I'm sorry but the contract was screwing me. I worked (decades ago) as a third shift janitor in a 24 hour supermarket. My responsibilities included cleaning the customer and employee restrooms and also cleaning the meat cutting room. My union negotiated maximum hourly wage was less than the starting wage for stockers and cashiers. Why? Because there were maybe 10 janitors per store, whereas there were 100+ stockers and cashiers. So the union represented votes and 10 votes per store amounted to exactly what you think it would. This is why any sort of generic 'tech union' is going to be a failure in my opinion, because if you have 150 developers and 20 QA, for example, where do you think the equality will actually land. People will vote for the common good up to a point. Single occupation unions would possibly work, i.e. a QA union, a Developers union but would introduce other problems.

Contracts and unions aren't some magical cure all. Unions are political organizations and come with all the problems that political organizations have.

With most unions, pay is a function of seniority only.

I think most of these tech-unions are ideologically motivated and have no interest in actually improving working conditions.

Those 5% can argue for better conditions or leave. If their value is not commensurate with their asks, they won't get it.

Both labor supply and demand needs to be competitive for an efficient society.

If there's a single employer in town, and lack of mobility for residents, that's a monopoly on labor demand just the same as a union is a monopoly on labor supply

Apple sets prices based on what they think will maximize their profitability. If iPhone cost $1M dollars, there are still people who would buy it. Demand is a curve, not a fixed value.

It compounds them. Government has no incentive for real results, union leads to highly overpaid employees who are frequently caught not working on the clock.

Two separate problems for sure, both bad for the rest

No they don't, inflation is baked into their pricing model. They make money by taking a percentage of the donations. If inflation makes the dollar worth half as much, people will donate twice as much to get the same results.

Then why try to convince me to join if I'm paying into insurance and strike funds that I will never see any benefit from? I understand collective bargaining but it seems like they just wanted to trick high school kids into giving away 15% of their paychecks. Also even though the store had high union membership, my managers still pulled crap like calling me to the register during my legally mandated 15 minute break.

How about data that doesn't come directly from union activists.

It's funny the groups that claim to be non-partisan while simultanously advocating a list of positions...

I can assure you my employer would like the union to fuck off.

In a world where it isn't illegal to fire everyone who even thinks of joining the union, you might have some (ethically wrong) point. That's not in this world.

I'm not saying that is the only barometer I would use if I were measuring performance but again, I'd be surprised if you told me that an average Kickstarter now was anywhere close to being as productive (whatever metric you'd like to use) before their unionization.

Source this. Every Union I've seen continues to support performance based raises, just weighed appropriately against other compensation increases.

Their current minimum is 0%. I suspect "you get a 3% raise this year" will be treated the same way "you get a 0% raise this year" is.

I’ve found that to be untrue.

Often what people think of as “toxic” are informal actions and behaviors that unions don’t resolve.

Maybe they can sit with you in a meeting but that doesn’t change how that manager can behave.

So in other words, you can only prove the MTA has lazy employees, and are assuming that the union is causing that (with no evidence).

That's what I wanted to know, thanks!

A level of performance / ability where you can interview, get a job and the salary you deem indicative of your skill. This varies from person to person obviously.

For instance, for a while I had a CS degree and was solidly above average, but I didn't quite meet the bar because I sucked at leetcode and didn't have enough experience. So I accepted this, improved, and now have a higher paying job.

I think it may mean that the poster thinks that changing "at-will" to "just cause" is a language change rather than a procedure change (which now routes discipline and dismissal through a union intermediary.) It's the only way I can make sense of the language: that people are being sensitive snowflakes because they want these nicer words to be used.

The fact that there is a minimum wage, and that efforts to increase it are met with resistance is proof that there are many jobs for which the minimum wage is also the maximum.

The other sibling comments in reply to this comment emphasise the central point that it was about culture war and that therefore it's not surprising that many employees don't want to take part on one side or the other!

The comments are literally just rehashing a conflict. Would anyone want to work in a place where such a discussion was part of daily working life?

> banning a project that was raising money to support violence against conservatives (the actual physical kind, not words)

"A graphic artist...raising money on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter to bring a comic book, called 'Always Punch Nazis,' to life" doesn't obviously sound like a call for violence [1]. I see enough ambiguity here to hold judgement.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/10/how-debat...

>management banning a project that was raising money to support violence against conservatives (the actual physical kind, not words)

What? The article you linked says this is about a comic book about punching Nazis. How is this "not words" ? We are seriously getting angry at comic books about punching Nazis? Captain America comics have been doing that for 80 years. Is there more to the story that I am missing or are people just equating a comic book about punching Nazis to literal "violence against conservatives"? This sounds exactly like the "words are literal violence" idea that conservatives are always mocking.

