Few people know how unions work any more. They vary as much as companies do. Some are top down, some are bottom up. Some run their own insurance and pension plans. Some are craft oriented, like the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, and some cover everyone in a plant, like the United Auto Workers.
For the "tech" industry, the Hollywood unions are worth looking at as a model. Most are under the umbrella of IATSE, The International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees. The Animation Guild represents most of the animators at the major studios. IATSE has grown over the last decade, which is unusual for unions today. They've picked up many people in Hollywood effects houses. They have not, however, been able to organize the game industry, despite trying.
IATSE figured out the "gig economy" long ago. Their contracts cover things like "minimum call time" (if you're called into work for an emergency, that's not only paid time, there's a minimum number of hours, usually 4), and overtime (not just paid, but time and a half and double time during crunches). This is why, as I've pointed out before, film scheduling is an organized discipline but software development scheduling is a joke.
There are advantages to working at a company with a partly unionized workforce even if you're not in a unionized job. There's less being jerked around. Management is aware that their authority is not unlimited. Hours also tend to be more reasonable.
My main concern for the tech industry is that a union is fundamentally exclusionary. It's survival depends on preventing competition- any other activity it undertakes is only to serve that goal, or to justify it.
Unions prevent competition by demanding exclusivity in a company's labor supply, they prevent competition from new entrants by being outright hostile to young tradespeople (in most trade unions, it's basically impossible to join without sponsorship form an existing member), and they prevent competition among members by fixing wages, suppressing the earning potential of the most valuable employees.
Once a union has succeeded in restraining trade, it can extract monopoly rents from the flow of labor. At best, this looks like an ever-growing university-style administration that exists to justify its own existence. Unions can never exist to create net value, only to capture it, and that by necessity means that value is destroyed by their existence. They're antithetical to the principles of fairness, openness and inclusiveness that we claim to value.
Moreover, why would we even want a union, on an individual level? We (American citizens with a BSCS or similar) each already hold a golden ticket directly to the gentry class. We are, by pure luck of nationality, already privileged beneficiaries of the American coastal tech boom cities, of American currency and political dominance of the past seven decades, and of our restrictive immigration policies that artificially inflate wages for computer professionals across the country above their global equilibrium price. A CS graduate today can reasonably expect to be a millionaire by midlife, if they choose to save accordingly.
And if you don't like having to work late sometimes, you have the option to take a job that doesn't require it. If you don't want to live the Senior SRE lifestyle, you don't have to.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust...
Companies view everything as a cost whether it is infrastructure, health care or rights. They lobby broadly to minimize those costs and to keep their own position. And that is unlikely to change. If there is any argument against unions it is that it is already too late. Unions ultimately work by having a war chest for strikes. The company, or the employer organization, then have their own war chest. Tech companies have so much cash, and the cost of living is so high, that a strike wouldn't even be thinkable for many many years. Making an effective union impossible.
But, like all big and complex organizations they become corrupted and rather than having the interest of workers and society as foremost goals, self perpetuation and preservation become the goals.
Except for Bernie no other candidate explicitly and implicitly supports unions. All the others support policies which would undermine unions, except for where it’s politically expedient.
But this is natural. Even in the proletarian era of Mao, unions/workers suffered descent too. Often a most favored group would be pitted against another when necessary, for example the Hong Wei Bings [紅衛兵]
What does "up to a point" mean? Like these videos, this makes it sound as if the progress of workers' rights is over, and we've got all we'll ever need.
What about, say, "a living wage", which the government's minimum wage law is unable to provide? This isn't done. It will probably never be done.
The same can be said of corporations too.
That point being when capitalists convinced the government to limit the power of unions and stifle their use of union pension funds to finance things that would be beneficial union.
Taft Hartley Act of 1947
I agree with this from both perspectives. Companies and business-owners should also be allowed to espouse anti-union arguments without automatically being tagged as "evil" or subjected to extra scrutiny.
