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Comment by doctorpangloss | Hacker News Reader

I'm a business owner. I am "pro-union."

Do you have a union in your business? If not, why not? If yes, what is the experience like?

Usually the pro-union business owners who don't have unions justify it like this" "I'm such a a good boss that my workers don't need a union, If I ever hear that they want to unionize I would be shocked and would think I failed" - Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips.

Genuine question, if I was a business owner, how would I force my employees to join a union?

Isn’t it a non-managerial activity (on purpose)?

Seems like there would be very limited influence on creating one

Linus’s position and other people like him is indefensible.

In European countries, you do an agreement with an industry union, everyone on the building gets the agreement, regardless of how they feel about it.

From this side of the pound, usually the large majority is happy with the benefits, even without being themselves union members.

That is why countries with strong union culture have negociation rounds of industry leaders with the main union groups, to discuss how the sector will be handled for the current fiscal year.

Nonsense. Ultimately, it's a zero sum game and therefore there can not be shared interest between business owners and Unions.

You may have detente or even just a laid back employee base.

But you're only pro-Union insofar as you are financially and personally comfortable with what the Union demands at the penalty of consequences.

Unless there is some kind of non-standard relationship between yourself and the Union, then there isn't a direct connection between what they will eventually demand and what you are willing to give at the cost of your business.

Your pro-Union stance can only be solely due to lack of personal stakes, and therefore it is only a matter of time or a change in labor circumstances. Unless your vision for your company is as a total cooperative.

Zero-sum games get more complicated when you care about the other players.

>there can not be shared interest between business owners and Unions.

There absolutely can. The point of a zero-sum game is that one party cannot win more without the other winning less. This is only a problem if all parties care exclusively about winning the most, rather than about winning enough sustainably. If you value your workers and care about them and want them to have happy, good lives, then you can absolutely find an alliance with a union.

It's not like a criminal justice case where one side has to win and the other has to lose, it's like a divorce where if everyone maintains a level head and allows the existence of humanity in the other side, everyone can come out happy. It only becomes adversarial when one side decides to make it that way.

>Ultimately, it's a zero sum game and therefore there can not be shared interest between business owners and Unions.

The interests are misaligned, but is it really unbelievable that there's some minority of business owners actually

1. Do care about their labor?

2. Feel the best long term profit strategy is one of retention instead of the cheapest labor?

3. Whose primary goals are not to maximize profit margins?

It isn’t a zero sum game. It’s commerce which is a positive sum game.

At the end of the day, the customer (the business) values the labor it’s buying more than money it costs and the vendor (the employees) value the money received more than the labor sold. Both sides end up with more value then they started with - positive sum.

If that was not the case, neither side would agree to the transaction.

Labor creates something new. So not zero-sum, not hardly.

There are of course shared interests - almost everything! The business, the customer, the cash flow, everything matters to both of them.

Not sure what if anything was being suggested by that comment? It seems like nonsense.

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