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