That said, you're certainly not going to find a nuanced debate in a ... training video. The purpose of this video is literally for the company to train their employees, not to serve as a forum for debating the pros and cons of unions.
As long as the union gets to speak to the employees on company time and gets to add pro-union arguments to the training videos, I see no problem with the boss doing so as well.
I honestly believe the Internet, specifically places like Twitter have destroyed civil discussion and consideration of alternate viewpoints.
Also, I don't think the video is absurd at all. What advantage would Amazon have by being pro-union or pretending to be pro-union? And what advantage would they have by not addressing it at all?
(Edit: This was meant to sound hopeful.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
As for particular criticisms of any particular org (unions, corporations, government, whomever), the evergreen all purpose prescription is to increase transparency, responsibility, and accountability. What's going on, how are decisions made, who gets the blame.
Everything else is just rhetoric (partisan squabbling).
This is largely a legacy of the police Red squads funded by the capitalists all over the USA starting in the 1930's. To get the radicals and other effective organizers and voices of the working classes out of the unions, local politicians and the police looked the other way as organized crime gained influence over many unions, thus simultaneously corrupting local governments, law enforcement, and organized labor.
I would be VERY interested in a reading list of any kind, as I have lived near Chicago, which has an interesting history with both police officers and unions.
The US will see yet another major driver of innovation and production growth, this time the tech industry, succumb to social activists and their rent-seeking-motivated ideological narratives.
A century of pro-union-monopoly advocacy will not change the fact that unions as generally conceived are anti-market interventions and thus economically unsound.
These are blatant anti-market interventions that give any group of workers that unionize an effective state-backed monopoly over their employer's labor force.
The conspiratorial narratives about opposition to such state-backed monopolies being nothing more than Big Business trying to mislead and exploit the little guy, and such monopolies being in the public interest, is nothing more than economic quackery, on par with anti-vaxxer conspiracy theories about vaccination being a harmful practice that is only widely promoted because of the nefarious influence of Big Pharma.
The economic reality is that these rules create rent-seeking and reduce economic efficiency. They will destroy Amazon's dynamism.
Giving a select group of workers a temporary wage boost at the expense of the industry that sustains them is the same short-sighted policy implemented in the post-war era, which saw workers see large wage gains, and then saw the industries that employed them suffer massive bankruptcies and contractions.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16131314
Now if it is reasonable that a designed in "disagree" button is also used for automatic moderation (greying/hiding/easier flagging/etc) I'll leave up to the opinions of the reader.
Multiple sites have implemented some form of upvote/downvote. That within itself is a great proxy for agree/disagree. The problem sites have is when they take a downvote to mean both disagree and low quality/bad/de-modded. HK technically has flag to solve this, but that isn't how the site is implemented.
PS - I didn't vote on the post above at all.
PPS - You should downvote this very post per (last line): https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Every single benefit comes at a cost. Companies do not have an infinite amount of resources to spend on benefits. The optimal mix of benefits should be determined through bottom up organic processes, not by state fiat based on simplistic assumptions.
The process by which the market develops and quality of life improves is much more complex than these cookie cutter rules assume.
I'd argue it's only because the nature of film making - with many short-lived independent productions - doesn't give unionized work units the monopoly control they would have in large stable production facilities, like factories, and moreover, due to being cultural work, is very difficult to outsource.
For a time all major industrial sectors were dominated by unions. It resulted in America losing its manufacturing edge and seeing most manufacturing migrate to Asia. The entire passenger rail service also went bankrupt due to the demands of the Brotherhoods, which had a stranglehold on the industry. Today, besides a few notable exceptions like Hollywood and the screen actors guild, unions are only growing in the public sector, and that's because taxpayers are forced to subsidize their inefficiency.
As a general rule, industries lose their dynamism when they come under the domination of unions, which is exactly what standard economic theories on free markets and efficiency predict.
I'd tend towards it being a fake, if it didn't seem reasonable these are the kinds of ends Amazon HR goes to in order to keep their labor pools un-unionized.
