This might not seem so annoying, but in the Bay Area where I worked, the unions had lobbied to secure work that could _only_ be done by union members. For example, I was a controls technician, and I legally couldn't wire a 12v controller because it was considered protected work. Which means I had to try to convince the same people who were not incentivized to be productive to help me.
So yeah, after a few years of that, I left with a pretty sour taste in my mouth. That being said, philosophically I like the idea of unions. I've had my own share of experiences being abused by "the man." The retirement plans offered in particular were always alluring. But, despite being invited to join, I never felt compelled because I just couldn't find myself enjoying working with the people they attracted.
The flip side was when the company owner retired from active management to the board of directors, and a management consultant was brought in to make the company more profitable --- he opened the curtains of the boardroom where he was making his pitch, pointed out at the parking lot filled with nice cars and trucks in good repair and stated, "You're paying too many people too much money."
An uncle of mine in the coal region of the northwestern Virginia mountain once noted that a local union organizer was noted for having 3 things in his trunk:
- a mimeograph
- a fifth of whiskey
- a sawed-off shotgun
Any discussion of unions needs to include a history of the Pinkertons.
https://guides.loc.gov/chronicling-america-pinkertons
https://daily.jstor.org/how-steelworkers-stopped-a-paramilit...
Not hard to find.
But US unions seem to exist nearly exclusively to protect people who don’t want to work.
Not my thing. At all. One should be able to be rewarded for hard work and productivity when you are expending more effort than the guy clocking in and doing everything possible to avoid it.
I’ve often thought you solve this via old fashioned guild based systems. The guild trains and provides labor while guaranteeing skills, quality, and honesty. They vet their members and cull the losers - a poor performing member should be seen as a liability for the rest of the pool of labor and very quickly corrected or removed from the guild.
That way employers know that even if they are paying more than they would like, at least the labor being supplied is going to be top tier and the job will done done to a high standard and on time.
Unions devolving to simply protect the lowest common denominator is a problem.
There are some trades unions in local chapter formats that work somewhat like this today. I’d just like to see more of it and more formalized with local competition between different union groups.
> Unions devolving to simply protect the lowest common denominator is a problem.
I've always wondered if this is because the ones most incentivized to stay are the ones that eventually make it into upper leadership. It always seemed to me like the decisions being made at that level were intended to protect those same people. For example, rather than seeing poor-performing members as a risk to the union, the answer was to just lobby legally secured work so that companies had no choice but to hire its members. Which is quite the game, because I'm sure at face value it sounds great (companies can't ignore unions), but the hidden reality seemed to be that it just ensured these people always had a job.
On one hand I don't like to deal with results of bad craftsmanship, on the other hand I don't desire of the suffering of others.
The thing is real, but so are the people.
Not a snark or a gotcha, I'm a union member and recognise this thing at work.
They don't exist for that reason, but their inevitable ground state is that.
The fundamental and intractable problem with any form of socialization is that it naturally attracts free riders. The idea doesn't have a balanced equilibrium, so it's either logistically/bureaucratically heavy or always being pulled towards collapse.
Everyone who starts these systems has pure intentions, and the initial members tend to be dedicated too. But over time it will either naturally decay, or turn into the thing it was trying to fight.
The nordics are anywhere from 50% - 90% of all labor unionized and they absolutely destroy the US on every standard of living metric.
It seems to me a case that echoes “better to let 99 guilty men go free than to execute an innocent man”. Of course, in this case, the ratios are actually reversed. Should we execute 99 innocent men to make sure that 1 guilty guy gets punished?
There will be some free riders, just like there will be some welfare queens, just like there will be some voter fraud.
That said, these cases represent a vanishingly small minority of the whole, and the cure is far worse than the disease.
In order to protect the long term value of a profession or some other labour corps, you can't skip efficiency and defend poor work ethic. I think to a degree the medical profession exemplifies this with professional bodies regulating conduct and standard of care/work. Part of this is the generally earnest approach to the scrutiny, but I believe part is the lack of immediate grave concern to anyone ‘on the stand,’ who can be presumed to earn comfortably, upon losing their job.
It's a similar dynamic here in Australia, but it seems not in Germany and Japan.
I think the difference is that in the USA and Australia the unions are organised on a craft or occupational basis. You see this in the sorts of laws they want passed - they are invariably after laws that only union members can do a certain job. It isn't always so direct. Doctors for example insist on certain qualifications, which seems fine and necessary at first glance, but then the doctors' associations somehow manage to gate the institutions that can issue the qualifications. It's interesting how doctors have no trouble with that, but computer engineers can't bring themselves to do it.
