This is a single retail location in Maryland. There's probably a reason they let them unionize without a lot of fighting, and I'm guessing it's because they will shut the store down if the union becomes a problem.
I know this site is pretty pro-union, but if I were them I would not have wanted to unionize at all. Apple has decent salaries for what it is, and it's probably cheaper to close the store than hire a McKinsey consultant to renegotiate union contracts.
It's illegal to close a store just because you're afraid of unions. It's one thing for a Starbucks to close a store because they're opening and closing stores all the time and have thinner profit margins and thus have cover, but for Apple it's another deal.
That seems a somewhat pretzel-like contortion to enforce. If Apple says they don't want to run the store, how are they to be forced to run it? Especially if someone a bit Machiavellian gets involved; it can't possibly be hard for management to create reasons for a business to close. It is a delicate enough operation keeping one open; feigned incompetence at any level could easily result in a good reason to shut a store down.
What leverage are the union employees supposed to bring to bear, strike until the store opens? Or if suing business into existence turns out to be a workable strategy then we've maybe been running society wrong for a long time now.
Unless there is a paper trail like email from an exec saying something like "we need to close this store as an example because they unionize", then there is no way to prove wrongdoing.
This is a company with hundreds of thousands of people. I work in several ones. It is very hard to do this kind of things. If you do, there will be paper trail because you would need to get consensus from others.
If store is unprofitable, then they would just use that reason.
If the store is unionised and profitable, why would apple even close it?
> Unless there is a paper trail like email from an exec saying something like "we need to close this store as an example because they unionize", then there is no way to prove wrongdoing.
In my area, it didn't take a paper trail for Starbucks to get a smack. Several stores in the area were unionizing or considering unionizing.
So Starbucks removed the cushioned anti-fatigue floor mats from a bunch of stores, declaring them a trip/fall hazard.
Employees talked to each other and discovered that they'd only been removed from a few stores, not all. You can guess which.
Employees told the NLRB who asked Starbucks to explain why the mats weren't a trip hazard in non-unionizing stores.
Seems like quite the stretch, just to not want to bargain with labor. I 100% believe it, but it's just sad. This all happened because businesses are stingy with paying employees properly.
> It is very hard to do this kind of things. If you do, there will be paper trail because you would need to get consensus from others.
Hard but doable. A few companies got burnt with direct messages between executives showing up in court in discovery, but everyone watched and learned to quickly scrub and remove those routinely. So next time it’s easier. And of course we only find out those that slip up and get caught.
But even that is not needed, all it really takes is the subordinates to read between the lines. It takes just one minion to suggest closing that particular store for “unrelated reasons” and they are promoted quickly. Everyone else learns exactly what the idea is without leaving a single paper trail.
But they run many others too not just that particular one store. Even closing and reopening a few stores in the region just to teach others “a lesson” could make “business sense”. They just have to find unrelated business reasons for to put on paper.
If they’re losing money on that store, they’ll close it. If not, they’ll keep it open. But it’s not mandated to keep a money losing store opened. No one’s going to go into court and argue, “no fair! They closed my money losing location!”
And there you have the real reason Apple doesn’t care about a union here. The performance of this location can be ascertained in a fashion that is authoritative, objective, and unassailable. If they ever lose money, they’ll close, union or no union. So it doesn’t make a difference to Apple.
What I dislike about your statement is the confrontational usage. If we don’t fundamentally agree on collaboration, we run into fights over power.
A business owner sets the direction and the goals. A union is a commitment and should go beyond defensive rights. Both should work together on different interests sometimes but shall fundamentally agree: without a successful business there won’t be any employees, not the other way around.
> without a successful business there won’t be any employees, not the other way around.
And without employees there would not be any business. At the end of the day they put the work as well.
It’s in Apple’s interest to keep these employees happy because they are the face of the company. Their customers interact with them when they buy something and when something goes wrong.
I agree that the relationship should be more constructive than confrontational, but it goes both ways. Apple is both a wonderful and difficult company to work for.
> And without employees there would not be any business. At the end of the day they put the work as well.
Successful businesses always attracts employees, that has never been an issue. So the scarcity here comes from the business side and not the employee side.
The other way around would be that employees starts a successful business if there is none around, but that isn't the case. Good setups that enables good jobs are hard to create, you see what happens when those leave in the Midwest after the car industry left.
In the end it is up to each area to ensure their workers are competitive on a global stage, either price wise or skill wise or some other advantage. Otherwise there wont be anyone who wants to pay them.
Having someone around to do the actual work is absolutely a prerequisite to a successful business. Too much time in management might blunt that understanding but I assure you it's true.
But unskilled union labor dictates that it has to be them or those whom they approve of "around to do the actual work" ("actual" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here) or else the business that they don't own can't be a business at all.
It can't be anyone else, even when it could easily be.
Businesses that employ unskilled labor aren't the equal partnership that you want to make them out to be.
See the fact that the trend is toward international outsourcing. Unionization will increase that trend, even if the cashier that the public sees is now making $20/hr (now at half-time hours and much of her family has now had to move out of the area to find work, due to a downward trend in job availability: aggravating the gentrification or the depopulation trend, depending on the area).
I think that Unions are economically and socially useful, but not in the case of what is essentially unskilled labor.
As beyond the rational nonsense of such a proposition, the existence of non-unionized unskilled labor plays an important economic and social role. For one, these jobs maximize job availability to a lower class that is growing for reasons other than job availability and average salary trends. The alternative being unemployment.
And unskilled unions should especially be discouraged when other wage control issues are both not addressed and frankly aggravated by the generally pro union side.
In summary, unskilled labor wages should be buoyed by measures other than unions: reasonable minimum wage law, labor supply control at the population level, etc. As unskilled Unions otherwise distort the economy and social sphere too much. Last, one can't rationally justify the existence of such Unions on profit margin. If they are justified for one, then they are justified for all. And vice versa.
I think this boogey man "ooooo outsourcing!" argument against anything good for workers is so tired.
Look, even un-unionized laborers in America get paid significantly more than, say, China or Bangladesh. And they're also adults, by law. The reality is the jobs that can be outsourced safely already have, a long time ago. When was the last time you saw an article of clothing made in the US? Or a plastic product made here? Or anything really, besides an automobile?
But not all jobs can be outsourced. You can't outsource retail or food service.
All labor is skilled labor. Sometimes the required skill is dealing with unpleasant members of the public who believe them to be lessers, all while keeping a smile on their face.
This "all labor is skilled labor" mantra is a deeply unhelpful misunderstanding of the difference between skilled and unskilled labor
Unskilled labor is something people can be trained to do in a very short period of time, and where it doesn't require any kind of specialized training or certification
Yes, we still should respect people doing unskilled labor, but pretending that there's no such thing doesn't help anyone. All it does is generate a scoff at the idea that stocking shelves or operating a point of sale is "skilled"
I’m aware of and understand the difference. I’m not suggesting that the amount of training to run a cash register is equivalent to, say, wire a house, or calibrate lab equipment.
I just find it distasteful when people are outright rude or dismissive to “unskilled labor.”
> without a successful business there won’t be any employees, not the other way around.
How do you get that successful business? Employees like Product Managers trying to analyze product market fit, leadership setting direction, etc.
This happens a lot in small business - the owner/founder thinks they and they alone have the magic sauce, and it quickly becomes "you should be grateful to have this opportunity to work on my ideas".
>Both should work together on different interests sometimes but shall fundamentally agree: without a successful business there won’t be any employees, not the other way around.
And that social contract was broken some 6-10 years ago at this point. Businesses can be successful, record breaking profits successful. But still refuse a raise or even lay you off to save a penny.
So the increased opposition is inevitable. You can't just lie saying "times are tough", cut hours and and pretend unemployment is at an all time low, and not expect your labor to resent the business.
Usually the pro-union business owners who don't have unions justify it like this" "I'm such a a good boss that my workers don't need a union, If I ever hear that they want to unionize I would be shocked and would think I failed" - Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips.
In European countries, you do an agreement with an industry union, everyone on the building gets the agreement, regardless of how they feel about it.
From this side of the pound, usually the large majority is happy with the benefits, even without being themselves union members.
That is why countries with strong union culture have negociation rounds of industry leaders with the main union groups, to discuss how the sector will be handled for the current fiscal year.
Nonsense. Ultimately, it's a zero sum game and therefore there can not be shared interest between business owners and Unions.
You may have detente or even just a laid back employee base.
But you're only pro-Union insofar as you are financially and personally comfortable with what the Union demands at the penalty of consequences.
Unless there is some kind of non-standard relationship between yourself and the Union, then there isn't a direct connection between what they will eventually demand and what you are willing to give at the cost of your business.
Your pro-Union stance can only be solely due to lack of personal stakes, and therefore it is only a matter of time or a change in labor circumstances. Unless your vision for your company is as a total cooperative.
It isn’t a zero sum game. It’s commerce which is a positive sum game.
At the end of the day, the customer (the business) values the labor it’s buying more than money it costs and the vendor (the employees) value the money received more than the labor sold. Both sides end up with more value then they started with - positive sum.
If that was not the case, neither side would agree to the transaction.
Zero-sum games get more complicated when you care about the other players.
>there can not be shared interest between business owners and Unions.
There absolutely can. The point of a zero-sum game is that one party cannot win more without the other winning less. This is only a problem if all parties care exclusively about winning the most, rather than about winning enough sustainably. If you value your workers and care about them and want them to have happy, good lives, then you can absolutely find an alliance with a union.
It's not like a criminal justice case where one side has to win and the other has to lose, it's like a divorce where if everyone maintains a level head and allows the existence of humanity in the other side, everyone can come out happy. It only becomes adversarial when one side decides to make it that way.
I expect what is significant is that this site attracts an audience on the wealthy end of the spectrum. Unions aren't just for workers. There are also unions for business owners (e.g. farmer unions). Freedom of association is for everyone.
But unions are ultimately a rich man's sport. They require funding and if they need to exert power they can only do so by withholding service. The poor are generally not in a position to act on either, especially the withholding of service. Unions embolden the rich, but can completely cripple the poor. So you find much less support when the money isn't there.
I am sure your opinion is formed based on some experiences you have had in life.
I would like to disagree. Unions are a tool for the poor, the people who don’t have a lot of rights, and protects them from the whim of the rich. If you are working a minimum wage job, and you are being made to work excessive hours, what is your recourse? What is your bargaining power?
Okay, one answer may be to quit and try somewhere else since there isn’t anything to lose here.
Well, I can tell you a very real scenario. My mother was working as a bank clerk in India. Has been her whole life. In the same bank (branches changed but she never changed the bank). When she was 50, there was a fraud. There was a transaction from a local businessman to someone, worth 3x her annual salary. She approved the txn. Once discovered, the businessman took the bank to court who in turn put the blame on my mom of will full ignorance. Businessman offered to settle out of court but we couldnt afford it, of course.
At this point, the union came to mum’s help. They pressured upper management to get their house in order, not shift the blame to the tellers, and do not even think about firing her.
> If you are working a minimum wage job, and you are being made to work excessive hours, what is your recourse? What is your bargaining power?
That's the question. What is your bargaining power? All you have is your ability to stop working. Which, indeed, can exert power –– But if you are poor how long can you really go without work before you starve to death?
The rich can afford to sit around and wait until the over side caves. But unless you working excessive hours is the only thing keeping a business afloat (in which case, what do you stand to gain?), most likely they can outlast poor you with ease. Once you give up, your power is gone.
If you can't go without work for weeks, months, maybe even years, the business will quickly recognize your idle threat is just that. It is not just coincidence that unions are rare in professions where there isn't a whole lot of money floating around.
> Well, I can tell you a very real scenario.
This doesn't appear to speak to bargaining power, just communication. No power was needed to be exerted. If it came to a point where power needed to be exerted, how long would your mother have actually lasted? Assuming she could have lasted long enough, perhaps she wasn't as poor as you let on?
> All you have is your ability to stop working. Which, indeed, can exert power –– But if you are poor how long can you really go without work before you starve to death?
When union workers strike, they do so collectively, which means that the bargaining power is not that of a single individual but that of the collective workforce. Employers often can’t just wait out a strike because they lose tons of money when all its employees aren’t working. The union’s strength lies precisely in this collective bargaining power.
Also, unions raise money to support striking workers and unions emerged initially in the jobs where workers were paid the least and exploited the most (see early 19th century textile workers in the U.S., for example). The decline of unions since then is a more complicated history but the reality is that unions most benefit the most exploited workers who would otherwise have no recourse as individuals. Collective support helps maintain workers throughout a strike.
> most likely they can outlast poor you with ease. Once you give up, your power is gone.
Maybe don't put forward arguments that hinge on denial of reality?
The railway strikes in Germany from beginning of this year prove that, no, the bourgeoisie cannot just sit around and wait and/or rehire their entire staff. The 2023 Hollywood labor disputes show that "the poor" can indeed last longer than "the rich".
>The railway strikes in Germany from beginning of this year prove
That's because national railway and other such national critical infrastructure workers like policemen, teachers, healthcare workers, etc have actual leverage. Like what are you gonna do then? You can't outsource your infrastructure maintenance, healthcare or policing to remote offshore Asian workers, but you can for other non-credentialed internet connected professions in the private sectors where the language is Englisch, which correlates to their unions being very weak in negotiation power, like IT workers for example.
The recent tanking of IT/tech jobs in some high-CoL countries has made IT workers there realized that without the low interest rates to artificially inflate the market demand, they have virtually no leverage over their employers unlike those in credentialed professions with unions.
> but you can for other internet connected professions in the private sectors
You can certainly try, but the quality will be noticeably poorer. You can get away with that for a while, especially as a big business, but I think the tide is already turning there. Everyone's tired of broken shitty tech that doesn't work properly with no one to really contact about it. Skilled IT professionals are in huge demand nowadays, it's only the fleas on the rats complaining that the ship is sinking. Rats can swim, they'll be fine as long as land isn't too far. Mechanics and firefighters that can actually keep the ship going (if you pay us well enough), are on the other hand doing quite well these days. Unions are great, especially for tech professionals. As long as you're still allowed to negotiate personally as well, there's no reason not to.
>You can certainly try, but the quality will be noticeably poorer.
I know HN loves repeating this outdated trope to feel good, but that's not always the case and not in many I saw where they offshored and product quality didn't drop because they made sure to hire qualified people and managers, and not bottom of the barrel on the cheap.
Sure, you won't find many rockstar workers abroad, but most companies don't need that many rockstar engineers especially for CRUD work which is a commodity now, and plenty of countries have upskilled their workforce in the last 20 years especially in web CRUD, that they can take on the maintenance of stable products on the cheap.
>Everyone's tired of broken shitty tech that doesn't work properly with no one to really contact about it.
You mean like the one Google, Microsoft, Crowdstrike, etc. build in he US and not by offshore workers?
>Unions are great, especially for tech professionals. As long as you're still allowed to negotiate personally as well, there's no reason not to.
That's not how unions work in France and Germany. The unions set strick salary bands so that a newcomer can't earn more than someone who's been longer in the company so your negotiation doesn't get you anything, you let your union negociate for you.
> product quality didn't drop because they made sure to hire qualified people and managers, and not bottom of the barrel on the cheap.
So they didn't save much money, they just chose not to pay their domestic talent. Much better.
>Sure, you won't find many rockstar workers abroad, but most companies don't need that many rockstar engineers especially for CRUD work which is a commodity now,
Sure, we're mostly in tech and tech is one of the "easier" factors to outsource. I think your underrating how much even Crud work needs, but that's besides my main point.
You can't outsource everything. If you need people in a physical store, or on a physical setting in a building or in government land, you'll need to negotiate with your labor or shut down the project. I guess you can immigrate aliens who you can pay under minunum wage with the promise of citizenship, but that's clearly beyond the gray area at this point.
>You mean like the one Google, Microsoft, Crowdstrike, etc. build in he US and not by offshore workers?
In the grand scheme of things, most of my CS nightmares came from financial issues, not technical. And yes, they want to make that experience painful.
Sure, Crowdstrike happens but domestic labor means it's mostly fixed (and actually fixed) in a weekend instead of a week with precarious results.
Are the railway strikes in Germany really a good example? It's a public company, no matter what happens it will be kept afloat by the taxpayers. Realistically, if DB were a private company, it would have long gone bankrupt and the strikers would be out of a job. They lost 1.3B apparently in the past 6 months, and they claim 300M were due to the strikes.
>staff. The 2023 Hollywood labor disputes show that "the poor" can indeed last longer than "the rich".
Did it? What I read from the dispute is that it only slightly delayed AI while throwing Voice actors completely under the bus.i think the only reason it even settled was due to declining movie sales, another issue self inflicted by the rich.
> Maybe don't put forward arguments that hinge on denial of reality?
Ironic. If I was able to meet reality, that would imply I have a full understanding of reality, at which point for what reason would there be to talk about it? That would be a pointless waste of time.
> 2023 Hollywood labor disputes show that "the poor" can indeed last longer than "the rich".
According to the internet, these "poor" you speak of are making average incomes into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. These are, generally, very rich people. Perhaps you aren't aware of what poor is?
Unions in Europe originated with the poor factory workers, miners etc.
Sometimes going on strike would be tough — there'd be less to eat, if the union wasn't large enough to subsidise strikers with workers' income from elsewhere.
Unions predate the labour movement. The Royal Society is oft considered the first formalized union, originating in the 17th century, with a focus on the progression of science and not employment woes.
The early trade unions were not successful. I mean, they were successful in bringing about change, but they were not successful as power entities. They had to lean on government to exert the power. Unions are a rich man's sport.
Of course, government itself is ultimately a union, although differing in how membership is recognized. A government of only poor people wouldn't go far either, though. Government equally needs riches to wield power.
Consider the airline union strikes a while back. They leveraged the threat of striking in fits and spurts. They would strike for a day here or a hour there. Extremely disruptive to the business. The airlines had upper managers covering for flight attendants and scabs on contract but the stress was too much after a while. Because it was unpredictable and there are real costs to training flight staff the airlines could just replace everyone or have a whole fleet of spare staff on standby.
Strikes don't need to be and shouldn't be simple affairs, they can and should be nuanced and creative because the capitalists certainly will try to be clever and creative at putting people back into abusive working conditions when it suits them.
Unions are about organization. Because organization creates options. Options are power. Money is one way to get options and therefore power, but not the only way.
... but its not, because the union makes this easier than doing it yourself.
Okay, just do some simple reasoning.
Who has more bargaining power? An individual or a union? A union, of course.
Therefore, who can end a strike sooner? A union, of course.
Therefore, who can get paid sooner? Unionized workers, of course.
If you're POOR and in a position to REQUIRE CHANGE, a union will be necessarily better for you. I don't even understand how this can be up for debate because it seems so painfully obvious.
> Who has more bargaining power? An individual or a union? A union, of course.
Depends. Whomever has the most money. Generally, a group of moderately wealthy people will have more combined money than a single very wealthy person, but statistical likelihood does not provide a guarantee. We can find all kinds of examples in history where exceptionally wealthy individuals have completely dominated over unions.
