Trade unions - A force for good or a detriment to society?

[Jack Haywood]

What's your position on trade unions and why? I personally think unions are a good thing because they remove the inherent imbalance of power between employee and employer, but they may need to be constrained in a few cases to prevent them becoming greedy like corporate management can be.

 

[ForgedBlades]

Irrelevant. They spit in the face of the free market and capitalism. Corrupt. Their only goal is to feed and sustain the upper tier of their own bureaucracy while trampling the workers they claim to support. Dangerous. Teacher's unions are the single biggest entity holding our country back.

They were arguably necessary back in the day to prevent child labor and exploitation of workers, but now that society has collectively become more moral, and monopolies have become less sustainable in the modern economy, they have completely outlived their usefulness.

 

[Joan Nyan]

Unions are definitely good for union bosses and Democrat politicians who get union donations. Unions are usually good for the unionized employees. They are definitely bad, however, for both job seekers who will have a harder time finding a job because the employers can't afford to hire as many people, and consumers, who have to pay more for products made by a union. I don't blame people for unionizing if it's in their best interest, I blame everyone else for letting them get away with it, and especially the government for often allowing union organizers and strikers to get away with violence.

 

[Tennis Monkey]

I don't want to :powerlevel: too much, but I am a union member, and my experience is that their actual power to influence what happens in a workplace is pretty limited, even with a management that's happy to deal with unions.

If management is planning some changes, they may sit down and discuss them with your union and maybe it can persuade them to tinker around with them, but ultimately its main weapon is strike action. No-one really wants to take strike action if they can avoid it. In the UK, at any rate, you have to ballot members before you can strike, the ballots are legal minefields, your members won't usually want to go on strike indefinitely (because they won't get paid indefinitely), so you're realistically limited to calling 24 or 48 hour strikes.

And, quite frankly, who cares if some random office or factory is shut down for a day or two? The unions that genuinely seem to still have some power are those in industries where even a short shutdown will get lots of publicity and generate public pressure on management to resolve things. (Like railways. You've never seen tight-lipped rage like a British person who's had their daily commute fucked with).

I know that a lot of people in the US think the teaching unions there are the root of all evil in the schools system. All I can say is that the teaching profession in Britain is also highly unionised and that hasn't stopped Labour or Conservative governments imposing various major changes in the education system.

 

[Oh Long Johnson]

We'll all get a good look at how wonderful the elimination of collectively bargained labor has been once Gen-X begins retiring without the pensions the generations before them had. There's going to be a shitload of people/families retiring with $50,000 and age 65 Social Security. IRAs and 401k accounts are great, but the bell curve dictates the majority of people will fuck them up with borrowing, early withdrawals, misallocations and other stupidity.

The fact these pensions disappeared during a time of extreme wage stagnation is scandalous, and something the most ineffectual union could have blocked.

 

[Tetra]

To me it all depends on how a union goes about achieving things.

A bad union would demand unreasonable wages for it's members AND(this is important) organize it's members to block or disturb the hiring process of other non-unionized employees that most likely finds the wage acceptable.

A good union would make sure the wages/safety are actually unreasonable before protesting and that it's members has skills which is important for the employer(in other words, it's not easy to replace the angry workers, meaning the employer has a hard time actually ripping off it's workers BUT if the wage isn't unreasonable and they are being paid enough, the employer is forced to take the more expensive option of hiring and training new, non-spoiled workers.)

the 40 hour workweek became standard because it increased the efficiency of workers, which was a good argument for it.
It didn't become standard because unions started blocking off and terrorizing employers.

So how do I feel about unions? Well, it depends on which of these two options they follow.

 

[Daughter of Cernunnos]

futile in capitalism. not leftist enough.

 

[The Carolignian]

I have always been for worker-run unions. The one thing to watch out for, though, is when you start accumulating a system of those so-called "professional trade unionist" types; the kind who do nothing but go around forming unions with they themselves at the top handling all its business aspects. Such unions inevitably develop an opaque, corrupt bureaucracy at the top which both claims to speak in the workers' names while simultaneously managing to never be directly answerable to them.

