I see how poorly public sector works with public sector unions (especially police, but also city government generally) and I wonder if private unions won’t be just as bad for organizations. Private companies do a lot of the work to enable modern living (e.g. producing food, handling logistics, manufacturing, etc). I get that corporate=bad, but do we want them to become more poorly run and inefficient than they are now?
Unions are sort of ok when there aren’t that many of them, because market forces demand some level of competitiveness, but what happens when union shops are the only or the majority option?
Again, just consider how well public sector unions work for society (ime: disastrously) and how that will work applied to the organizations that do the much of the work enabling modern society.
I guess another angle is: look at how dysfunctional politics have become, at how ~50% of Americans would gladly re-elect DJT post-January 6, and ask, do you want those people to hold the industrial economy hostage? Do we really think the average worker is able to produce better outcomes than management?
Maybe I’ve just been traumatized by the public sector unions. I don’t understand why people can’t make the connection between public sector unions, and the inevitable outcomes of private sector unions get too much traction.
That a union can lead to negative outcomes is not an argument in favor of no-unions, I think, it's an argument that that union should be improved.
The basic gist of unions (or "collectives" or co-ops), that they offer employees and workers leverage and collective bargaining power to counteract arbitrary changes, still stands as necessary.
I also have experience with public sector unions, and though management might dislike them, I know very very few employees who would choose to be non-unionized instead. It's literally giving yourself up to the whims of your employer for no gain.
> I get that corporate=bad, but do we want them to become more poorly run and inefficient than they are now?
Do we want them to succeed at the cost of basic human dignity, or by dragging people into shitty working conditions? "inefficient" for whom? That human dignity should come at the expense of corporate profits is, I think, always a grotesque position to hold. We can mitigate that out by understanding how profit can co-exist with safe and good working conditions for everyone.
> That a union can lead to negative outcomes is not an argument in favor of no-unions, I think, it's an argument that that union should be improved.
Can't the same be said about companies that aren't non-unionized?
> It's literally giving yourself up to the whims of your employer for no gain.
You could just as well say you are giving yourself up to the whims of the union leadership, which is just a parallel management structure. Sure they are supposed to represent your interests, but they're also supposed to balance that against the interests of the company and what is practically possible. So is there really much of a difference?
I feel like the bigger problem is the exclusivity. Anytime there is only one option and competition disappears (whether for an employer or for a union), the incentives get corrupted. People shouldn't have to join a particular union. They should have the right to optionally do so, but being obligated means there's no competition incentive.
"Can't the same be said about companies that aren't non-unionized?"
No, for two reasons. First, a company always has far greater negotiating power than an individual worker. Second, the company's incentive is to spend as little money on workers as they can get away with, in order to maximize profits. As a result non-union jobs almost always pay less and offer fewer benefits than unionized jobs.
So even if a company could be convinced that they should not ask warehouse workers to pee in a bottle instead of taking the time to go to the bathroom, workers still come out on the losing end when they do not have a union.
"You could just as well say you are giving yourself up to the whims of the union leadership"
Workers have a say in union leadership decisions -- at a minimum they elect their leaders, but in most cases there are other ways for people to be involved. So unless the workforce also represents a significant fraction of ownership of the company (very unlikely for any company of significant size) they will have far less say in management decisions than in union decisions.
"People shouldn't have to join a particular union"
That is standard union-busting propaganda. It sounds great to give people a choice but the reality is that it reduces union representation and gives management an advantage over the workers by keeping them divided (among other things, it makes a strike far less effective and far less of a threat). The reason unions demand that the entire workforce be part of the union is to ensure that the union can negotiate with the company on equal footing -- two big parties negotiating, not one big party dealing with many small parties.
Except that we are not talking about a political club. We are not talking about an external group that imposes itself on the workers. Unions are formed by workers, the leaders are elected by the workers and drawn from the workforce, and unions serve the purpose of negotiating employment terms for the workers.
If you would rather have an argument about political clubs go find a forum where it is not wildly off-topic...
You DO see that politics are inevitably tied up in the root cause/purpose of unions though, right? I mean, often it is nakedly political reasons that unions even come to exist in the first place, or this situation with Amazon, for example. Your explanation of what a union is could easily be rewritten for a society made up of constituents electing a candidate drawn from the community to represent them...
