Comment by koheripbal
6 years ago
> Unions will slow us down, and we'll become more bureaucratic
Anyone who's actually had to deal with a union can agree with this point.
At our company, a number of job functions are union-only work, meaning it is a violation of the union contract for any non-union employee to perform that work.
In principle, you might think that makes sense, until you need to get something very simple done - that you are willing to do yourself and cannot.
It becomes infuriating. Need to plug that new PC into the socket? Sorry, equipment installation is a union job. But the new employee can't start if the new PC on his desk isn't plugged in? Tough shit - please put in a requisition and it'll get scheduled within the 48hr SLA, and completed in 7-10 business days.
Need that extra monitor moved between two adjacent cubes? Sorry, equipment relocation is union work. If you do it yourself, you'll be fired. But it's just a monitor, you say? Tough shit - please put in a requisition and it'll get scheduled within the 48hr SLA, and completed in 7-10 business days.
Oh, you want to move that folding table and a few chairs to the conference room so you can have a design meeting with the whole team? Sorry furniture movement is union-only work. But it'll take me literally 10 minutes and the alternative is to cancel the meeting. Tough shit - please put in a requisition and it'll get scheduled within the 48hr SLA, and completed in 7-10 business days.
These are real examples at my company - I didn't make them up.
So what's the ultimate outcome here? Employees obviously look for ways to circumvent the union. Then the union finds out and sends a few reps in to take pictures of things that have been touched/moved by non-union workers, and sends it to their lawyers (paid for by union dues). The lawyers then send formal notices that the company has violated the company contract, and notices go out to the whole company - union workers get all riled up that the company isn't respecting them, and non-union workers roll their eyes and vow never to work for another unionized company again. Bad feelings all around & Giant waste of everyone's time.
The alternative to carving out job functions for union workers, is to force everyone to unionize - and that's got its own problems.
Unions are great in unsafe industries in an unregulated market - ie. 1940's coal mines (extreme example). Six figured desk jobs can manage with some reasonable labor laws made at the State level. A union is a huge additional layer of bureaucracy.
Well, sorry to be blunt but that's fucking stupid.
Contrast that with my experience with Unions in Sweden; and that is that they basically don't exist except to ensure that workers rights are not infringed.
So they'll be involved in a termination, or help negotiate overtime pay.
There is no such thing as a "union job", it's just having what's referred to as a "collective agreement".
For years now I've seen comments like this from Europeans every time unions come up in conversation online. You all need need to come work for a large union in the US. They are just not the same thing. I've had direct or indirect experience with Teamsters, CWA, NEA, IBEW and UBC. You can dress it up however you like but there are definitely 'union jobs' with all of the connotation that brings.
Yes there are benefits to the worker (esp when your job puts you in harm's way). Yes collective bargaining is awesome. Unions, if run well, are fantastic. In my opinion we tend to mess them up.
This is the same argument I see americans make a lot.
"Unions are bad!", no, the concept is fine, you have some bad ones.
"Police are bad!", no, the concept is fine, yours are just untrained and overburdened.
"Public transport is bad, I need a car!", no, the concept is fine, you just have bad public transport and that forms your opinion.
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Is that not exactly the point? "It's not unions that are bad, it's the concept of union jobs. Collective agreements would solve the problem you're pointing out."?
Here’s the thing, if you set up a new union, you don’t have to follow the same model as the ones that don’t work well in the us, you can follow the ones that do. You also don’t have the same incentives or personnel as the unions you mentioned, an engineering union would look quite different just in terms of the personality types of the people involved if nothing else.
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Sounds like American individualism tends to skew work arrangements to the point of them instituting what outsiders would say is corrupt systems. American unions are positioned in opposition of their management, when the situation is supposed to be collaborative cooperation. And I suspect this situation is a result of active opposition by the businesses. Individualism is a nice word for selfish.
I don't think it's that the unions are bad, it's just that definitions of work came from factories, where moving or installing equipment would come as a part of retooling assembly lines.