And even when unions, especially labour unions, do show some amount of strength, they often have to go crying to a rich government for additional power when they don't have enough money of their own.
But if the union members are poor (like, actually poor, not pretend poor like we keep seeing in other comments)...
> If you're POOR and in a position to REQUIRE CHANGE, a union will be necessarily better for you.
Require is an interesting word. What is actually "required"? From what I gather "require" merely means something akin to "would be really nice to have". In that vein, a poor person attaining wealth would be really nice to have. Few would argue with that.
So, why don't the poor unionize and use their power to the capture wealth they are so sorrily lacking? The answer is simple: They don't have the resources to actually do it. Unions are a rich man's sport.
> So, why don't the poor unionize and use their power to capture wealth they're lacking?
They... do. You just described a union and why a union would be good for poor workers.
> They don't have the resources
Right... which is why they unionize, to pool resources.
> Unions are a rich man's sport
You've said this, and never explained how. Rich man are, presumably, business owners. Not laborers. Why, and how, would a union be beneficial for business owners? Wouldn't it be bad for them?
> They... do. You just described a union and why a union would be good for poor workers.
Okay, given that you say they have unionized, but are still poor, what are they waiting for? Why are they sitting on this mythical power that will magically appear without money that you speak of?
> Right... which is why they unionize, to pool resources.
What resources? They are poor. They don't have resources to pool. If they had such resources they wouldn't be poor.
> Rich man are, presumably, business owners.
Why would that be the presumption? The data shows that business owners tend to be quite poor themselves, if not even the poorest, statistically. Obviously there are counterexamples, but the average mom and pop trying to eke out a living at their restaurant down the street, that won't make the year before bankruptcy, are probably not rich. What makes you think that they are?
> Wouldn't it be bad for them?
Why wouldn't business owners also stand to gain bargaining power if they joined a union? It seems you're completely contradicting yourself now.
It's not mythical, it's logical. If you rely on me and ten other people to run your business, and I say I'll walk without a raise, then you say, "good luck". If all ten of your employees say they'll walk, you have a problem.
That's just bargaining power. It's a real thing that exists.
> what resouces?
The most valuable resource from a business perspective, labor. Without labor you don't have a company. You don't have a product. And you don't have customers. Again, a tiny drop of labor you can let go. All of it? Well, there's nothing left.
> business owners stand to gain bargaining power
Two problems. 1, businesses already have perfect bargaining power in labor relations. They can't get more because they have the most. Number 2, bargaining power against themselves? Again, why? That doesn't even make sense.
> If you rely on me and ten other people to run your business, and I say I'll walk without a raise, then you say, "good luck". If all ten of your employees say they'll walk, you have a problem.
Yet we can find all kinds of examples where the employer did say "good luck" to all ten people. In fact, it used to happen frequently enough that the government will now often step in to try and prevent the business from doing that. As before, labour unions, even when comprised of moderately wealthy people, are not always wealthy enough to hold power and have to cry to a much richer government for assistance.
> The most valuable resource from a business perspective, labor.
You can direct your labour resources towards the union, but that comes at the cost of not being able to direct it to your paid job. Opportunity cost is real. If you are poor, what supplemental resources do you plan to use to acquire things like food in the absence of the pay you gave up? There is no such thing as a free lunch.
> businesses already have perfect bargaining power in labor relations.
And...? Even if that is true (it's not, of course), unions are not limited to labour relationships. The farmer unions talked about at the top of the thread branch (which you obviously didn't bother to read) aren't about trying to embolden farmer bargaining power over their farmhands.
> bargaining power against themselves? Again, why? That doesn't even make sense.
Uh... What? Best to stop and think before replying, my friend.
I am fully convinced that you are not arguing in good faith.
Finding a few counterexamples on a gradient doesn't mean the gradient doesn't exist. Finding a few counterexamples means that strikes don't always work, but they certainly work more often than solo negotiations.
At best you are doing this thing that smart but narrowly focused people do where you try to break it down to a binary. That might be possible, but if this most charitable interpretation is correct your binary is "Are unions perfect" which they clearly aren't. Instead your binary should be "Are union usually better than solitary negotiations?" and that the answer to that is clearly yes.
I also doubt this is your actual issue, because you have introduced data and brought in hypothetical mom and pop stores that are clearly unrelated. Because of abject non-sense like this:
> You can direct your labour resources towards the union, but that comes at the cost of not being able to direct it to your paid job.
We are talking about strikes. You know and have demonstrated a knowledge that withholding labor is the power a laborer has, not directing it to a union. And in some situations (like the Kellogg's Strike over the pandemic) the union pays people on strike, this is a problem with many solutions and people get more options as they pool effort and resources.
You are ignoring repeated explanations and willfully choosing to answer the wrong questions. You are not engaging with this topically honestly.
> but they certainly work more often than solo negotiations.
Generally, least as long as the members are moderately rich and have the richest, and therefore most powerful, entity – the government – willing to hold their hand. But how successful do you think labour unions would be if the government eliminated all laws that protect labour unions? Let's be real: Most of them wouldn't stand a chance. A lot of them aren't rich enough to exert the needed power on their own.
> Instead your binary should be "Are union usually better than solitary negotiations?"
It seems the problem here is that you're doing that weird programmer thing where you think everything is binary. The first comment described four possible states on the blatant surface. It cannot be distilled down to a binary state. To try and force it into to a binary state loses everything that is being talked about. The quantization you are trying to apply is invalid.
With respect, no wonder you're so confused about the subject. Hopefully recognition of your error can get you back on track.
> the union pays people on strike
Assuming we're still talking about a union of poor people, and not going off on wild tangents, how? Where has this money magically appeared from? Sure, rich people can fund a union and pay out dividends to workers on strike, but then you're talking about rich people. We recognized from the very beginning that unions are beneficial to the rich.
Again, where do you think these poor people are magically finding all this money out of thin air? You keep going there, but never seem to be able to answer to it. Let me be clear: Poor people, not rich people.
> What resources? They are poor. They don't have resources to pool. If they had such resources they wouldn't be poor.
This is binary thinking where a gradient is required.
Poor is a spectrum. Someone with a car and a house and a $20/hour job might be poor because they barely make ends meet but manage to save a few hundred a month, but they have more options than a renter who is otherwise financially identical because they can use their house or car as collateral to get a loan.
A group of people might be able to take out a loan an individual can't. A group of people might collect dues as a cost to be in that group and pay them back out to allow strikes.
A group of people can threaten a strike and that costs Zero dollars.
> The data shows that business owners tend to be quite poor themselves
This is bullshit. I now think you are a liar. We are clearly talking about business large enough for strikes to happen and that excludes whatever non-sense dataset you have cherry picked.
More people have more options. Options are power. Why are you arguing against this fundamental point?
> Someone with a car and a house and a $20/hour job might be poor because they barely make ends meet
And someone with a $1,000,000 per year salary and a penchant for hookers and blow might also barely make ends meet. Is there some kind of useful takeaway from this fun anecdote?
> but manage to save a few hundred a month
If we assume the average worker with 20 years under their belt, that's ~$40,000. In what world is that poor? That alone, even ignoring the house and any other assets (a car, perhaps?), is somewhere around the top 20%. This disconnect from reality is fascinating.
> A group of people might be able to take out a loan an individual can't
Just who, exactly, is going to lend to poor people, even if they come by the millions, for no reason other than to cover their living expenses? There is almost no chance the poor are going to pay you back, unless maybe they happen to win the lottery. But if you really want to "invest" in the lottery, why not put that money directly into the lottery? What value do the middlemen bring?
> A group of people might collect dues as a cost to be in that group
From who? The poor don't have resources to pay dues. Are you being tricked by rich people again?
> We are clearly talking about business large enough for strikes to happen
No, we are clearly not. What makes you think the farmers that we were talking about earlier in thread even have employees? Many farmers do not. You're clearly not talking about anything related to what the rest of us are, but anyway...
> More people have more options. Options are power. Why are you arguing against this fundamental point?
Get back to us when you've actually read the thread. As amusing as your confusion is, there is no interest in arbitrarily changing the subject for no reason. Never was, never will be. Start a new thread if you want to talk about something else. Hijacking an existing thread for a different purpose is in bad faith.
If you were living off that money maybe you wouldn't find it so decent. Maybe you'd want a union idk unless you have some non-financial reason not to that you haven't mentioned here. I trust their perception of their needs more than I trust your perception of it.
How do unions make shitty employees unfireable? From what I've seen, collective bargaining agreements usually mandate two things:
1. Documentation of 'just cause' for firing. Unlike standard at-will, you need a real reason to fire someone like poor performance.
2. You need to follow the specified disciplinary process.
This is just a formalized, bureaucratic version of the process that any legitimate termination for performance is going to follow anyway, so I'm not sure how it's a huge change.
1. I don't think that is a meta-study. It seems to be an attempt to build a dataset to track US union membership over long timeframes.
2. It notes that there is a correlation between union membership and inequality. Which is interesting but not that powerful - correlation is not causation. It might be that both trends are being driven by the financialisation of the US economy.
3. It finds that union households earn a premium over non-union households. Again, because of the nature of the study that doesn't tell us much about the impacts of unions. As an analogy, we might find that HN commentators earn more than non-HN commentators in the tech industry but that doesn't indicate that HN is pushing salaries up.
Although in fairness I would suspect there probably is a causal element. But I still don't want to be in a unionised industry. I don't want a premium over other tech workers. I want to maximise the average tech worker salary and then be employed in tech. Those are very different objectives and require different strategies to achieve.
Pro-union types tend to have a very short term view of the world and aren't about maximising long term returns. Strikes and collective bargaining don't move the needle in the right direction over the long term.
You're right that this isn't a meta-study. It's a deep survey and references many similar studies, though. It certainly doesn't exist in a vacuum.
"In this section, we explore in a more direct manner the relationship between unions and income inequality, joining an extensive empirical literature examining how unions shape the income distribution."
You're right to point out that "correlation is not causation," but the study specifically addresses your concern and presents a strong argument for causation. It's not as if science can never demonstrate anything using correlation and statistical techniques, you know?
https://xkcd.com/552/
"Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.'"
> It notes that there is a correlation between union membership and inequality
Specifically, it notes a robust INVERSE correlation that:
* Increased union membership correlates to decreased inequality
* Decreased union membership correlates to increased inequality
> Which is interesting but not that powerful - correlation is not causation
The authors acknowledge the statistical nature of correlation, and they addressed it (they say so right in the abstract). They used the following techniques to establish a causal relationship between union density and income inequality.
* distributional decompositions
* time series regressions
* state-year regressions
* instrumental-variable strategy based on historical events like the 1935 legalization of unions and the World War II–era War Labor Board
> It might be that both trends are being driven by the financialisation of the US economy.
The authors find that policy changes which significantly reduced the cost of union organizing (e.g., the Wagner Act and the National War Labor Board during WWII) led to lasting increases in state-level union density and corresponding reductions in income inequality. These effects were specific to the periods when these policies were active and had no similar impact in other times, such as during the Korean War, which did not explicitly promote union organization. This is a cause very different from a wild guess at "financialisation of the US economy."
Furthermore, the study highlights that unions were particularly effective in reducing inequality by increasing the wages of less-educated and nonwhite workers. During periods of high union density, the wage gap between union and nonunion workers was substantial, contributing significantly to overall income equality.
> It finds that union households earn a premium over non-union households. Again, because of the nature of the study that doesn't tell us much about the impacts of unions.
The study does more than just observe a premium; it provides historical and statistical context to argue that the premium is associated with union activities, such as collective bargaining. The consistent premium over many decades, despite changes in union density, suggests a link between union presence and wage levels.
In short, no, neither union membership or inequality are evidenced as show "both caused by financialization of the economy." They the latter correlated to the former, and was tested for causation. The former's uptake can include economic considerations, but it also correlated directly to governance policy directly targeting labor law.
> They used the following techniques to establish a causal relationship between union density and income inequality.
I don't think those techniques establish causal relationships. Which of these techniques do you think establishes a causal relationship? I can tell you right from the start that "time series regressions" don't establish a causal relationship. The paper established a very strong statistical relationship.
Which is all very well but if you look in the paper [0] at Fig I you can see a very strong statistical relationship without any need for statistical methods. It leaps out of the graph at you. There was a pre-WWII period, the WWII-through-to-US-mini-peak-oil in the 70s and then the post-peak [1] regime (speaking loosely since shale oil has indeed been a miracle over the last decade - but it isn't the wealth engine that oil was back post WWII). There are a lot of interesting statistical correlations at around the same time.
That is far too much background noise to claim that unions are the causal element. Geopolitics and cheap energy was more likely to causal.
> Which of these techniques do you think establishes a causal relationship? I can tell you right from the start that "time series regressions" don't establish a causal relationship.
Hm, time series series regression is a standard, accepted approach to causal inference:
For me, it suffices to say that the authors did not weakly position their argument as you claimed. I responded because I thought that claim was an attack, and that it was a careless regurgitation of the standard line about correlation.
There's some author discussion here that might help get the points across:
> Hm, time series series regression is a standard, accepted approach to causal inference
But statistical causality - things like Granger causality for example - aren't, in reality, establishing causality. They're statistical properties. You can't ever establish causality from statistical data. Eg, if I light a log on fire there will be bright light and later on there will be ash. If you have a timeseries of luminosity and quantity of ash present, bright light will be Granger-causal of ash. But in reality we know that bright light isn't causing the ash; the situation is we are analysing a bonfire.
You've got a group of people there in that analysis article that aren't very good at interpreting results. They're looking at a time of extreme turmoil, they've picked 2 random timeseries that are responding to underlying causes and assuming that they are the entire story. They can't do that, it isn't a valid argument. It isn't a thorough enough treatment. In analogy, they're missing the fire for the light. There isn't particularly strong evidence that unions do anything on their own at the macro level; especially since the economic regime was just very different in an era where the available energy supplied was cheap and quantity was rapidly increasing.
> For me, it suffices to say that the authors did not weakly position their argument as you claimed.
I never said they weakly positioned their argument, their argument is watertight, they developed a data set and analysed it. Found a bunch of interesting statistical facts. Solid academic work. camdat weakly positioned his argument.
The authors are using other historical events to help improve the theory. They aren't solely reliant even on time series.
This isn't an experimental study, and so they have to rely upon plausibility in context. This explains their multi-faceted approach a la distributional decompositions and state and IV.
To me, the contrarian position — that unions have no such effect — doesn't look as good. Prove it :)
They don't. I think there might be a gap between what they wrote and what you think they wrote. They aren't attempting to rely on "plausibility in context", they're doing academic work and they're stating basic facts - they developed a dataset and analysed it. That analysis revealed a bunch of interesting statistical features. But that is a series of fairly specific statements. What they aren't claiming is to have a theory. There isn't a theory in the paper. They aren't doing any work that requires theorising. They're just looking for evidence.
And they found some, but it is weak evidence for the idea that unions have a positive influence and it is unclear what it actually shows in reality. It is a good example of the truism that correlations are not causations.
> To me, the contrarian position — that unions have no such effect — doesn't look as good. Prove it :)
I do believe that unions have a generally negative effect, but that isn't what I'm arguing about in this thread. My point here is that this paper isn't a meta study and is evidence of something different than what camdat originally claimed. And I felt your response was interesting enough to justify a few extra comments about the difference between statistical causality and practical causality.
Do you have proof of your position? Do you have proof, also, how these authors are specifically evidenced to be wrong?
> Although in fairness I would suspect there probably is a causal element.
Why did you think so earlier? Is it contrary to your current position?
> Pro-union types tend to have a very short term view of the world and aren't about maximising long term returns. Strikes and collective bargaining don't move the needle in the right direction over the long term.
> Do you have proof, also, how these authors are specifically evidenced to be wrong?
Where have I said they're wrong? I've been saying the opposite. They're correct. I don't think you've understood what they said; you're misinterpreting the paper if you think they've said something controversial. It just happens that what they are saying isn't very strong evidence that unions have an impact on anything, positive or otherwise. They've found an unassailable correlation - which is what anyone would expect them to find if you look at Fig. 1 in the paper.
> Why did you think so earlier? Is it contrary to your current position?
General knowledge. I've worked in some union-heavy industries. And no - generally my opinions are fairly stable over any given 24 hour period. :)
> What does move the needle over the long term?
Investment, capital ownership, education, flexibility. The usual. You'll note that a figure was being thrown around where the premium commanded by union households was present, but that pales compared to the benefits of being in a higher paid industry like software which commands a >2x over median wage.
There is a real danger with unions that the union members will end up with a cushy salary relative to non-union members but the industry overall will be pushed elsewhere. Compare that to China which is generating amazing wealth over the last 50 years by relentless capital investment [0]. There isn't a comparison between the ability of commercial enterprise to generate wealth vs the ability of unions to capture a slightly bigger slice of the pie, with great difficulty and to the general detriment of society.
> Do you have proof of your position
As a postcript, you aren't going to get very far demanding proof in economic discussions. There is scant proof of anything in economics. That is one of the contributing factors to planned economies doing so badly; there is a practical reality where relationships between different parts of the economy have to be felt out in a competitive arena otherwise it is impossible to figure things out.
But if there is strong evidence unions help the process someone needs to get past these sort of weak evidence studies and put that on the table. Because this study we're talking about isn't at all compelling. I'd rather not be involved with them based on what I've seen. The best I've seen in their favour is that unions do something between nothing much and entrenching low performers in sinking industries.
If the labour organisers had focused on making co-op models of business ownership viable the US would be in a much stronger position. Instead they doubled down on fighting and enabled the rise of China. It was poor strategy with predictable results.
[0] If someone could show that the Chinese model of business development depended on strong unions then that'd be some pretty hefty evidence. But given the sweatshop conditions they started with that would be an optomistic prior to hold.
> Although in fairness I would suspect there probably is a causal element.
> General knowledge. I've worked in some union-heavy industries. And no - generally my opinions are fairly stable over any given 24 hour period. :)
So you do think that unions are causal in their correlation between union membership and inequality?
> Where have I said they're wrong? I've been saying the opposite. They're correct. I don't think you've understood what they said; you're misinterpreting the paper if you think they've said something controversial.
Well, you see, the position they take is actually in their paper... it's from the abstract.
"we find consistent evidence that unions reduce inequality, explaining a significant share of the dramatic fall in inequality between the mid-1930s and late 1940s."
Do you believe they've found consistent evidence that unions reduce inequality, which explains a significant share of the dramatic fall in inequality between the mid-1930s and late 1940s?
> So you do think that unions are causal in their correlation between union membership and inequality?
No. It seems very unlikely that it'd do anything to inequality. Inequality isn't really driven the wages paid to workers. If you note the context of that sentence, I was talking about the wage premium for union households. I don't think that paper provides particularly strong evidence for it - but the better argument is that even if there is strong evidence, that isn't a good thing. I don't want a premium, I want my job to exist and be well paid. The great successes of the manufacturing unions resulted in amazing manufacturing growth on ... completely different continents. I want to live in and work in an industrial cluster (think Silicon Valley, although I don't live anywhere near SV). Unions are likely to push the cluster somewhere else and everyone gets poorer (think Detroit) - albeit that the union jobs are somewhat better off than the people who just lose.
