the privileged position that your employer actually needs you specifically because you aren't easily replaced. That can change over time.

hi, im an IAM union diesel engine mechanic and have been for over a decade. Maybe I can help explain a bit.

in a 'blue collar' job like manufacturing or shipping or any of the trades like plumbing or mechanical maintenance, the only part of the business that doesnt see meaningful pushback is the labor. My job performance as a TIG welder in Texas as part of an oil and gas company was stellar, but not stellar enough to keep me from things like "mandatory overtime" and having to show up at a frigid gas field at 4 am to fix a line in chronic disrepair. part of the reason for this is a rosy picture of the rugged life of a tradesman, a misunderstanding of just how hard this work is, and a disconnected culture of leadership that see us as expendables/undesireables/expenses. Personal relationships only go so far when your op supervisor only shows up to berate you about tardiness or demand you work a weekend.

The union isnt a third party agency, its you. you decide what needs fixing, what doesnt work, and what you want changed to make your job more effective and a lot of times that includes your pay. when our shop unionized we did things like reduce shop floor noise, change how overtime gets assigned and made it voluntary, and even added paternity leave (we also get a say in our healthcare and opt in or out.) We even amended the companies equal opportunity employment statement to include LGBTQ+, something leadership resisted for a long time.

unions dont guarantee everyone works hard (thats culture), but they help to make sure everyone whos hired to work is treated fairly and with respect, and they fight to prevent common excesses in trade like wage theft, mandatory overtime, unfair scheduling, retaliation, and dangerous work conditions. They can push back on myopic or bad management decisions that harm customers or degrade quality.

The relationship isnt perfect. strikes can and do happen but when they do its mostly for good reasons like demanding sick leave (go get em CSX railworkers!!) and health insurance we were told the free market would provide us (looking at you Starbucks.) Federal law requires good faith collective bargaining, regardless of how many hit pieces on the evening news try to spin it any other way.

> Those CSX rail workers just didn't work hard enough, and poor struggling management can't afford to give them paid sick leave because they're just so lazy and they work too slowly to be able to take the time off.

The above should be obvious as cruel sarcasm, but based on how people talk (and vote), it seems that some people genuinely believe such things.

Maybe a little bit, but just in kinda applying that kind of high level business logic of a manager onto yourself as a person. It is really best to not worry so much on being "more productive" for your boss. You have a specific contract, which delineates how you trade your labor for money, that's it. They will make you think that your personal productivity is more than that, and yes, that your fellow workers who are less productive are somehow an obstacle to you. But you gotta realize at least deep down the bad faith in this way of thinking, even of you understandably need to act the part day to day.

Even if worker solidarity isn't you're thing, just for your mental health down the line you should adjust your thinking a little bit.

The theoretical reasoning behind unions is that they counteract the market power of companies over employees.

If this market power assymetry doesn't exist (for example software engineers in San Francisco), unions are not beneficial to the society but at least slightly beneficial to the average union member assuming the union is making good decisions. Because more market power is always better than less market power. It's always advantageous to be a monopoly.

If you're a highly productive employee, the company doesn't have market over you, you can easily find another job. But this may be different for an average employee.

> for example software engineers in San Francisco

Uhm... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Not sure what's your point.

Unions can and do exist in right to work states.

The point of a union is not job security. It's about giving workers collective power they may not otherwise have. Historically unions have been painted as extremely antagonistic towards companies in the United States, but there's no reason that has to be true.

A well-run union recognizes that their survival is tied to the company's survival, and as long as both sides engage in good faith, they should reach an agreement that's mutually beneficial. To your point about job security, no one I know in unions wants to keep all employees no matter what. What people want is protection from being fired for no reason. Usually that means something like getting a PIP and six weeks to improve performance. Is that such an unreasonable ask? That way the employee has a chance to keep their job, and the company can potentially avoid the expense of hiring and training a new employee.

  The point of a union is not job security. It's about giving workers collective power they may not otherwise have.

What would people do with this theoretical collective power? Probably job security combined with restrictions on work. Do as little as you can while being guaranteed a paycheck.

  What people want is protection from being fired for no reason.

How can people be fired for no reason? There is always a reason, whether it's related to company's performance, worker productivity or overall economic conditions.