Amazon commented on the video saying Gizmodo "“cherry-picked soundbites” from the video". If it was fake, Amazon wouldn't say something like that, Amazon would say it's fake.
https://gizmodo.com/amazons-aggressive-anti-union-tactics-re...
The new dealers ( FDR, Truman ) gave organized labor tremendous power because without it the USA would probably have had a big communist party.
They also knew the deflationary period of the 1930s lead to the rise of fascism and nationalism in Europe. So the petty greed of capital was scarified at the altar to maintain peace. They were also willing to sacrifice growth to maintain peace.
We are going through a similar period of deflationary shock, so it's going to be interesting to see how it plays out and ends.
Most likely the source of unrest may not be US but China.
> They were also willing to sacrifice growth to maintain peace.
Who would do such a thing! We should get back to my grandfather times, he was happy because he was a child, and children did not only get a few potatoes to eat per day, but also a little bit of oil with it. Also I suppose it's kind of romantic to have sex with a stranger on the barricades before being shot to death and having your body join the decomposing pile of bodies in the streets.
One huge difference is there can only be a single union at an American company, while with the European style an employee can pick which to chose from.
The real problem with American unions is its bloody fight against suppression in the late 19th century. American labor relations with management are war compared to Europe and Asia.
What really struck me is how much they remind me of the cringey anti-drug videos we used to watch in like middle school, “If you see a suspicious person smoking something that looks like a cigarette but smells funny, cross the street to get away. They may offer you a joint for free to get you hooked. If you smoke that joint, before you know it they’ll be giving you free crack. Cool kids just say no.”
I mean, obviously, just like everything, unions have pros and cons, but does this kind of cheesy fear mongering actually work? If we could see through it and make fun of it as children, surely a grown adult would find it as off putting as kids do?
These anti-union videos are indeed reminiscent of the anti-drug videos. Drugs are unhealthy, expensive, and illegal -- so DARE should be shooting fish in a barrel, and yet they still have zero demonstrated effectiveness. Hearing an adult in a position of power tell you not to do something only makes it seem more attractive.
Yeah, gotta feed that customer obsession at all costs.
- Valuing innovation while saying that nothing should ever change in their relationships with employees
- Using the words "vulnerability to organizing" and "dangers of organizing" as if it's a terrible disease
- Saying that unionizing employees aren't displaying "normal behavior"
- Calling the phrase "living wage" a warning sign
- Refusing to explain why it is that employees might want to unionize
> notices another worker says "grievance"
> i was trained for this
> i run to the hrm
> i twist my ankle jumping over my piss bottles
> i struggle to limp through the warehouse as the other
workers have to push me over so the make their times.
> i fall over from heat exhaustion because the hvac has
never worked
> finally at the hrm
> i get fired before i can report the red scourgeWhy did Jeff Bezos get divorced? Because his marriage... was a union!!
1970 to 2020 is 50 years. Consider how long feudalism lasted before it was discarded.
Managers may notice a change in the language of employees because it becomes more formal and legal in nature. Employees may start using union words like “grievance,” “arbitration,” “job security,” “employee rights,” “prevailing wage” and “unfair labor practices.” They may also start asking their immediate supervisor or manager questions around these topics, so be sure you have a system in place for your front-line managers to report a change in employee behavior that could be an indication of organizing activity.
"Union Proof Certification" is a thing.
The Communications Workers of America describes typical employer tactics from the labor side.[2]
Historically, neither side is very creative, so once you know what the standard moves are, you know what to expect.
[1] https://blog.unionproof.com/are-you-missing-these-10-signs-o...
Unions, by definition, are strictly about the collective over the individual. You must acquiesce that you have no individual value and qualities that raise you above the minimal employee in order to benefit.
Decisions like Janus are supremely on-point: let unions justify their existence to their own members. Forcing one to join the union as a prerequisite for employment is undeniably immoral and robs employees of free choice.