Those definitions should be loosened in an office setting, rather than dismissing the entire idea of a union.
You don't need to be rude to the parent poster.
They have real experiences of a union in their company. You have examples of unions in your country. Who is correct?
If your answer is yourself, then you're not understanding the point or the concern that people who are against unions have. It doesn't matter if Sweden implemented it well and somewhere else implemented it poorly. Bottom line is that the poorly-implemented scenario can happen, does happen, and in fact happens more often than anecdata of "oh no true union does that".
Unless you can propose a foolproof way that the "wrong way" is always prevented, then you will get opposition to your beliefs. Calling people or things stupid doesn't solve that.
The way to prevent "the wrong way" is to have a collaborative relation to the unions, rather than one of all out war.
Don't like your deal, which doesn't let everyone move tables? Negotiate a new one. Maybe you can offer them something they'd rather want instead.
Having a let hostile environment also let smaller, more agile unions thrive, instead of forcing them to all join together.
>There is no such thing as a "union job", it's just having what's referred to as a "collective agreement".
I won't retort with a similarly vulgar comment because:
1. we probably agree on the value of unions
2. I understand your exasperation with American ignorance and cultural bias on the subject
3. it's not constructive
However, it brings me no joy to assert that you are dead wrong. Union jobs can and do exist in places. The deleterious nature of these jobs is a subject of frequent debate in France: https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Permanent_syndical
> "I understand your exasperation with American ignorance and cultural bias on the subject"
"Ignorance and bias" is apparently now equivalent to "decades of experience that differ from your preferred reality".
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Often, things that seem to not make sense are the result of historical practices at that workplace or others. In a situation like the comment describes, usually it's at a partially unionized workplace.
If you don't have these kinds of things in the contract, what can sometimes happen is a situation where all the "monitor movers" are unionized, but then management hires a new "screen transporter" for $10 an hour who isn't in the union.
In Netherland, unions negotiate with employers, generally with the government also at the table, to agree on workplace conditions and pay scales that apply to the whole industry, and not just the union members. The employer gains nothing by hiring a non-union member, and besides, a non-union member can always join the union if they want to.
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Well if you live in Sweden maybe being a unionized software engineer isn’t that bad. If you live in USA it’s another story. Sweden has different history, culture, and labor laws than US and so Swedish unions don’t work the same way as US unions.
...and this is one of the main problems with online advocacy.
You can say "unions are a no brainer - America is so backwards not to have them".
I can say "unions are awful and poisonous to a company."
...and given the different definition of "union", we are each correct within our national context, but often incorrect when saying it online.
US unions != EU unions.
You are lucky to be living in Sweden then. My experience from other EU countries is that unions are leeches that once in a while defend "high-ranking" union members that did something bad from being fired. (although admittedly it is not nearly as bad as what GP described)
I think that unions in Sweden would be better classified as Professional Societies. There are unions for different professions, and they help with training, education, discounts etc. A lot of people in UK and America unions are associated with striking miners etc.
Yeah, this, same in the Netherlands. Where a large company tends to put share holders first because that is where the CEO's bonus depends on, the unions put the employees first. I see it almost a necessary thing to keep the balance. But the way I see it, with the very little workers rights there are in the US the anti-union movement has basically won there. Reminds me of that quote [0] or this meme [1]. Yeah, you don't need a union, it's a privilege that your boss can fire you on the spot without proper reasoning. It's also a privileged for a woman to get 2 weeks of paid pregnancy leave (can you even walk normally when you're expected back at work?). Working on chemo sounds great as well. Keep telling yourselves that you don't need unions. I feel American work culture completely ignores the fact that the vast majority of people is nice, social and wants to make nice things they feel good about, even if they didn't go to an "ivy". This attitude is reflected by employees. You would do good just being a bit nicer overall.
[0] Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.
[1] https://m.9gag.com/gag/aoP1WMg
In the US, a big part of the anti-union movement's success has been the fact that states retain enough autonomy to rig the rules in pro- or anti-union fashion, while also competing for business that can typically be located anywhere in the CONUS.