I feel like you missed my point that it is not in a union's interest to protect low-performing workers. A union cannot survive without jobs, and union members are just as frustrated as anyone else when someone is not pulling their weight.

To your point about labor restrictions, unions gave us two day weekends and forty hour weeks. Modern labor practices are almost entirely defined by things unions fought for and standardized. The restrictions we have on work now didn't nebulously appear from the goodwill of employers.

People are absolutely fired for no reason all the time. Sometimes their boss is having a bad day. Maybe their manager is prejudiced against people wearing green shirts. Sometimes people are (illegally) fired for joining a union. People are not always rational, and that doesn't change between their work and personal lives.

All of this is true but there are companies that were driven out of business due to unrealistic demands from their union. As you pointed out, humans are quite often irrational and there's no reason to think that unions will always act in a rational manner that protects workers from losing their job through employer bankruptcies. Certainly, it is the goal to prevent that from happening, but humans being humans, often don't see how a particular short-term goal can end up harming their long-term goals. Of course, most companies, no matter how profitable, will cry poverty to each union request that's going to have costs to the company, so an adversarial relationship builds, with both sides insisting the other is acting in bad faith. Plenty of times, it's true for both sides.

So according to you unions are rational, omnisciencet and benevolent agents, while entrepreneurs are dumb irrational idiots who will randomly fire people all the time for wearing a green shirt.

  To your point about labor restrictions, unions gave us two day weekends and forty hour weeks. Modern labor practices are almost entirely defined by things unions fought for and standardized. The restrictions we have on work now didn't nebulously appear from the goodwill of employers.

What enabled more leisure and higher living standards for workers was harnessing efficient sources of energy, especially in the 19th century and creating machines to do a lot of hard work. Without efficient energy and machines, everything has to be done by humans, so reducing work hours means worse living standards. The fact that living standards were rising while cutting back on hours tells you there was something else doing the hard work and that was machines powered by efficient energy sources. That was the real enabler of leasure, cozy office work and high living standards.

> So according to you unions are rational, omnisciencet and benevolent agents, while entrepreneurs are dumb irrational idiots who will randomly fire people all the time for wearing a green shirt.

Why so antagonistic? By the way getting antagonistic doesn't make your argument better, it just makes you look frustrated and sour. Using logical fallacies like false binaries also isn't helpful.

The point isn't that one set is 'rational and good' and the other is 'frivolous and bad', the point is that in order for markets to work (labor is a market) there must be a even playing field so that parties can leverage their value for others without getting exploited.

When you have a society setup like the USA, without a real safety net and where periods of unemployment lead to instability financially, personally, and healthcare-wise, then employees are not able to properly leverage their value.

The proposal of 'work for me or your life falls apart' is pretty devastating to labor markets because it makes people settle for bad deals.

Unions are one method of trying to level this, by saying 'if you try to make me work on a ledge and don't give me a harness, then we are all going to shut down your business and not let you hire someone more desperate to do it' then one person is able to leverage the actual value of labor to bargain with the employer.

On the other hand, why would people use their collective power to sink the company they work for? No company, no jobs. In reality the power has to be balanced between the two, and both parties need to act carefully and rationally.

And in fact, sometimes I feel the power goes the other way a little bit. Unions are big boosters for industry in a way that can be negative for the public. So you’ve got “pro-business” politicians supporting some project (let’s say highway expansion) alongside “pro-labor” politicians. The glowing blue orb manufacturers agree with their unions that people need more glowing blue orbs.

That’s in the case of a traditional trade union anyway, there are other models, and if there’s one big union that represents horseshoe workers (blacksmiths? Puddlers? Idk how a horseshoe is made I guess) and rubber tire manufacturers well, uh, they’ve got some things to discuss.

Anyway, much ink has been used discussing this by people better informed than me, but yeah, I agree, it is nuanced.

> Usually that means something like getting a PIP and six weeks to improve performance. Is that such an unreasonable ask?

Isn't this what parent took issue with? If you can't fire the underperformers, where's the incentive to get shit done?

You can fire them after six weeks, which in the grand scheme of things is not that long. I've been places where it takes longer to get requirements back from clients.

> If you can't fire the underperformers, where's the incentive to get shit done?

