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.