> Do you believe they've found consistent evidence that unions reduce inequality, which explains a significant share of the dramatic fall in inequality between the mid-1930s and late 1940s?
Yeah, obviously. The consistent evidence is a correlation - which is interesting but doesn't establish causation. The 1940s->1970s is a particularly famous period for US economic data and the paper contains extremely weak evidence that the unions were causative of the remarkable trends over that period.
The issue is "consistent evidence" is academic language. People saying that Zeus' anger causes lightening would be consistent evidence that Zeus is responsible for lightening. That isn't true, the evidence for Zeus-motivated lightening is about as strong as tissue paper, but there can be consistent evidence for it. This paper has stronger evidence than the Zeus theory, but is much more on that end of the spectrum than something like better education pushing productivity up. They've basically found an interesting correlation in a period riddled with interesting correlations. That doesn't mean much; correlations aren't causation.
This is like saying business owners hurt people by ignoring regulations, and governments decrease lifespan by killing their citizens. Or that internet commenters weaken society by telling lies.
These things have all happened, but they aren't inherent qualities of those actors, and the fact that some actors have done those things doesn't mean the organizational category should be discarded.
But the jobs didn’t disappear to Asia, the office jobs moved to Detroit and the factory jobs moved to other cities/states. Flint was the birthplace of the UAW, and it’s generally credited with driving all the jobs out.
That said, blaming globalization for the loss of factory work feels intellectually lazy. Some things will always fall to the lowest bidder, but a lot of stuff is extremely complex and you wouldn’t send it overseas unless you felt like you had to (either because of unions, suppliers, local politics, or some other reason).
The irony is most HN users advocate for unions, but never join one because the work is too boring or the pay is too low, as if those aren’t a direct result of the union.
There are different models of union. IIUC, Nordic countries use sectoral bargaining: [0]
Sectoral bargaining is when a union covers an entire sector of the economy, e.g. telecom, electrical, aviation.
In sectoral bargaining, companies don't fight unions as hard. ("We'll have to pay our workers more, but all our competitors will too, so we won't be at a relative disadvantage.")
The study is paywalled so I can't see what their methodology is, but the effect size is suspiciously large. Are they accounting for the fact that well paid jobs, especially in manufacturing tend to be unionized?
As per site guidelines, please assume the most charitable reading of your parent comment. They don't have access to the linked source, and there is no tone indication of snark in their message, so it is possible they are asking a genuine question.
Unions is more than just salaries, is about proper work conditions, fair layoffs, not being called on the middle of weekend just because boss feels like, being able to go home when desired not because we're crunching as there is no tomorrow dying before getting to enjoy all that money,....
I find it hard to believe that HN is truly pro-union when the top comment here seems to miss the point entirely, suggesting that “decent salaries” make unions unnecessary.
The reality is that workers are individuals who have to fend for themselves. Employers are naturally organized and have the power to modulate work conditions and say "find work elsewhere if you're not happy." Unions are the countervailing force to that. Even in the fairest of societies this would be true.
Makes sense. When you're paid well and you can raise your own salary every 2-3 years, why would you want a union? You're doing fine on your own. Sure, some shitty markets like right now happen, but you negotiated your way into years of savings to tap into as you need. You can weather the storm.
But yes, I'm in gamedev and this was a forgone conclusion for studios making record profits but laying off very talented people. If your ace isn't safe, the rest of us jokers need to band together to survive. These same FAANGs seem to forgotten why they paid their other tech so well, and they are sowing what they reap.
That's the thing. I dont know of any Apple Retail in the world that pays below average to their industry counterparts. And benefits are decent as well.
First comment is of course Apple knows what they are doing and they don't need unions, nobody does. This site is overrun by pro-capitalist forces, and this is against hacker ethos, but it's ok as hacker is just a random word we keep in the title. Shame.
> That’s no particular reason to hide that kind of work.
Wow, that is incredibly hard to respond to without casting aspersions. You claim there is no reason to hide a fundamentally unpopular and sometimes illegal thing?
This is the kind of thing that is so wrong that it doesn't merit a factual response. This in line with people using levels on airplanes to prove the world is flat.
I don't know if McKinsey is or isn't union busting, there are credible accusations against them. But I do know that discounting the notion out of hand and not even attempting to present evidence or argument is so laughably wrong that you should feel ashamed.
At this size, shuttering a store in retaliation for unionizing should result in the corporate death penalty. If Apple doesn't want to deal with unions, then they can feel free to make the point moot, by giving their employees an ownership stake in the company.
It certainly is, and I would imagine letting the children chained up in your sweatshop go would be bad for business too. On the bright side, their eyes won't be adjusted to the sunlight, so they won't get very far.
Yes, you can frame this as "bad for business". Contrary to what all the armchair economists online will say, you should never just do what's good for business. If we did we would be seeing crimes against humanity. And we do, just not here.
Its always a balancing act. Often what's good for business isn't good, and what's bad for business isn't bad. You need more robust reasoning than that. Because if that's all you're relying on to form your opinions, you have no substance.
My point is that "bad for business" on its own doesn't really mean much. Often people can't see the holes in their arguments or beliefs. But when you enlarge the view and take it to its logical conclusion, the holes become obvious.
And my point is that a store deciding to unionize could negatively impact the business. Calling for the death of the company, and inciting images of child slaves in chains is not an argument against that. It's an appeal to emotion.
It's not an appeal to emotions, it's a logical argument.
You're saying "well okay it could negatively impact business".
I'm replying "that doesn't mean anything, and sometimes negatively impacting business is very good".
It's not enough to just say something. You need to explain WHY. So what? Who cares? If you don't answer that, I'm sorry, you don't have an argument and anyone wise would choose to not listen to you.
It's bad for business. Okay let's assume that's true. So what? What's the big idea? What's the cost versus the benefit?
But they are willing to close stores for the specific purpose of no longer being in the jurisdiction of a specific court. So this is not a stretch at all.
So if a company is about to close an underperforming store and the employees get wind of it, all they have to do is sign union cards and the company has to keep the store open forever?
> But that's just pointless because there are a thousand other reasons they might want to close the store and there is no way to prove it
That's the exact point where your argument breaks down. It is possible, sometimes, to prove that a company closed a store because of a union. See the recent Starbucks trial. In the end, they were only saved by the SCOTUS, who isn't exactly uncontroversial at the moment.
> It is possible, sometimes, to prove that a company closed a store because of a union.
The "sometimes" is doing all the work there. Sure, if the company writes an email that says "we decided to close this store because the employees unionized and we're trying to deter that in other stores" then you could prove it, but then they could just... not do that, and close the store anyway.
Which is kind of the other problem. You end up trying to mind read the intent behind some possible innuendo with an ambiguous meaning, because the outcome isn't determined by what they do, it's determined by what they write down.
> And note I'm replying to someone claiming it's impossible to charge companies with union busting at all.
If it's impossible to charge companies that have better lawyers but still use the same tactics, you still have the same problem with the law, because then those companies will have a competitive advantage and the others would either learn to do the same or lose their market position.
I believe in labor disputes the standard is a preponderance of guilt. You don't need proof at all, just the inclination they could have had bad motives.
Beyond a certain size, it becomes hard to pretend you're doing it for one reason while actually doing it for another. Especially if it becomes a pattern.
> Luckily, executives have a habit of occasionally putting their blatantly illegal deals in writing
This is the weirdest way to have laws though. It strongly implies that the person putting it in writing didn't know it was illegal, because otherwise they wouldn't have put it in writing. But then you're never enforcing the law against people knowingly breaking the law, you can only ever enforce it against people who didn't realize it was illegal.
That seems like a bad design. In particular, it rewards a corporation the more evil it is, because the ones who know they're breaking the law are the ones who get away with it.
> Beyond a certain size, it becomes hard to pretend you're doing it for one reason while actually doing it for another. Especially if it becomes a pattern.
The pattern thing also doesn't really work.
Suppose some of your stores are in high crime areas and keep getting knocked off. The employees in those stores don't like the risk and form a union so they can demand bulletproof glass and hazard pay. The company looks at those stores and the insurance cost is getting out of hand and shrinkage is high and the stores just aren't profitable. So they close the stores.
Now you have a strong correlation between the stores that form a union and the stores that close, but it's because union formation and store closures are both caused by high crime, not because the company is purposely closing the stores that form a union.
> It strongly implies that the person putting it in writing didn't know it was illegal, because otherwise they wouldn't have put it in writing.
Just because someone created evidence that didn’t have to exist doesn’t mean they didn’t know their actions were illegal.
On Chris Hansen’s latest predator sting show the suspects frequently acknowledge, in writing, the age of the decoy and the sex acts they want to perform. They also take steps to create alibis, suss out if it is a sting, or otherwise avoid getting caught, which indicates clearly that they know what they are doing is illegal.
The sting show is obviously setting up a situation in which the suspects who know they're breaking the law think the evidence is only in the hands of their co-conspirators who have the same incentive to conceal it as they do.
Major corporations know that their emails etc. are discoverable regardless of whether the recipient is trusted. It's also not even necessary to disclose the true intention to anyone else in the company, unlike a situation where they're trying to enter into an intrinsically illegal transaction with a third party. The manager can just come up with a rationale for closing the store all on her own and then tell everyone else that it's happening.
It's not relevant. Unionization takes months at least but usually years. The workers at this store in Maryland had their first vote in 2022. The campaign started in 2021. The NLRB moves like molasses and heavily favors employers.
If workers had a notion that their store was underperforming, there's no way anyone could unionize fast enough to prevent it from closing. So it's not a realistic hypothetical. In fact, the company would probably close an underperforming store sooner if there was a unionization drive and would have plenty of time to do so before certification.
> In fact, the company would probably close an underperforming store sooner if there was a unionization drive and would have plenty of time to do so before certification.
Presumably closing the store in response to an attempt at unionization would be the same thing?
Legally, closing an underperforming location in response to a unionization attempt and after a successful unionization are completely different situations.
After unionization, what is required when closing a store is written into the negotiated contract.
The contract isn't really the issue. It's what the law should be.
The parties could put nearly anything they want into the contract. But if the company intends to close the store then they'd just not accept anything in the contract that makes it difficult to close the store, and if the workers go on strike then they were going to close to store anyway.
Unionizing a workplace is insanely difficult. It requires tons of bureaucratic work (to meet the standards set by state labor agencies) while also trying to get a large number of people who probably don’t know each other well, if at all, to all agree on a few things, all while risking their employment. This work often takes years. And all of this organizing work is unpaid labor on top of one’s regular job (which is already likely underpaid/overworked, hence the organizing effort). There is no “all they have to do is sign union cards.” The scenario you pose is practically impossible.
There is a recurring pattern where companies fight any kind of worker representation and unionization as hard as they can, paint vivid doomsday scenarios why it's actually bad for workers - and create the impression that it is futile because the company will never "play along" and just sabotage forever or even close locations etc. And when the organizing succeeds, the company often actually accepts it and lives with it, trying to make the best out of it (rather than keeping on fighting a losing war) and it turns out to not be so horrible after all.
If you are ever involved in organizing - expect this pattern.
The other two are examples of relatively small businesses that look like they either decided to burn everything to the ground and go out of business rather than accept a union for ideological reason or were failing independently of that.
I can only speak to the Homegrown location in Redmond, but I'm not surprised it's closing down. The location just doesn't make sense to me there at all - if they were half a mile south there's Amazon and Microsoft offices there that would be close enough for workers to grab lunch. If they went east by a mile there's a business park right there. Yes they are close enough to both that they could still get that foot traffic, but people would also pass by 10 other places on the way they'd stop in instead. They also open at 10 so no way to grab breakfast (or lunch) on the way to work, and close at 6 which is too early for folks coming back from work wanting a small dinner.
There's a park right there, and lots of people hanging out after work are grabbing ice cream from a place that's in the same building - that's the kind of establishment that makes sense in the location they are in (the ice cream place is not a sweat shop either that is only able to survive by underpaying workers: as far as I can tell their starting wages are 21/hr, they have 100% employer paid health insurance premiums, paid vacation and sick time, and a ton of other benefits - Homegrown's benefits were worse despite the union). There's 2 other cafes that have sandwiches nearby, and for one they are open starting at 7am so you can actually have breakfast there before work, two, Homegrown charges 15 for a sandwich which gets you a full meal at both those other places. From a quality standpoint the other 2 also feel more like a proper meal than fast food.
If this is the way that they ran all of their locations, then really there is no surprise here, union or not.
Completely shutting down a successful business for ideological reasons is odd. I can't imagine someone building a profitable business for years and then suddenly shutting it down b/c he disagrees with the staff he hired.
If he is unhappy, he can at least sell it.
As far as, "independently failing" I'm also skeptical that staff at a visibly failing business would feel comfortable to unionize.
If the company was not competitive enough to meet the unions suggestions, it was probably not a successful business.
As the parent implies here, typically union standards are incredibly generous. They're not difficult or costly to meet. Often it is painted as though a union is asking for the world and then some, and then you read the print and its... a COL adjustment. Which 90% of businesses do, anyway. Or something of that nature.
I'm being presumptuous here but from what I've seen, its trivial for a company to flourish with a union. Ideologically though, most American companies are opposed just because.
yes, that is exactly the anti-union rhetoric: if you form a union, we can't continue business and you will lose your job.
Restaurants have famously thin margins. If the profit margins are 5%, then a 1% increase in expenses (due to union demands) results in a 20% reduction of profits.
Unions can drastically increase operating costs for a business. When I was at a trade show in las vegas a few years ago, I had to work with a "lighting guy", "setup guy" and a "cleaning guy" to plug in a couple lamps for our display, b/c each role was unionized.
The problem with profit margins is that they're often artificially low in order to fuel business expansion, which may not be necessary.
I actually managed restaurant business. Our labor cost target was 15%, and food cost 30%. Then operating expenses like electricity, water, rent... I'd estimate there's 20% of revenue left over. Was our profit margin then 20%? No, because we were constantly buying new stores and random things we don't need. For example, a 16,000 dollar automated flattop grill that barely works, when we already have a flattop.
I'm often dubious of the "capital" that businesses purchase. Point being, profit margins are not really a good measurement of much. I can burn money and have low profit margins, if I wanted.
It is illegal to close a store for unionizing. It can be devilishly hard to prove that’s the case, but if the workers do, the NLRB has the power to force a store to reopen.
> There is a recurring pattern where companies fight any kind of worker representation and unionization as hard as they can, paint vivid doomsday scenarios why it's actually bad for workers - and create the impression that it is futile because the company will never "play along" and just sabotage forever or even close locations etc.
Ex- used to work at Target. Watching anti-union videos was part of onboarding and quite regularly required at store meetings.
Idk, this is the decade of history in the making every week. And companies have long since stopped hiding under a mask of politeness. I wouldn't trust past trends to determine this decade's fate.
> The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers’ Coalition of Organized Retail Employees, which represents the employees ...
I've never understood how employees choose unions when they form new arrangements like this. Does someone more familiar with the process have any insight into why the names of the unions that get selected in these votes never seem to bear any relationship to the work being unionized?
Old unions like this one that were originally more specific to a trade can and do attempt to expand and cover any type of trade if they want to. They also absorb (merge with) smaller unions all the time, even if the original name has nothing to do with the trade union they merged with. The end goal of international unions is to unionize most major trades, hence the concept of a general strike, to increase the bargaining power of the entire working class collectively across trades.
There are several flavors of labor unions. Some represent entire industries, but in this case they are joining a federation of smaller unions that are company specific. So the titular IAM is more like a parent company, or franchise, and to an extent it can get somewhat arbitrary, but generally if there’s a union that already represents a similar industry as one’s own, that’s usually the one to choose, as they will have an established base of members, relevant expertise for preparing for a vote and negotiating contracts. Even for somewhat novel professions, there’s generally going to be a similar analog to start with.
The nominal profession(s) (in this case, machinists) were simply the O.G. industry that kicked it all off back in the day. The IAM is part of the AFL-CIO, and represents more than 200 industries in North America according to Wikipedia. A labor union does what it says on the label, and represents a unified coalition of workers. Most of these kinds of unions have been around for far longer than even some of the industries they represent. The United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America also represents teachers, clerical workers, hospital workers, and railroad operators.
Their power is derived from their numbers, and their reach is increased with a diversified pool of industries. They are incentivized to develop branches and provide a big tent in order to grow their influence and power. As long as the members’ interests are aligned, the specific jobs they occupy aren’t strictly relevant, however there needs to be some level of commonality in order to provide them with a meaningful amount of leverage during contract negotiations. If the organization is too untethered between industries, then things like labor strikes won’t carry the intended message very effectively.
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Note: I am not a union official, or even a member, and this is entirely based on my own (possibly flawed) understanding as a history and poli-sci enthusiast. Take it with the requisite grain of salt.
What you said makes sense. But I feel like representing lots of mostly-unrelated industries is a weakness, too?
Like, imagine you're a teacher and you're on strike because of conditions at some steel mill you've never heard of. You want to support your fellow workers... but also, you're forfeiting your income for a cause that's not yours, for people you don't know.
Few unions survived union-busting in the 80s, and pretty much no new unions formed. Between this and the hollowing out of the unionized trades in the US, we’re down to autoworkers, machinists, boilermakers, teamsters, and a few others as large unions able to help new shops unionize.
Douglas J. McCarron head of the Carpenters Union Las Vegas, they own the most expensive piece of property in the USA (or thought to be) right across from the White House. The carpenters also do welders, carpet layers, ceiling tile, and a few others. Mostly in the upper US, as the south is known for being right to work. Some government contracts will pay prevailing wages even to non-union workers to make the bids fair.
Las Vegas is where the International Training Center is and where Douglas is usually based out of but you are correct he is the head of the whole union not just in Las Vegas.
Yes, the non-union employees will end up taking more home (paid the same but like you say less goes back to the Union, Insurance, Retirement, Training) than their union counter parts (assuming the boss is honest), but the idea is the Contractors need to base their bids off that number as to make the bids fair to all contractors both Union and Non-Union. Guessing the government has some auditing to ensure the employees are paid according to the Union wage of that location/trade. Without a prevailing wage would be very difficult for Union shops to get work on some of these Government projects.
Every Apple Store has a Genius Room, which repairs everything Apple makes. This union sort of makes sense.
It can get quite sophisticated as all stores are specialized and trained to make these repairs, including Geniuses getting trained on much of the same equipment as an iPhone assembly line, (plus the equipment to do the reverse) including test and validation equipment. I have worked at flagships in top tier cities, down to the smallest mall stores in a market that has exactly one store, the job is exactly the same. These jobs don’t require engineering degrees, but at least for Genius they require quite a bit of training, not so dissimilar from trades. It’s been quite a few years since I’ve been there but used to be if one is promoted up to Genius they will be certified to do repairs. If one fails training and cannot get their Apple Technician Certification, they’re demoted or fired.
Think about it like finding an investor. There are a lot of unions and some are more similar to an organizing contract style than others to the groups organizing.
Others may not have the capacity or ability to help in larger cases like these.