The assumption with you guys is always three parts:

  1. That the company actors know what good performance is, therefor they can determine underperformance
  2. That underperformance is meaningful in the context (taking care of a sick kid for a month is underperformance, but not meaningful when the kid is no longer sick)
  3. That the company actors are being truthful about the reason

When in reality I know that company actors rarely understand good performance or thus underperformance, they rarely consider meaningfulness, and rarely are they actually telling the truth about the reason.

> The point of a union is not job security. It's about giving workers collective power they may not otherwise have.

No, it's about giving workers currently employed by the company collective power. This means keeping potential employees out by setting a threshold for financial compensation or number of hours available to work. The victims here (unemployed and underemployed people) have no collective power and don't appear in data so they are ignored.

this take is kind of breathtaking? There's an entire history of workers unions in the US and around the world, famous spurring events like the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory disaster, surely you aren't just waving the entire subject off as "absurd", thinking that whole factories of garment workers for example would have success via "individual performance" ? like they'd have fire exits just for the better performing workers? I can't even get my head around this take.

They are comparing an office job to a back breaking trade (plumbing, metal working, electrician) or manufacturing job. Factory jobs have lots of people doing the same reparative job, individual performance only goes so far.

Would the bosses really care if you are the fastest chicken skinner or bolt screwer?

It exemplifies the "individual exceptionalism" attitude of many Americans, wherein they attribute all their successes to themselves and all their failures to external forces beyond their control.

yeah that's the baseline attitude of Hacker Newsers, that post went way above and beyond all that in its ignorance :)

A decent union is mostly about job conditions, not job security - collective bargaining prevents a "race to the bottom" where abusive conditions creep in due to there always being some people who'll do the job anyway. A good example is the Screen Actors Guild which imposes all kinds of minimum conditions, for example, due to which all kinds of safety issues in filming are handled quite decently (even if stuff does still happen), despite the fact that many desperate wannabe actors would easily sign a contract where they agree to whatever conditions the company imposes.

> conditions creep in due to there always being some people who'll do the job anyway

don't worry, minimum wage laws keep those pesky people unemployed

I can’t tell if you’re against minimum wage laws or not but I’ll say regardless that minimum wage laws show a boat in worker income and small employment effects:

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

The 5% of economists who suck up to politicians are always able to find data that shows that if you set a floor on the price of labor it somehow doesn't affect demand. The other 95%–the ones who aren't grifters–know that the only effect of minimum wage laws is unemployment for those who would otherwise make less than the price floor. This has devastating effects on teenage and young adult unemployment, and prevents those people from gaining experience, which is highly correlated with income.

Everyone can already set their own price floor under which they will not work. There's zero good reason to make it illegal for people to choose their own minimum. This is third parties making the decision because they feel icky about it. No one who's ever had a low wage would've preferred to not work at all. Ask all the people e.g. who worked for $10/h before California raised the minimum wage to $15/h.

When less experienced workers agree to receive less in compensation it's because they understand that they are not just being compensated financially, they are also gaining experience.

As individuals negotiating with a business, you’re always going to be at a massive disadvantage due to the balance of resources. The company is bigger than the people you’re building relationships with.

Unions, done well, perform a lot of similar functions to insurance providers: they allow many people to collectively bargain in a way that can level the playing field in negotiations.

Do you enjoy free Saturdays? Paternity leave? Maternity leave? A pension? Health insurance? Holidays? A 40 hour work week? A safe working environment? Workplace training programs?

And so on. All of these and more are the result of unions. You by your lonesome wouldn't stand a chance negotiating all of the above with the captains of industry, no matter how rare your talents.

Probably. I think you should start by understanding the workers' conditions and demands better. Your post mentions job security and puts in quotes, and yeah, that is one thing the workers mentioned, but they've talked about more, too.

If you've been treated with dignity and fairly compensated for your effort at your previous jobs, that's great! Not every employer is like that, though, and no amount of personal relationships can change them. In that situation, you gotta demand it together with your fellow worker.

Reflecting on the latest big tech lay offs. Decisions about whom were targeted were made by folks 3-4 levels above you who doesnt know you personally and even your performance might not matter to them.