As a result, it's a race to the bottom as governors try to pursue business-friendly policies to attract jobs. And on the other "side", to pursue union-friendly policies to attract votes.
Both of which tug decisions to the extremes, the better to win their base, rather than seeking compromise that's acceptable to both parties.
One reason proletarian internationalism remained a hotly debated topic in communist theory for decades.
Sorry to be blunt but when you give unions power, this is the bullshit that comes from it
Why do you trust corporation-backed power (small amount of people in charge) versus union-backed power (power distributed across many people)?
I find it fascinating, particularly in a country like America where democracy is a core part of our being.
Unions allow people to vote on their own preferences, then use their collective voice to negotiate. If you don’t like some bullshit union practice, then that is the fault of the people in it not the unions themselves.
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No. That's what's happening in some American unions (not all!), but it's not true in Denmark (for any union!), by the sound of it from the above post, in Sweden.
Unions in Sweden (and Scandinavia, Germany) are powerful to defend workers interests, it doesn't mean that unions are requiring to have union-only jobs or trying to micromanage the workplace. The bullshit you are seeing is from your own bubble and worldview, don't make broad platitudes out of it, that is bullshit.
I'm in a union and see similar things, but instead of using lawyers, the union would note that the contract had been violated, and management will typically agree to pay the people who would have done the work. If it's just 10 minutes, the union probably wouldn't bother with it - unless it's a pattern, and in that case, they'd add up all the 10-minute transgressions. I often disagree with the focuses of my union, but I'm still happy to support it. As many have noted, the main thing a union does is balance the leverage. Without them, the employer has all of it.
For seemingly silly rules like the ones you're describing, the union is attempting to protect jobs and hours.
I wish my union was more like some European unions I've read about, where they're involved in the decision-making process. Mine fights for wages, positions, and conditions, but management decides how things work - so long as they're not violating the agreed-upon conditions. I expect your workplace is similar. Instead of mapping out a path with management, my union reacts to the path set out by management, and I think a lot of the weird rules come as a result of reacting, rather than helping to create.
I also think this sort of collaboration would be better for companies, particularly larger companies, where there is a disconnect from how things actually work and how corporate thinks they work. We have this particularly terrible piece of machinery that corporate is obsessed with justifying. We have other machines that do its jobs better, but it does the jobs of many machines - just much worse. It just wastes a lot of time, but corporate incentiveses management to use it, and when discussing the POS machine, management cites those incentives as reasons for why the machine is actually good. When you say, "Yes, but how does wasting all this time using this particular machine help the company?" management highlights the incentives.
> ...a union does is balance the leverage. Without them, the employer has all of it.
Maybe that's true of low labor jobs, but Employees in six figure jobs have tremendous power.
One of the reasons companies try to create anti-potching rules is exactly to try to get back some power.
The unemployment rate in the US was 4% prior to covid, and even lower for tech and white collar desk jobs.
This issue simply must take a back seat to bigger problems in America.
== This issue simply must take a back seat to bigger problems in America.==
What if labor rights is actually the single biggest problem that drives all the others?
I can think of things like a higher minimum wage, paid sick leave, anti-discrimination in hiring, maternity/paternity leave, and guaranteed PTO that could be helped by unionization to make us a stronger country, collectively.
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>Maybe that's true of low labor jobs, but Employees in six figure jobs have tremendous power.
You may be right. I don't know enough about those specific dynamics to argue against it. It doesn't feel right to me, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. It does bring to mind professional sports in the US - Football, Basketball, and Baseball. All have player unions, and all have players that make six figures at minimum, with a fair amount making tens or millions and some making hundreds of millions. But, the NFL is famous for having the most toothless union, and, as a result, its players have the worst contracts/conditions - by a wide margin. It seems to me that unions could still help people who make six figures.
One issue I saw with the pre-Covid job market is that it's too often all or none. Either you spend a ton of time and resources getting a position that pays well and then asks you to work 60+ hours a week, or you take a job that lets you scrape by (even if those positions still ask its workers to put in a lot of hours). It's hard to find balance in either situation, and unions could help restore some of that balance to both situations.