What nakedly political reasons do Amazon workers have? They were being told to use a plastic container instead of a bathroom so that they would spend more time working, they were being ordered to put their health and their coworkers' health at risk with inadequate COVID protection, and after more than a year complaining about their working conditions little action was taken (but the workers who complained the loudest were fired for complaining). Amazon management's only response to the effort to unionize in response to all that was to hire consultants to discourage unionization.
Yeah, you are right, the way union representation works is as democratic as political representation. Shareholders also vote on corporate leadership and typically elect other shareholders to the board. That does not make it "political" beyond the internal politics of the organizations involved, and trying to connect those internal politics to the politics involved with government is dishonest.
...and all of that is true, to a much greater extent, of the corporations whose workers unions represent. Do you think Amazon warehouse workers agree with the views of every politician whose campaign received a contribution from Amazon?
I am a big fan of taking money out of politics and banning campaign contributions from unions, corporations, PACs, lobbying firms, and basically any entity that is not an individual citizen. Unfortunately, until that happens, unions must engage with political campaigns to counter corporate political engagement. Corporations push for politicians to pass union-busting laws and to block pro-union laws; unions push for politicians to block such union-busting and to pass pro-union laws.
As for your other comment, I have to wonder whose interests you think unions are representing when they actually sit down to negotiate pay, benefits, work rules, etc. Do you think that when a union rep says, "No, we need a healthcare plan that has a lower deductible," they are doing so because some politician somewhere benefits from it? Do you think "power people" tell a union that, actually, employees should have their wages adjusted according to both their seniority and the local cost of living? The day-to-day business of a union is its workers' interest, just like the day-to-day business of a corporation is its shareholders' interest, regardless of campaign contributions or support for politicians. If the workers feel that their interests are poorly represented, they can vote for different union leaders; likewise, when shareholders feel that their interests are poorly represented they can elect a different board of directors.
What else did those politicians vote on? If your claim is that the union funded politicians because of their support for the invasion of Iraq, that is an extraordinary claim that demands extraordinary proof. Let's see your proof.
[Edit: At the end of the day, union leaders are elected by union members, and if the members do not like how their contract is negotiated they can elect different leaders or otherwise make their voices heard. Call it "bullying" if you want, but I fail to see how non-unionized workers are not being bullied by the companies they work for, given how one-sided negotiations between individual workers and companies are.]
Why does it matter why they funded them? Why are they funding them all all? What is going on the unions are funding one particular political viewpoint?
Read the post you replied to; unions fund politicians who are friendly toward unions because corporations fund politicians who are antagonistic toward unions (or, if we are being charitable, let's say "politicians who are friendly to corporate interests").
...because the corporations on the other side of the table would never support antisemites [0], white nationalists [1], fascists [2], or political parties that harbor and support such deplorable people [3]. Not that the workers have any say in who their employers make contributions to.
Look, I already explained this in my other comments, but you are just ignoring those and repeating anti-union propaganda. Either you are a troll or you are some kind of paid anti-union consultant; if you actually want an answer to your question, read what I wrote again.
You've kind of shifted the debate towards over whether any large institution or organization should be allowed to finance or donate or "fund" political campaigns to the degree that they can at present in the US. I would say they shouldn't be able to. Many other liberal democracies do not allow it.
While I support unions in many cases, I would say that many of the arguments against a decision like the one made in Citizens United in favor of unfettered amounts apply to corporations and unions equally. I found Justice Stevens dissenting opinion extremely convincing compared to the concurring and majority opinion. He raised things like: they do not vote, they "survive" the lifespan of the normal human, they disrupt the spirit of democracy and the conceptual underpinnings of liberal democracy, and they manipulate speech into a concept of power and wealth rather than expression and communication.
So, obviously they're political, but in the sense that they are politically active. And so are corporations. Take away the ability to fund, donate to, or finance, politicians and political campaigns from corporations and unions, and you still end up with a situation where unions collectively protect workers from arbitrary change.
Don't B-Corps both (a) show working towards improvement without a union and (b) by their definition consider far more than profit maximization in their core mandate?
You didn't really refute their final point about mandatory union affiliation other than "but that would make it harder for the union". Their point about personal choice stands (and is valid).
Don't B-Corps work for the "public benefit?" That does not necessarily align with the needs or interests of the workers and the profit motive still exists. It is not hard to imagine a B-Corp working for the public interest while still paying its workers too little, offering limited benefits, or even engaging in various abuses of its workforce.
