Comment by gklitz | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gklitz | Hacker News Reader

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Great question. Ledt assume that you’re discussing a topic like working hours. Your company says you have to work. 14h each day, and you argue that if you have to do that, you’ll be sleep deprived, make mistakes and be so low productivity that it wouldn’t benefit the company, especially since they would have to pay you more with a constant hourly wage than if you worked fewer hours and was more productive. The company argues: “STFU pessent, you’ll work when we say, how long we say and exactly how we say or you’re fired this instance, now get back in line before I duct your pay for the time you’re wasting by even thinking you’re worthy of talking to someone in management!”

Now in that scenario the worker has no power at all, even though it actually is as we all know today, a proven benefit to have resonable working hours for the company.

So if you have a union and all the workers can collectively go “we need to talk about work hours or we strike” you force through the policy that is ultimately beneficial to the company, even though management hates the idea of there being 6hours more per day that their wage slaves are not at the work benches.

Why would workers argue for fewer hours if it doesn’t end up costing the company net profits? Because they are humans, not machines, and not everything in this world boils down to pure profit driven motives.

This is a bad example and overall I don't see the argument. For decades companies did force workers into extremely long hours. The standardization of the 40 hour work week was in some sense a collective action effort, starting with the request of the National Labor Union in the U.S. in 1866. [1] Prior to those efforts, workers in industrialized positions were indeed working 80 to 100 hours a week on average, with little to no recourse.

Beyond that, you ask 'Why would workers argue for fewer hours if it doesn't end up costing the company net profits? The workers don't care about net profits, at least at the expense of their own time. Time is money, and if the company has more of your time, you have less...

[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-the-40-hour-workw...

>Prior to those efforts, workers in industrialized positions were indeed working 80 to 100 hours a week on average, with little to no recourse.

And much lower productivity. Even by recent metrics we know the modern work is twice as efficient, but apparently the average hours per week worked is around 55-60 hours.

That's part of the point. It in fact has quickly dimishing returns to work more than X hours, and past that there probably is some physical breakdown point wher ea worker loses productivety in the mid-long term (e.g. working 120 hours for 2 weeks, then sick for a month. Congrats, you lost 80 hours of productiviy + whatever middling returns happened) but companies won't budge without collective action.

> Now in that scenario the worker has no power at all

The worker holds all the power, so long as another worker isn't an asshole ready to screw over his fellow man. What's the company going to do if the worker balks? Hire nobody? Not going to happen.

Which is what a union ultimately serves: Establishing a brotherhood where the workers agree to not be assholes towards each other, to not screw each other over, so that when a worker decides the terms are un-agreeable another worker isn't waiting to pounce to take his position. This retains a worker's power.

But if workers had common decency to begin with...

>What's the company going to do if the worker balks? Hire nobody? Not going to happen.

These days, yes. They get rid of Bob and make Andy do his and Bob's work (with no extra pay, of course), promising to replace Bob over the next 6 months while the company actually has a hiring freeze.

I wish more "assholes" would realize this before trying to turn against their peers.

> But if workers had common decency to begin with...

What on earth do you mean? If a job gets posted do you ask them “did the last person get fired? If so I don’t want this job” to have “common decency”?

> and not everything in this world boils down to pure profit driven motives.

that's not true. In fact, the polar opposite is true - every decision is in service to profit and the bottom line. It is only laws that prevent slavery. It is only laws that prevent over-work or exploitation.

I would say that it is better to have regulation over unions. Unions may or may not act in the interest of the employee - it's a hit or miss depending on the actual union in question. But as a citizen, you have some semblence of a vote on the gov't, and at least everybody gets the same gov't.

The problem with government (or too-large unions) is that different jobs have different employment concerns. It's hard to legislate in a way that covers all cases from seasonal farm work to IT office jobs to airline pilots. A union gives you more fine-grained representation to address the problems specific to your profession and workplace.

> I would say that it is better to have regulation over unions.

It’s not an either/or, there’s unions and there is labor law, and labor law is in large part written to codify the trade offs in incentives between workers and companies. Are you really trying to argue that workers should have no say in the laws written to govern them?

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