>One of the reasons companies try to create anti-potching rules is exactly to try to get back some power.
What I've read indicates that anti-poching rules are BS. They seem to exist so that employers can control their employees without adequately compensating them. Pay for talent or let it walk.
>The unemployment rate in the US was 4% prior to covid, and even lower for tech and white collar desk jobs.
Beside the point, but the 4% figure doesn't account for gig work, underemployment, or people who have stopped trying. I believe you, and it makes sense, that white collar desk jobs would be in better shape than lower-class positions.
>This issue simply must take a back seat to bigger problems in America.
The hollowing of the middle class is as big as any issue imo, and if we prioritize building the middle class, it will aid in solving many of our other issues. As far as I can tell, nothing would help bring people out of poverty more than a strong union presence.
Interesting, so you're saying the union is most concerned with hours and making sure that none of the hours that would be directed to union members as per their collective bargaining agreement are redirected elsewhere.
Are your union members actually paid by the hour or are these hours tracked to justify/demand a certain headcount of salaried union members?
It is hourly. These are issues that arise most often, but the union is most concerned with wages, positions, benefits, etc.. But, all of that is negotiated in the contract, so it only comes to the forefront every few years.
The tracking of work affects future contracts, though, because management (particularly at the corporate level) is continually looking to cut hours and positions, and the union looks to justify keeping them.
In non-union jobs I've worked, those hours/positions get cut without meaningful pushback, and the workers left were forced to do more work without receiving more compensation.
This is definitely not unique to unions, nor are all (or many) unions like this. Of course the examples you list are ridiculous and shouldn’t happen, but the more boring instances of bureaucracy are just part of the mundane process of work in a large company (e.g. raising a ticket on a third party vendor to grant access to some service and the whole process descending into farce as no one knows how to/wants to do it and everyone has a problem with it). The benefits of unionisation almost always outweigh the negatives, and most of the time a union has some degree of member democracy so you can attempt to change internal processes.
> "most of the time a union has some degree of member democracy"
Most of the time? Some degree? Any union that does not represent its members to the best of its ability is not a good union.
That's also why it's vital that no single union has a monopoly on a certain type of work; if union members are unhappy with their union, they need to be able to leave and join or start a new one.
> Any union that does not represent its members to the best of its ability is not a good union.
This is as naive as saying that "any good country does not represent it's population" and then therefore expecting good governments.
> That's also why it's vital that no single union has a monopoly on a certain type of work; if union members are unhappy with their union, they need to be able to leave and join or start a new one.
Again, the reality on the ground is one of union monopolies. Union power derives from its collective bargaining power - so separate unions always end up merging and union bosses always end up as major power brokers, accountable to no one.
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>Any union that does not represent its members to the best of its ability is not a good union.
I absolutely agree, but there are unions and unions. The SDA in Australia for instance is, for some members, useless, and for other members actually harmful - but it has been effective at winning better conditions for some workers. (SDA isn't the best example because RAFFWU, which is another union founded by workers and organisers who believe that SDA has failed workers, does a better job everywhere it goes.) A good union is better than a bad union, and a bad union is often but not always better than no union.
I also agree that unionised workers need to be able to effectively organise, which might involve starting a new union. That being said, union turf wars can devastate actual efforts to better conditions because of issues that could be resolved without splitting the union. The best reason to pack up shop and set up a new union is because the union doesn't have an effective means to, or a culture of, internal democracy, which means problems with the way the union is run can't be addressed. But if a union does have this, it's better to 'work within the system.'
I've worked plenty of union jobs that didn't have this problem. Like the original comment said: yes, some unions are bad. But it's ridiculous to pretend they're all like what you dealt with.
But it's also ridiculous to pretend they're all rainbows and sunshine, too. Some people have valid reasons for not wanting to be part of a union, and some people have valid reasons for wanting to be part of a union. Dismissing either group is wrong.