It's more about which unions are willing to represent them. Sometimes it makes for strange bedfellows and sometimes it results in inter-union competition, but there are no strict laws on who can represent who as far as I know.
Some unions are more willing to take on an underdog, whereas others only get involved if it feels like a sure thing. Sometimes a union will support a drive if it specifically strengthens their position (like an adjacent industry). And some industries like fast food the big unions feel are a lost cause, so most union activity there is independent.
The fact that companies tell you that you don't need a union and they'll spend millions to union-bust or to avoid union certification should tell you everything you need to know: vote "yes" to the union if it comes up in your workplace and join.
The company is not your friend.
Just compare earnings by workers at the Big 3 who are represented by the UAW and Tesla workers who are non-unionized [1].
> The fact that companies tell you that you don't need a union and they'll spend millions to union-bust or to avoid union certification should tell you everything you need to know: vote "yes" to the union if it comes up in your workplace and join.
This isn't entirely logical. Companies also spend millions to fight off patent trolls, but that doesn't naturally lead to the conclusion that you should team up with the trolls or that patent law doesn't need to be reformed after all. Something can be bad for you and bad for the company, so evidence of harm to the company is not sufficient to prove benefit to you.
Personally (speaking as a software engineer), if unionization is ever raised my plan is to look into all the details of the plan and weigh my options. I'm disinclined to trust any claim that something is always good or always bad, so I take the pro-union propaganda with the same salt as the anti-.
All your analogy says is there are 2 sides to every fight. in the co-vs-union case, one of those sides is the company’s employees (you). That means the company’s interests are opposite to yours when they fight unionization.
You might be skeptical of the union side, but the company is doing whatever will let them pay you less and/or exert more undemocratic control over you.
> All your analogy says is there are 2 sides to every fight. in the co-vs-union case, one of those sides is the company’s employees (you). That means the company’s interests are opposite to yours when they fight unionization.
I think that what you say here can be true, but I don't believe it is definitionally true.
I have a vote in the US elections every year. In my entire adult life, I haven't ever felt like the federal government represents me. Most of the time the US federal government acts against my interests while pursuing the interests of some other segment of the population whose vote matters more to them. This suggests that having a vote in an organization does not make my interests by definition aligned with that of the governing body that the majority elects.
A union is much the same: it represents the interests of the majority of its members. Most unions will actually fail to represent some portion of their members well, because their obligations are to the majority and few organizations are completely homogeneous.
This may be fine and right, but it also means that I can't just assume that my interests will align with the interests of the majority and therefore of the future union. Sometimes my interests may align better with those of the company, and the rational move for me in the event of unionization is to consider that possibility.
I agree with many of your points but not your parallel, entirely:
> I haven't ever felt like the federal government represents me. Most of the time the US federal government acts against my interests while pursuing the interests of some other segment
Imo, the only thing a rational participant in a democratic system should do is either (a) voting for a candidate that represents all of your make-or-breaks or (b) abstaining. I think if more people abstained (which I feel most people “wish” they could [I quote that because they absolutely could]), we’d see a little more change or diversity in opinion. Yet people feel shoehorned into a side because for the better part of a decade “side = !other side” (in the US, anyway) which perpetuates the notion that you don’t have to offer anything new and hurts the possibility of real change. Let the abstaining groups make their voice heard by the very act of abstaining.
> will let them pay you less and/or exert more undemocratic control over you.
the latter isn't necessarily bad for the worker, e.g. if a tech union tries to force divestment from Israel
if more money for workers is involved, sure, I'm with you. but I kind of doubt it. If the (tech) union spends more effort pushing political things unrelated to money, best of luck to them. for unions outside of tech, this seems like less of an issue
In America, it is illegal for a union to bargain for things like not doing business with Israel. The union can put out statements about how they don't support trade with Israel, etc. and hope that management takes the feelings of its employee union seriously, but how often do you think that happens?
> This isn't entirely logical. Companies also spend millions to fight off patent trolls, but that doesn't naturally lead to the conclusion that you should team up with the trolls or that patent law doesn't need to be reformed after all. Something can be bad for you and bad for the company, so evidence of harm to the company is not sufficient to prove benefit to you.
The difference is that companies don't often claim patent trolls are good and then turn around and fight them.
> The fact that companies tell you that you don't need a union and they'll spend millions to union-bust or to avoid union certification should tell you everything you need to know: vote "yes" to the union if it comes up in your workplace and join.
This is more like oppositional defiant disorder than politics; it's true that your interests are not fully aligned with your employer, but that doesn't mean you should do everything that they say not to do.
A better answer is that the USA has some of the oldest and therefore most antiquated union laws. Other countries have sectoral bargaining systems, which are better precisely because individual employers are less motivated to oppose joining them. (Because with per-corporation unions, your employees joining makes you less competitive. But with sectoral systems it doesn't because your competitors all have to join too.)
> Because with per-corporation unions, your employees joining makes you less competitive. But with sectoral systems it doesn't because your competitors all have to join too.
Doesn't this have the same problem, but now for your whole country? That industry in your country becomes less competitive against the same industry in another country.
Many of the more productive countries that have sectoral unions end up competing on quality over price. Although that may have more to do with their economies being more advanced. A German worker simply could not survive on Indonesian wages, regardless of unionization.
Competitiveness is about more than just price. One of the best ways for first world countries to compete is through automation. Now you need higher skilled workers, because they're building and maintaining manufacturing equipment instead of sewing textiles by hand in a sweatshop, but you also need fewer of them and then they can each be paid more without compromising competitiveness.
But you're still back to the original problem, because you're not just competing with Indonesia, you're also competing with other industrialized countries that have skilled workers but may not have unions. And you'll have to pay the market wage in those countries, which will certainly be higher than the median wage in Indonesia, but having a union that e.g. prevents bad workers from being discharged would still put your industry at a disadvantage.
That's all very abstract, but in reality the countries with sectoral unions all compete relatively well. And the cohesion provided by sectoral unions is enough of a social benefit that you rarely find their employer class willing to destroy that contract. Countries are more than their economies.
> the countries with sectoral unions all compete relatively well.
Relative to what? The question isn't really whether Poland is more or less competitive than California (the other differences between them would dominate), it's where they would each be with the other system.
> And the cohesion provided by sectoral unions is enough of a social benefit that you rarely find their employer class willing to destroy that contract.
It also tends to result in market concentration because a startup who can't hire in an industry without negotiating with a huge existing union is put at a disadvantage relative to large incumbents, and the incumbents may like it that way.
> it's true that your interests are not fully aligned with your employer
How are the employer's and employee's interests aligned exactly?
I would posit that they're not at all. They're completely opposed. You, as an employee, are completely disposable. You are an inconvenience because they have been unable to economically automate your job... yet.
Even if you're in a job unlikely to be automated anytime soon (eg software engineer), the industry as a whole is colluding to suppress your wages with what I call "permanent layoff culture". Layoff 5% of the staff every year and give their workload to the remaining employees.
There is an extreme power imbalance here. If you withhold your labor, it really doesn't matter. If the employer fires you, well that's a real problem (for you). It's your health insurance, shelter, food and water, putting your kids in school and your transportation (because we're a dystopian car-dependent hellscape here in the US).
But I'm sure you're better off negotiating as an indivudal. So many believe that. I'm sure they're all right.
I’m not as extreme as the parent, but think about it. Consider a small construction company where one (highly rational, borderline sociopathic) man manages a crew of workmen. The interests of the manager are those which maximize his profit on each house his crew builds, which includes paying the crew as little as he can get away with. The interests of the workers are oriented around securing the money they need to live. The only shared interest that I can identify is that the manager and the workers both have a desire to move money from the person building a home to their hands. The problem is that this money transfer is a zero sum game, so even then their interests are diametrically opposed. There are many employer employee relationships that don’t look this way, but I think it’s largely because the relationship evolves away from rational self interest for a myriad of reasons, such as if both employer and employee believe their work is valuable regardless of the money.
Thought about it. All I gather is that there might be some slight disagreement in the exact distribution of promised future value, but that is minor detail. The people involved are still aligned generally, working towards a common goal.
But this confuses their individual interests with their behavior on a broader level. The house construction is completely irrelevant to the interests of the workers, but they still construct the house. I’m disagreeing with your derivation of interest from apparent behavior, because working on something is quite different from believing in it.
> How are the employer's and employee's interests aligned exactly?
Well, if you're a tech employee you get paid in your employer's stock. But if they were entirely opposed you wouldn't be working for them, or you'd be a contractor and not salaried.
"Obviously" requires the act of perception, but why would management take the time to perceive the situation? Remember the old adage "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM"? Much the same applies here. Management's job is typically to follow the trodden path and do what everyone else that came before them also did, not to actually develop and lead in newfangled directions. They have no reason to consider if opposing joining a union is actually worthwhile, it's just what you do.
If you are old enough to remember the IBM adage, you might also be old enough to remember when management would only hire college graduates. That's what everyone else did, so they did to. It obviously made no sense at the time to anyone who actually looked, but that was the status quo, so management customarily followed suit without evaluation. But look now: Businesses no longer do that. Finally, something broke the status quo and overnight management had to give it some thought and realized that it was nonsensical. Obviously management acting in some way does not imply how obvious something tangentially related is.
> I do know a company where the owner voluntarily recognized the union… one company.
Sure. And nothing magical happened, right? Obviously. What could happen? Unions aren't magic. And with enough of these people going against the grain eventually everyone else starts to take notice that the status quo may not be what it seems, but it's a long road to see that kind of shift. It took decades upon decades upon decades from when everyone noticed that the college thing was the most braindead idea ever to actually seeing management in general change their ways. It took the limited number of pioneers willing to challenge the status quo to eventually see the change take place on a wider scale.
As before, management isn't some kind of all knowing super being. It's just irrational humans who follow the crowd without much thought or reflection. In fact, I posit that people in management in particular are especially prone to not putting much thought or reflection into things as avoiding that line of thought is what helps propel them into management. You don't often see the staunch engineer who wants empirical data for every last decision make it into management. They typically don't make for good managers, even if they should on paper, as managers have to work the crowd and the crowd isn't driven by data. The crowd is driven by arbitrary emotions.
> Just compare earnings by workers at the Big 3 who are represented by the UAW and Tesla workers who are non-unionized [1].
What are we to compare, exactly? How the "old guard" auto companies have better cash cows than the new guy trying to get off the ground and use that to pay more to attract the best talent? Just like how and why Microsoft and Google pay way more than DuckDuckGo?
> The company is not your friend.
A union is a company. First we find encouragement to vote "yes" to see the company form, but then a warning that it will not be your friend... No wonder the typical American is so afraid of labor unions.
> the UAW got one of the big 3 to stop their planned closure of one of their plants.
Then they have excess capacity, which is generally not great for the union: Now if the union goes on strike the company just increases utilization at facilities in another country and actually saves money.
It also raises the company's costs in general, and so raises prices, and so lowers sales, and soon you're looking at more plant closures.
I can't find where that article is getting $90 an hour, I'm seeing 28 an hour starting, with 42 an hour as a max in 2028 (which isn't to say anything about the people in probation; we shouldn't forget people sometimes have to work for years to earn their way into a union). This would suggest the salary is lower than at Tesla (at least according to Reuters) https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/gms-la...
From the studies I've seen, factory unions pay the most at formation, and after 5 years they fall to 1-2% above comparable factories in regards to total compensation. This makes sense, as union contracts are usually negotiated against industry averages, and no offense to joe schmo from aluminum castings but the Harvard MBA in charge of negotiating for the company is usually a better negotiator.
Why is Apple presented as the protagonist in this headline? It's obvious that they fought this teeth and nails. No, store employees managed to make a behemoth bow and accept their demands.
Used to shop here all the time when I lived in Baltimore, a friend that works as a Genius there had been speaking about them trying to organize as early as 2017 - when HE first started. Not a surprise - welcome news.
The original purpose and intent of unions was to prevent workers from becoming literal wholesale slaughter in the interest of profits: machines that could remove limbs, train couplers that required a user to stick their fingers in it as they were coming together, mining conditions where collapse was not prevented, etc.
I certainly hope Apple retail employees are facing no conditions that threaten their health or safety, and my suspicion is they are not.
The "pool" of humans overall's wealth, health, safety, and happiness increases in general when people strive for more through education and training. I don't see retail jobs as a permanent resting place for anyone. They are useful learning tools however for learning how to interact with coworkers, customers, and develop other skills. The usage of Union law to abate this is bad for society as a whole.
> I don't see retail jobs as a permanent resting place for anyone.
So that means what? They get to be treated poorly in the meantime? Apple store employees are probably better off than Walmart employees, but unionizing helps (to some degree) to ensure it stays that way.
I think we forget that the (rather limited in the US) employee rights that we do have, even things as basic as not being expected to work 10-12 hour shifts 6-7 days a week were only won because of hard fought action by work unions (since individual workers have zero leverage).
Corporations are built on the premise of generating returns for shareholders. That is their number one priority, and whatever they can do to cut costs, including reducing headcount, wringing the most out of employees, treating them poorly, etc., they _will_ do (with few notable exceptions) so long as it doesn't damage their brand image and profits.
just because you don’t “see” retail jobs as a permanent resting place for anyone doesn’t mean that’s not what has happened and continues to happen across this country. people quite simply do not have the ability geographically, per skill level, or at a certain level of risk, to do what you propose and get a higher paying more skilled job.
EVERY job should be livable and with proper benefits like universal healthcare and paid leave. if the company cannot afford it, it should not exist. people are real, companies are not.
> The most significant early step was the passage of workers compensation laws, which compensated workers in the event of an injury, increasing the costs to employers if workers were injured (Aldrich 1997). Prior to workers comp laws, a worker or his family would have to sue his employer for damages and prove negligence in the event of an injury or death. Wisconsin passed the first state workers comp law in 1911, and by 1921 most states had workers compensation programs.
…
> OSHA in particular dramatically changed the landscape of workplace safety, and is sometimes viewed as “the culmination of 60 or more years of effort towards a safe and hazard-free workplace.”
The "collapse" is more metaphorical, but real. Job security is non-existant, and wages aren't even keeping up with rent in some areas. People don't unionize and they are literally left out on the streets, for no fault of their own.
It's not manslaughter, but it certainly is still abuse. Collective bargaining seems to be an inevitably in such a situation.
My father in law ran a decent electrians business and the employees unionized and the costs destroyed his business. He ended up returning to be a tradesman despite being in his 50s as he took debt to keep it afloat and the employees now work non-unionized at the only other electrician business in town with a worse boss (according to friends I know in town disconnected from the drama). That's usually the most common disaster.
This is a single retail location in Maryland. There's probably a reason they let them unionize without a lot of fighting, and I'm guessing it's because they will shut the store down if the union becomes a problem.
I know this site is pretty pro-union, but if I were them I would not have wanted to unionize at all. Apple has decent salaries for what it is, and it's probably cheaper to close the store than hire a McKinsey consultant to renegotiate union contracts.
It's illegal to close a store just because you're afraid of unions. It's one thing for a Starbucks to close a store because they're opening and closing stores all the time and have thinner profit margins and thus have cover, but for Apple it's another deal.
That seems a somewhat pretzel-like contortion to enforce. If Apple says they don't want to run the store, how are they to be forced to run it? Especially if someone a bit Machiavellian gets involved; it can't possibly be hard for management to create reasons for a business to close. It is a delicate enough operation keeping one open; feigned incompetence at any level could easily result in a good reason to shut a store down.
What leverage are the union employees supposed to bring to bear, strike until the store opens? Or if suing business into existence turns out to be a workable strategy then we've maybe been running society wrong for a long time now.
Unless there is a paper trail like email from an exec saying something like "we need to close this store as an example because they unionize", then there is no way to prove wrongdoing.
This is a company with hundreds of thousands of people. I work in several ones. It is very hard to do this kind of things. If you do, there will be paper trail because you would need to get consensus from others.
If store is unprofitable, then they would just use that reason.
If the store is unionised and profitable, why would apple even close it?
> Unless there is a paper trail like email from an exec saying something like "we need to close this store as an example because they unionize", then there is no way to prove wrongdoing.
In my area, it didn't take a paper trail for Starbucks to get a smack. Several stores in the area were unionizing or considering unionizing.
So Starbucks removed the cushioned anti-fatigue floor mats from a bunch of stores, declaring them a trip/fall hazard.
Employees talked to each other and discovered that they'd only been removed from a few stores, not all. You can guess which.
Employees told the NLRB who asked Starbucks to explain why the mats weren't a trip hazard in non-unionizing stores.
The mats returned quickly.
Was their bright idea here really:
- remove conviniene for employees
- employees get more tired
- sales decline
- store justifies shut down
Seems like quite the stretch, just to not want to bargain with labor. I 100% believe it, but it's just sad. This all happened because businesses are stingy with paying employees properly.
I expect that one was probably a District Manager hoping to score points, rather than an executive edict.
> It is very hard to do this kind of things. If you do, there will be paper trail because you would need to get consensus from others.
Hard but doable. A few companies got burnt with direct messages between executives showing up in court in discovery, but everyone watched and learned to quickly scrub and remove those routinely. So next time it’s easier. And of course we only find out those that slip up and get caught.
But even that is not needed, all it really takes is the subordinates to read between the lines. It takes just one minion to suggest closing that particular store for “unrelated reasons” and they are promoted quickly. Everyone else learns exactly what the idea is without leaving a single paper trail.
Isn't Apple running that store for a reason? Maybe to sell something, I would imagine. They should be opposed to closing it for that reason.
Of course, that's assuming the main activity of a business is to make and sell things. Could be a wrong assumption.
But they run many others too not just that particular one store. Even closing and reopening a few stores in the region just to teach others “a lesson” could make “business sense”. They just have to find unrelated business reasons for to put on paper.
It is a wrong assumption. The only activity of a business is to turn a profit.
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They can just spin up a new instance and destroy the old one. Legality aside…
Everyone has ‘cover’. It’s just the P&L sheet.
If they’re losing money on that store, they’ll close it. If not, they’ll keep it open. But it’s not mandated to keep a money losing store opened. No one’s going to go into court and argue, “no fair! They closed my money losing location!”
And there you have the real reason Apple doesn’t care about a union here. The performance of this location can be ascertained in a fashion that is authoritative, objective, and unassailable. If they ever lose money, they’ll close, union or no union. So it doesn’t make a difference to Apple.
Paper…
I am a Senior Manager and saw a thing or two.
What I dislike about your statement is the confrontational usage. If we don’t fundamentally agree on collaboration, we run into fights over power.
A business owner sets the direction and the goals. A union is a commitment and should go beyond defensive rights. Both should work together on different interests sometimes but shall fundamentally agree: without a successful business there won’t be any employees, not the other way around.
> without a successful business there won’t be any employees, not the other way around.
And without employees there would not be any business. At the end of the day they put the work as well.
It’s in Apple’s interest to keep these employees happy because they are the face of the company. Their customers interact with them when they buy something and when something goes wrong.
I agree that the relationship should be more constructive than confrontational, but it goes both ways. Apple is both a wonderful and difficult company to work for.