As to the point about mandatory union affiliation, as I said the entire purpose of a union is to allow workers to negotiate the terms of their employment on an equal footing with their company. For the reasons I gave mandatory union membership is necessary; personal choice serves to divide the workers and gives the company an advantage in every negotiation. To put it another way, managers do not have any "personal choice" on their side of the negotiation -- the company negotiates as a collective and the job of individual managers is to negotiate on behalf and for the benefit of the company. So if the workers exercise a "personal choice" to negotiate individually or collectively, the company, which always negotiates as a collective, will have an advantage in every negotiation.
So I suppose it really comes down to whether or not you think it is a problem for a company to have a huge advantage over its workers when negotiating the terms of employment. I personally think it is a problem to give such a large advantage to employers, but I can grant that it is a matter of personal values and worldview, so maybe your values are different. If you do assert that there is no particular problem with companies having such a large advantage, then to be intellectually honest you should not speak of a "market" for employment, because markets do not function effectively when they are so extremely one-sided (see e.g. the failure of the "market" for home ISP service).
As an alternative place workers on the board. Have them be elected by the workers. A lot of places in Europe apparently do this. There's your non union workers representation and brings parity to negotiating power as well.
> You could just as well say you are giving yourself up to the whims of the union leadership, which is just a parallel management structure. Sure they are supposed to represent your interests, but they're also supposed to balance that against the interests of the company and what is practically possible. So is there really much of a difference?
There's a difference: they are elected by the workers.
I have a vote if I'm in a union. I don't have a vote with my employer except to leave, and the process of finding a new job with a new employer is very long, painful, and uncertain.
You have to be careful with this line of reasoning.
In the absence of a social safety net, being "not skilled" or "not valuable" from the perspective of an employer easily becomes being not valuable as a person, they "deserve" what happens to them because they are at fault. When your employer is your source of healthcare, retirement, and livelihood, the idea that it can arbitrarily control the basis of your health and dignity is grotesque.
The line of reasoning seems fine when you are "skilled and valuable" from the perspective of your employer, but you might not be seen that way. Insisting that someone pays some price for that beyond simply not ending up wealthy is needlessly cruel. Despite our focus on it, there is more to life than being subservient to profit.
I know people that are skilled and valuable, but they still don't have the savings to fund their life for an extended period of time. And since they live in a country that doesn't pay reasonable unemployment money, they can only switch jobs when the jobs line up perfectly. Saying "this sucks, I quit" is not an option for them. They have family that relies on them. The employer nearly always has the better negotiation position.
When I leave a company the company loses out on a cog in their wheel. When a company leaves me, they also take from me a way to access healthcare, which is life-threatening given my medical profile. It's not really the same.
This law was passed to address employment gaps as you described.
If you can't get a new job in that time, then it's time to look for a ACA solution for unemployed workers (insurance premiums limited to a percentage of income) or apply for disability or some other issue depending on your circumstances.
Health care insurance is pretty well subsidized for the unemployed and the poor, the issue is that providers zap the middle class with unexpected bills and extremely high bills that are not covered by insurance. E.g. the old losing your savings because of a snake-bite problem, which can hit both the employed and the unemployed.
Back when I lived in SF, SF General famously refused to accept insurance from anyone. Their entire business model was to charge outrageous bills and give free care to the indigent. That's why you'd get these 100K bills for a broken ankle.
I would go even further:there should be a free market of unions for workers and employees to choose from. If you believe that the virtues of markets are absolute, then having complete freedom for unions should be the norm: they would autoregulate themselves and be beneficials for the workers, the companies and the society. I genuinely believe that if you are against unions, you are more communist than capitalist.
There can never be a true free market for unions because there’s such a big network effect bonus from everyone in your company/industry being in the same union.
but many large companies have too deal with multiple Unions anyway. a metal mill for example will have to deal with the teamsters for their truck drivers, united steel worker for anyone working the floor, Service Employees International Union for security guards and janitor, International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers for the electricians the service any of the electrical equipment, and any of a number of unions for the office staff.
Unions are really, really different from collectives, or worker co-ops.
They have in common an implication that capital should not be the sole deciding factor in organizational decision making, but it is really weird to see them lumped together.
Kind of like saying jet engines (or bears, humans, or amphibians) all depend on breathing oxygen!