When talking about unions the focus is generally on hourly wage jobs where the skills are quite transferable and thus workers’ leverage is less.

A factory worker installing bolts on a panel in some car isn’t gonna get opportunities to show “individual performance” or get to develop “personal relationships” with their supervisor who’s probably managing dozens of people

In context of white collar salaries jobs, esp software engineering I agree with you 100%.

I also live in a “right to fire for whatever” state, often referred to as “right to work” which really means the right of employers to ignore union agreements and compensate individuals less if the individual agrees to it. It’s already illegal at the federal level to force someone to be part of a union and states like ours just work harder to make sure we don’t end up collectively bargaining for better conditions by controlling the supply of our labor of which our employers are the consumers (literally basic market economics and nothing more).

Your statement brings to mind this quote from Martin Niemöller, who was sympathetic to the Nazis until he witnessed the escalation and reach of their beliefs:

> First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. > Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a trade unionist. > Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. > Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me. > —Martin Niemöller

> Workers at the Buffalo plant told Bloomberg that Tesla tracks their computer keystrokes to monitor how they work, prompting some employees to refrain from taking bathroom breaks.

It’s honestly kind of mind boggling that this is even legal.

In the absence of labor regulation, employment sprints in the direction of slavery.

Keyloggers are nothing like chattel slavery. Melodramatic comparisons make labor advocates sound unreasonable. It’s fine to push for less intrusive performance monitoring on its own merits.

Rather, the point is to illustrate how the default state of the employer-employee relationship is to be as unfavorable to the employee as the employer can get away with, where slavery is merely the extreme end of the scale that employers aspire to.

if the "employer-employee relationship" was not a positive sum transaction then it wouldn't happen

This is damning with faint praise. When Clint Eastwood pulls out a gun, tosses Tuco a shovel, and tells him to start digging, that's also a positive sum transaction, but it may bode poorly for Tuco.

That's very disputable given the costs to Tuco and in any case, the modal positive sum is that both employee and employer profit.

I don't know that reference but no one we're talking about here is under threat of death from their employer. You are an intellectually dishonest person.

why would it be illegal? employees are welcome to find jobs elsewhere

"Why would lack of air conditioning be illegal? Sweatshop workers are welcome to find jobs elsewhere."

yeah you clearly don't understand what the alternatives are

If this campaign gets traction, what are the odds Elon _doesn't_ run afoul of the NLRB?

"Was I not supposed to fire everyone I caught handing out a union card?"

Does Tesla / Musk view their employees as people with their own lives, dreams, and aspirations.. or are they merely faceless resources?

The answer to this question will explain a lot.

Sometimes a little bit of empathy goes a long ways. Even in capitalism.

Kinda ironic that the people trying to automate human tasks are themselves treated as robots.

Not that it matters much as a matter of labor policy, but the factory in question is Gigafactory 2, which is a photovoltaic cell fab that employs (per Wikipedia) 1500 people. They make the roofing products, not cars or batteries.

Per Bloomberg, this is specifically regarding a group of workers who "label data for Tesla’s Autopilot technology."

Some reading about the factory - https://www.investigativepost.org/2023/01/11/teslas-solar-fa...

Space Rupert is going to hate this

On the bright side, if Tesla had a union, Biden might acknowledge that they actually exist in this world.

Like he acknowledged the rail workers?

Going to be big trouble when the balloon workers of the world unite.

They’re labelers, which are being quickly replaced by automation. This is a bid to secure their jobs long-term.

While I get their unease.... moves like this in a Globalized economy (supported by most Unions) might just prompt Tesla (or any other) to find an overseas shop to do this work for them. It's really a lose-lose for them, in my view. They may buy themselves some temporary "relief" but it'll accelerate business propensity to find more economical alternatives.

Yes and ultimately they will reduce the headcount to a fraction of current size since autolabeling will work in most scenarios. To my knowledge this has already happened… labelers now are tagging new scenarios for the autolabeler to grok for future learning passes.

I don't live or been to Western Upstate NY... but I get the feeling their mindset is still pre-80s union and have a hard time realizing the realities of working in technology or technology adjacent industries. You cannot capture an industry. If you make doing business with them more difficult than necessary, they will seek friendlier terms elsewhere. And it's a shame, Buffalo deserves a chance to integrate into the modern economy so they should take advantage of these toe-holds to attract more industry interest to the area.

