It seems like most of the "union problems" in the US arise from workers clashing with overly-greedy, abusive employers. The employer generally has more power in this relationship, and uses that power to squeeze every last bit of value out of their workforce. The workforce has few ways to push back against this, with unions being one of the options.
Maybe if other options were on the table, there would be fewer union problems? As a worker, would you join a union for protection (and pay for it) if your government provided robust legal defences for you?
I think employers hate having to deal with a gatekeeper and some rubric as to who they can hire to do what, how much to pay them etc
I've worked in places where there was union labor for building management. You literally weren't allowed to unplug your computer and move it yourself. You had to file a ticket and have somebody come and do it for you and bill handsomely to do it. What's not to love from an employer perspective?
I'd argue that policies like that are the fault of employers not unions. Those sorts of rules are meant to protect against employers reducing workforce by heaping extra work on a smaller number of employees. If employers didn't try to pull stunts like that then the rules would not be necessary.
yes, employers hate that, employees also hate that. dumb police is dumb police - union or HR.
HR usually doesn't do stupid shit like that because it reduces employer KPIs so even if they do that for some time it gets killed quickly. unions have different KPIs to optimise for and if they're pathological and/or parasitic, you get dumb shit like the above.
an union which is not a parasite is absolutely possible in the same way a non-exploiting employer is also possible.
Most employees in the US do not in fact have unions. Only about 10% of US workers are unionized, partly because of their employers' attempts to prevent that.
To be fair, most businesses don't have HR either. Data collection isn't great here, but from what is available, it seems maybe only 20-30% of businesses with employees might have HR.
Govt is a tool of the large abusive employers at this point. Tesla, Amazon and Apple have all been in the news for illegal anti-union behavior and I expect them to get no significant punishment for this at all. Meanwhile the trials take years in which they can simple continue to misbehave. This "policy" is probably discussed within their giant legal depts and c-family with plenty of plausible deniability sprinkled on top.
Meanwhile the word "socialist" already freaks so many voters out in the US, that frankly I do not see an easy way out for you guys.
> "union problems"
Glad you put it in quotes, as unions are solutions for oppressed workers. Though unions you got weekends, holidays, end of child labour, minimum wage, paid sick leave and more.
By your "overly-greedy" conclusion, in your equation do you include the pressures of international competition that exist on an uneven playing field?
If your competitors can sell for lower costs than you due to the cost of living is not as high (likely the quality of life is not as high either) - because they don't take care of the population as much, don't have safeguards in place, etc), and 2) therefore the margins to be lower - and so if not competing with pricing from the uneven playing field - then the whole company may go under, or worse be taken over by states or companies essentially owned/controlled by totalitarian states?
If you extrapolate out that then means more and more power-money-control flows towards bad actors, propagating, compounding, and accelerating their takeover of potentially everything globally - so while in the short-term unions may maintain a certain quality of life, until totalitarians centrally control the means of production - and then everyone becomes slave labor, the ones who last will be those conditioned to comply and/or think whatever controlled-relatively low quality of life is normal and the only thing possible.
Also, the solution is the relatively free market to your conundrum, right? If it's "so easy" then the people who want to unionize for a certain maintained standard can then find investment and start their own company - and then they too can face the economic pressures of international competition on an uneven playing field, and they'll see how well they can fair too; and then cool if they can outcompete everyone and maintain their desired quality of work-life, but in their effort to aim for their goals they're far more likely to get a rude awakening of competitive market forces.
There's a reason there's a naturally formed hierarchy of competence, and highly competent people gravitate towards voluntarily wanting to be led and employed by the most highly competent people they can identify - who helps drive and support their passion by having a foundational trust or belief the company being led by whatever organizational structure (especially including founder(s)) has allowed them to reach their current state of success; and then an ideological mob of workers who apply pressure for improvements, where the business will want to keep good employees happy - presumably they'll be more reasonable than not in work load, work conditions, etc, in part as keeping trained employees is far cheaper and more efficient than hiring new - if they can match the requirements the company has set for the system, if the system appears to be functional-fluid and efficient for the majority - the majority ideally highly competent-healthy individuals who are gauged as accurately as possible to being happy enough with their income and conditions, then that is arguably the best way to orient and determine course corrections if/when necessary.
And then we haven't even begun the conversation of when Tesla Bot et al will be able to replace more and more tasks - to begin the discussion of how then how do we safeguard against tyrants from capturing and deploying these systems against humanity and creating a Terminator-like future?
It seems Elon has thought-extrapolated this far out, and why he's concerned with AI - and why he also believes UBI is likely inevitable; UBI which can be weaponized by bad actors as well, e.g. if you have everyone getting enough money to survive then boredom and cults will be easy to form, who can then be weaponized against the very system they now depend on; why education and understanding the fundamental mechanics and policy that allows for whatever thriving society we design and follow next, tapping into the abundance of the universe as soon as possible - and forming Heaven on Earth, thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven.
> Maybe if other options were on the table, there would be fewer union problems? As a worker, would you join a union for protection (and pay for it) if your government provided robust legal defences for you?