I only lumped them together because in America all forms of worker organization outside of the dominant system of employee subservience is deemed suspect in a hilariously uniform way. Farmers co-ops, for instance, have been described as "socialist," or "anti-competitive," or "inefficient" or "rent seeking" in the same way that unions have been.
But I do agree, for the sake of specificity, they should be considered separate.
I mean, we don't have to guess, a third of US workers were union members in the 50s and 60s. You can look at the real history of private sector unions and see how they impacted society. I think it's clearly been positive, but it's tough to summarize in a comment. One easy example is the Fair Labor Standards Act, which would not have passed when it did without decades of union activism including massive strikes.
Basically, I don't think the outcomes you're imagining are inevitable because we tried private sector unions for a very long time and those outcomes didn't happen.
I understand why you're traumatized by police unions, but I can just as easily say I don't understand why people can't make the connection between the decline of union membership and the increase of income inequality and all its disastrous effects.
Unions' interests are not aligned with those of the company. If the company needs to shed a bunch of people or switch business models or _hire different talent_ the union will resist, because their job is to maximize the number and pay of jobs for their members.
The prime example of this being a problem right now is longshoremen in LA and Long Beach resisting automation.
The other issue with co-op like structures is that they don't provide enough upside for company founders and early employees. Founders need the chance to make big money or they won't take big risks (see: Europe for an example of this). One of the reasons the NYC rideshare co-op is failing is because no software engineer wants to work at some rando startup for a fraction of what they could make at Uber & Lyft.
Unions work when the work is highly commoditized and technological improvement is stagnant. I can't say that's the case for a huge percentage of jobs today.
> Unions' interests are not aligned with those of the company.
They are not aligned with those of management. They are aligned with those of the company almost by definition if the union is big enough, because a company is its workforce. If the CEO says the company wants to do something and 80% of the employees disagree, then in fact the CEO wants to do something and the company does not.
It's obviously not hard to find examples of unions causing negative impacts on society, just like it's not hard to find the same for corporate executives. The idea is to find the right balance. Is the the threat of inefficiency worse than the threat of worker abuse and inequality? At some point yes it will be, but I don't think we're anywhere close to that point yet.
The company is not its workforce. Every individual in the company would like more money for less work, but that's not in the company's best interest. If the company goes under because it's paying too much for too little, the employees can get new jobs elsewhere, whereas any money reinvested into the company will provide virtually no direct benefit to any individual employee. A company's interests can be aligned with employees, indeed typically you want good employee retention and high morale which can only come from creating a company where people want to work, but companies do not exist to maximize employment and employee compensation.
A company is nothing more than the collection of its employees. Without employees, the company does not exist. There may be some legal fiction around registration and taxes and similar, but make no mistake, without people those legal fictions cannot make plans, cannot advocate for itself, cannot change direction, _cannot exist_.
Saying a company is its employees, is like saying a bunch of dots randomly placed on a piece of paper would magically create a line. People playing a crucial part in a company, but without founders, well oiled processes and risks taken, these people would not be able to create what a company creates in terms of products and profit.
I think this is a fundamental philosophical difference that we're not going to resolve in a comment thread. For me "a company is its workforce" is almost tautological, I don't even know how to explain it further. I don't know how to argue with your objections either, it seems like you're agreeing. Founders are people, processes are designed by people, risks are taken by people. All these people make up the workforce. That's what a company is.
No, the workers have to have actual ownership (ie stocks) in the company. Work councils are no different from unions in that the members of the council are not working to maximize the success of the company but to maximize employment and wages (and these two things are not always aligned). Until incentives are aligned, there will always be an antagonistic relationship between workers and companies. Putting workers on the BoD just makes the conflict internal rather than external.
Of course this is easier said than done since most workers just want to get paid and would sell their equity stakes as soon as they vest. Designing good incentives is very hard.
Yeah, many of them were incredibly racist organizations focused on keeping black people from doing jobs. Easy when they cartelize labour and use violence when required.
Yeah they were fantastic for the majority because they allowed the majority to retain a tight grip on work.
If your preference matrix prefers that racist workers get better gigs while other workers don’t get work at all, fine. That isn’t my preference matrix.
That's why I said it's tough to summarize. Obviously there were many negatives including racism, organized crime, corruption, etc. I do not believe that racism or corruption is an inevitable outcome of unions, just like I don't think the positive outcomes are inevitable.
