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.
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.
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.
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.
We don't have to do an echo. We can just do it as it is.
9 men hunt and 1 man eats free, so the 9 men are carrying the weight of the 1.
This system is inherently unstable and unsustainable. Maybe you can mitigate it (nordic style) by keeping a small population and drilling into people's heads from birth that "you take turns being the 1, and the 1 needs to be eager to get back to the hunt or shame will be had", but even then that is a not an inherently stable system, but one propped up by trust.
Updated the quote to the historically accurate 99 vs 1.
> This system is inherently unstable and unsustainable.
The countries cited are extremely stable. Arguably far more stable than the US.
That said, we can bring in the rest of Western Europe if 5 countries aren't enough of an example. They have union participation rates between 10% and 50%, median around 20%. The thing is, they have much larger proportions of their workforces covered by collective bargaining agreements - France for example is at 10% union participation yet 98% of labor covered by bargaining agreements.
Western Europe and the Nordics combined = ~400 million people, bigger population than the US, and far more diverse, so the common refrain of "small homogenous population" doesn't hold up to scrutiny.
Of course, all societies so far have eventually been unstable.
We can just choose whether our unstable society will be a vindictive one that prioritizes punishing wrongdoers over the wellbeing of the whole, or a pragmatic and (as a nice bonus) compassionate one which prioritizes the wellbeing of the whole over a puritanical urge to purge the unworthy.
To defeat this you need intense oversight, but then you yourself become the man with an iron fist.
This is a super common theme whenever you dig into anything socialized. It works great when everyone understands the system and is dedicated to the work, the mission. But as soon as a single atom of "I can get away with not doing my full part" seeps in, it's like a seed crystal that eventually collapses the whole system.
Our desires make us our own worst enemies, and until we acknowledge and openly plan to counter these tendencies, any social structure at some scale is going to fail to them. Unfortunately, the problems we face as a species are increasingly at larger and larger scales.
I'm not sure if we can remain what we would recognize as "human," and solve for this without surrendering some level of executive function to an entity not afflicted by it. Government and regulation are already expressions of this, while retaining our intrinsic nature, but history has demonstrated this is inherently unstable.
This seems logical. A labor union carries power commensurate with the number of members in it. It is more important for members that they be protected than that they be held to a high standard. If the latter is done, it is in service to the former. That is entirely the purpose of the union after all. No one forms a union so that others can hold them to a high standard of performance.
> 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.
The union should help them find roles they can be successful in. It should offer them more specialized training, mentorship programs, and other ways to help build up their skills. If they refuse to take any of these seriously, they should be fired. To me, that's the difference between poor performing and intentional laziness.
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.
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.
That's the case for most service-sector unions, but a lot (certainly not all) of builder's unions seem to meter the amount of people that are allowed to join, making it prohibitively difficult to actually get into the union.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
Someone taller has a better chance at becoming a pro basketball player. Shorter people are not given more leeway. But both tall and short people have the chance to try out (at least on paper).
Life is fundamentally unfair. Anything that tips the balance in the other direction is due to specific, continuous human effort. It's a good thing when we can make things more fair, but the inherent unfairness of life is not a cosmic injustice.
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.
We should do both, but when I agree to take a job at a given pay, I show up every single day capable, ready, and willing to work for the wage I agreed to. When other people don't pull their weight, it means I have to take on an unfair amount of work to make up the difference so that I can complete the things I've committed to in the workplace. The focus is on worker to worker relationships, because those are the most locally impactful relationships you have in the workplace. At the giant corporation I currently work for, I'm in the ladder fairly high up compared to most people as far as steps from the CEO, and yet I still only see the CEO on video calls with the whole company 4 times a year. The person in the office down the road from me that is blocking me from completely the thing I need to do to meet my own quarterly objective is far more tangible and legible to me than whether or not the CEO is a bum who spends all day golfing.
The fundamental difference is I take personal accountability for my own behavior and commitments, and that is one camp. The camp that doesn't see an issue with union free riders not pulling their weight are generally folks who only see accountability collectively, rather than personally, or maybe don't even take any accountability at all. Accountability is generally in short supply in our current society, so maybe its a novel thing, but I actually don't like doing a shitty job and if its due to somebody else screwing me over at work, I don't like that person a whole lot more than I don't like someone who I've hardly ever met and never talk to (CEO).
> The camp that doesn't see an issue with union free riders not pulling their weight are generally folks who only see accountability collectively, rather than personally, or maybe don't even take any accountability at all.