Anyway, the outcome of "guild based unions" ends up being what others here noted. Instead of everyone in the same firm cooperating to get work done, they are all fighting to preserve their patch. In Germany and Japan, unions look to be organised around large companies. If the company goes broke the union disappears with them, so the company's incentives and the union's are more aligned. So much so the union reps are given seats on the board, and are expected to make a contribution. The unions are still focused on ensuring the distribution of profits goes more towards the employees than the shareholders of course, but nonetheless the outcome seems to be far less dysfunctional than the USA and Australian systems.
Competition is required, rather than unionization. If an industry is dominated by monopolies, not only do customers suffer, workers do too. Unions don't really fix the problem - only make certain groups win over others.
Which is to say, as a union, they make deals with companies and the government and fight for regulations requiring union labor, but then they turn around and act as a guild by restricting who can join and get trained and become union labor, keeping wages high with an artificial labor shortage.
So you end up with a situation where you're only allowed to hire union elevator technicians, but also there aren't any union elevator technicians. They get high wages and all the work they want, and everyone else gets broken elevators.
I also find it that people who are critical of union workers never seem to be critical of police or fire fighters, both of whom are unionized.
My dad was a union worker for 19 years and I don't think ever displayed any of the negative characteristics assigned to unionized workers.
Philosophically unions benefit the majority and are probably a net good on a social construct level. But they are likely a net loss to the top percentage of workers who are extremely motivated to move up and probably hurt innovation overall.
Unions exist to benefit the median and bring up the floor, but it stifles competition among those who really do desire to be at the top. And in doing so while it brings up the floor, it also brings down the ceiling because people who would normally be motivated enough to move up would not have much incentive to do so anymore.
Additionally most companies arguments against unions make the assumption that EVERYONE wants to be part of that top percentage, that everyone is extremely motivated to move up the ladder, etc. Also they bank on convincing everyone they could be part of that top percentage that moves up.
But statistically only so many can, and there is no universe where everyone can be that top worker who is successful because only so many can move up anyways.
Edit: Adding that this is from my perspective on US views of unions. I don't know much about how it differs elsewhere since many point out it seems to be done differently here vs elsewhere.
Ambitous Icaruses didn't get us heavier-than-air flight; sustained investment in a series of societies that supported educated middle classes over years of technological development did. The key wasn't the "obvious" straight line of gluing wings to your arms, it took a few decades of people literally spinning their (bike) wheels. Ironically, the sky was the limit only once the ceiling was lowered.
If you think you are part of that top percentage or even if you think that the union is not representing your interests, tough luck. It is illegal to quit or reorganize like-minded individuals to form your own that better represents you. To reform the union you need to get 50% of the members to vote for change instead of just forming a new, smaller organization that represents your interests.
This is in contrast to many European unions where you can choose to join because you think they provide worthwhile benefits. Or you can choose to not join because it does not. Unions need to compete on benefits to their members and are thus incentivized to provide better benefits.
Legal representation is probably the main exception. Other benefits you could just pay on your own, but unions are the easiest way to get access to lawyers specialized in labor issues, and they will often represent you for free.
The bigger difference between American and European unions is that Europe tends to treat union membership as sensitive personal information. Your employer has no legitimate reason to know whether you are a union member, and it's not allowed to ask. The union is also generally not allowed to tell its members which of their colleagues are members. Many of the issues surrounding American unions just disappear when union membership has no impact on your daily job.
Reading up on this has been eye-opening, they didn't teach much about it in school, except maybe a paragraph in the history textbook about the Ludlow Massacre. They don't mention at all the IWW or other leftist unions from the 1910s and 20s. If they mention the Taft–Hartley Act, they don't talk about how it targeted "communist" union leaders, and left "capitalist" unions alone.
You had guilds in the middle ages, and that worked well to serve the primarily agrarian feudal society. Unions worked well in a rapidly industrializing country with little to no enshrined worker protections or rights. We saw measured, direct, positive change. But the last 30 years or so, I can't really say the same has happened. In fact, some of the most unionized sectors have seen the most degradation. Blame who you will (I've heard it all in this point), but the main take away is its not working. Maybe its time for a new structure for this modern, post industrial society.
I think people tend to fixate on the worker-to-worker differences inside of unions. Yes, that is the most visible part of a union when in place, and at least in the US has valid arguments about meritocracy.
What is missed when limiting the scope to just that is the population-level abuses of workers that no amount of meritocracy will fix. When corporations engage in collusion against workers (now common and nearly unpunished in the US) the top-level wages are suppressed industry wide.
