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Comment by bluGill | Hacker News Reader

Unions have not helped their cause over here. They have regularly enforced paying bad people more than good people because the only measure they allow is years on the job. They regularly prevent people who want to move into management from doing so (not to be confused with people who don't want to!) be not allowing anything learned to count for your management role. They regularly discourage learning something more. They regularly yell that doing better work just helps your employer and will not help you.

Unions don't have to be that way, but all the examples I have of unions are places I would not want to work. Thus why would I want a union in my job?

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> They have regularly enforced paying bad people more than good people because the only measure they allow is years on the job.

This is blatant propaganda. Stop repeating it, it's just false. There are plenty of unions where compensation has nothing to do with seniority, just look at SAG-AFTRA: Daniel Radcliffe was making a lot more than actor playing Mr. Dursely, despite the the latter having more acting experience than the former's experience living.

All you do by perpetuating lies about unions is making management more powerful. It doesn't benefit you at all. Yet here you are, going to bat for them.

It is not false. It is not true for all unions, but it is true for some.

Management is NOT your enemy. This is probably the worst lie unions keep repeating. The best solutions are win-win. Yes management has different interests, but that doesn't make them an enemy.

Fundamentally, why do we work? We work for money. The employees want to make as much money as possible, the employer wants to make as much as possible. Management, representing capital, can make more money by paying their employees less. Therein lies the fundamental, unsolvable conflict between labor and management.

There are win win solutions to that conflict which makes it solvable.

By the company as a whole making more money, everyone can make more money. But no matter how much more money the company makes, capital and by extension management can make more money by paying the employees less.

Here’s how I think about it —

There’s a value X that’s the absolute minimum you would work for, any less and you quit today.

There’s a value Y that’s the absolute maximum I would pay you, any penny more and I fire you immediately.

Y - X is up for grabs, and there are zero moral proscriptions I would give to any allocation of this between employee and employer. Each and every aspect of the employee-employer relationship is advantaged already in favor of the employer (resource disparity, implicit solidarity from company structure, regulations). Unions tend to reduce my share of Y-X. If I was a laborer, I’d prefer a union.

E: I’ve seen unions that are counter examples to each of your complaints so not really interesting to me to think too much about your own personal experience with unions.

I've seen counter examples of the unions as well. However overall what I've seen has left me with a bad taste.

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