Idk why people are downvoting me, it’s 100% facts. Google “Project Vacation”

I didn't downvote you, but this part describing their motivation reads as opinion, not facts:

"This is a bid to secure their jobs long-term."

I'm not anti-opinions, just responding to your 100% facts comment.

Let me rephrase, it either ensures their jobs stick around (perhaps doing a different function?) or that they will receive well above industry average severance.

There’s no point in unionizing unless that leverage equals some sort of compensation down the road.

You'd be surprised how many workers organize primarily because they feel disrespected.

I'm not suggesting it's the case here, just letting you know from my experience with union organizing.

I wonder what made them feel disrespected

If you ever see me at a bar I’ve got plenty of stories of some of the crazy shit people deal with from their boss (or customers/patients).

How would that work? Threaten to go on strike if they're replaced? Tesla would likely tell them to go ahead and just implement the automation. Seems like the only way this works is if there is a much larger union for all employees and the union wants to protect these jobs as part of keeping itself as large as possible.

They trying to encourage Tesla abandoning that plant? The lure of more factories China (or even Texas) is hard enough to resist as it is.

LOL they’re office workers who “label data”. Meanwhile the factory workers all have seven figure options grants and aren’t interested.

Considering their work is keeping people from being driven straight into trees and other cars, I don't know why you'd laugh at what their job consists of.

But yes, the article mentions that Tesla has been working on auto-labeling for years and it's interesting tech that I hope is successful because it could improve safety.

> the factory workers all have seven figure options grants

I would genuinely like to see a citation for that. That's wonderful if true, but probably too expensive to be real.

I wouldn’t be surprised that UAW be behind that. It’s a very powerful organisation having a lot of political power.

They see Tesla as a threat to their system as Tesla is the only in the US not part of it and they are doing better than all the other car companies.

I know someone who saved companies from bankruptcy, usually heavy industries. When he get hired he install security cameras and other measures and after a few week usually find out that a lot of people are constantly stealing valuable materials from the company. It’s always people in the union with some friends that work on the floor.

He confront them, fire them and a few months later the company become viable again. He found out that the most corrupt people are almost always in the Union organisation.

> they are doing better than all the other car companies

By which metric? Their market cap is astronomical, but they, to be frank, don't actually make a lot of cars. Not to mention that virtually every product release is delayed ad nauseum, FSD from Tesla is both a pipe dream and a liability nightmare, and other manufacturers, both foreign and domestic, are rapidly catching up with appealing EVs.

Profit per electric car[1]. They beat all competitors by a very large margin.

Heh, it looks like people disagree that this is a valid metric parent was asking for or disagree that the data is valid. Oh, goodness.

[1]https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-...

soecifically, tesla profitability per vehicle is 8 times that of toyota (as of Nov 2022).

And Toyota places second, and all others have worse numbers. And Ford a strong contender loses money per electric vehicle sold.

Just like Tesla did when their volumes were statistically insignificant.

I suspect that's largely because they have massive sunk costs since they've been doing it for longer than anyone else. I sincerely don't think you can count on that lasting. Especially since some models are getting up in the years, and their shoddy build quality is becoming increasingly evident to consumers.

In 2022 Tesla produced 1.3 million vehicles and will produce 1.8 - 2 million this year, how can you quantify that as not a lot of cars?

By others rapidly catching up do you mean announcing future models instead of shipping actual EVs? No one is within an order of magnitude of making the number of EVs that Tesla does in their market segment (not counting PHEVs or micro cars in China)

> I know someone who saved companies from bankruptcy, usually heavy industries. When he get hired he install security cameras and other measures and after a few week usually find out that a lot of people are constantly stealing valuable materials from the company. It’s always people in the union with some friends that work on the floor.

It always strikes me how unions in the US are subject to these kinds of casual stereotyping attacks that would be totally outside the pale anywhere else.

Well, that can go both ways. Maybe your friend is an union-busting crook hired by those companies to push out union leaders via fake investigations! It could be that he got caught trying to have a chilling effect on unions via electronic surveillance (a practice that the NLRB is cracking down on [1]), and made up stories about stealing in an effort to justify his snooping.