And while I don't like that the Union protects folks like this, I believe the work they do to protect hard working folks like me from being "managed-out" or even laid off so that the billionaires can make even more money next quarter is of great societal value. We as workers deserve to have security that as long as we are meeting reasonable productivity targets, we won't be kicked to the curb.
Having dealt with a manager deciding they didn't like me and doing everything in their power to manage me out (successfully), despite me meeting every goal given to me, management and the capitalists can take a long walk off a short pier for all I'm concerned.
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 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.
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 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
If you have a machine that makes widgets, which requires people to operate, the machine (capital) without anyone operating it (labor) is worthless, but if you have people (labor) without any machine (capital), you won't have any widgets.
I feel like this is one of those situations where "the whole is larger than the sum of the parts" - combining the power of capital and labor, you get much more value than just capital or just labor.
Of course, this does NOT imply that "I provided the capital, it couldn't have happened without me, ergo I deserve all the rewards" is true, even if, if we look at the history and current state of the world, generally speaking it is more advantageous to provide capital than it is to provide labor.
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.
Also perhaps review guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
A bunch of people form an organization so that they can work together to sell stuff.
When they're selling widgets, or other people's labor, we call those people "management" and we call their organization "business" and it's the standard way of doing things.
When they're selling their own labor, we call it a "union" and suddenly people have Opinions about whether they're really a good thing or not.
If Bob's Heavy Manufacturing Concern can collectively bargain with its customers when selling its Retro Encabulators, then Bob's employees should be able to collectively bargain with its customer i.e. Bob when selling their product i.e. their labor.
IMO Cooperatives are a better model, it combines cooperative behavior with the dual risk/profit model of entrepreneurship.
I liken to being similar to a protected class that you cannot discriminate against.
Edit: why would this get downvoted? If I am wrong about the NLRA I am happy to be corrected.
Union itself I'd agree could function as basically a corporation of workers. That's not on face a bad thing, but the devil is in the details of what kind of violence (via law or otherwise) is used to try and use that to form a monopoly. Of course the companies are no better in this regard, they use the violence of the state to monopolize markets as well.
it’s a free country—individuals have freedom to just work at a non union shop.
But what's wrong with forcing the other employees to join to keep their jobs? That is fundamentally a requirement on the company, that they only hire people in the union. And that's no different from any other sort of exclusive contract. If a restaurant has an exclusive contract with Coke, is it sinister to say that Pepsi employees can't supply them, and they have to join Coke if they want to do that?
It's my understanding in some states in the US it's possible a worker will be forced to join a union if a certain number of other workers want a union, even if neither the worker nor the company hiring them consent to it. In about half of states under "right to work" though they do give employees the option to not join the union if they don't want to.
This happened to me when I was working a ~minimum wage job at a grocery store. At the time it was not a right to work state, and I was forced to join the UFCW. The union I was forced to join then made me pay dues, pushing me below minimum wage.
---- re: due to throttling ------
>"I will cripple you" must have referred to the bosses, not the entire country including his people. Idk why it matters that he had a gold chain. Are people without tech jobs not allowed to have money?
No he literally threatened normal people like construction workers and car salesman that he would ensure they were laid off, he was using "cripple" to refer to normal Americans and everyone.
The only question is where the line is.
I've seen corporate HR got to insane (illegal) lengths to "stick it" to people trying to unionize - to the point of being severely fined.
So I wonder if anyone actually calculated financials here.
> For instance, if an engineer drives a diesel train at the start of a shift but is asked to switch to an electric train in the same day, the M.T.A. must compensate that worker with two days’ pay. If, on the same day, the engineer is also asked to switch from driving passengers to driving a train back to a yard for maintenance or storage, that worker is entitled to a third day’s pay.
Take from that what you will.
My view is that -- with some exceptions -- unions today are mostly bad, and worth fighting.
The reason for this rule is that it forces management to schedule workers more predictably and compensates workers who invest in obtaining broader qualifications.
> My view is that -- with some exceptions -- unions today are mostly bad, and worth fighting.
There are literally thousands of unions just in the US. I agree that some are dysfunctional, but making a claim like "with some exceptions -- unions today are mostly bad" needs a lot more evidence. My counter-evidence is simple: historically, there's a direct correlation with the strength of unions and the existence of a strong middle class.
No, it's just a scam, and anyone should be able to see that. It's like saying I get 2 days pay if I have to write go in addition to typescript. And 3 days pay if I have to write java.
> There are literally thousands of unions just in the US. I agree that some are dysfunctional, but making a claim like "with some exceptions -- unions today are mostly bad" needs a lot more evidence. My counter-evidence is simple: historically, there's a direct correlation with the strength of unions and the existence of a strong middle class.