I think the difference is in the US there is a strong history of busting up unions specifically to disempower workers.
There absolutely are legitimate reasons to not want to join a union.
However, “both sides can be right” so to speak, whitewashes (word chosen deliberately) away the historical fact and current reality of systemic suppression of and propaganda against union organizing by US workers.
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> At our company, a number of job functions are union-only work, meaning it is a violation of the union contract for any non-union employee to perform that work.
This is known as a 'closed shop' in the UK. Closed shops are not synonymous or required for unions to function.
Yeah, we have a union at work and can confirm we're allowed to move chairs, monitors... actually I can't imagine any work our employer would stop us doing unless there is a health and safety, ethical or PR issue
This is really strange. Unions should be there to protect workers rights when they are abused from above, ie they give more strength to workers when necessary. In normal working conditions, unions should be invisible.
Case in point: my girlfriend's workplace has been recently purchased by a multinational. Everything fine and well, until they had to pay her. Her monthly salary was cut by about €400 because they refuse to pay past overtime work (which is perfectly legal here, was required by the old employer and was 100% documented). She then gathered with her colleagues and they decided to sign up with an union to put some pressure to the new employer. It happened last week so I have no more news. Anyway, that's what unions are for, at least over here; they shouldn't be used to move furniture or things like that.
The US is setup differently. The local/state labor departments usually handle pay issues, and almost always force the company to pay/backpay employees. I've dealt with them on occasion, and they do an amazing job in the US. When dealing with the State labor board, the company needs to prove their innocence (which is right because they are expected to have better record keeping).
Unions, unlike in Europe, function to protect hours for hourly workers, carve out job functions for union-only work, set standardized salaries, and prevent dismissals. Historically they did a lot more with worker safety, but that's been taken over by the federal gov't (OSHA).
It's just not comparable to the EU. The words almost mean entirely different things - and that's why talking about it in this forum can be very confusing, and often needlessly antagonistic - because the words just don't mean the same thing.
Thanks for the explanation, I was not aware of how unions work in the US.
> A union is a huge additional layer of bureaucracy.
They can be, undoubtedly.
But don't forget the times when they go into bat to defend the rights of workers who have been treated badly by their employers - whether during employment or when they have been made redundant and procedures have not been followed correctly. When you're a part-time worker who is in a union who has very little input in your day-to-day work, but they come to your rescue with a considerable amount of legal muscle behind you in such a situation, the £10 a month you've paid them looks like very good value indeed.
I totally get that unions can be the embodiment of self-protection and bureaucracy, and can lead to expensive and crazy situations (indeed when I see some union leaders here in the UK it appears that is their desire). But that isn't all they are there for - they can also help the little guy out when their back is against the wall.
THIS!
when i was in my early 20's and unaware of how the world worked i had a job as a contract IT guy at a very well known Power company. People would call me up with their problems and i would fix them. After a few months, somone took me aside and explained to me that they are really bad, as they are "using" me to avoid having to deal with other unions to do this work. I was simply unaware that "plugging in a network cable" was a union job and i just did it as it was easy enought.
The sad thing is it was union employees attempting to avoid other union employees...
In general I think unions are like governments - they need to be regularly overthrown and rebuilt to ensure that they always represent the best interests of their members.
That being said, there are some obvious counter-arguments to your experiences, however they tend towards "guilds" as mentioned in another comment more than unions as I understand them.
> Oh, you want to move that folding table and a few chairs to the conference room so you can have a design meeting with the whole team? Sorry furniture movement is union-only work.
Bob grabs the table and lifts with his back, in a twisting, jerking movement. Bob is then unable to come in to work due to back pain for the next two weeks. The union keeps Bob from hurting himself unintentionally.
> Need that extra monitor moved between two adjacent cubes? Sorry, equipment relocation is union work.
Someone notices that a bunch of monitors have gone missing. Have you been burgled?! Noone has any record of where these monitors have gone, however you eventually track then down to Alice's cube where she has finally completed her dream 9-monitor nest. Phew, false alarm!
