If I understood the parent comment, there are two kinds of leverage being discussed here: there's the leverage that individual tech workers currently have (as high demand, high income laborers in a hot market) and then there's the leverage inherent to collective bargaining.
I believe the GP was saying that unions can deliver when circumstances give individuals large amounts of leverage, but they don't need to. But we all know that good times don't last forever, and unionization does provide sufficient leverage when individual leverage evaporates.
I understood the point. My counterpoint is that if a union doesn't use the leverage of collective bargaining to deliver when it's in a good position to do so, it rather weakens the argument that the same union will decide to use its leverage when individual leverage evaporates.
Organizations run on precedent, policy, and consistency. Arguing for the potential for inconsistency seems to me to be a rather weak reed. Especially since the WSJ's been a union shop for 80-ish years.
More likely, IMO, is that the union as a whole did not care much about the developers and was more concerned with other parts of the membership. There's one union covering the whole shop, so this seems pretty likely.
People don't pay a monthly subscription for a lawyer their not likely to use even though a lawsuit or criminal charge is one bad day away. You're view of supply and demand matches that of a paranoid actor rather than a rational one. If ever the market were to contract, there are alternative solutions like savings, downsizing, or looking for another job. It's not as though one company has a monopoly on all the job opportunities in the world or working in that one company is the only way to feed oneself.
A union is not a panacea. For many people, unions are just as much of a hassle as a bad job and without the benefit of self-representation. And when all breaks loose, the last thing most reasonable is trade their agency
I don't believe the Turbotax product pays for a lawyer. Non lawyers can represent you at the IRS though I'm guessing certain criminal matters would need a lawyer.
The turbotax product is also not called "legal defense" but "audit defense" presumably for that reason.
> If you receive a speeding ticket or other moving violation, you can call your lawyer and they will handle the situation for you. This plan benefit is one of our most popular as it can reduce or eliminate points on your license and reduce or eliminate fines with no additional lawyer fees. Representation under this benefit is provided when you or your family members have a valid driver’s license and are driving a non-commercial vehicle.
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I don"t know anything about that particular product but I've read anecodotes about the lawyers being terrible that are provided by such services.
A better example is perhaps liability insurance. The insurance company will pay for a lawyer and has an incentive to pay for a good lawyer since the insurance is on the hook up to the policy limit if the lawyer loses.
> People don't pay a monthly subscription for a lawyer
That's a pretty poor analogy. Some people do keep lawyers on retainer. Also, if you don't have legal representation at the point in time you're sued/charged, you're not required to represent yourself, and can still hire a lawyer.
Unions are probably closer to insurance. You can't buy insurance after you crash your car and expect them to pay out, neither can you join a union after you've been given the sack and expect representation.
I think this analogy is more apt than you realize. Internet commenters absolutely love to shove insurance down the throats of people who can afford to self-insure against or simply are not exposed to the particular outcome in question.
Insurance against what? If you (a tech knowledge worker) is unionized, does it mean that the company must not remove the tech that you use, so that you get job security? Would unions have a say in such decisions?
I don't see unions as being useful, unless there's some pre-existing guarantees that the union can provide (like insurance - you pay a premium and get a known quantity of payout).
And what’s stopping tech companies from doing the same thing manufacturing companies do when they don’t want to deal with unions - hire cheaper labor overseas?
My hometown use to be booming with multiple manufacturing plants. Every time the union got involved, the plants just picked up and left.
> Every time the union got involved, the plants just picked up and left.
Unions have been around - especially in manufacturing - long before they started offshoring production. The cost of labor in China and elsewhere was simply too low, unionized or not.
Sure, that's their job. Individuals do the same thing; unions just mean everyone negotiates as a group instead of one at a time, with a more balanced power dynamic.
> But regardless, what good would unions be to prevent outsourcing?
Unions aren't magical. That doesn't mean there's zero value in such a scenario.
They can negotiate rules and limits on layoffs, they can negotiate severance and healthcare coverage during such an outsourcing, etc.