> raising money to support violence against conservatives

Let's be clear; the title was "Always Punch Nazis", not "Always Punch Conservatives". If you're mixing the two up, that's more on you than the author.

Only 15% being activist is usually the case. Most people just participate in conversations and voting.

Internal polling is always skewed, which is why you have the NLRB process. Negative articles in the press about working conditions and demanding that the management accept the union without going through a vote are both normal. Pretending they're "dirty" is kind of weird.

And if the people left, that's fine. I instigated and ran an organizing committee and left the shop after we won. It's a draining struggle, and one that wouldn't have been successful if things weren't already fucked up for a lot of people at Kickstarter. Ultimately, the success of a union campaign shows that people don't think informal channels will get them what they need at their jobs, and they're willing to commit to long-term conflict in order to make it happen. They wouldn't do that over mild dissatisfaction.

>Can we also make a hostile work environment to pro-union employees?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Union_busting

Historically, it would be hard to argue otherwise. It is lucrative to remove bargaining leverage from labor.

It already is hostile to pro-union workers, usually. This is part of the resentment that sets in. After months of surveillance and harassment, your pro-union coworkers will be pissed that you chose to side with the people who surveilled and harassed them.

What...sort of environment do you think caused them to unionize?

> Can we also make a hostile work environment to pro-union employees?

That's already the default in any non-union workplace, which is to say, the majority of workplaces.

Just move the office to a low tax country / state. Union people will refuse to move there.

The people who could create that hostile work environment refuse to cooperate with each other.

The flip side is that a union shop, especially a recently unionized one, is much more tight-knit. I still have close friends from a union struggle years ago. And you have job security, collective bargaining power, and Weingarten rights for the duration of your time at that company.

My comment holds regardless. Whether they merely wanted to solicit their boss's favor or had some ideological objection, they still opposed it.

"Power flows from the barrel of a gun": broke "Power flows from not being chatty with your coworkers": woke

It's a good thing Europe can mooch off US innovation and Chinese manufacturing. Manufacturing that is not unionized, by the way.

If the US went the way of Europe, technological innovation would slow dramatically, which I'll argue is a bad outcome for the world in the long run.

What do you think the cost of basic goods would rise to if all the Chinese manufacturing centers unionized?

If you're on the far right of the bell curve of earnings, you might not find studies based on the average too convincing.

> Google "___est countries".

How about I Google which countries have the largest revenues for their technology companies, and the senior-level salaries of their employees?

But there’s a chicken and eg problem there. I would argue that we in Sweden have the GDP (per capita) we have because of the few large companies that were started before unionization.

It’s also kind of unsustainable in a globalized world, and even more so with remote work: The Nordic model is that you give everyone more or less the same compensation regardless of contribution. But how is that going to work 5 years from now? It’s already coming apart I would say.

> have massive levels of unionization. Finland has unionized entire sectors of the economy

There's an opportunity for tech to create a less antagonistic form of unions. Simply creating a Board seat for the ESOP, voted in by the ESOP holders (excluding senior management), would be shareholder aligned and beneficial to employees.

The Nordic union system is apparently different, the unions are responsible for distributing unemployment insurance. In places like Canada you get that everywhere as long as you’re not a contractor. So there’s a much bigger incentive to join in Nordic countries.

> The thing about unions in the Nordic countries, though, is that they’re different from unions in most other countries. I learned this in Denmark in 2007 when a union steward at Lego A/S, which had just announced plans to move a bunch of factory work to Eastern Europe, gave me an impassioned lecture on the positive economic aspects of outsourcing. Unions in Denmark saw (and presumably still see) preserving the competitiveness of Danish industry as a much higher priority than protecting specific jobs. They arrived at this mindset in part because Denmark is a small country trying to succeed in a big, scary world, but also because access to generous unemployment benefits is what leads many (perhaps most) workers in Denmark to join unions in the first place.

> Denmark, Finland and Sweden are what are called “Ghent system” countries, where unions administer the unemployment insurance program with help from government subsidies. Norway used to have a Ghent system but abandoned it in 1938. Belgium, where the actual city of Ghent is located, has a “partial Ghent system.” In recent years, the link between union membership and unemployment insurance has weakened in the remaining Ghent system countries too, with most union-affiliated insurance providers now formally independent, and scholars from those countries have written lots of papers about the pressures the system is under. But from the perspective of many outside observers it still looks pretty great in the way that it combines continued union strength with a flexible, pragmatic approach to serving workers that seems quite compatible with economic competitiveness.

https://archive.ph/2ExBA#selection-6089.0-6961.1

From “ The Conservative Case for Unions”:

> This is not to say the old style of American industrial unions will come back, or should. The mid-20th-century enterprise model, as it was called, relied on confrontational tactics to organize particular companies or factories. That may have succeeded in an era of oligopolistic, locally rooted corporations. However, in an era when even a slight increase in labor costs at a North Carolina factory sends jobs to China, organizing just a single company can boomerang against workers and management alike.