The whole pay band alignment that comes out of that undermines the meritocracy argument, and doesn't even begin to address the wage-fixing that has gone almost unchecked in tech for decades[1,2]. As a merited employee, you might have more options to where you can go, but it won't protect you from predatory hiring/layoff cycles and it certainly won't guarantee that you'll receive a truly competitive wage.
On paper, meritocracy sounds great. I have worked many places in tech and never once observed it, personally. Best case, if you have warmed a seat for enough years, then you advance that way. Worst, your employer knows they can just take advantage of you because you're willing to work without a dangling carrot.
As before, either the government frees itself from corruption and enacts justice or unions will come back. That is point we are at.
[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2015/01/16/37...
[2] https://conversableeconomist.com/2025/10/31/the-silicon-vall...
In reality, meritocracy was a slur word. It was coined in 1956 to describe a farcically unequal state that no one in their right mind would want to live in: https://archive.discoversociety.org/2018/10/02/meritocracy-a...
It’s about showing up ready to do an honest days work for an honest days pay. Not going above and beyond, but being reasonable about the fact that at the end of the day it’s work and things need to get done for everyone involved to put food on the table.
Instead it becomes a cat and mouse game of figuring out how to game the rules and scam as many hours as possible while doing either nothing, or as bad of a job as possible. The whole “not in my job description” thing makes a bit of sense when first implemented as a union rule, but devolves rapidly into nonsense like office workers being unable to plug in a monitor at their desk and sitting around idle for a few days until a union electrician can amble on around.
There is of course a balance here, and it seems the US is one extreme or the other outside of the trade specific unions. Other countries apparently have avoided much of this absurdity somehow.
The grocery store union I was forced to join as a teenager made sense on paper. Make sure employees were kept in safe working conditions, couldn’t be fired arbitrarily, had a reasonable pace of work anyone could keep up with. But it was more about protecting that group of guys who spent half their shift out back on smoke breaks, purposefully damaging cartons of goods while stocking since they didn’t like a particular manager, etc.
And some unions practically are this, where the union negotiates rates and benefits, but the "customer" still gets to decide which particular people he hires (and so the "bad apples" never get any reliable business) - which I've seen in AV production, etc.
It just hurts competition among those who have an internal motivation to go above and beyond. They will feel they are being held back and either lose motivation or go somewhere where they feel a union isn't holding them back.
And the downside of that is companies losing their most hardworking/motivated people.
Edit: the above was written before the edit adding the cat and mouse game.
Added: I agree as well that when implemented wrong unions have pretty annoying affects on peoples motivation or work ethic. People who are qualified for things aren't allowed to do things outside of their explicit job description/contract. Etc. Some argue this is good, others argue it just wastes tons of time and hurts progress.
Why do we constantly denigrate these "free loaders" and exalt the capitalists who quite literally free load off of our labor extracting untold billions and trillions of dollars off the backs of average folks like you and me while we get relative pennies?
I worked in Big Tech for a while. For a normal person, I made good money. But the founders and top shareholders of these companies made literal billions off the labor of myself and my coworkers while contributing absolutely nothing on a day-to-day basis. I would have to work 100 lifetimes to earn what many of them take home in a year.
Frankly, if the system allows some normal folks to dick around and get paid the same as billionaires jetting off to spend time on their megayachts then more power to the folks taking a smoke break.
I work at a company creating wealth, and heirs who own stock collect dividends from the company. What work did they do? You're talking about the guy sitting near you who you don't feel is working hard enough, and nothing of the parasitic heirs expropriating the product of unpaid surplus time of those working and creating wealth. Which unions are formed to rest control back from.
I remember non union non tech jobs where the entire workforce were lazy and useless too.
Seems like an American thing or a human thing. Not a union thing.
I have only been exposed to unions like dock workers where who you know or the color of your skin matter more than your ability to execute on the job.
It is a plague in the programming field.
Not having unions is not a silver bullet for that problem. So maybe it is a false attribution/bias on your part
Meanwhile the concern for being abused by people with actual power is just an emotionless throwaway scare quote. “The man”.
Shareholders are investors who give valuable resources to business
It is weird how much discourse these days is about pretending something obviously true isn't actually happening. The first step of fixing a problem is being honest about its existence. The inability of some people to be honest about the existence of obvious things is why so many problems go unaddressed.
I suspect the guidelines explain voting behaviour: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Of course it's not that black and white, but I don't think the previous commenter was necessarily painting it like that.
