Comment by drig | Hacker News Reader

Comment by drig | Hacker News Reader

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Yeah, I'm with you. I just wish it wasn't portrayed as such a partisan, negative thing. Which is frustrating because that's how he leads.

I wish he could have just said "we have an untapped well of jobs which sit between unskilled jobs and highly skilled tech jobs. Someone has to run all these new computers. If you go to a trade school, you can get a good job in less time and with no debt."

Heck, liberals and Democrats should be psyched for this message. Because: 1) people who graduate from trade schools join unions 2) green energy production needs these skills more than older oil companies do. Sun doesn't turn itself into electricity. 3) this sort of training is usually close to urban centers, which means more business for blue-leaning cities

I don't believe in unions as the ideal situation for workers or employers, I believe strongly when a company ends up with a union, it's because they did something stupid.

Didn't pay enough, treated employees unfairly, poor working environment, any number of things, but generally something that could have been mitigated by 'doing the right thing' in the first place.

To be fair, the bigger unions aren't tied to their employers. There are, for sure, large companies with their own unions, or that might ought to have their own unions (e.g., Wal-Mart), but most of the larger unions arise from historical conditions that may or may not pertain to a given employer.

I've been a union member in the past, but I don't generally see the need for unions to exist in anywhere near the capacity that they do -- that said, for a counterpoint that justifies their existence, check out Harlan County, USA[1]. It's a documentary that illustrates how bad exploitative employers can be in the US.

And of course, the other counter to anti-union sentiment is that unions are just people. Employers have, like it or not, economic power over their employers, which could (or could not) be leveraged for abuse. Employee collusion is the fairly obvious counter to that advantage.

In short, my opinion of unions has evolved from unions are the worst -- to unions are great, in theory, but often bad in practice.

[1] - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0074605/

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