Comment by yibg
6 years ago
I don't think it's necessarily based on misconceptions about what unions are, but also their own experience and from what they hear from people they know. We've already seen in this thread very different personal experiences with unions, often based on where they are. e.g. folks in Europe seems to have mostly positive interactions, where as folks in the US negative.
I personally don't want an union in my work place. It's not because I've watched too many movies, but because I've worked at unionized environments before and they are absolutely terrible for me. All the usual symptoms often talked about were there.
Maybe there are good unionized workplaces out there (Hollywood has been frequently pointed to as an example), but I've never experienced them. Out of my interactions with unions, they've been 100% negative, hence my views on unions. Until some of these underlying issues are resolved, I think we'll always have this very mixed to negative view of unionizing.
I live in a Romania - an European country - and I don't know of any good union, be it police, transportation, or healthcare. All they do is basically ask for more and more, while doing nothing else.
Their leaders earn a lot, so they have an interest in maintaining the status quo. As one parent mentioned, you can't do much without their approval. Take for example the underground. The commercial property from the subway stations was under the control of the union, all the kiosks and small shops paid rent to the union.
Also some of their former leaders went into politics and got involved in corruption scandals.
What I have learned from U.S. union interactions is that people who profit from bureaucracy love adding more bureaucracy to the system.
The "boxing match" analogy is reflective of the "us against them" power struggle between those trying to leverage their own hand at the expense of someone else in the U.S. corporate-union world.
This is contrasting to the concepts in Europe of labor stakeholders having a roundtable and coming to compromise as a group effort... not that it's perfect, just a different system.
It’s usually a symptom more than the cause.
Unions are formed in environments where people feel it’d bad enough to pay the price.
The same way if we looked at jobs hiring bodyguards, most would look pretty dangerous, but we wouldn’t blame the bodyguards.
Perhaps, but even so I still wouldn't want to work at a place that requires bodyguards, even if bodyguards are not the cause of the danger.
Without getting into the details of cause and effect, look at it from the perspective of the current employees. Currently it's a nice place to work. Contrasting with previous experiences with unions where they've been terrible experiences to work at. Why would I want this kind of change?
> Currently it’s a nice place to work
If they’re seriously discussing unionizing, perhaps that assumption is to be revisited ?
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