 

[Holdek]

In the US, the most unionized sector, government employees, are least in need of them. And the least unionized sector, private sector services (ie food service, janitors, retail workers) are most most in need. If they keep spending their money on political donations in return for relatively little, instead of organizing new members, they’ll continue to wither away anyway.

 

[Bassomatic]

10 years of economics for a living and I can't sum it up better than the simpsons, I don't know if that means I'm medically retarded, or the simpsons are that good.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UxYm6wboGyw

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFM5o-5G-Yw

 

[ADN_VIII]

I've been courted by unions at both my previous jobs, and I have to say that the current US system of at will employment is probably the biggest sore point between unions and unionized workers and the companies that employ them.

For those who don't know, at will employment is a system that allows the bonds of employment to be severed at any time and for any reason by either party. The obvious upside is that it allows employers to get rid of useless employees with little issue, and allows abused employees to walk away at any time.

However, it also allows for petty or incompetent managers to fire employees without cause or justification and has a double whammy effect of making it difficult if not impossible for a wronged employee to fight against it. In an at will employment state, suing an employer for wrongful termination is made significantly more difficult by the law, which in turn means that worker protection is significantly harder to ensure because an employee that complains is an employee that gets fired.

The point of a union is to protect unionized workers, and that's an admirable goal since its often hard for workers to effectively fight their employers without getting axed. However, they need to divest themselves of political connections to regain lost trust. At the same time, we as a society need to remember that workers are people as well.

 

[Jack Haywood]

I added a poll to this! Come one, come all to take the poll and express your opinion more efficiently than you would through a comment!

 

[Recoil]

The way that some unions operate and restrict their membership is pretty unethical. I'm talking about construction unions in general. I'm not sure if this has changed much in recent years.
Basically? you can't join some unions until you have the right job, but you can't get that job unless you're a member of the Union.

 

[Lemmingwise]

now that society has collectively become more moral,

Do you really believe that?

What exactly is more moral about sending kids to common core schools where they learn methods intended to hamper their abilities and may take years to undo in their competition with private school kids? And pumping government and transpropraganda into their soft heads? Taking their fertility with drugs? Getting them hooked on stimulants? Setting them up for a lifetime of student debts?

Is it really that much more moral than having them work with machinery, paying them for it and having the occasional industrial accident?

I tend to think that people that see such a more moral society now than in the past just isn't really looking at all of the immoral stuff going on. Of course there is media with an interest in telling you there is less crime than ever and we're ever moving forward into a culturally better world. But think for a moment: who has more to gain from that message; people doing shady stuff or people trying to fix shady stuff?

 

[Sable]

I don't know, they can be a force for good and can prevent workers being abused or whatever but they can also cripple the country and damage the lives of people they've never met.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Trade unions are an extension of capitalism, not a contradiction of it. The union is basically just a company which sells labor. That simple. Why should I care about a private union doing business anymore than I care about a private company? It's their business, not mine.

What isn't right is when governments step in and start making laws that force companies to deal with unions, and the like. Then it introduces the same sorts of inefficiencies as any form of intervention (that isn't aimed at correcting market failure).

Unions also have a tendency to let their greed bleed their companies dry. My family comes from up in the Rust Belt, where there was a manufacturing city that was rich off of factory money. The unions were practically in their infancy back then. About one generation later, the factories were dying out, moving off, because the unions had forced the company to make so many concessions that they were unable to make a profit. So those men got rich, but their kids and grandkids were fucked over. At their worst, unions are even like organized crime. My Pa was a policeman and he often had to crack union skulls because they would get rowdy and assault scabs.

 

[ICametoLurk]

Proudhon wasn't particularly fond of unions as they tend to do the same thing as capitalists and collect surplus value.

