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Comment by functionmouse | Hacker News Reader

I used to work at a call center for a large (fortune 500) company. But that company did not sign my paychecks. It was a shell company with a different name, so that the company could not be held accountable when someone inevitably jumped from the roof.

Since then accountability sinks have stood out to me. I'm going to side with the Union on this one. And plus, unions are good.

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Good? They've been a mixed bag in my life. Unions are made up of people and they come with all of the good and bad of people. I watched a union refuse to support a colleague of mine. Why? Because the people in the union were competing against him for resources and they wanted him gone. And they succeeded. I've never really liked unions after that. I suppose I can see some good, but for the most part the union ends up being another branch of management with a few slightly different powers.

> I watched a union refuse to support a colleague of mine. Why? Because the people in the union were competing against him for resources and they wanted him gone. And they succeeded. I've never really liked unions after that

Wait until you see what management does to workers, like fail to pay them on time, give them inhumane working conditions, or fire them arbitrarily.

Sarcasm aside, I've never understood this genre of comment. One second-hand bad experience and you seem opposed to unions for life? Unions are the only way workers can have anything like even footing with management.

I've noticed a lot of Americans have an anti-union sentiment, probably a product of indoctrination.

Or maybe encountering union workers. Many Americans grow up in schools run by teachers' unions. Maybe the so-called indoctrination isn't working the way you expect. Ask yourself why 12 or so years of being on the receiving end of union labor isn't having the effect you expect?

This is what people say but I have yet to experience it myself. But maybe the problem is that I never had great expectations for management. I always assumed it was all a business. Making money was the goal. The unions, though, push this dreamy narrative about how there are these great knights in shining armor that will always defend you. Bah. Baloney. They're also profit-maximizing people motivated by selfishness, but they hide it.

If we are going by anecdotes, then I suspect the number and scale of anecdotes of capital misusing it's power are going to vastly outnumber unions doing the same.

Your suspicions are wrong in my case. (Yours may be different.) For the most part, I've found that companies have treated me fairly and, if anything, avoided making overly rosy promises. It's always been a very quid-pro-quo message.

Unions, though, spin up these stories of worker protections that haven't worked out in my life. When the unions didn't defend my colleague, I was pretty much gobsmacked. It was such a clear case. But in the end they didn't even give a reason. And they didn't have to because, well, they're a magical union and people like you reflexively love them and imagine that they'll defeat that evil capital. Hah. The scales fell off my eyes. I'm sure you'll experience the same one day.

So, coming with its own pitfalls. How does it feel however with no counter power at all in similar structures, in your own experience?

Speaking of keeping separate things separate: remember that Unions (a business in it's own right) is different from the Union Workers that it represents.

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