Yes. The solution you provide might seem to on the surface, but it doesn't in reality. Let me give you an existing exemple, and one that people associate with strong workers right and yet the relation between workforce and employers is horrible : my country of France.
France made a capital mistake compared to our other european neighbors, by making an inverted order of agreement. Countries where it works (like nordics, etc ...) have a flow of importance like this :
1 Union collective agreement
2 Country's law
3 Company local agreement
Meaning the defining rules are made through the union, some are set by the country (but they're not overriding union agreement), and local companies can make their own internal agreement but they can't override the law nor the union agreement (so eg you can give extra holiday, but you can't take out a national holiday or a union negotiated holiday).
France being centralised as it is, and believing in the messiah governement above adult talking with rules; decided to invert this with the following scheme :
1 Country's law
2 Union collective agreement
3 Company local agreement
On the surface, it seems like it makes sense or is even better. In reality, here is what happens : if you are a worker and want a change, or there is a strike and you're the employer negotiating, or ... The end game is not the other side. It's the governement. This doesn't promote discussion between both side of the work share, it makes it useless.
So you have the joke about employer's association regretting that the governement make news laws and rules every time there is a major strike instead of negotiations, and the employee's union regretting that when a strike is stalling the situation employers go to the governement instead of negotiating harder ... You get the governement having to "invite both side to the table" in front of them at every major strike. Because ultimately, our system makes the governement the daddy when workers and employers are the kid.
And what's really insane is that both side hate this and criticize it, yet when Macron made a push to change it both side where also against it because they saw it as destroying their position : employees union pretended it would allow employers to do whatever since they have more power, employers pretended it would put them in a kidnapped situation every strike.
Meanwhile you go on the french subreddit or any other center to left place, you will regularly see things like union agreement that have minimal salaries in them BELOW the french legal salaries, acting like this is horrible, while in reality it's like that because nobody cares about that because it doesn't matter because the minimal is the country's one.
I love my country's approach to people rights and society's rules, but this is one where we're really wrong, except it gives everyone a taste of power (gov like to be in power; employees like that they can call daddy to "screw the evil employer", employers like that they can circumvent their peole to go straight to daddy to "skip those lazy workers").
I don't know if proper union in charge is the best solution. All I know is every place doing better than us at that have strong union and a governement that doesn't try to do their job for them.
> The problem with government (or too-large unions) is that different jobs have different employment concerns. It's hard to legislate in a way that covers all cases from seasonal farm work to IT office jobs to airline pilots. A union gives you more fine-grained representation to address the problems specific to your profession and workplace.
In Sweden government labor protection rules are somewhat low (there is not a minimum wage for example), but unions have a lot of power and a good chunk of workers are unionised. The job of the gov is to guarantee a basic minimum of labor regulations and unions do the rest.
I don't think the conversation gets to a high enough level of complexity as it necessarily should for employees to fully understand the stakes.
They need to always include the influence of industrial complexes and an uneven playing field with international competition, nations not having same cost structures because not having alignment on services and quality of life minimums for its population - so those who don't take care of their population as well get a competition advantage on pricing.
Fascism also needs to come into play, for example, when countries give certain companies $10s of billions of the taxpayers' money to "compete" for those factories being local instead of built somewhere else, but the serious risk is fascism is authoritarian politicians partnering with industrial complexes, so long as the companies receiving the money are willing to toe the tyrannical line.
The corporations are the only ones that can pay the salaries being requested by labor activists though. IMO, a lot of the agitation for higher wages as a universal right has a negative effect on smaller businesses, while the corporations (which are the actual targets) have an easier time adapting to changes in federal and state law, for example by compensating with foreign revenue.
I can't imagine it makes starting a new small business any easier when you're required to pay employees $20/hr. Think about how many startups are designed from the ground up for corporate acquisition, almost like a fire-and-forget model never intended to scale.
I'd like to think unions and labor reformers consider such things, but to be honest it's probably tertiary at best.
That's $40k (gross) a year assuming the job is full time, which it won't be. Unless you're living in an extremely low CoL area that's a meager existence that pays for rent, food, bills, health insurance and not much else. You might be able to afford a house someday at that wage.
Where else would you put the minimum if not "scraping by?" If businesses literally can't afford it then maybe government should step in and pay the difference.
A new business with 1 employee isn’t going to be union. Federal and (in many) state minimum wage laws don’t even apply. Labour regulation kicks in as you get more and more employees.
Most activists are demanding higher wages from bigger employers.
Doesn't the bigger employer already pay more? Otherwise, why would you work for them? If compensation is the same, the smaller employer will otherwise be preferable to work for.
20 bucks an hour in some areas is literally unlivable. That's around 40k yearly (before taxes), and in the areas where the minimum wage should be at least 20 an hour, that's barely enough to afford to live.
> I can't imagine it makes starting a new small business any easier when you're required to pay employees $20/hr.
Why should workers suffer because some techbro wants to get rich from the Nth AI chatbot he shits out using VC money?