> Need to plug that new PC into the socket? Sorry, equipment installation is a union job
It gets cold in the winter, so Dan brings their own heater to put under their desk[1]. One day they forget to turn it off when going home and burns down the department; On the other side new employees don't just materialise out of the ether. The organisation should have plenty of time to set up their working environment
[1] Funnily enough, if Dan was part of a union they would have enough bargaining power to make sure their employers provide adequate working conditions, however their manager simply filed away their request away under 'C', for "Complainers - Fire these people first"
I'm totally on your side about these examples being ridiculous, but I do like to steelman the other-sides arguments
Governments can be fatally dysfunctional before they are overthrown. In this analogy, prior to a shareholder revolt (which do happen), usually the company just goes bankrupt.
Now introduce a powerful union - and now you have TWO incompetent authorities fighting one another, which often results in a hopelessly ineffective company - not a better one.
I appreciate the humor in your responses - but the difference is that my examples were real-world examples - not theoretical.
A company cannot put process in front of every theoretical risk - that will just run you into the ground because an unbounded inefficiency.
Need to plug that new PC into the socket? Sorry, equipment installation is a union job
For anyone who thinks that this is just hyperbole, it's exactly the sort of thing that happens.
When I worked at a unionized television station, I was watching an aircheck of a recent broadcast. When I was done, I ejected the tape and put it back into the archive.
The union filed a grievance against me for pressing the eject button. As a manager, I could use Play, Stop, and the shuttle controls, but not Eject. Only a union member could eject a tape.
At another television station where I worked, there was an employee retiring after 30 years with the station, and we thought it would be cute to show a ten-second clip of him working while the anchors said goodbye and thanks. It never happened. He worked upstairs, in the tech center, and the members of the photographers union weren't allowed to operate any electronic equipment up there because that was the province of a different union. This included working their own cameras. At the same time, the people who worked in the tech center weren't allowed to operate any of the station's cameras, because that was the domain of the photographer's union. As I said, we were never able to air a clip of this good employee doing his job.
At another television station, I worked weekends. Naturally, I was expected to work five days a week like every other employee. So I was assigned to help write during three weekdays. A union grievance was filed against me for taking a theoretical writer's job. The result was that for the next FIVE YEARS, I did nothing three days a week but look at lolcats, and the station had to keep paying me my full salary.
I'm not anti-union. I think unions are essential for coal miners, maids, janitors, and other people. But I'm not convinced that white collar people need unions. Or at least there should be a method of calling out and publicizing union abuses to let their members know what's going on.
Every time someone brings this up I can only imagine some horrible version of of something like SCRUM being given the force of law.
Imagine only union worker could move kanban cards between columns
Doesn't seem to be a problem at Toyota
https://www.nytimes.com/1983/03/30/business/japan-s-producti...
That's absurd, laughable and not how a single union works in Sweden and essentially the enrire country is unionized.
This is how unions work in America - and why we hate them.
People throw the word "union" around a lot with their support, not knowing that it's not the same everywhere.
Careful with that “we” bud, lots of us Americans love unions.
Thta's the responsability of the participants. It sounds like they've been complacent and they allowing people to represent them who do not represent them.
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The work rules are the thing that gets me. The idea of paying employees more? Great. Protection from discrimination and unfair termination? Collective bargaining? Great. But I can't imagine how it's possible to get anything done with the work rules.
Companies that operate this way must be in slow paced industries. To innovate you must be able to just do stuff. As soon as you add a bunch of hoops and sign-offs you lose momentum.
My own hypothesis on this is that it's not just a matter of high overhead but of slowing things down to the point that it breaks the dopamine reinforcement loop for the human beings involved. Humans need to be able to see results or at least movement toward them in a reasonable amount of time or it becomes really difficult to stay focused and engaged.
The work rules and bureaucracy element is like 100% of my skepticism about unions. Get rid of that stuff and I'd be all for them.
That being said, unions aren't the only source of inane bureaucracy of course. Many organizations without unions manage to invent worthless tar pits of their own.