I think we’re on the same page as to the situation. You just believe that curation of the process and vigilance will ensure positive outcomes and I believe that that path is not anti-fragile and will eventually fail.
You keep saying that "public sector unions" are bad for society without giving any specific reasons why we should think so. What is so disastrous or traumatic about public sector unions?
From my perspective, unions come with plenty of problems, largely the same problems as any large organization, but on the whole workers are better off when they have a union that represents them. Society as a whole benefits when people do not have to put off seeing a doctor because their employer decided to give them a garbage health plan. Society as a whole benefits when the wealth gap is kept under control. Unions, historically and currently, negotiate compensation and benefits in ways that individual workers cannot -- because an individual negotiating with a large organization is at a disadvantage (and corporations know this, which is why they try to prevent workers from forming unions). Society benefits when the people we rely on to sort and deliver packages are not being told to pee in a bottle just to save some time. Unions have been particularly important in dangerous occupations where cutting corners or working multiple roles can result in death or permanent injuries -- which is why unions formed in the first place and why unions remain strong in certain industries (railroads, etc.).
Market forces work poorly when one side of the market has greater negotiating power and a greater ability to externalize costs than the other. Corporations have been known to rely on the welfare system instead of paying workers the minimum wages needed to live in a given region or provide effective health and retirement plans. Corporations work hard to avoid compensating workers for injuries and have faced few penalties for discrimination, harassment, and other abuses.
Almost all the complaints about public-sector unions are based on myths or at best unusual and extreme examples. Things that work well often go unreported, and unions typically work well.
That is relevant to the actual article, which is about Amazon warehouse workers unionizing in response to various abuses, including being told to pee in a bottle.
Yes, most corporations are not asking people to pee in a bottle. On the other hand, as I said, individual workers have little negotiating power with a corporation, even a relatively small corporation, and the difference between union and non-union jobs is clear. It is not at all unusual or extreme for corporations to give non-union workers lower wages and lower-quality benefits because the corporation has outsized power to negotiate the terms of employment with individual workers. Non-union workers are more vulnerable to abuses and abuses are more common among non-union workers -- not extreme abuses, but mundane abuses that generally go unreported.
> Do we really think the average worker is able to produce better outcomes than management?
As a long time HN reader who works in a factory, I often hear the sentiment that management is clueless MBA's and workers are better off left on their own in WFH situations. Strange I see this is a highly upvoted comment. Maybe it has something to do with this:
> look at how dysfunctional politics have become, at how ~50% of Americans would gladly re-elect DJT post-January 6, and ask, do you want those people to hold the industrial economy hostage?
I'm just curious why you think "those people" don't deserve the right to fight for better wages, work life balance, better benefits just as the skilled tech class does. Does some of them voting for a politician you don't like have to do with this bias perhaps? Switching jobs to up your comp by 30% isn't an option for most of "those people". Unions are likely the only option they have to bring themselves leverage in negotiation.
It feels like North America hates unions enough that we got the very worst of them. In Europe, there isn't the same societal conflict over unionization, but at the same time they aren't any more in love with the idea of industrial labour monopolies like the UAW than we are.
Where unionization works well, it's been because the government regulated to create competitive unions. In Germany, once a company unionizes, the union has special rights and privileges within the company, including access to the company's books and executive meetings. And things like union-busting are illegal. There's a lot of legislation in place to prevent the sort of abuses that North America has always seen with "company unions". But they can't join together with workers at other companies to form industrial labour monopolies either, so you still get market competition.
There is a fundamental difference between public sector unions and private unions. Public sector unions often have outsized power with management because, with such a large number of employees, politicians want to curry their favor to get re-elected. It's basically as if public sector unions can negotiate from both sides of the table.
That dynamic doesn't exist with private sector unions because management has much more independent goals than the union does.
This makes a false equivalency between no unions or decades old, powerful, public sector unions.
Between those two ranges, the following nuance is important:
- will a union of $15/hr Amazon employees, in aggregate, have the same power in the short term as a union of police or firefighters.
- mid-term, will those union bosses for Amazon become as powerful as the PD/FD/teachers union bosses?
- Are there lessons learned from when a private sector union like the Teamsters under Hoffa got out of control?
The answers to all of those, and likely more, are necessary to evaluate the outcomes of letting Amazon unionize. And from there, ya interesting discussions start - well, we do use Amazon for a lot. What if the local warehouse strikes? And so on.
