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Comment by lazzlazzlazz | Hacker News Reader

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> ...research that shows that unions actually depress wages

Citation?

A rational person would agree that unions, like anything else, have pros and cons. They can do good, but also can do harm. It's the commenters here seem to fly off on emotional rants that derail the conversations. The thinking is capital takes less risk than labor; and that model of thinking makes it easy to ascribe faults to capital, but not to labor. You can't argue your way out of that. When you have to manage a bunch of employees and run payroll, bonuses, benefits, increments, that is when you'll know who takes more risk.

I'll believe you that capital is the bigger risk taker when limited liability is revoked.

or if we change bankruptcy such that labour is paid out rather than creditors.

laws are setup to reduce and limit the risk for capital, and capital can hedge its risks where labour cannot. Generally nobody is able to work to full time jobs

Um, Capital sits at the bottom of the payment waterfall, labor, suppliers, lenders, creditors all have priority claims. Capital returns are vastly more volatile than labor compensation. Most startups burn and die, but employees still get paid (keeping illegal practices aside). Capital bears most of the uncertainty that labor doesn't.

To argue your point, the strongest argument is that labor cannot easily diversify or easily re-train for new sectors. But there aren't entire job sectors being wiped out with any kind of regularity or high frequency. Mostly people take skills from one job into another.

And speaking more about the US, social safety nets (not arguing that they're perfect) have some role to play when labor faces downsides. There is no "unemployment" for a company (again I'm talking about average businesses without cherry picking the too big to fail examples - which are a tiny percentage when looking at the number of small/medium/large businesses that operate around the world).

Citations? I’m not aware of this strong a conclusion. In fact, my understanding is that generally wages go up.

Doing my own research, ChatGPT summarizes the state as generally unions improve wages and working conditions for employees much more than they pay in premiums. This has gone down since the 1970s but is still a noticeable effect. Indeed the 40 hour work week comes from unions. There is a negative effect on profitability, but that’s subject to interpretation:

> The negative effect on profitability from unionization may reflect that unions raise labour costs (via higher wages/benefits) and may impose work rules or other constraints that reduce flexibility. The classic model: higher labour cost → lower margins, unless offset by higher productivity or price increases. But the productivity and growth effects are less clear: many studies find little or no negative effect on productivity or capital structure, suggesting that unions may shift the distribution of returns (towards workers) rather than clearly kill growth.

So it may be worth revisiting the research you cited so decisively against unions as it likely contradicts your belief about them.

>Doing my own research, ChatGPT summarizes...

One of these things is not like the other.

No but one step further than OP went making unsubstantiated claims that actually contradicts the actual research that paints a much more complicated picture.

>... the actual research that paints a much more complicated picture.

Given that ChatGPT is still very much in a "trust, but verify" state (on a daily basis it confidently states falsehoods about subject matter I'm highly familiar with, for instance), I'm wondering if you followed up to confirm that the data at the sources provided by ChatGPT accurately reflected what it told you.

If you're going to insist that others revisit their research, I would hope that you're making a good faith effort towards doing the same.

I did actually check some of the sources and they seemed solid.

I believe you replied to the wrong comment

When your industry is notorious for insane hours, low pay, disgusting crunch, and covering up sexual abuse, a union seems reasonable.

Cherry picking examples to paint broad brush/strokes doesn't work. There are game companies all over the world, and have varying levels of work/life balance. Your crude caricature is just that; crude.

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