If I told you that I once worked in a shop that didn’t use source control, didn’t have any formal testing, and builds came from dev desktop machines, would you:
1. Vow never to work in the software industry.
2. Allow that perhaps mine is a bad example, that there might be good software shops to work in, and wait for more data.
Though I would not fault anyone for choosing #1.
> The alternative is to force everyone to unionize - and that's got its own problems.
Does it really, though? Because literally every one of your complaints above would be solved, if your companies employees stopped actively fighting the union, and just simply joined it instead.
These rules impact the customers, too, not just the employees.
Have you ever been involved with trade show setup? The trade show unions have elaborate rules about work attendees can and cannot do for themselves.
At low-budget startups, we built our trade show booths ourselves. We had to carefully read the union rules during booth design so we made sure we could install our lighting without the use of a ladder and tools, for example. We used a lot of tool-less fasteners and kept everything low enough that our tallest person could reach it without standing on anything, because otherwise it would trigger union labor rules that required us to pay extra and wait for the union labor to get around to our booth.
Sure enough, on the trade show floor we had a union member watching us to make sure we didn’t get up on a ladder or use tools when installing certain pieces of equipment. Presumably they were getting paid to monitor us and ensure we didn’t actually do any of the forbidden work ourselves.
This is the inefficiency that people see when they think of unions. That inefficiency isn’t going away, because it’s central to how unions maximize income for their members. That inefficiency is why many developers don’t want to form or join unions.
> Sure enough, on the trade show floor we had a union member watching us to make sure we didn’t get up on a ladder or use tools when installing certain pieces of equipment. Presumably they were getting paid to monitor us and ensure we didn’t actually do any of the forbidden work ourselves.
I'm trying to think of how this is different than how the mob operates but I'm at a loss.
How are you bound by union rules if none of your employees are members? I don't understand. Did the trade show organizer include a clause in your contract that you have to use union workers for certain jobs?
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Not just unions though. The IT department in a company I worked for had similar slow processes. I needed more RAM in my desktop, to process really huge log files. "It'll take about a month".
I could have gone to Best Buy, bought what I needed, installed it, and been back at work in an hour. Sigh. So I limped along.
A month later, along comes the new RAM and gets installed. But I was long done with the project that needed it.
Anyway, no fan of unions that get their feelers into every crack, in an attempt to pad union jobs. I am definitely in favor of some feedback that helps them be useful and productive - time-to-response on tickets for instance, that affected their pay maybe. Then we might all be happier.
This happens in non-union jobs. Your issue is not with unions, but with bureaucracy, which is fair. To blame unions is not.
We can blame unions for bringing it to a fine art. Their goals are to preserve jobs and pad pay. That directly results in nonsense like this - 7 days to prepare for a meeting or plug in a monitor etc.
<edit> Sure unions are not the only ones doing this. But unions are doing this. So its 'fair' to blame them.</edit>
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But there is a direct correlation with unions and an increase in bureaucracy.
Right... that's the point... these processes are terrible. Unions create even more of these situations.
Imagine you did get your RAM in time, or could have bought it and expensed it. ...then you had to raise ANOTHER 2 week ticket to have it installed in your computer.
How does that work at a large company that's already bureaucratic? Where I work, I still have to open tickets for everything. I still have to wait a long time for new equipment. How does a union make that worse if I have to wait for cogs to turn anyway?
I also would like more realistic examples of bureaucracy, because yours are frankly bullshit. Yeah yeah the MTA is bad sure, and I've interacted with unions before that exemplified their stereotypes. But if you really think employees would suddenly not be able to plug in a monitor or move it across the room because there's a union, I think you're completely incorrect.
> I also would like more realistic examples of bureaucracy, because yours are frankly bullshit.
These were real examples that infuriated everyone. I also think they're bullshit. That's what made them infuriating.
> How does that work at a large company that's already bureaucratic?
It effectively doubles the amount of bureaucracy, because it adds to the list of work that requires a ticket.