(I don't actually mean that last paragraph, it just demonstrates how you can make up these sorts of stories out of thin air in order to appeal to people's existing prejudices. If you want to have a reasonable conversation, a good starting point would be some statistics about union v/s non-union employee workplace theft.)

[1] https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news-story/nlrb-general-c...

The structure of unions is such that it facilitates and encourages seniority as well as corruption including ties to the mob. It's no accident that unions are targets of corruption by the feds for various forms of malfeasance.

The exact same things could be said about companies themselves.

"The structure of companies is such that it facilitates and encourages seniority as well as corruption including ties to the mob. It's no accident that companies are targets of corruption by the feds [1] for various forms of malfeasance."

You're basically saying that crime exists among groups of people where there is a power differential. I mean, sure? I still don't understand [2] why unions are so specifically a target of it as compared to, say, insider traders. You don't typically see people saying we should just not have an executive board because some have been caught insider trading -- that would be absurd!

[1] https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/white-collar-crime

[2] I suspect though, that it has something to do with the typical judgements of "blue-collar" crime as being more heinous than "white-collar" crime.

Union crime _is_ white collar crime (they may represent blue collar workers but the reps are starched white collar workers --and aside from intimidation and other forms of violence). But why are Unions such magnets for corruption? For corporations you have various forms of oversight like SEC, SOX, and many others. In unions there is more of an unspoken code not to whistleblow because they are "you" and you don't wanna be a rat and target of violence so corruption goes less checked.

EXACTLY no one can name a single crime committed by a company. Its only the union orgs within them. Look at Enron. The only crime commited by Enron was in its ultra left wing accounting depts. Those poor C levels were nothing but heros!

Yeah, I don't know why the Saintly unions get tarred like that. Just because some engage in racketeering and have ties to organized crime, right? It's so weird!

Even if someone were to believe you that unions are inherently prone to crime and corruption in a way unique to any other organization, here in the states they have a tiny fraction of the influence they had 100 years ago. You're talking about the unions ties to the mob like we're all living in 1930s Chicago or something.

You mean CEOs?

That's a pretty big conclusion you're drawing there, and it's not something that's been supported by much evidence.

To be clear, the contention is "Most heavy industries go bankrupt because union members are constantly stealing supplies from the company."

Consider me skeptical. And I'm not a union member, let alone UAW.

> To be clear, the contention is "Most heavy industries go bankrupt because union members are constantly stealing supplies from the company."

I didn't read it like that, and I'm surprised anyone can read it this way.

It seems to me the contention is that someone who steals from a company does other things too that lower the overall productivity of the company. One bad apple and all that. The supporting evidence was that once those people were fired, the company starting performing well.

At least that's how I understand the OP's argument.

Ok my claim is that if you go into an established unionised company that is going down if you look carefully you will probably find shady things going on and that people from the union will be at the center of it most of the time.

Those position of power attract psychopathy personality, people that want to profit from the work of other but have no skin in the game. A bit like politic.

What you need to be good in those job is to be good at pretending to care of others while destroying people that get in your way.

And it's always some capitalist stealing wages from hundreds (or thousands) of people at a time. Incidentally, has Twitter paid the 3 months severance it owes ex-Twitter employees yet?

people on the factory floor are able to steal enough valuable materials that a heavy industry company (I mean, multiple companies) approaches bankruptcy? and management doesn’t have sufficient inventory logs to notice something is amiss?

that doesn’t sound like a true story.

People are not stupid, they steal the valuable things first.

I think it was copper wire, specialized tools, etc.

Sometime the margin between profit and loss is small. Add a bit of stealing, demotivation, corruption, bad management and you are in the red.

I don’t think the money from the thefts made a huge difference in the balance sheets.

Unions are almost always good for employees, at least in theory (assuming the union is making good decisions). More market power is better than less market power.

You are talking about Tesla, who will give you a 40h contract, then expect you to work for 60h with no extra pay. Who is the bigger thief?

Don’t take the job then.

The UAW guide to UAW made vehicles is hardly comprehensive. Lots of automakers building cars in the US in factories not in the UAW.

https://region1.uaw.org/member-info-0/2022-uaw-union-built-v...

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