> And without employees there would not be any business. At the end of the day they put the work as well.
Successful businesses always attracts employees, that has never been an issue. So the scarcity here comes from the business side and not the employee side.
The other way around would be that employees starts a successful business if there is none around, but that isn't the case. Good setups that enables good jobs are hard to create, you see what happens when those leave in the Midwest after the car industry left.
In the end it is up to each area to ensure their workers are competitive on a global stage, either price wise or skill wise or some other advantage. Otherwise there wont be anyone who wants to pay them.
Having someone around to do the actual work is absolutely a prerequisite to a successful business. Too much time in management might blunt that understanding but I assure you it's true.
But unskilled union labor dictates that it has to be them or those whom they approve of "around to do the actual work" ("actual" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here) or else the business that they don't own can't be a business at all.
It can't be anyone else, even when it could easily be.
Businesses that employ unskilled labor aren't the equal partnership that you want to make them out to be.
See the fact that the trend is toward international outsourcing. Unionization will increase that trend, even if the cashier that the public sees is now making $20/hr (now at half-time hours and much of her family has now had to move out of the area to find work, due to a downward trend in job availability: aggravating the gentrification or the depopulation trend, depending on the area).
I think that Unions are economically and socially useful, but not in the case of what is essentially unskilled labor.
As beyond the rational nonsense of such a proposition, the existence of non-unionized unskilled labor plays an important economic and social role. For one, these jobs maximize job availability to a lower class that is growing for reasons other than job availability and average salary trends. The alternative being unemployment.
And unskilled unions should especially be discouraged when other wage control issues are both not addressed and frankly aggravated by the generally pro union side.
In summary, unskilled labor wages should be buoyed by measures other than unions: reasonable minimum wage law, labor supply control at the population level, etc. As unskilled Unions otherwise distort the economy and social sphere too much. Last, one can't rationally justify the existence of such Unions on profit margin. If they are justified for one, then they are justified for all. And vice versa.
I think this boogey man "ooooo outsourcing!" argument against anything good for workers is so tired.
Look, even un-unionized laborers in America get paid significantly more than, say, China or Bangladesh. And they're also adults, by law. The reality is the jobs that can be outsourced safely already have, a long time ago. When was the last time you saw an article of clothing made in the US? Or a plastic product made here? Or anything really, besides an automobile?
But not all jobs can be outsourced. You can't outsource retail or food service.
All labor is skilled labor. Sometimes the required skill is dealing with unpleasant members of the public who believe them to be lessers, all while keeping a smile on their face.
This "all labor is skilled labor" mantra is a deeply unhelpful misunderstanding of the difference between skilled and unskilled labor
Unskilled labor is something people can be trained to do in a very short period of time, and where it doesn't require any kind of specialized training or certification
Yes, we still should respect people doing unskilled labor, but pretending that there's no such thing doesn't help anyone. All it does is generate a scoff at the idea that stocking shelves or operating a point of sale is "skilled"
I’m aware of and understand the difference. I’m not suggesting that the amount of training to run a cash register is equivalent to, say, wire a house, or calibrate lab equipment.
I just find it distasteful when people are outright rude or dismissive to “unskilled labor.”
> without a successful business there won’t be any employees, not the other way around.
How do you get that successful business? Employees like Product Managers trying to analyze product market fit, leadership setting direction, etc.
This happens a lot in small business - the owner/founder thinks they and they alone have the magic sauce, and it quickly becomes "you should be grateful to have this opportunity to work on my ideas".
>Both should work together on different interests sometimes but shall fundamentally agree: without a successful business there won’t be any employees, not the other way around.
And that social contract was broken some 6-10 years ago at this point. Businesses can be successful, record breaking profits successful. But still refuse a raise or even lay you off to save a penny.
So the increased opposition is inevitable. You can't just lie saying "times are tough", cut hours and and pretend unemployment is at an all time low, and not expect your labor to resent the business.
Especially not with the news being wall-to-wall with headlines about many of these employers making record profits
In Europa this is called the "social partnership".
> I know this site is pretty pro-union
If this site is primarily workers (as opposed to business owners) then I am not surprised.
I'm a business owner. I am "pro-union."
Do you have a union in your business? If not, why not? If yes, what is the experience like?
Usually the pro-union business owners who don't have unions justify it like this" "I'm such a a good boss that my workers don't need a union, If I ever hear that they want to unionize I would be shocked and would think I failed" - Linus Sebastian of Linus Tech Tips.
Genuine question, if I was a business owner, how would I force my employees to join a union?
Isn’t it a non-managerial activity (on purpose)?
Seems like there would be very limited influence on creating one
Linus’s position and other people like him is indefensible.
In European countries, you do an agreement with an industry union, everyone on the building gets the agreement, regardless of how they feel about it.
From this side of the pound, usually the large majority is happy with the benefits, even without being themselves union members.
That is why countries with strong union culture have negociation rounds of industry leaders with the main union groups, to discuss how the sector will be handled for the current fiscal year.
Nonsense. Ultimately, it's a zero sum game and therefore there can not be shared interest between business owners and Unions.
You may have detente or even just a laid back employee base.
But you're only pro-Union insofar as you are financially and personally comfortable with what the Union demands at the penalty of consequences.
Unless there is some kind of non-standard relationship between yourself and the Union, then there isn't a direct connection between what they will eventually demand and what you are willing to give at the cost of your business.
Your pro-Union stance can only be solely due to lack of personal stakes, and therefore it is only a matter of time or a change in labor circumstances. Unless your vision for your company is as a total cooperative.
It isn’t a zero sum game. It’s commerce which is a positive sum game.
At the end of the day, the customer (the business) values the labor it’s buying more than money it costs and the vendor (the employees) value the money received more than the labor sold. Both sides end up with more value then they started with - positive sum.
If that was not the case, neither side would agree to the transaction.
>Ultimately, it's a zero sum game and therefore there can not be shared interest between business owners and Unions.
The interests are misaligned, but is it really unbelievable that there's some minority of business owners actually
1. Do care about their labor?
2. Feel the best long term profit strategy is one of retention instead of the cheapest labor?
3. Whose primary goals are not to maximize profit margins?
Zero-sum games get more complicated when you care about the other players.
>there can not be shared interest between business owners and Unions.
There absolutely can. The point of a zero-sum game is that one party cannot win more without the other winning less. This is only a problem if all parties care exclusively about winning the most, rather than about winning enough sustainably. If you value your workers and care about them and want them to have happy, good lives, then you can absolutely find an alliance with a union.
It's not like a criminal justice case where one side has to win and the other has to lose, it's like a divorce where if everyone maintains a level head and allows the existence of humanity in the other side, everyone can come out happy. It only becomes adversarial when one side decides to make it that way.
Labor creates something new. So not zero-sum, not hardly.
There are of course shared interests - almost everything! The business, the customer, the cash flow, everything matters to both of them.
Not sure what if anything was being suggested by that comment? It seems like nonsense.
I expect what is significant is that this site attracts an audience on the wealthy end of the spectrum. Unions aren't just for workers. There are also unions for business owners (e.g. farmer unions). Freedom of association is for everyone.
But unions are ultimately a rich man's sport. They require funding and if they need to exert power they can only do so by withholding service. The poor are generally not in a position to act on either, especially the withholding of service. Unions embolden the rich, but can completely cripple the poor. So you find much less support when the money isn't there.
I am sure your opinion is formed based on some experiences you have had in life.
I would like to disagree. Unions are a tool for the poor, the people who don’t have a lot of rights, and protects them from the whim of the rich. If you are working a minimum wage job, and you are being made to work excessive hours, what is your recourse? What is your bargaining power?
Okay, one answer may be to quit and try somewhere else since there isn’t anything to lose here.
Well, I can tell you a very real scenario. My mother was working as a bank clerk in India. Has been her whole life. In the same bank (branches changed but she never changed the bank). When she was 50, there was a fraud. There was a transaction from a local businessman to someone, worth 3x her annual salary. She approved the txn. Once discovered, the businessman took the bank to court who in turn put the blame on my mom of will full ignorance. Businessman offered to settle out of court but we couldnt afford it, of course. At this point, the union came to mum’s help. They pressured upper management to get their house in order, not shift the blame to the tellers, and do not even think about firing her.
> If you are working a minimum wage job, and you are being made to work excessive hours, what is your recourse? What is your bargaining power?
That's the question. What is your bargaining power? All you have is your ability to stop working. Which, indeed, can exert power –– But if you are poor how long can you really go without work before you starve to death?
The rich can afford to sit around and wait until the over side caves. But unless you working excessive hours is the only thing keeping a business afloat (in which case, what do you stand to gain?), most likely they can outlast poor you with ease. Once you give up, your power is gone.
If you can't go without work for weeks, months, maybe even years, the business will quickly recognize your idle threat is just that. It is not just coincidence that unions are rare in professions where there isn't a whole lot of money floating around.
> Well, I can tell you a very real scenario.
This doesn't appear to speak to bargaining power, just communication. No power was needed to be exerted. If it came to a point where power needed to be exerted, how long would your mother have actually lasted? Assuming she could have lasted long enough, perhaps she wasn't as poor as you let on?
> All you have is your ability to stop working. Which, indeed, can exert power –– But if you are poor how long can you really go without work before you starve to death?
When union workers strike, they do so collectively, which means that the bargaining power is not that of a single individual but that of the collective workforce. Employers often can’t just wait out a strike because they lose tons of money when all its employees aren’t working. The union’s strength lies precisely in this collective bargaining power.
Also, unions raise money to support striking workers and unions emerged initially in the jobs where workers were paid the least and exploited the most (see early 19th century textile workers in the U.S., for example). The decline of unions since then is a more complicated history but the reality is that unions most benefit the most exploited workers who would otherwise have no recourse as individuals. Collective support helps maintain workers throughout a strike.
> Also, unions raise money to support striking workers
You’re still thinking of the rich. The poor don’t have money to raise. If they did, they wouldn’t be poor.
> most likely they can outlast poor you with ease. Once you give up, your power is gone.
Maybe don't put forward arguments that hinge on denial of reality?
The railway strikes in Germany from beginning of this year prove that, no, the bourgeoisie cannot just sit around and wait and/or rehire their entire staff. The 2023 Hollywood labor disputes show that "the poor" can indeed last longer than "the rich".
>The railway strikes in Germany from beginning of this year prove
That's because national railway and other such national critical infrastructure workers like policemen, teachers, healthcare workers, etc have actual leverage. Like what are you gonna do then? You can't outsource your infrastructure maintenance, healthcare or policing to remote offshore Asian workers, but you can for other non-credentialed internet connected professions in the private sectors where the language is Englisch, which correlates to their unions being very weak in negotiation power, like IT workers for example.
The recent tanking of IT/tech jobs in some high-CoL countries has made IT workers there realized that without the low interest rates to artificially inflate the market demand, they have virtually no leverage over their employers unlike those in credentialed professions with unions.
> but you can for other internet connected professions in the private sectors
You can certainly try, but the quality will be noticeably poorer. You can get away with that for a while, especially as a big business, but I think the tide is already turning there. Everyone's tired of broken shitty tech that doesn't work properly with no one to really contact about it. Skilled IT professionals are in huge demand nowadays, it's only the fleas on the rats complaining that the ship is sinking. Rats can swim, they'll be fine as long as land isn't too far. Mechanics and firefighters that can actually keep the ship going (if you pay us well enough), are on the other hand doing quite well these days. Unions are great, especially for tech professionals. As long as you're still allowed to negotiate personally as well, there's no reason not to.
>You can certainly try, but the quality will be noticeably poorer.
I know HN loves repeating this outdated trope to feel good, but that's not always the case and not in many I saw where they offshored and product quality didn't drop because they made sure to hire qualified people and managers, and not bottom of the barrel on the cheap.
Sure, you won't find many rockstar workers abroad, but most companies don't need that many rockstar engineers especially for CRUD work which is a commodity now, and plenty of countries have upskilled their workforce in the last 20 years especially in web CRUD, that they can take on the maintenance of stable products on the cheap.
>Everyone's tired of broken shitty tech that doesn't work properly with no one to really contact about it.
You mean like the one Google, Microsoft, Crowdstrike, etc. build in he US and not by offshore workers?
>Unions are great, especially for tech professionals. As long as you're still allowed to negotiate personally as well, there's no reason not to.
That's not how unions work in France and Germany. The unions set strick salary bands so that a newcomer can't earn more than someone who's been longer in the company so your negotiation doesn't get you anything, you let your union negociate for you.
> product quality didn't drop because they made sure to hire qualified people and managers, and not bottom of the barrel on the cheap.
So they didn't save much money, they just chose not to pay their domestic talent. Much better.
>Sure, you won't find many rockstar workers abroad, but most companies don't need that many rockstar engineers especially for CRUD work which is a commodity now,
Sure, we're mostly in tech and tech is one of the "easier" factors to outsource. I think your underrating how much even Crud work needs, but that's besides my main point.
You can't outsource everything. If you need people in a physical store, or on a physical setting in a building or in government land, you'll need to negotiate with your labor or shut down the project. I guess you can immigrate aliens who you can pay under minunum wage with the promise of citizenship, but that's clearly beyond the gray area at this point.
>You mean like the one Google, Microsoft, Crowdstrike, etc. build in he US and not by offshore workers?
In the grand scheme of things, most of my CS nightmares came from financial issues, not technical. And yes, they want to make that experience painful.
Sure, Crowdstrike happens but domestic labor means it's mostly fixed (and actually fixed) in a weekend instead of a week with precarious results.
Are the railway strikes in Germany really a good example? It's a public company, no matter what happens it will be kept afloat by the taxpayers. Realistically, if DB were a private company, it would have long gone bankrupt and the strikers would be out of a job. They lost 1.3B apparently in the past 6 months, and they claim 300M were due to the strikes.
>staff. The 2023 Hollywood labor disputes show that "the poor" can indeed last longer than "the rich".
Did it? What I read from the dispute is that it only slightly delayed AI while throwing Voice actors completely under the bus.i think the only reason it even settled was due to declining movie sales, another issue self inflicted by the rich.
> Maybe don't put forward arguments that hinge on denial of reality?
Ironic. If I was able to meet reality, that would imply I have a full understanding of reality, at which point for what reason would there be to talk about it? That would be a pointless waste of time.
> 2023 Hollywood labor disputes show that "the poor" can indeed last longer than "the rich".
According to the internet, these "poor" you speak of are making average incomes into the hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. These are, generally, very rich people. Perhaps you aren't aware of what poor is?
Unions in Europe originated with the poor factory workers, miners etc.
Sometimes going on strike would be tough — there'd be less to eat, if the union wasn't large enough to subsidise strikers with workers' income from elsewhere.
Unions predate the labour movement. The Royal Society is oft considered the first formalized union, originating in the 17th century, with a focus on the progression of science and not employment woes.
The early trade unions were not successful. I mean, they were successful in bringing about change, but they were not successful as power entities. They had to lean on government to exert the power. Unions are a rich man's sport.
Of course, government itself is ultimately a union, although differing in how membership is recognized. A government of only poor people wouldn't go far either, though. Government equally needs riches to wield power.
Consider the airline union strikes a while back. They leveraged the threat of striking in fits and spurts. They would strike for a day here or a hour there. Extremely disruptive to the business. The airlines had upper managers covering for flight attendants and scabs on contract but the stress was too much after a while. Because it was unpredictable and there are real costs to training flight staff the airlines could just replace everyone or have a whole fleet of spare staff on standby.
Strikes don't need to be and shouldn't be simple affairs, they can and should be nuanced and creative because the capitalists certainly will try to be clever and creative at putting people back into abusive working conditions when it suits them.
Unions are about organization. Because organization creates options. Options are power. Money is one way to get options and therefore power, but not the only way.
> They would strike for a day here or a hour there.
Still a luxury of the rich, of course. The poor can't afford to lose a day, or even an hour.
... but its not, because the union makes this easier than doing it yourself.
Okay, just do some simple reasoning.
Who has more bargaining power? An individual or a union? A union, of course. Therefore, who can end a strike sooner? A union, of course. Therefore, who can get paid sooner? Unionized workers, of course.
If you're POOR and in a position to REQUIRE CHANGE, a union will be necessarily better for you. I don't even understand how this can be up for debate because it seems so painfully obvious.
> Who has more bargaining power? An individual or a union? A union, of course.
Depends. Whomever has the most money. Generally, a group of moderately wealthy people will have more combined money than a single very wealthy person, but statistical likelihood does not provide a guarantee. We can find all kinds of examples in history where exceptionally wealthy individuals have completely dominated over unions.
And even when unions, especially labour unions, do show some amount of strength, they often have to go crying to a rich government for additional power when they don't have enough money of their own.
But if the union members are poor (like, actually poor, not pretend poor like we keep seeing in other comments)...
> If you're POOR and in a position to REQUIRE CHANGE, a union will be necessarily better for you.
Require is an interesting word. What is actually "required"? From what I gather "require" merely means something akin to "would be really nice to have". In that vein, a poor person attaining wealth would be really nice to have. Few would argue with that.
So, why don't the poor unionize and use their power to the capture wealth they are so sorrily lacking? The answer is simple: They don't have the resources to actually do it. Unions are a rich man's sport.
> So, why don't the poor unionize and use their power to capture wealth they're lacking?
They... do. You just described a union and why a union would be good for poor workers.
> They don't have the resources
Right... which is why they unionize, to pool resources.
> Unions are a rich man's sport
You've said this, and never explained how. Rich man are, presumably, business owners. Not laborers. Why, and how, would a union be beneficial for business owners? Wouldn't it be bad for them?
> They... do. You just described a union and why a union would be good for poor workers.
Okay, given that you say they have unionized, but are still poor, what are they waiting for? Why are they sitting on this mythical power that will magically appear without money that you speak of?
> Right... which is why they unionize, to pool resources.
What resources? They are poor. They don't have resources to pool. If they had such resources they wouldn't be poor.
> Rich man are, presumably, business owners.
Why would that be the presumption? The data shows that business owners tend to be quite poor themselves, if not even the poorest, statistically. Obviously there are counterexamples, but the average mom and pop trying to eke out a living at their restaurant down the street, that won't make the year before bankruptcy, are probably not rich. What makes you think that they are?
> Wouldn't it be bad for them?
Why wouldn't business owners also stand to gain bargaining power if they joined a union? It seems you're completely contradicting yourself now.
> mythical power
It's not mythical, it's logical. If you rely on me and ten other people to run your business, and I say I'll walk without a raise, then you say, "good luck". If all ten of your employees say they'll walk, you have a problem.
That's just bargaining power. It's a real thing that exists.
> what resouces?
The most valuable resource from a business perspective, labor. Without labor you don't have a company. You don't have a product. And you don't have customers. Again, a tiny drop of labor you can let go. All of it? Well, there's nothing left.
> business owners stand to gain bargaining power
Two problems. 1, businesses already have perfect bargaining power in labor relations. They can't get more because they have the most. Number 2, bargaining power against themselves? Again, why? That doesn't even make sense.
> If you rely on me and ten other people to run your business, and I say I'll walk without a raise, then you say, "good luck". If all ten of your employees say they'll walk, you have a problem.