Unions had a good reason to exist post industrialization when many people worked in factories under terrible conditions. But today, in the West, that's no longer the case. Today, unions are mostly bad.
It that’s true, why is union membership declining? why did Trump et al gut the NLRB? why do starbucks unionized employees STILL not have a contract years after forming a union?
Unions are good and we need more of them.
Even unions like SAG-AFTRA, which is one of the most extreme ones I can consider barely reach 1% of the harm employers cause.
tell that to all the Meta coders being let go today.
This may be the moment to start thinking about unions seriously in tech. The large employers have, themselves, acted to suppress worker power in the past: https://journals.law.unc.edu/ncjolt/blogs/wage-fixing-scheme...
And maybe it would be better not to have the layoffs in the first place? The profits of the hyperscalers are growing steadily even as they fire more workers.
I think this may be one of the last moments when programmers have enough power to dictate these things, should LLMs become as powerful as some suggest.
This is unpalatable to HCOL engineers, because their pay will significantly compress in this union to support the growth of compensation of similarly skilled LCOL regions/countries.
QED: Unions will not happen.
In doing so, companies may lose their leverage and are forced to actually negotiate. This is often painted as blackmailing, but it's the same thing they do to employees. Bosses often go with "we're doing you a favor. If you don't want this job, I have a replacement for you".
When their power and leverage vanishes, they see it as being blackmailed, when in reality they are just being forced to play a fair game.
This thread has several stories of unions "keeping lazy workers", etc. I can't deny your experiences. But what about the thousands of companies that violate Labor Laws? Why are we not talking about these stories? e.g. https://www.epi.org/publication/unlawful-employer-opposition...
When you push people hard enough, they will fight back. In fighting back, the corporations that had the leverage will feel attacked by losing their power.
While 68% of workers approve unions (https://news.gallup.com/poll/694472/labor-union-approval-rel...) there are only 9% of them that actually belong to a union. That's a huge discrepancy. It can be explained by the immense difficulty in forming one due to illegal corporation practices and laws that make it difficult.
$1.5B is roughly the wage theft recovered between 2021-2023. It's estimated that more than $15B in wage theft occurs annually just from minimum wage shortfalls.
See: https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021-23/
Keep in mind that wage theft is narrowly defined to include only blatantly illegal actions such as underpaying minimum wage, failing to pay overtime, requiring off-the-clock work, denying meal breaks, etc. It that doesn't even get into more general wage suppression via abusing visas, anti-poaching collusion with competitors (a favorite pastime of FANNG), and at-or-below inflation raise policies, among other things, which have caused wages to diverge from productivity over the last half century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law
Loosely that just means that if you work somewhere with a lot of employees, you'll hear that the same job in a neighboring state pays 1.5-2 times as much. And that they have a harder time firing you. And that you'll be more likely to get compensated if you get hurt or whatever. Etc etc etc because unions.
It was pitched as a way to avoid paying union dues and possibly make it easier to move around the job market. And especially avoid working with "those" people.
If you sensed the ick factor there, that's why I think it's hard to have a rational debate around unions. It's become a divisive word like liberal due to deep-rooted disagreements going back to the founding of the (cough) union.
I prefer to use a term like representation. Do we want an advocate between us and the bosses when the next round of layoffs comes? Of course. Do we want our own form of human resources (HR) that has real teeth when something violent or inappropriate happens to a coworker? Of course. Do we want to have our voices heard when it comes to the quality of our work environment? Of course.
When people agree on principles but not on the umbrella term that covers them, it makes them vulnerable to political manipulation so that they can be divided and convinced to vote against their own interests.
I understand that a free market where people can switch jobs easily might be seen as more ideal than unions. But do we live in that market really? How many cities in America have a handful of large companies propping up the local economy? How many of those companies would take us in if we got fired from the other companies? How often do we hear about people moving to another city because they can't find a job?
There seems to be quite a discrepancy between the ideal and the actual. Another way to make people vulnerable to political manipulation.
I think maybe it comes down to how we see ourselves as blue collar or white collar. I understand how unions might be against the interests of white collar workers who tell blue collar workers what to do. What I can't understand is why blue collar workers would be against unions. What is the rationale there, really?
Without logic, we're left with bad faith arguments. Unions don't exist much these days for the same reasons that people on food stamps vote for billionaires. There's an irony there that their hope for opportunity gets used against them in a negative reinforcement loop. It's plain to see, and yet no help is coming.
If companies decide who gets hired instead of the people doing the work, that would seem to open the door to corruption and prejudice. So it's interesting that we might associate unions with mob activity, but not the existing corporate status quo. Why is that?