 

[Rand /pol/]

Objectively a good thing

 

[Slap47]

Trade unions are an extension of capitalism, not a contradiction of it. The union is basically just a company which sells labor. That simple. Why should I care about a private union doing business anymore than I care about a private company? It's their business, not mine.

What isn't right is when governments step in and start making laws that force companies to deal with unions, and the like. Then it introduces the same sorts of inefficiencies as any form of intervention (that isn't aimed at correcting market failure).

Unions also have a tendency to let their greed bleed their companies dry. My family comes from up in the Rust Belt, where there was a manufacturing city that was rich off of factory money. The unions were practically in their infancy back then. About one generation later, the factories were dying out, moving off, because the unions had forced the company to make so many concessions that they were unable to make a profit. So those men got rich, but their kids and grandkids were fucked over. At their worst, unions are even like organized crime. My Pa was a policeman and he often had to crack union skulls because they would get rowdy and assault scabs.

Vegas was built by money laundered by the Steel Union.

The issue with unions is that they're good in their infancy but become either corrupt bureaucratic messes that care about about social issues (because college kids who become the bureaucrats don't actually care about the workers) or become cliques that promote gross inefficiency to loot the company before it collapses.

Do you really believe that?

What exactly is more moral about sending kids to common core schools where they learn methods intended to hamper their abilities and may take years to undo in their competition with private school kids? And pumping government and transpropraganda into their soft heads? Taking their fertility with drugs? Getting them hooked on stimulants? Setting them up for a lifetime of student debts?

Is it really that much more moral than having them work with machinery, paying them for it and having the occasional industrial accident?

I tend to think that people that see such a more moral society now than in the past just isn't really looking at all of the immoral stuff going on. Of course there is media with an interest in telling you there is less crime than ever and we're ever moving forward into a culturally better world. But think for a moment: who has more to gain from that message; people doing shady stuff or people trying to fix shady stuff?

There is less crime despite there being more laws. However, alot of those laws are laws that should be broken so I'd call it a mixed bag.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Do you really believe that?

What exactly is more moral about sending kids to common core schools where they learn methods intended to hamper their abilities and may take years to undo in their competition with private school kids? And pumping government and transpropraganda into their soft heads? Taking their fertility with drugs? Getting them hooked on stimulants? Setting them up for a lifetime of student debts?

Is it really that much more moral than having them work with machinery, paying them for it and having the occasional industrial accident?

I tend to think that people that see such a more moral society now than in the past just isn't really looking at all of the immoral stuff going on. Of course there is media with an interest in telling you there is less crime than ever and we're ever moving forward into a culturally better world. But think for a moment: who has more to gain from that message; people doing shady stuff or people trying to fix shady stuff?

Are you defending child labor?

I did an essay on that once, and maintain that child labor is not immoral. If child labor had never been used, humanity would have gone extinct from starvation.

For some reason, people don't think of children working on family farms as being child labor, even though it is. Early civilizations couldn't even produce enough food to support a family using just the adults' labor. They'd literally starve without it. There's still nations, like Ethiopia, where that's true.

Child labor also often doesn't come at the expense of education, but enables it. When Western nations have had movements target foreign child labor, it has often made the families of the child laborers worse off because they can't afford stuff needed to buy what education they were buying (like transportation to get the kid to the school, textbooks and school uniforms, fees), and sometimes it results in more child labor being used overall. For example, when Bengali garments factories were targeted by boycotts, the laid-off children were instead redeployed to prostitution/stone mining, which were far more dangerous and paid far less.

The Western obsession with child labor as some great evil is very arrogant and damaging to people from poor countries and borders on hysteria.

In the West, the future value of an educated child is worth far more than the present value of a child laborer, so it makes sense to ban child labor to ensure a highly-trained workforce. That the law exists and is sensible doesn't make the concept that's banned immoral, though, anymore than it's "immoral" to smoke weed.