> Fortunately, other models have emerged elsewhere in the world, models that can benefit both companies and labor. A well-known example, popular in Europe, is the so-called works council, which gives workers a voice in company affairs without triggering the fraught, complex process of creating a formal union. In Germany, unions can organize entire sectors, rather than particular companies, giving employers and workers incentives to cooperate in ways that improve industries’ competitive position.

> Even more intriguing is the Ghent system, successful in Denmark and Sweden, under which unions administer government-funded unemployment benefits. Providing that safety net helps unions to shift their focus from protecting individual jobs to maintaining workers’ overall income security; this in turn allows employers more flexibility in hiring and firing.

https://archive.ph/2ycDr

The best argument for unions is to evolve them from the large rigid bureaucratic ones that protect bad workers to ones that focus purely on wages, while keeping the country competitive (Unions 2.0 if you will).

Also I was surprised to find out France has less unionization than even the US (9% vs 13%).

Otherwise I think reducing anything to a single metric like that is silly.

It depends how it's structured. If Kickstarter can go and hire non union labor, then all is good.

If the whole union will quit unanimously if they do that, then they have effective monopoly power over labor for the company.

The company will die if they try to bypass the union. In this case they could distort compensation far above what a competitive market would bear, and consumers of Kickstarter eat the cost (e.g. broader society).

It's definitely not a free lunch where workers get paid more and there's no societal cost, as many would like to believe

Unions benefit the people in the union at the expense of the rest of society. There is no free lunch; when somebody gets paid more, that money comes from somewhere else

I didn't say that milo ect were typical or that I agree with them.

I said that the idea was about labeling conservatives in general as nazis and justifying violence.

I don't agree with the idea that you get to punch someone in the face if you disagree with them, even if you label them as a fascist

"If working with dangerous machinery without union representation for 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, for company scrip was good enough for my great-grandfather when he was 8 years old, it's good enough for me!"

This is 75% housing prices, 24% people leaving who never wanted to be there in the first place but moved for tech jobs, and 1% human excrement.

You can't fool me about Boise. I've been there.

I was just quoting from the book to provide missing context. My read is that they are casting a larger net than the traditional definition to include anyone that disagrees with their ideology.

The way I read the passage, merely holding any position perceived by them as "racist, anti-immigrant, anti-POC, anti-LGBTQ+, anti-anything-but-white-Christian-views ideologies" constitutes Nazism - regardless of whatever term you may choose. Therefore, holding such views rightfully subjects you to well-deserved violence.

Given that most conservatives hold positions that are perceived by the nazi punching crowd as one or more of those evil stances above, I feel like the concern is genuine. Emphasis on perceived, because there is a tendency to exaggerate just how "anti" such stances are.

Can you elaborate instead of being coy? I'm not sure what you're referring to.

That's an appeal to tradition. If harassing gay people was a core part of American culture should we continue to do it? Beating up and killing people over one's political beliefs is wrong.

I think you're dramatically overstating just how integral "beating up and killing Nazis" is to American culture. I'd go a step further and say that the principles of liberty and the First Amendment are more ingrained than the notion that it is permissible and encouraged to commit violence against Nazis. Especially if the alleged Nazis are fellow Americans.

>"Is Inglorious Basterds anti-conservative? Is Captain America? "

Obviously not, and the fact that this is even being asked illustrates the concern because the association between Nazism and Conservatism has already taken root in some way. If you had just left those last two sentences out of your post, the first assertion would have stood on its own.

More communists than Nazis although we've forgotten about that unfortunately.

> Sure a union could try to take that profit and feed it into wages instead, but that's worse for society in the end.

Yeah, that's the whole assumption I'm challenging with real world data.

Your ideas sound great on paper or in a vacuum, though. This conversation is way asymmetric, where I'm the only person pointing to facts you can look at with your eyes, so I'm gonna leave and wish you luck with your theories.

PS: > Chinese manufacturing. Manufacturing that is not unionized, by the way.

Unintentional comedy? Natural language model trained on Econ podcasts? Arguing from opposite day? Or the most embarrassing gaffe you could have possibly made in this convo? Not that their unions are good. Just a funny thing to write, caveat-free.