Yet we can find all kinds of examples where the employer did say "good luck" to all ten people. In fact, it used to happen frequently enough that the government will now often step in to try and prevent the business from doing that. As before, labour unions, even when comprised of moderately wealthy people, are not always wealthy enough to hold power and have to cry to a much richer government for assistance.
> The most valuable resource from a business perspective, labor.
You can direct your labour resources towards the union, but that comes at the cost of not being able to direct it to your paid job. Opportunity cost is real. If you are poor, what supplemental resources do you plan to use to acquire things like food in the absence of the pay you gave up? There is no such thing as a free lunch.
> businesses already have perfect bargaining power in labor relations.
And...? Even if that is true (it's not, of course), unions are not limited to labour relationships. The farmer unions talked about at the top of the thread branch (which you obviously didn't bother to read) aren't about trying to embolden farmer bargaining power over their farmhands.
> bargaining power against themselves? Again, why? That doesn't even make sense.
Uh... What? Best to stop and think before replying, my friend.
I am fully convinced that you are not arguing in good faith.
Finding a few counterexamples on a gradient doesn't mean the gradient doesn't exist. Finding a few counterexamples means that strikes don't always work, but they certainly work more often than solo negotiations.
At best you are doing this thing that smart but narrowly focused people do where you try to break it down to a binary. That might be possible, but if this most charitable interpretation is correct your binary is "Are unions perfect" which they clearly aren't. Instead your binary should be "Are union usually better than solitary negotiations?" and that the answer to that is clearly yes.
I also doubt this is your actual issue, because you have introduced data and brought in hypothetical mom and pop stores that are clearly unrelated. Because of abject non-sense like this:
> You can direct your labour resources towards the union, but that comes at the cost of not being able to direct it to your paid job.
We are talking about strikes. You know and have demonstrated a knowledge that withholding labor is the power a laborer has, not directing it to a union. And in some situations (like the Kellogg's Strike over the pandemic) the union pays people on strike, this is a problem with many solutions and people get more options as they pool effort and resources.
You are ignoring repeated explanations and willfully choosing to answer the wrong questions. You are not engaging with this topically honestly.
> but they certainly work more often than solo negotiations.
Generally, least as long as the members are moderately rich and have the richest, and therefore most powerful, entity – the government – willing to hold their hand. But how successful do you think labour unions would be if the government eliminated all laws that protect labour unions? Let's be real: Most of them wouldn't stand a chance. A lot of them aren't rich enough to exert the needed power on their own.
> Instead your binary should be "Are union usually better than solitary negotiations?"
It seems the problem here is that you're doing that weird programmer thing where you think everything is binary. The first comment described four possible states on the blatant surface. It cannot be distilled down to a binary state. To try and force it into to a binary state loses everything that is being talked about. The quantization you are trying to apply is invalid.
With respect, no wonder you're so confused about the subject. Hopefully recognition of your error can get you back on track.
> the union pays people on strike
Assuming we're still talking about a union of poor people, and not going off on wild tangents, how? Where has this money magically appeared from? Sure, rich people can fund a union and pay out dividends to workers on strike, but then you're talking about rich people. We recognized from the very beginning that unions are beneficial to the rich.
Again, where do you think these poor people are magically finding all this money out of thin air? You keep going there, but never seem to be able to answer to it. Let me be clear: Poor people, not rich people.
> What resources? They are poor. They don't have resources to pool. If they had such resources they wouldn't be poor.
This is binary thinking where a gradient is required.
Poor is a spectrum. Someone with a car and a house and a $20/hour job might be poor because they barely make ends meet but manage to save a few hundred a month, but they have more options than a renter who is otherwise financially identical because they can use their house or car as collateral to get a loan.
A group of people might be able to take out a loan an individual can't. A group of people might collect dues as a cost to be in that group and pay them back out to allow strikes.
A group of people can threaten a strike and that costs Zero dollars.
> The data shows that business owners tend to be quite poor themselves
This is bullshit. I now think you are a liar. We are clearly talking about business large enough for strikes to happen and that excludes whatever non-sense dataset you have cherry picked.
More people have more options. Options are power. Why are you arguing against this fundamental point?
> Someone with a car and a house and a $20/hour job might be poor because they barely make ends meet
And someone with a $1,000,000 per year salary and a penchant for hookers and blow might also barely make ends meet. Is there some kind of useful takeaway from this fun anecdote?
> but manage to save a few hundred a month
If we assume the average worker with 20 years under their belt, that's ~$40,000. In what world is that poor? That alone, even ignoring the house and any other assets (a car, perhaps?), is somewhere around the top 20%. This disconnect from reality is fascinating.
> A group of people might be able to take out a loan an individual can't
Just who, exactly, is going to lend to poor people, even if they come by the millions, for no reason other than to cover their living expenses? There is almost no chance the poor are going to pay you back, unless maybe they happen to win the lottery. But if you really want to "invest" in the lottery, why not put that money directly into the lottery? What value do the middlemen bring?
> A group of people might collect dues as a cost to be in that group
From who? The poor don't have resources to pay dues. Are you being tricked by rich people again?
> We are clearly talking about business large enough for strikes to happen
No, we are clearly not. What makes you think the farmers that we were talking about earlier in thread even have employees? Many farmers do not. You're clearly not talking about anything related to what the rest of us are, but anyway...
> More people have more options. Options are power. Why are you arguing against this fundamental point?
Get back to us when you've actually read the thread. As amusing as your confusion is, there is no interest in arbitrarily changing the subject for no reason. Never was, never will be. Start a new thread if you want to talk about something else. Hijacking an existing thread for a different purpose is in bad faith.
I don't believe randomdata is arguing in good faith.
If you were living off that money maybe you wouldn't find it so decent. Maybe you'd want a union idk unless you have some non-financial reason not to that you haven't mentioned here. I trust their perception of their needs more than I trust your perception of it.
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How do unions make shitty employees unfireable? From what I've seen, collective bargaining agreements usually mandate two things:
1. Documentation of 'just cause' for firing. Unlike standard at-will, you need a real reason to fire someone like poor performance.
2. You need to follow the specified disciplinary process.
This is just a formalized, bureaucratic version of the process that any legitimate termination for performance is going to follow anyway, so I'm not sure how it's a huge change.
This meta-study says the exact opposite. Can you defend your position empirically?
https://www.nber.org/digest/digestsep18/new-evidence-unions-...
1. I don't think that is a meta-study. It seems to be an attempt to build a dataset to track US union membership over long timeframes.
2. It notes that there is a correlation between union membership and inequality. Which is interesting but not that powerful - correlation is not causation. It might be that both trends are being driven by the financialisation of the US economy.
3. It finds that union households earn a premium over non-union households. Again, because of the nature of the study that doesn't tell us much about the impacts of unions. As an analogy, we might find that HN commentators earn more than non-HN commentators in the tech industry but that doesn't indicate that HN is pushing salaries up.
Although in fairness I would suspect there probably is a causal element. But I still don't want to be in a unionised industry. I don't want a premium over other tech workers. I want to maximise the average tech worker salary and then be employed in tech. Those are very different objectives and require different strategies to achieve.
Pro-union types tend to have a very short term view of the world and aren't about maximising long term returns. Strikes and collective bargaining don't move the needle in the right direction over the long term.
You're right that this isn't a meta-study. It's a deep survey and references many similar studies, though. It certainly doesn't exist in a vacuum.
"In this section, we explore in a more direct manner the relationship between unions and income inequality, joining an extensive empirical literature examining how unions shape the income distribution."
You're right to point out that "correlation is not causation," but the study specifically addresses your concern and presents a strong argument for causation. It's not as if science can never demonstrate anything using correlation and statistical techniques, you know?
https://xkcd.com/552/ "Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.'"
> It notes that there is a correlation between union membership and inequality
Specifically, it notes a robust INVERSE correlation that:
* Increased union membership correlates to decreased inequality
* Decreased union membership correlates to increased inequality
> Which is interesting but not that powerful - correlation is not causation
The authors acknowledge the statistical nature of correlation, and they addressed it (they say so right in the abstract). They used the following techniques to establish a causal relationship between union density and income inequality.
* distributional decompositions
* time series regressions
* state-year regressions
* instrumental-variable strategy based on historical events like the 1935 legalization of unions and the World War II–era War Labor Board
> It might be that both trends are being driven by the financialisation of the US economy.
The authors find that policy changes which significantly reduced the cost of union organizing (e.g., the Wagner Act and the National War Labor Board during WWII) led to lasting increases in state-level union density and corresponding reductions in income inequality. These effects were specific to the periods when these policies were active and had no similar impact in other times, such as during the Korean War, which did not explicitly promote union organization. This is a cause very different from a wild guess at "financialisation of the US economy."
Furthermore, the study highlights that unions were particularly effective in reducing inequality by increasing the wages of less-educated and nonwhite workers. During periods of high union density, the wage gap between union and nonunion workers was substantial, contributing significantly to overall income equality.
> It finds that union households earn a premium over non-union households. Again, because of the nature of the study that doesn't tell us much about the impacts of unions.
The study does more than just observe a premium; it provides historical and statistical context to argue that the premium is associated with union activities, such as collective bargaining. The consistent premium over many decades, despite changes in union density, suggests a link between union presence and wage levels.
In short, no, neither union membership or inequality are evidenced as show "both caused by financialization of the economy." They the latter correlated to the former, and was tested for causation. The former's uptake can include economic considerations, but it also correlated directly to governance policy directly targeting labor law.
> They used the following techniques to establish a causal relationship between union density and income inequality.
I don't think those techniques establish causal relationships. Which of these techniques do you think establishes a causal relationship? I can tell you right from the start that "time series regressions" don't establish a causal relationship. The paper established a very strong statistical relationship.
Which is all very well but if you look in the paper [0] at Fig I you can see a very strong statistical relationship without any need for statistical methods. It leaps out of the graph at you. There was a pre-WWII period, the WWII-through-to-US-mini-peak-oil in the 70s and then the post-peak [1] regime (speaking loosely since shale oil has indeed been a miracle over the last decade - but it isn't the wealth engine that oil was back post WWII). There are a lot of interesting statistical correlations at around the same time.
That is far too much background noise to claim that unions are the causal element. Geopolitics and cheap energy was more likely to causal.
[0] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w24587/w245...
[1] https://wtfhappenedin1971.com/
> Which of these techniques do you think establishes a causal relationship? I can tell you right from the start that "time series regressions" don't establish a causal relationship.
Hm, time series series regression is a standard, accepted approach to causal inference:
https://towardsdatascience.com/inferring-causality-in-time-s...
For me, it suffices to say that the authors did not weakly position their argument as you claimed. I responded because I thought that claim was an attack, and that it was a careless regurgitation of the standard line about correlation.
There's some author discussion here that might help get the points across:
https://www.stone-econ.org/research/unions-and-inequality-ov...
Here, also, is a third-party discussion:
https://journalistsresource.org/economics/inequality-labor-u...
The data that the union papers authors used is here. Scroll to the bottom of the page to find
"Supplementary data | qjab012_Online_Appendix - pdf file"
https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/136/3/1325/6219103
> Hm, time series series regression is a standard, accepted approach to causal inference
But statistical causality - things like Granger causality for example - aren't, in reality, establishing causality. They're statistical properties. You can't ever establish causality from statistical data. Eg, if I light a log on fire there will be bright light and later on there will be ash. If you have a timeseries of luminosity and quantity of ash present, bright light will be Granger-causal of ash. But in reality we know that bright light isn't causing the ash; the situation is we are analysing a bonfire.
You've got a group of people there in that analysis article that aren't very good at interpreting results. They're looking at a time of extreme turmoil, they've picked 2 random timeseries that are responding to underlying causes and assuming that they are the entire story. They can't do that, it isn't a valid argument. It isn't a thorough enough treatment. In analogy, they're missing the fire for the light. There isn't particularly strong evidence that unions do anything on their own at the macro level; especially since the economic regime was just very different in an era where the available energy supplied was cheap and quantity was rapidly increasing.
> For me, it suffices to say that the authors did not weakly position their argument as you claimed.
I never said they weakly positioned their argument, their argument is watertight, they developed a data set and analysed it. Found a bunch of interesting statistical facts. Solid academic work. camdat weakly positioned his argument.
The authors are using other historical events to help improve the theory. They aren't solely reliant even on time series.
This isn't an experimental study, and so they have to rely upon plausibility in context. This explains their multi-faceted approach a la distributional decompositions and state and IV.
To me, the contrarian position — that unions have no such effect — doesn't look as good. Prove it :)
They don't. I think there might be a gap between what they wrote and what you think they wrote. They aren't attempting to rely on "plausibility in context", they're doing academic work and they're stating basic facts - they developed a dataset and analysed it. That analysis revealed a bunch of interesting statistical features. But that is a series of fairly specific statements. What they aren't claiming is to have a theory. There isn't a theory in the paper. They aren't doing any work that requires theorising. They're just looking for evidence.
And they found some, but it is weak evidence for the idea that unions have a positive influence and it is unclear what it actually shows in reality. It is a good example of the truism that correlations are not causations.
> To me, the contrarian position — that unions have no such effect — doesn't look as good. Prove it :)
I do believe that unions have a generally negative effect, but that isn't what I'm arguing about in this thread. My point here is that this paper isn't a meta study and is evidence of something different than what camdat originally claimed. And I felt your response was interesting enough to justify a few extra comments about the difference between statistical causality and practical causality.
Do you have proof of your position? Do you have proof, also, how these authors are specifically evidenced to be wrong?
> Although in fairness I would suspect there probably is a causal element.
Why did you think so earlier? Is it contrary to your current position?
> Pro-union types tend to have a very short term view of the world and aren't about maximising long term returns. Strikes and collective bargaining don't move the needle in the right direction over the long term.
What does move the needle over the long term?
> Do you have proof, also, how these authors are specifically evidenced to be wrong?
Where have I said they're wrong? I've been saying the opposite. They're correct. I don't think you've understood what they said; you're misinterpreting the paper if you think they've said something controversial. It just happens that what they are saying isn't very strong evidence that unions have an impact on anything, positive or otherwise. They've found an unassailable correlation - which is what anyone would expect them to find if you look at Fig. 1 in the paper.
> Why did you think so earlier? Is it contrary to your current position?
General knowledge. I've worked in some union-heavy industries. And no - generally my opinions are fairly stable over any given 24 hour period. :)
> What does move the needle over the long term?
Investment, capital ownership, education, flexibility. The usual. You'll note that a figure was being thrown around where the premium commanded by union households was present, but that pales compared to the benefits of being in a higher paid industry like software which commands a >2x over median wage.
There is a real danger with unions that the union members will end up with a cushy salary relative to non-union members but the industry overall will be pushed elsewhere. Compare that to China which is generating amazing wealth over the last 50 years by relentless capital investment [0]. There isn't a comparison between the ability of commercial enterprise to generate wealth vs the ability of unions to capture a slightly bigger slice of the pie, with great difficulty and to the general detriment of society.
> Do you have proof of your position
As a postcript, you aren't going to get very far demanding proof in economic discussions. There is scant proof of anything in economics. That is one of the contributing factors to planned economies doing so badly; there is a practical reality where relationships between different parts of the economy have to be felt out in a competitive arena otherwise it is impossible to figure things out.
But if there is strong evidence unions help the process someone needs to get past these sort of weak evidence studies and put that on the table. Because this study we're talking about isn't at all compelling. I'd rather not be involved with them based on what I've seen. The best I've seen in their favour is that unions do something between nothing much and entrenching low performers in sinking industries.
If the labour organisers had focused on making co-op models of business ownership viable the US would be in a much stronger position. Instead they doubled down on fighting and enabled the rise of China. It was poor strategy with predictable results.
[0] If someone could show that the Chinese model of business development depended on strong unions then that'd be some pretty hefty evidence. But given the sweatshop conditions they started with that would be an optomistic prior to hold.
You wrote:
> Although in fairness I would suspect there probably is a causal element.
> General knowledge. I've worked in some union-heavy industries. And no - generally my opinions are fairly stable over any given 24 hour period. :)
So you do think that unions are causal in their correlation between union membership and inequality?
> Where have I said they're wrong? I've been saying the opposite. They're correct. I don't think you've understood what they said; you're misinterpreting the paper if you think they've said something controversial.
Well, you see, the position they take is actually in their paper... it's from the abstract.
"we find consistent evidence that unions reduce inequality, explaining a significant share of the dramatic fall in inequality between the mid-1930s and late 1940s."
Do you believe they've found consistent evidence that unions reduce inequality, which explains a significant share of the dramatic fall in inequality between the mid-1930s and late 1940s?
> So you do think that unions are causal in their correlation between union membership and inequality?
No. It seems very unlikely that it'd do anything to inequality. Inequality isn't really driven the wages paid to workers. If you note the context of that sentence, I was talking about the wage premium for union households. I don't think that paper provides particularly strong evidence for it - but the better argument is that even if there is strong evidence, that isn't a good thing. I don't want a premium, I want my job to exist and be well paid. The great successes of the manufacturing unions resulted in amazing manufacturing growth on ... completely different continents. I want to live in and work in an industrial cluster (think Silicon Valley, although I don't live anywhere near SV). Unions are likely to push the cluster somewhere else and everyone gets poorer (think Detroit) - albeit that the union jobs are somewhat better off than the people who just lose.
> Do you believe they've found consistent evidence that unions reduce inequality, which explains a significant share of the dramatic fall in inequality between the mid-1930s and late 1940s?
Yeah, obviously. The consistent evidence is a correlation - which is interesting but doesn't establish causation. The 1940s->1970s is a particularly famous period for US economic data and the paper contains extremely weak evidence that the unions were causative of the remarkable trends over that period.
The issue is "consistent evidence" is academic language. People saying that Zeus' anger causes lightening would be consistent evidence that Zeus is responsible for lightening. That isn't true, the evidence for Zeus-motivated lightening is about as strong as tissue paper, but there can be consistent evidence for it. This paper has stronger evidence than the Zeus theory, but is much more on that end of the spectrum than something like better education pushing productivity up. They've basically found an interesting correlation in a period riddled with interesting correlations. That doesn't mean much; correlations aren't causation.
Sorry, but that's a lot of nonsense.
This is like saying business owners hurt people by ignoring regulations, and governments decrease lifespan by killing their citizens. Or that internet commenters weaken society by telling lies.
These things have all happened, but they aren't inherent qualities of those actors, and the fact that some actors have done those things doesn't mean the organizational category should be discarded.
Lack of unions decrease wages because there will always be someone willing to sell themselves for less.
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Globalization ate union and non-union jobs, so blaming unions for flint’s fall from grace… seems unfounded.
But the jobs didn’t disappear to Asia, the office jobs moved to Detroit and the factory jobs moved to other cities/states. Flint was the birthplace of the UAW, and it’s generally credited with driving all the jobs out.
That said, blaming globalization for the loss of factory work feels intellectually lazy. Some things will always fall to the lowest bidder, but a lot of stuff is extremely complex and you wouldn’t send it overseas unless you felt like you had to (either because of unions, suppliers, local politics, or some other reason).