I'm not sure how useful this is going to be if you only read portions of the replies.
Unions negotiate in advance. They set up multi-year contracts between employees and management. These often involve limitations on the company's ability to lay people off, or otherwise meaningfully change employment conditions.
They're not unlimited, and they don't go forever, but it tends to mean there's a lot fewer "surprise! you're all fired tomorrow!" scenarios, because there's contractual protections in place that companies won't give individuals without bargaining power.
Again, unions aren't magic - they can't prevent all layoffs. They can make them harder to do, and they can protect employees better during one.
If the company isn’t competitive and can’t pay their negotiated rates - they file for bankruptcy. When has a union ever protected workers when a company was in distress? The auto industry? The airline industry? Flight controllers in the 80s?
> Investment bank William Blair & Company estimated that the strike likely reduced Deere's output by between 10 and 15% for the fourth quarter of 2021 and the first quarter of 2022.[29]
The strike led to an increase in the already-inflated auction prices of used Deere equipment such as tractors and other used agricultural machines.[30]
It really depends on the numbers here. Were the companies paying say $12/hour in current terms and the union was asking for more or were they trying to get $35/hr raised beyond what was reasonable for the work?
What’s “reasonable” is the same as the market demands for their skillset. If the companies could pick up and move to another state or a cheaper country, what does that tell you?
It tells me that they don't care about anything but their profits and, as a society, we need to stop being okay with that. Employees are not just an inconvenient cost that should be minimized in any way possible. They're human beings who have a right to decent quality of life. They have a right to be paid a living wage for their work. It's sick that there are people out there that believe otherwise.
The unions didn't destroy those towns. Those companies did.
A union is like an insurance policy, or a lawyer on retainer, or a contract in writing. It doesn't do anything when times are good, that's not what it's for.
You have to judge how much involvement to have. Just signing up and forgetting about it is a pretty bad idea. But not getting insurance at all because you've heard some insurance sucks and doesn't pay out is an even worse one.
Most kinds of disaster preparedness are thankless, seemingly pointless work until the disaster in question happens.
I do agree with that much. But having a manager attempt to fire me under false pretences was, subjectively, the worst and most stressful experience of my life; I've had scary medical incidents but those are something everyone is on your side for, a human actively trying to wreck your life is so much worse. YMMV I guess.
You have my sympathies. I just don't think unions are going to help on balance here.
If someone doesn't want to work with you anymore, they should be allowed to just fire you. Instead of having to come up with false pretenses.
See also how Orange in France ended up bullying their own employees in order to entice them to quit; mostly because they weren't allowed to just fire them. (Some of the victims were even driven into suicide.)
So it's like buying a lottery ticket every day for decades expecting to win millions. They don't show value and there's no indication they ever will, and it costs a significant amount of money.
Most problem I see with unions is that they tend to run their own causes at some point. It is difficult to keep them focused on the interest of workers and they can get tangled up in contemporary issues. Corruption is another problem since possible. If I look at some unions some people in tech wanted to start, I don't really see the issues of worker prioritized.
That said, because corporations seem to default to exploiting workers to the maximum degree possible, they are a necessary evil.
I don't know how bad working for the NYT is, but I wouldn't be surprised that instead of arguing for employee conditions, they try to influence editors and dejure editorials the might not like.
> So it's like buying a lottery ticket every day for decades expecting to win millions. They don't show value and there's no indication they ever will, and it costs a significant amount of money.
Money has diminishing returns. Paying to gain a small chance of winning big is generally foolish; paying to eliminate a small chance of losing big is often wise.
> Often, the unions themselves are corrupt.
This seems to be a distinctly American quirk. Maybe figure out what you're doing differently to the rest of us that causes that, rather than attacking an institution that works very well elsewhere.
Not so much American. They are very corrupt here in Australia. There are union leaders or related staff in court pretty much every working day in court down here.
Not at all, they're pretty much corrupt across all of South America as well. I don't have first hand experience elsewhere, but have heard similar stories from who do.
