Don't. HN is far from a monolith on this issue.
To the degree I've seen even a semblance of consensus, it's in animosity towards public-sector unions and gentle support for blue-collar private-sector unions. Where it turns to total anarchy is when we debate unionizing tech workers. (They tend to be fun reads.)
haha, true. Lots of straw men creep into that discussion.
> I can't live off $500,000/yr, what if I get laid off? We need to unionize to protect our jobs and make sure our salary keeps up with inflation!
Just wait until we talk about VP's unionizing.
Bad negotiator? Anxious? A woman? Congratulations! You're probably doing better than you could on your own.
Amazing negotiator? Could sell ACs in Alaska? Congratulations! You get all the fruits of your labor and your new coworkers immediately love you.
I think what messes people up isn't that they think their temporarily embarrassed millionaires, but that their temporarily undiscovered principal engineers who deserve more money for pulling the same cards as everyone else on the team.
Even a business like Apple has some number that is the most it can pay to all of its employees. And if there is a maximum, then that means it can be divided any number of ways.
Keep going along this track and “max(individual rate, group rate)” will break down as you winnow down the definition of group.
There isn't some fixed bag of money $X that gets distributed to employees, where X is uninfluenced by the market. If the labor market happened to change such that X must be more, companies would have to pay X or do without some employees.
EDIT: I think we actually agree. Roundabout way of saying the same thing.
Except this misses the fact that negotiating for your own pay raise is now suddenly harder. Suppose there's a company with 100 non-supervisory employees, each of which $200k worth of value for the company, gets paid $100k. Under a regime where everyone's pay is automatically bumped up to the highest rate, if you're trying to negotiate a $10k raise for yourself, you're actually negotiating for the company to part with $1M ($10k * 1000 employees). Without such a regime, a negotiated $10k raise for yourself only costs the company $10k. Obviously negotiating in the latter situation would be easier to pull off.
Of course, the real world is more complicated than this, because the union can hire trained negotiators or whatever, but your simplistic model of "max(individual rate, group rate) so everyone wins" makes no sense.
I've read the other comments too. The most interesting ones were the people who previously had "conventional, blue collar" union jobs and didn't like their union. There are certainly real problems, but thankfully there are a number of "reform caucuses" right now winning elections that can start to fix them.
If there's a relatively open market, non-onerous regulation, and some money to be made, then businesses will spring up and the best engine of salary-raising, other employers, will work without intervention.
It's not a perfect solution, but it also requires paying close to zero taxes to work. Every regulation is more cost paid in tax by employers to central and regional government, and also within every business as they have to employ more people to ensure they stay compliant. This is all money that could go to salaries / lower prices / higher quality elsewhere / dividend payments. It's not free.
And so you don't need to be a Fountainhead-quoting 17 year old to question this stuff. It's a fundamental lever on how economies and productivity work.
It sounds like "overhead depresses wages", but outside of a few special cases like Academia, I don't really see much evidence of that. Until recently we had chronically loose labor markets. There is simply no reason to presume employers are handing out all they can in that case. And the ones that are and not paying above-market wages are, by definition, low-productivity businesses that do not deserve to exist.
That's the great thing about high employment: as the "floor" of acceptable comp/working conditions goes up, we find all sorts of shitty (typically small) businesses that cannot make it. Those shitty businesses do fine in the Obama years when everyone is desperate for work, but they can't cut it now. They go under when they can't hire, and average productivity rises accordingly.
I didn't say that there was.
> That's the great thing about high employment
Not if it's coming from the public sector. Then it's government taking taxes from businesses and using it to pay people more than said business can. Saying that means the businesses shouldn't exist feels like a statement of faith.
> we find all sorts of shitty (typically small) businesses that cannot make it
We also find good small businesses that can't, and bad public sector ones. We just call the public sector ones "underfunded" when that happens.
* In the US there's a narrative that unions add layers to bureaucracy to a process that should (from an IMO limited "pro free market" position) efficiently settle on an optimal solution all by itself. Many people just by default accept this argument, and to be entirely fair US unions definitely got complacent in the last few decades.
* Many HN commenters are affluent tech workers or entrepeneurs, and some are bosses or capital owners themselves. People in this first group kind of "won" the economy, and in the second group actively benefit from workers negotiating 1-on-1. Group (1) has a tendency to not relate well or understand the position of the typical union constituency, Group (2) has financial motivation to push back against it.
Another position is that unions destroy companies by forcing a cost structure which dooms the company to fail.
Lots of people think one or both plus other things.
On the other hand teachers union, I don’t know what they have done. That is still a thankless job, poor pay for most of the career, dwindling benefits, and even situations where teachers have physical security issues.
More seriously, I don't have a problem with Unions - except when they start to get propped up by the government. I don't have a problem with UPS cutting a deal with the teamsters. If the government steps in and sets the deal or the government steps in and says that all shippers have to use the teamsters - that's when I have problems.
It really is.
Workers in certain industries have been pushed to the absolute breaking point. This is exactly what unions were meant to solve.
You can only take so much before you get pushback.
This is good for the US. Unions built the middle class in prior generations.
I used to be a commercial pilot and a federal ATC. Unions were an option.