> I still have to wait a long time for new equipment.
Do the examples in the comment above currently require a ticket? Plugging in a computer? Carrying a monitor one cube over? Grabbing some chairs from another office? I suspect not.
You suspect not, but you'd be wrong :) Those things do require a ticket. We can't install our own equipment, only IT is allowed to do that. Pretty strict about connecting peripherals and USBs too.
> "At our company, a number of job functions are union-only work, meaning it is a violation of the union contract for any non-union employee to perform that work."
That's not a union, that's a guild. A medieval-style guild has a monopoly on a certain type of work. A union merely represents its members in workplace negotiations.
That might be your definition, but unions do this also. Maybe it's different in different places - but here the union clearly forbids non-union workers from doing various types of work.
Well, it's not how unions work in Europe, and those unions do not create the kind of problems that American unions apparently create, so maybe the US could learn a lesson from Europe here.
Because the argument "the wrong way is the only right way" makes no sense. If it's wrong, you fix it. Being forced to choose between two wrongs is no good.
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This is why you need a union for IT workers to - tell the blue collar union to piss off or more politely set demarcation boundary's.
I worked at a unionised company in the UK and the CWU would have got short shrift if they Tried that with my members (I was Branch's secretary For the M&P union)
> > Unions will slow us down, and we'll become more bureaucratic Anyone who's actually had to deal with a union can agree with this point.
What about the Writers Guild and the NBA players union? Would the people in those unions say that?
Semi-genuinely asking? ;)
NBA players Union is a great example of how top performers get penalized. The Max contracts that the union agrees to is why top players are underpaid versus what they could command absent that, with most of the bench being overpaid.
Is there any evidence the highest-paid players in the NBA themselves want to get rid of their union? I.e, do you claim this is empirically verifiable?
Or, is this a hypothetical, rational-actor thought experiment you're conducting?
Protecting work in this manner exists because the prevailing culture is that jobs solve social issues - we can't give the disadvantaged money directly because socialism, but we can pressure companies to make-work jobs because having a job means you deserve to be human, and it also creates situations where people want to protect their jobs for their income rather than any other reason.
A UBI can possibly help prevent this type of silliness.
Anyone who wants a job, should be able to get one. Personally, I advocate UBW - Universal Basic Work - A guaranteed living-wage job for any American that wants one.
I have dealt with unemployment in the Great recession and know how nice that would be but the logistics of it are unfortunately very non-trivial, essentially in having everything already broken down to specified commoditized tasks. Annoyingly much of the work is "contextual" and would take far more effort to specify correctly to arbitrary outsiders and that is before work standards and cost of verification. Which would drive down wages of commoditized and halfway "automated" tasks further.
Ironically the best examples that come to mind are Uber and some other start ups which manage to both pay terribly and be hardly viable businesses.
UBW would probably work best in a productive sense in a massive stack of prespecified mini-jobs that could be done without supervision like "mow this section's grass, paint this fence".
Soviet Russia did that by making being unemployed illegal.
The Soviet economy tended to have supply side issues - everyone had enough money but getting things to buy was difficult.
I'm not sure how the two are really related and it's a deep and interesting thing to study which I haven't really done. So I don't know all the nuances but that would be an actual example of it.
The failure mode of UBW is having make-work jobs with high oversight, no productive output, and no path forward to a different job. I'd recommend this essay [1], which goes into the topic in more detail than I can in a comment.
[1] https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/05/16/basic-income-not-basic...
> A UBI can possibly help prevent this type of silliness.
I'm not so sure. That's a handwave past social issues, and sounds like a bandaid-for-a-bandaid.
So if we give UBI out, can I suddenly plug my monitor into a socket without violating a union contract?
This is true of many many unions, but it is neither a necessary part of a union, nor exclusive to unions.
At my company, the majority (all?) employees in my local office are un-unionised. We have the same system (it's just departmental). This is a system that emerges in large old bureaucracies regardless.
Which is why it's present in many unions tracing their formation back to the early 20th century. They're big and they're old.