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Comment by alfor | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

> 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.

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)

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-...

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.

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.

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.

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?

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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