The irony is most HN users advocate for unions, but never join one because the work is too boring or the pay is too low, as if those aren’t a direct result of the union.
So why does it work so well in Nordic countries then? Unionisation is the norm here
There are different models of union. IIUC, Nordic countries use sectoral bargaining: [0]
Sectoral bargaining is when a union covers an entire sector of the economy, e.g. telecom, electrical, aviation.
In sectoral bargaining, companies don't fight unions as hard. ("We'll have to pay our workers more, but all our competitors will too, so we won't be at a relative disadvantage.")
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectoral_collective_bargaining
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00197939221129261
Workers in unions earn up to a million dollars more in their lifetime.
The study is paywalled so I can't see what their methodology is, but the effect size is suspiciously large. Are they accounting for the fact that well paid jobs, especially in manufacturing tend to be unionized?
If you can't read it, at least have the decency to assume the scientist has taken account of the most obvious factor in their work.
They probably didn't need a software developer to tell them.
As per site guidelines, please assume the most charitable reading of your parent comment. They don't have access to the linked source, and there is no tone indication of snark in their message, so it is possible they are asking a genuine question.
Unions is more than just salaries, is about proper work conditions, fair layoffs, not being called on the middle of weekend just because boss feels like, being able to go home when desired not because we're crunching as there is no tomorrow dying before getting to enjoy all that money,....
I find it hard to believe that HN is truly pro-union when the top comment here seems to miss the point entirely, suggesting that “decent salaries” make unions unnecessary.
The reality is that workers are individuals who have to fend for themselves. Employers are naturally organized and have the power to modulate work conditions and say "find work elsewhere if you're not happy." Unions are the countervailing force to that. Even in the fairest of societies this would be true.
> I know this site is pretty pro-union
This site is pro-union for anything outside of tech, but staunchly anti-union for tech. except maybe gamedev, which has a reputation of underpaying
"This site" isn't a single person and if you read the comments under this story, you will find a ton of anti-union sentiment.
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Are you trying to make a joke? Or just derailing the conversation? I'm clearly talking about the people posting on this site.
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Makes sense. When you're paid well and you can raise your own salary every 2-3 years, why would you want a union? You're doing fine on your own. Sure, some shitty markets like right now happen, but you negotiated your way into years of savings to tap into as you need. You can weather the storm.
But yes, I'm in gamedev and this was a forgone conclusion for studios making record profits but laying off very talented people. If your ace isn't safe, the rest of us jokers need to band together to survive. These same FAANGs seem to forgotten why they paid their other tech so well, and they are sowing what they reap.
>Apple has decent salaries for what it is
That's the thing. I dont know of any Apple Retail in the world that pays below average to their industry counterparts. And benefits are decent as well.
First comment is of course Apple knows what they are doing and they don't need unions, nobody does. This site is overrun by pro-capitalist forces, and this is against hacker ethos, but it's ok as hacker is just a random word we keep in the title. Shame.
McKinsey doesn’t do that sort of thing
officially*
No just plainly. That’s no particular reason to hide that kind of work. It’s just a factually incorrect statement.
> That’s no particular reason to hide that kind of work.
Wow, that is incredibly hard to respond to without casting aspersions. You claim there is no reason to hide a fundamentally unpopular and sometimes illegal thing?
This is the kind of thing that is so wrong that it doesn't merit a factual response. This in line with people using levels on airplanes to prove the world is flat.
I don't know if McKinsey is or isn't union busting, there are credible accusations against them. But I do know that discounting the notion out of hand and not even attempting to present evidence or argument is so laughably wrong that you should feel ashamed.
At this size, shuttering a store in retaliation for unionizing should result in the corporate death penalty. If Apple doesn't want to deal with unions, then they can feel free to make the point moot, by giving their employees an ownership stake in the company.
> At this size
Size has nothing to do with it. Just because a company is large doesn't mean it needs to start making poor business decisions.
> corporate death penalty
That's a bit extreme. If you want to be seen as objective, this kind of inflammatory rhetoric will only work against you.
> Just because a company is large doesn't mean it needs to start making poor business decisions
To be clear this is also inflammatory rhetoric disguised as what some would have you think is ‘common sense’.
Is it not possible that employees forming a union could be bad for business?
It certainly is, and I would imagine letting the children chained up in your sweatshop go would be bad for business too. On the bright side, their eyes won't be adjusted to the sunlight, so they won't get very far.
Yes, you can frame this as "bad for business". Contrary to what all the armchair economists online will say, you should never just do what's good for business. If we did we would be seeing crimes against humanity. And we do, just not here.
Its always a balancing act. Often what's good for business isn't good, and what's bad for business isn't bad. You need more robust reasoning than that. Because if that's all you're relying on to form your opinions, you have no substance.
When Apple chains children up in sweatshops, please let me know.
My point is that "bad for business" on its own doesn't really mean much. Often people can't see the holes in their arguments or beliefs. But when you enlarge the view and take it to its logical conclusion, the holes become obvious.
And my point is that a store deciding to unionize could negatively impact the business. Calling for the death of the company, and inciting images of child slaves in chains is not an argument against that. It's an appeal to emotion.
It's not an appeal to emotions, it's a logical argument.
You're saying "well okay it could negatively impact business".
I'm replying "that doesn't mean anything, and sometimes negatively impacting business is very good".
It's not enough to just say something. You need to explain WHY. So what? Who cares? If you don't answer that, I'm sorry, you don't have an argument and anyone wise would choose to not listen to you.
It's bad for business. Okay let's assume that's true. So what? What's the big idea? What's the cost versus the benefit?
> sometimes negatively impacting business is very good
This is an oxymoron.
But they are willing to close stores for the specific purpose of no longer being in the jurisdiction of a specific court. So this is not a stretch at all.
https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2019/2/22/18236424/a...
So if a company is about to close an underperforming store and the employees get wind of it, all they have to do is sign union cards and the company has to keep the store open forever?
No? That's not what the person you're replying to said, nor what they meant, nor is it a logical implication of what they said.
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> But that's just pointless because there are a thousand other reasons they might want to close the store and there is no way to prove it
That's the exact point where your argument breaks down. It is possible, sometimes, to prove that a company closed a store because of a union. See the recent Starbucks trial. In the end, they were only saved by the SCOTUS, who isn't exactly uncontroversial at the moment.
> It is possible, sometimes, to prove that a company closed a store because of a union.
The "sometimes" is doing all the work there. Sure, if the company writes an email that says "we decided to close this store because the employees unionized and we're trying to deter that in other stores" then you could prove it, but then they could just... not do that, and close the store anyway.
Maybe read up on recent union busting cases. Starbucks, Tesla, Walmart, Amazon... It's a lot more nuanced than that.
And note I'm replying to someone claiming it's impossible to charge companies with union busting at all.
> It's a lot more nuanced than that.
Which is kind of the other problem. You end up trying to mind read the intent behind some possible innuendo with an ambiguous meaning, because the outcome isn't determined by what they do, it's determined by what they write down.
> And note I'm replying to someone claiming it's impossible to charge companies with union busting at all.
If it's impossible to charge companies that have better lawyers but still use the same tactics, you still have the same problem with the law, because then those companies will have a competitive advantage and the others would either learn to do the same or lose their market position.
I believe in labor disputes the standard is a preponderance of guilt. You don't need proof at all, just the inclination they could have had bad motives.
Luckily, executives have a habit of occasionally putting their blatantly illegal deals in writing (e.g. the recruiting cartel, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...).
Beyond a certain size, it becomes hard to pretend you're doing it for one reason while actually doing it for another. Especially if it becomes a pattern.
> Luckily, executives have a habit of occasionally putting their blatantly illegal deals in writing
This is the weirdest way to have laws though. It strongly implies that the person putting it in writing didn't know it was illegal, because otherwise they wouldn't have put it in writing. But then you're never enforcing the law against people knowingly breaking the law, you can only ever enforce it against people who didn't realize it was illegal.
That seems like a bad design. In particular, it rewards a corporation the more evil it is, because the ones who know they're breaking the law are the ones who get away with it.
> Beyond a certain size, it becomes hard to pretend you're doing it for one reason while actually doing it for another. Especially if it becomes a pattern.
The pattern thing also doesn't really work.
Suppose some of your stores are in high crime areas and keep getting knocked off. The employees in those stores don't like the risk and form a union so they can demand bulletproof glass and hazard pay. The company looks at those stores and the insurance cost is getting out of hand and shrinkage is high and the stores just aren't profitable. So they close the stores.
Now you have a strong correlation between the stores that form a union and the stores that close, but it's because union formation and store closures are both caused by high crime, not because the company is purposely closing the stores that form a union.
> It strongly implies that the person putting it in writing didn't know it was illegal, because otherwise they wouldn't have put it in writing.
Just because someone created evidence that didn’t have to exist doesn’t mean they didn’t know their actions were illegal.
On Chris Hansen’s latest predator sting show the suspects frequently acknowledge, in writing, the age of the decoy and the sex acts they want to perform. They also take steps to create alibis, suss out if it is a sting, or otherwise avoid getting caught, which indicates clearly that they know what they are doing is illegal.
The sting show is obviously setting up a situation in which the suspects who know they're breaking the law think the evidence is only in the hands of their co-conspirators who have the same incentive to conceal it as they do.
Major corporations know that their emails etc. are discoverable regardless of whether the recipient is trusted. It's also not even necessary to disclose the true intention to anyone else in the company, unlike a situation where they're trying to enter into an intrinsically illegal transaction with a third party. The manager can just come up with a rationale for closing the store all on her own and then tell everyone else that it's happening.
We don't have card check unionization in the United States.
Forming a union is much more difficult than you propose.
It's just an expression. The point is, what happens after a union is formed?
It's not relevant. Unionization takes months at least but usually years. The workers at this store in Maryland had their first vote in 2022. The campaign started in 2021. The NLRB moves like molasses and heavily favors employers.
If workers had a notion that their store was underperforming, there's no way anyone could unionize fast enough to prevent it from closing. So it's not a realistic hypothetical. In fact, the company would probably close an underperforming store sooner if there was a unionization drive and would have plenty of time to do so before certification.
> In fact, the company would probably close an underperforming store sooner if there was a unionization drive and would have plenty of time to do so before certification.
Presumably closing the store in response to an attempt at unionization would be the same thing?
Legally, closing an underperforming location in response to a unionization attempt and after a successful unionization are completely different situations.
After unionization, what is required when closing a store is written into the negotiated contract.
The contract isn't really the issue. It's what the law should be.
The parties could put nearly anything they want into the contract. But if the company intends to close the store then they'd just not accept anything in the contract that makes it difficult to close the store, and if the workers go on strike then they were going to close to store anyway.
Plenty of unionized companies close locations. What happens is usually covered by the union contract.
Unionizing a workplace is insanely difficult. It requires tons of bureaucratic work (to meet the standards set by state labor agencies) while also trying to get a large number of people who probably don’t know each other well, if at all, to all agree on a few things, all while risking their employment. This work often takes years. And all of this organizing work is unpaid labor on top of one’s regular job (which is already likely underpaid/overworked, hence the organizing effort). There is no “all they have to do is sign union cards.” The scenario you pose is practically impossible.
utterly absurd
There is a recurring pattern where companies fight any kind of worker representation and unionization as hard as they can, paint vivid doomsday scenarios why it's actually bad for workers - and create the impression that it is futile because the company will never "play along" and just sabotage forever or even close locations etc. And when the organizing succeeds, the company often actually accepts it and lives with it, trying to make the best out of it (rather than keeping on fighting a losing war) and it turns out to not be so horrible after all.
If you are ever involved in organizing - expect this pattern.
maybe this is just a small sample size, but Seattle and Orlando have lost a few local businesses months after the employees unionized.
- Homegrown: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/seattle-sandwich-chain...
- Dandelions: https://www.orlandoweekly.com/food-drink/dandelion-community...
- Starbucks (multiple locations): https://edition.cnn.com/2022/11/22/business/starbucks-closur...
Starbucks is a great example because it seems like they gave up now: https://jacobin.com/2024/02/starbucks-workers-united-master-...
The other two are examples of relatively small businesses that look like they either decided to burn everything to the ground and go out of business rather than accept a union for ideological reason or were failing independently of that.
I can only speak to the Homegrown location in Redmond, but I'm not surprised it's closing down. The location just doesn't make sense to me there at all - if they were half a mile south there's Amazon and Microsoft offices there that would be close enough for workers to grab lunch. If they went east by a mile there's a business park right there. Yes they are close enough to both that they could still get that foot traffic, but people would also pass by 10 other places on the way they'd stop in instead. They also open at 10 so no way to grab breakfast (or lunch) on the way to work, and close at 6 which is too early for folks coming back from work wanting a small dinner.
There's a park right there, and lots of people hanging out after work are grabbing ice cream from a place that's in the same building - that's the kind of establishment that makes sense in the location they are in (the ice cream place is not a sweat shop either that is only able to survive by underpaying workers: as far as I can tell their starting wages are 21/hr, they have 100% employer paid health insurance premiums, paid vacation and sick time, and a ton of other benefits - Homegrown's benefits were worse despite the union). There's 2 other cafes that have sandwiches nearby, and for one they are open starting at 7am so you can actually have breakfast there before work, two, Homegrown charges 15 for a sandwich which gets you a full meal at both those other places. From a quality standpoint the other 2 also feel more like a proper meal than fast food.
If this is the way that they ran all of their locations, then really there is no surprise here, union or not.
Completely shutting down a successful business for ideological reasons is odd. I can't imagine someone building a profitable business for years and then suddenly shutting it down b/c he disagrees with the staff he hired.
If he is unhappy, he can at least sell it.
As far as, "independently failing" I'm also skeptical that staff at a visibly failing business would feel comfortable to unionize.
If the company was not competitive enough to meet the unions suggestions, it was probably not a successful business.
As the parent implies here, typically union standards are incredibly generous. They're not difficult or costly to meet. Often it is painted as though a union is asking for the world and then some, and then you read the print and its... a COL adjustment. Which 90% of businesses do, anyway. Or something of that nature.
I'm being presumptuous here but from what I've seen, its trivial for a company to flourish with a union. Ideologically though, most American companies are opposed just because.
> it was probably not a successful business.
yes, that is exactly the anti-union rhetoric: if you form a union, we can't continue business and you will lose your job.
Restaurants have famously thin margins. If the profit margins are 5%, then a 1% increase in expenses (due to union demands) results in a 20% reduction of profits.
Unions can drastically increase operating costs for a business. When I was at a trade show in las vegas a few years ago, I had to work with a "lighting guy", "setup guy" and a "cleaning guy" to plug in a couple lamps for our display, b/c each role was unionized.
The problem with profit margins is that they're often artificially low in order to fuel business expansion, which may not be necessary.
I actually managed restaurant business. Our labor cost target was 15%, and food cost 30%. Then operating expenses like electricity, water, rent... I'd estimate there's 20% of revenue left over. Was our profit margin then 20%? No, because we were constantly buying new stores and random things we don't need. For example, a 16,000 dollar automated flattop grill that barely works, when we already have a flattop.
I'm often dubious of the "capital" that businesses purchase. Point being, profit margins are not really a good measurement of much. I can burn money and have low profit margins, if I wanted.
It is illegal to close a store for unionizing. It can be devilishly hard to prove that’s the case, but if the workers do, the NLRB has the power to force a store to reopen.
> There is a recurring pattern where companies fight any kind of worker representation and unionization as hard as they can, paint vivid doomsday scenarios why it's actually bad for workers - and create the impression that it is futile because the company will never "play along" and just sabotage forever or even close locations etc.
Ex- used to work at Target. Watching anti-union videos was part of onboarding and quite regularly required at store meetings.
Idk, this is the decade of history in the making every week. And companies have long since stopped hiding under a mask of politeness. I wouldn't trust past trends to determine this decade's fate.
same with third-party App Stores or any other thing like that
> The International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers’ Coalition of Organized Retail Employees, which represents the employees ...
I've never understood how employees choose unions when they form new arrangements like this. Does someone more familiar with the process have any insight into why the names of the unions that get selected in these votes never seem to bear any relationship to the work being unionized?
Old unions like this one that were originally more specific to a trade can and do attempt to expand and cover any type of trade if they want to. They also absorb (merge with) smaller unions all the time, even if the original name has nothing to do with the trade union they merged with. The end goal of international unions is to unionize most major trades, hence the concept of a general strike, to increase the bargaining power of the entire working class collectively across trades.
Late stage unionization.
There are several flavors of labor unions. Some represent entire industries, but in this case they are joining a federation of smaller unions that are company specific. So the titular IAM is more like a parent company, or franchise, and to an extent it can get somewhat arbitrary, but generally if there’s a union that already represents a similar industry as one’s own, that’s usually the one to choose, as they will have an established base of members, relevant expertise for preparing for a vote and negotiating contracts. Even for somewhat novel professions, there’s generally going to be a similar analog to start with. The nominal profession(s) (in this case, machinists) were simply the O.G. industry that kicked it all off back in the day. The IAM is part of the AFL-CIO, and represents more than 200 industries in North America according to Wikipedia. A labor union does what it says on the label, and represents a unified coalition of workers. Most of these kinds of unions have been around for far longer than even some of the industries they represent. The United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers of America also represents teachers, clerical workers, hospital workers, and railroad operators. Their power is derived from their numbers, and their reach is increased with a diversified pool of industries. They are incentivized to develop branches and provide a big tent in order to grow their influence and power. As long as the members’ interests are aligned, the specific jobs they occupy aren’t strictly relevant, however there needs to be some level of commonality in order to provide them with a meaningful amount of leverage during contract negotiations. If the organization is too untethered between industries, then things like labor strikes won’t carry the intended message very effectively.
—-
Note: I am not a union official, or even a member, and this is entirely based on my own (possibly flawed) understanding as a history and poli-sci enthusiast. Take it with the requisite grain of salt.
What you said makes sense. But I feel like representing lots of mostly-unrelated industries is a weakness, too?
Like, imagine you're a teacher and you're on strike because of conditions at some steel mill you've never heard of. You want to support your fellow workers... but also, you're forfeiting your income for a cause that's not yours, for people you don't know.
Typically, we’ll run unions have “strike funds” which are pools of money they distribute for strikes.
Additionally, I think backpay is sometimes part of a deal.
Few unions survived union-busting in the 80s, and pretty much no new unions formed. Between this and the hollowing out of the unionized trades in the US, we’re down to autoworkers, machinists, boilermakers, teamsters, and a few others as large unions able to help new shops unionize.
Douglas J. McCarron head of the Carpenters Union Las Vegas, they own the most expensive piece of property in the USA (or thought to be) right across from the White House. The carpenters also do welders, carpet layers, ceiling tile, and a few others. Mostly in the upper US, as the south is known for being right to work. Some government contracts will pay prevailing wages even to non-union workers to make the bids fair.
It looks like Douglas J. McCarron is the head of
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Brotherhood_of_Carpente...
Why do you say "Carpenters Union Las Vegas"?