> drives down costs for all technology in society

I am not familiar enough with the data to argue one way or another. But a counterargument would involve productivity. There are several fields where good-paying shops run rings around their budget-minded peers. Even for relatively unskilled roles, e.g. Costco. Sometimes consumers care about that directly. More often, it shows up in productivity.

Again, can't argue one way or another. Removing competition opens up novel channels for corruption. But I wouldn't say that a conclusion can be reached from first principles.

If your skillset is sufficiently rare and in-demand than Google/Facebook/Apple aren't your only options for high-paying employment.

Heck, I haven't even worked for any of those yet and last I checked at least 2 of them were offering less than what I make for my role.

That's an oligopoly/cartel, which represents monopoly power on labor demand, and is illegal

People like to forget about this. With the way salaries work in this industry, we are all underpaid.

He's saying he doesn't want the choice denied to him, as unionization advocates frequently attempt to justify.

> What an extremely elitist phrase.

This! I hate when people talk about "unskilled labor" because there is no such thing. There definitely is work that requires less training than other jobs, but there is no such thing as unskilled labor.

It's not elitist. Some skills are effectively commoditized. They don't require specialized, rare knowledge, years of training and constant personal investment.

If you pick a job that literally anyone else can learn to do in a few days, then the cap on your salary and lack of bargaining power is on you.

Do you have a better term for it?

Thank you for complimenting the above insightful comment! :)

> Unskilled labor can have decent bargaining power if there's a shortage of unskilled labor.

Not really, because that’s the definition of unskilled: it takes no special skills to do the job. So if there’s a shortage and wages go up dramatically then skilled labor can take its place. (The opposite is not possible/ advisable though.)

I haven't been part of a union for more than 20 years now. I'm doing great.

The character flaw isn't worrying about the labels being foisted wrongly upon someone. The character flaw is someone worrying that their personal politics can't clearly be distinguished as not being motivated by hate. Odds are that is a marker of a bad and unjust political opinion.

And plenty of people today call Joe Biden a communist. Yet if someone has a "Punch a Communist" bumper sticker, I'm not going to call up the Secret Service saying someone is threatening the president because I know that name-calling is inherently unserious.

Meanwhile Richard Spencer's Wikipedia page starts with "Richard Bertrand Spencer (born May 1978) is an American neo-Nazi..." It is entirely fair to call that guy a Nazi and it is the reason the modern "punch a Nazi" meme centers on him.

>Anyone can call anyone a criminal. The question is whether someone can make an individual determination that they think another person is a criminal, and whether this is a legitimate moral defense of extra judicial violence. Do individuals or groups have a moral right to judge others and carryout violence outside of the legal system

That is basically all comic books. Why are you criticizing this one and not like Batman or something?

I worked shitty jobs into my 30s before I landed on my career. Suck it up.

Also you're missing the point. I didn't say anything about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. You DON'T have to work hard. I said just show up. Every day. On time. That's literally the one thing I've seen in life that differentiates people who are successful in life from those who aren't.

And I know bank security guards who show up every day and live fulfilled happy successful lives. What I was saying was that commonly you'll find in unskilled labor jobs are people who don't show up every day. Not all of them but a large number. They won't do the minimum to succeed in life. They need the coddling.

85% of Americans have a driver's license too.

But aren't those low-paid, high skill jobs likely to be unionized? Only issue I see with that term is that union affects pay.

I won't be making that argument because I gave two examples of things that I disagree with, not one that I support.

I don't think violence is ever warranted against another non-violent person whom you have ideological differences with.

I don't think it is moral to act as an individual judge against any non-violent person and Carry Out violence.

Punching someone because you think they are a Nazi or communist is not okay

>"Punch a Nazi" is only a slightly more serious notion, but there is firmly a tongue in cheek aspect to it.

I think we are debating cross topic.

There is a literal argument that if you think someone is a Nazi you should punch them in the face. It is not a widespread sentiment but advocated by fringe people.

Others are arguing against the literal interpretation. If you disagree with the literal interpretation, I think discussion of abstractions would be more fruitful

What you advocate for, not organizing, is what got us to the indentured servitude and slavery current state (US centric of course). Those who can’t recognize that are beyond hope (as they ignore the economic data clearly demonstrating the benefits), and to cater to them or entertain their desire to maintain the status quo helps no one but themselves.

Edit: This forum has some sort of empathy deficiency in aggregate.

You're free to work at a non-unionized company, of course, or even found your own.

I did not know "collective bargaining in a capitalist wage-labour system" was actually synonymous with "proletariat uprising", but here we are.

We're not talking about wages, we're talking about who counts as 'skilled labor'.