Las Vegas is where the International Training Center is and where Douglas is usually based out of but you are correct he is the head of the whole union not just in Las Vegas.
isn't that paying them more, since they don't have to pay union dues?
Yes, the non-union employees will end up taking more home (paid the same but like you say less goes back to the Union, Insurance, Retirement, Training) than their union counter parts (assuming the boss is honest), but the idea is the Contractors need to base their bids off that number as to make the bids fair to all contractors both Union and Non-Union. Guessing the government has some auditing to ensure the employees are paid according to the Union wage of that location/trade. Without a prevailing wage would be very difficult for Union shops to get work on some of these Government projects.
SEIU—service employees—is not insignificant. When I was involved with unionizing TAs at UIC in the 00s, we organized as an SEIU union.
NABTU is a large umbrella organization encompassing a lot of these.
Glaziers have their own union
IBEW (electrical workers) is another
Ironworkers, pipefitters/steamfitters, airline pilots, there are still a number of trade-specific unions.
Every Apple Store has a Genius Room, which repairs everything Apple makes. This union sort of makes sense.
It can get quite sophisticated as all stores are specialized and trained to make these repairs, including Geniuses getting trained on much of the same equipment as an iPhone assembly line, (plus the equipment to do the reverse) including test and validation equipment. I have worked at flagships in top tier cities, down to the smallest mall stores in a market that has exactly one store, the job is exactly the same. These jobs don’t require engineering degrees, but at least for Genius they require quite a bit of training, not so dissimilar from trades. It’s been quite a few years since I’ve been there but used to be if one is promoted up to Genius they will be certified to do repairs. If one fails training and cannot get their Apple Technician Certification, they’re demoted or fired.
Think about it like finding an investor. There are a lot of unions and some are more similar to an organizing contract style than others to the groups organizing.
Others may not have the capacity or ability to help in larger cases like these.
It’s less formal than you might assume
It's more about which unions are willing to represent them. Sometimes it makes for strange bedfellows and sometimes it results in inter-union competition, but there are no strict laws on who can represent who as far as I know.
Some unions are more willing to take on an underdog, whereas others only get involved if it feels like a sure thing. Sometimes a union will support a drive if it specifically strengthens their position (like an adjacent industry). And some industries like fast food the big unions feel are a lost cause, so most union activity there is independent.
A benefit to getting into such a union is that other workers can put pressure on your managers via different mechanisms.
If your manufacturing job could be outsourced, you'll want the teamsters to refuse to unload the outsourced versions of the widgets off the boat
The fact that companies tell you that you don't need a union and they'll spend millions to union-bust or to avoid union certification should tell you everything you need to know: vote "yes" to the union if it comes up in your workplace and join.
The company is not your friend.
Just compare earnings by workers at the Big 3 who are represented by the UAW and Tesla workers who are non-unionized [1].
[1]: https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-gm-stellantis-pay-raise...
> The fact that companies tell you that you don't need a union and they'll spend millions to union-bust or to avoid union certification should tell you everything you need to know: vote "yes" to the union if it comes up in your workplace and join.
This isn't entirely logical. Companies also spend millions to fight off patent trolls, but that doesn't naturally lead to the conclusion that you should team up with the trolls or that patent law doesn't need to be reformed after all. Something can be bad for you and bad for the company, so evidence of harm to the company is not sufficient to prove benefit to you.
Personally (speaking as a software engineer), if unionization is ever raised my plan is to look into all the details of the plan and weigh my options. I'm disinclined to trust any claim that something is always good or always bad, so I take the pro-union propaganda with the same salt as the anti-.
All your analogy says is there are 2 sides to every fight. in the co-vs-union case, one of those sides is the company’s employees (you). That means the company’s interests are opposite to yours when they fight unionization.
You might be skeptical of the union side, but the company is doing whatever will let them pay you less and/or exert more undemocratic control over you.
> All your analogy says is there are 2 sides to every fight. in the co-vs-union case, one of those sides is the company’s employees (you). That means the company’s interests are opposite to yours when they fight unionization.
I think that what you say here can be true, but I don't believe it is definitionally true.
I have a vote in the US elections every year. In my entire adult life, I haven't ever felt like the federal government represents me. Most of the time the US federal government acts against my interests while pursuing the interests of some other segment of the population whose vote matters more to them. This suggests that having a vote in an organization does not make my interests by definition aligned with that of the governing body that the majority elects.
A union is much the same: it represents the interests of the majority of its members. Most unions will actually fail to represent some portion of their members well, because their obligations are to the majority and few organizations are completely homogeneous.
This may be fine and right, but it also means that I can't just assume that my interests will align with the interests of the majority and therefore of the future union. Sometimes my interests may align better with those of the company, and the rational move for me in the event of unionization is to consider that possibility.
I agree with many of your points but not your parallel, entirely:
> I haven't ever felt like the federal government represents me. Most of the time the US federal government acts against my interests while pursuing the interests of some other segment
Imo, the only thing a rational participant in a democratic system should do is either (a) voting for a candidate that represents all of your make-or-breaks or (b) abstaining. I think if more people abstained (which I feel most people “wish” they could [I quote that because they absolutely could]), we’d see a little more change or diversity in opinion. Yet people feel shoehorned into a side because for the better part of a decade “side = !other side” (in the US, anyway) which perpetuates the notion that you don’t have to offer anything new and hurts the possibility of real change. Let the abstaining groups make their voice heard by the very act of abstaining.
> will let them pay you less and/or exert more undemocratic control over you.
the latter isn't necessarily bad for the worker, e.g. if a tech union tries to force divestment from Israel
if more money for workers is involved, sure, I'm with you. but I kind of doubt it. If the (tech) union spends more effort pushing political things unrelated to money, best of luck to them. for unions outside of tech, this seems like less of an issue
In America, it is illegal for a union to bargain for things like not doing business with Israel. The union can put out statements about how they don't support trade with Israel, etc. and hope that management takes the feelings of its employee union seriously, but how often do you think that happens?
The law prevent businesses from boycotting Israel, they don't say anything about divestment.
> This isn't entirely logical. Companies also spend millions to fight off patent trolls, but that doesn't naturally lead to the conclusion that you should team up with the trolls or that patent law doesn't need to be reformed after all. Something can be bad for you and bad for the company, so evidence of harm to the company is not sufficient to prove benefit to you.
The difference is that companies don't often claim patent trolls are good and then turn around and fight them.
> The fact that companies tell you that you don't need a union and they'll spend millions to union-bust or to avoid union certification should tell you everything you need to know: vote "yes" to the union if it comes up in your workplace and join.
This is more like oppositional defiant disorder than politics; it's true that your interests are not fully aligned with your employer, but that doesn't mean you should do everything that they say not to do.
A better answer is that the USA has some of the oldest and therefore most antiquated union laws. Other countries have sectoral bargaining systems, which are better precisely because individual employers are less motivated to oppose joining them. (Because with per-corporation unions, your employees joining makes you less competitive. But with sectoral systems it doesn't because your competitors all have to join too.)
> Because with per-corporation unions, your employees joining makes you less competitive. But with sectoral systems it doesn't because your competitors all have to join too.
Doesn't this have the same problem, but now for your whole country? That industry in your country becomes less competitive against the same industry in another country.
Many of the more productive countries that have sectoral unions end up competing on quality over price. Although that may have more to do with their economies being more advanced. A German worker simply could not survive on Indonesian wages, regardless of unionization.
Competitiveness is about more than just price. One of the best ways for first world countries to compete is through automation. Now you need higher skilled workers, because they're building and maintaining manufacturing equipment instead of sewing textiles by hand in a sweatshop, but you also need fewer of them and then they can each be paid more without compromising competitiveness.
But you're still back to the original problem, because you're not just competing with Indonesia, you're also competing with other industrialized countries that have skilled workers but may not have unions. And you'll have to pay the market wage in those countries, which will certainly be higher than the median wage in Indonesia, but having a union that e.g. prevents bad workers from being discharged would still put your industry at a disadvantage.
That's all very abstract, but in reality the countries with sectoral unions all compete relatively well. And the cohesion provided by sectoral unions is enough of a social benefit that you rarely find their employer class willing to destroy that contract. Countries are more than their economies.
> the countries with sectoral unions all compete relatively well.
Relative to what? The question isn't really whether Poland is more or less competitive than California (the other differences between them would dominate), it's where they would each be with the other system.
> And the cohesion provided by sectoral unions is enough of a social benefit that you rarely find their employer class willing to destroy that contract.
It also tends to result in market concentration because a startup who can't hire in an industry without negotiating with a huge existing union is put at a disadvantage relative to large incumbents, and the incumbents may like it that way.
| where they would each be with the other system.
This is such a multi-variable hypothetical that I don't consider it worth discussing.
But that's just saying there's no practical way to get the answer from empirical evidence (too many confounders) and we're stuck with theorizing.
Basically.
> it's true that your interests are not fully aligned with your employer
How are the employer's and employee's interests aligned exactly?
I would posit that they're not at all. They're completely opposed. You, as an employee, are completely disposable. You are an inconvenience because they have been unable to economically automate your job... yet.
Even if you're in a job unlikely to be automated anytime soon (eg software engineer), the industry as a whole is colluding to suppress your wages with what I call "permanent layoff culture". Layoff 5% of the staff every year and give their workload to the remaining employees.
There is an extreme power imbalance here. If you withhold your labor, it really doesn't matter. If the employer fires you, well that's a real problem (for you). It's your health insurance, shelter, food and water, putting your kids in school and your transportation (because we're a dystopian car-dependent hellscape here in the US).
But I'm sure you're better off negotiating as an indivudal. So many believe that. I'm sure they're all right.
> How are the employer's and employee's interests aligned exactly?
If there was no shared interest, whey would employees and employers ever work together in the first place?
I’m not as extreme as the parent, but think about it. Consider a small construction company where one (highly rational, borderline sociopathic) man manages a crew of workmen. The interests of the manager are those which maximize his profit on each house his crew builds, which includes paying the crew as little as he can get away with. The interests of the workers are oriented around securing the money they need to live. The only shared interest that I can identify is that the manager and the workers both have a desire to move money from the person building a home to their hands. The problem is that this money transfer is a zero sum game, so even then their interests are diametrically opposed. There are many employer employee relationships that don’t look this way, but I think it’s largely because the relationship evolves away from rational self interest for a myriad of reasons, such as if both employer and employee believe their work is valuable regardless of the money.
Thought about it. All I gather is that there might be some slight disagreement in the exact distribution of promised future value, but that is minor detail. The people involved are still aligned generally, working towards a common goal.
But this confuses their individual interests with their behavior on a broader level. The house construction is completely irrelevant to the interests of the workers, but they still construct the house. I’m disagreeing with your derivation of interest from apparent behavior, because working on something is quite different from believing in it.
> How are the employer's and employee's interests aligned exactly?
Well, if you're a tech employee you get paid in your employer's stock. But if they were entirely opposed you wouldn't be working for them, or you'd be a contractor and not salaried.
> Because with per-corporation unions, your employees joining makes you less competitive.
There doesn't seem to be a lot of evidence to support this. Why would it even be true? The union isn't some magical thing.
If it obviously wasn't true, management would never oppose joining one.
What has lead you to believe (incorrectly) that 'management' is some kind of all-knowing super being and not merely irrational humans?
That's what the "obviously" is for. I do know a company where the owner voluntarily recognized the union… one company.
> That's what the "obviously" is for.
"Obviously" requires the act of perception, but why would management take the time to perceive the situation? Remember the old adage "Nobody ever got fired for choosing IBM"? Much the same applies here. Management's job is typically to follow the trodden path and do what everyone else that came before them also did, not to actually develop and lead in newfangled directions. They have no reason to consider if opposing joining a union is actually worthwhile, it's just what you do.
If you are old enough to remember the IBM adage, you might also be old enough to remember when management would only hire college graduates. That's what everyone else did, so they did to. It obviously made no sense at the time to anyone who actually looked, but that was the status quo, so management customarily followed suit without evaluation. But look now: Businesses no longer do that. Finally, something broke the status quo and overnight management had to give it some thought and realized that it was nonsensical. Obviously management acting in some way does not imply how obvious something tangentially related is.
> I do know a company where the owner voluntarily recognized the union… one company.
Sure. And nothing magical happened, right? Obviously. What could happen? Unions aren't magic. And with enough of these people going against the grain eventually everyone else starts to take notice that the status quo may not be what it seems, but it's a long road to see that kind of shift. It took decades upon decades upon decades from when everyone noticed that the college thing was the most braindead idea ever to actually seeing management in general change their ways. It took the limited number of pioneers willing to challenge the status quo to eventually see the change take place on a wider scale.
As before, management isn't some kind of all knowing super being. It's just irrational humans who follow the crowd without much thought or reflection. In fact, I posit that people in management in particular are especially prone to not putting much thought or reflection into things as avoiding that line of thought is what helps propel them into management. You don't often see the staunch engineer who wants empirical data for every last decision make it into management. They typically don't make for good managers, even if they should on paper, as managers have to work the crowd and the crowd isn't driven by data. The crowd is driven by arbitrary emotions.
> Just compare earnings by workers at the Big 3 who are represented by the UAW and Tesla workers who are non-unionized [1].
What are we to compare, exactly? How the "old guard" auto companies have better cash cows than the new guy trying to get off the ground and use that to pay more to attract the best talent? Just like how and why Microsoft and Google pay way more than DuckDuckGo?
> The company is not your friend.
A union is a company. First we find encouragement to vote "yes" to see the company form, but then a warning that it will not be your friend... No wonder the typical American is so afraid of labor unions.
> Just compare earnings by workers at the Big 3 who are represented by the UAW and Tesla workers who are non-unionized
On the other hand, Tesla isn't building new North American factories in Mexico.
Yup, fewer overpaid jobs for those lucky enough to hold them.
This isn’t just Tesla. Mercedes and one other carmaker have non-union plants in the US south.
And speaking of opening plants: the UAW got one of the big 3 to stop their planned closure of one of their plants.
> the UAW got one of the big 3 to stop their planned closure of one of their plants.
Then they have excess capacity, which is generally not great for the union: Now if the union goes on strike the company just increases utilization at facilities in another country and actually saves money.
It also raises the company's costs in general, and so raises prices, and so lowers sales, and soon you're looking at more plant closures.
Auto companies will already move production to cheaper places. Not unionizing will not stop that.
This is really about companies sharing more of their profits with their workers which is a good thing.
I can't find where that article is getting $90 an hour, I'm seeing 28 an hour starting, with 42 an hour as a max in 2028 (which isn't to say anything about the people in probation; we shouldn't forget people sometimes have to work for years to earn their way into a union). This would suggest the salary is lower than at Tesla (at least according to Reuters) https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/gms-la...
From the studies I've seen, factory unions pay the most at formation, and after 5 years they fall to 1-2% above comparable factories in regards to total compensation. This makes sense, as union contracts are usually negotiated against industry averages, and no offense to joe schmo from aluminum castings but the Harvard MBA in charge of negotiating for the company is usually a better negotiator.
Why is Apple presented as the protagonist in this headline? It's obvious that they fought this teeth and nails. No, store employees managed to make a behemoth bow and accept their demands.
The Bay Area 2073: one salary-maxed unionized unskilled State worker monitoring the Ai power led.
Used to shop here all the time when I lived in Baltimore, a friend that works as a Genius there had been speaking about them trying to organize as early as 2017 - when HE first started. Not a surprise - welcome news.
The original purpose and intent of unions was to prevent workers from becoming literal wholesale slaughter in the interest of profits: machines that could remove limbs, train couplers that required a user to stick their fingers in it as they were coming together, mining conditions where collapse was not prevented, etc.
I certainly hope Apple retail employees are facing no conditions that threaten their health or safety, and my suspicion is they are not.
The "pool" of humans overall's wealth, health, safety, and happiness increases in general when people strive for more through education and training. I don't see retail jobs as a permanent resting place for anyone. They are useful learning tools however for learning how to interact with coworkers, customers, and develop other skills. The usage of Union law to abate this is bad for society as a whole.
> I don't see retail jobs as a permanent resting place for anyone.
So that means what? They get to be treated poorly in the meantime? Apple store employees are probably better off than Walmart employees, but unionizing helps (to some degree) to ensure it stays that way.
I think we forget that the (rather limited in the US) employee rights that we do have, even things as basic as not being expected to work 10-12 hour shifts 6-7 days a week were only won because of hard fought action by work unions (since individual workers have zero leverage).
Corporations are built on the premise of generating returns for shareholders. That is their number one priority, and whatever they can do to cut costs, including reducing headcount, wringing the most out of employees, treating them poorly, etc., they _will_ do (with few notable exceptions) so long as it doesn't damage their brand image and profits.
just because you don’t “see” retail jobs as a permanent resting place for anyone doesn’t mean that’s not what has happened and continues to happen across this country. people quite simply do not have the ability geographically, per skill level, or at a certain level of risk, to do what you propose and get a higher paying more skilled job.
EVERY job should be livable and with proper benefits like universal healthcare and paid leave. if the company cannot afford it, it should not exist. people are real, companies are not.
Some background:
https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-much-safer-has-co...
> The most significant early step was the passage of workers compensation laws, which compensated workers in the event of an injury, increasing the costs to employers if workers were injured (Aldrich 1997). Prior to workers comp laws, a worker or his family would have to sue his employer for damages and prove negligence in the event of an injury or death. Wisconsin passed the first state workers comp law in 1911, and by 1921 most states had workers compensation programs.
…
> OSHA in particular dramatically changed the landscape of workplace safety, and is sometimes viewed as “the culmination of 60 or more years of effort towards a safe and hazard-free workplace.”
The "collapse" is more metaphorical, but real. Job security is non-existant, and wages aren't even keeping up with rent in some areas. People don't unionize and they are literally left out on the streets, for no fault of their own.
It's not manslaughter, but it certainly is still abuse. Collective bargaining seems to be an inevitably in such a situation.
> The usage of Union law to abate this is bad for society as a whole.
Can you elaborate on how unions abate the lessons you mentioned previously?
Good for them. It takes a lot courage and organization to stand up against a giant like Apple, especially when they could shut down the entire store.
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Less often.
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The most common union disaster is the employer suddenly and without warning deciding to shutter the location that unionized, usually citing 'crime'.
My father in law ran a decent electrians business and the employees unionized and the costs destroyed his business. He ended up returning to be a tradesman despite being in his 50s as he took debt to keep it afloat and the employees now work non-unionized at the only other electrician business in town with a worse boss (according to friends I know in town disconnected from the drama). That's usually the most common disaster.
If a business is 'destroyed' by rising prices of its inputs, we generally don't blame the vendors.
Cost of labour went up, it's up to the business to adapt.
Sounds like it did adapt. It did the rational thing of ceasing to exist (taking all the jobs with it).
And unless people in that town stopped using electricity, all of those jobs didn't disappear, they were recreated at the next shop over.
I doubt the uncle in this story was John Galt, or some other fantasy superhero.
He literally took loans to try to adapt but the economics and large administrative burden didn't make sense.
Is that actually the most common?
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It's unclear that they will be better off in terms of their take-home pay net of union dues.