Another way to evaluate it is the gut feeling about this: when an Amazon contractor sprints to your door, drops off a package at 8pm, apologizes for "being late," and sprints away to the next apartment.
Public sector unions are different from private sector unions for reasons I don't know but I can sense.
Just empirically, Finland/Sweden/Norway are famously pleasant places to live while also having very strong private sector unions, as does most of Western Europe.
>I see how poorly public sector works with public sector unions (especially police, but also city government generally) and I wonder if private unions won’t be just as bad for organizations.
I'm not a police officer, so can you provide some insight into how police unions work poorly for police officers (i.e. their members)?
>Do we really think the average worker is able to produce better outcomes than management?
Are we really that concerned with corporate/organizational outcomes, which seem to generally be doing pretty well? Maybe you can explain why we should be more concerned with corporate/organizational outcomes instead of worker outcomes?
>Maybe I’ve just been traumatized by the public sector unions.
I'm genuinely interested to hear more about this trauma, if you're able to share.
>I'm not a police officer, so can you provide some insight into how police unions work poorly for police officers (i.e. their members)?
How about police officers who don't want to be working next to another officer with a history of abuse and excessive violence complaint but can't be fired?
I assume you don't literally mean "working next to," but instead mean police unions prevent abusive and/or violent officers from being fired; but, as far as I'm aware, the bigger problem is that frequently arbitration hearings find in favor of officers that have been fired (and are obviously supported by their union) resulting in reinstatement. Police unions don't have direct control over arbitration though, so arbitration reform seems to be the more pressing concern.
Of course you could easily make the same hypothetical argument that police officers, accused of some type of misconduct, need support from somewhere merely in the name of due process (much in the same way that legal counsel is seen as a right).
Pointing to arbitration seems to be passing the buck. The unions had a hand in negotiating the arbitration rules and criteria.
Of course arbitration could result in just or unjust firing, but if you accept the premise that it currently too hard to fire bad cops, you have to look for what parties advocate for the position.
School teachers are an even more example of this, where it is essentially impossible for management to fire teachers. For example, California employs 300,000+ teachers and fires ~10 year.[1]
> Pointing to arbitration seems to be passing the buck. The unions had a hand in negotiating the arbitration rules and criteria.
And simply pointing to unions, as opposed to the numerous other parties involved or the process itself, is also passing the buck. Do they have a role in the process and its perceived failure? Obviously, yes, but can we blame police unions for the failures of those that they are negotiating against, or that implement arbitration?
> Of course arbitration could result in just or unjust firing, but if you accept the premise that it currently too hard to fire bad cops, you have to look for what parties advocate for the position.
I actually don't accept this premise of what is good from the perspective of police officers (or most police officers), i.e. are police officers generally more concerned with what you raised or more supportive of the job protections that enable it; and this framing was the original ask. It might be clear that "it [is] currently too hard to fire bad cops" from the perspective of the general public, but I'm not sure police officers, who the union protects, would agree - despite your framing. I think it's unreasonable to expect unions to protect every interest among its members.
The same is obviously true for your example regarding teachers...
>Obviously, yes, but can we blame police unions for the failures of those that they are negotiating against, or that implement arbitration?
This seems like a weird take, but maybe I don't understand. Are you saying that the other parties are equally at fault for failing to prevail in negotiation against the unions?
>I actually don't accept this premise of what is good from the perspective of police officers (or most police officers), i.e. are police officers generally more concerned with what you raised or more supportive of the job protections that enable it; and this framing was the original ask.
Most cops would believe it is too hard to fire other "bad cops" and simultaneously too easy to fire "good cops" like themselves.
I am not claiming that unions are a net detriment to police union workers, simply that there are tradeoffs.
>I think it's unreasonable to expect unions to protect every interest among its members.
By their very nature of representing all workers, some workers will benefit more than others, and some will see more detriments than others.
> This seems like a weird take, but maybe I don't understand. Are you saying that the other parties are equally at fault for failing to prevail in negotiation against the unions?
Well, first, we've not actually been discussing any specifics about arbitration. The most specific we've been is acknowledging that arbitration is a point of failure, and that police unions are involved in negotiating over the arbitration framework. Neither of those things points explicitly to police unions as a point of blame. For example, arbitration problems often stem from lack of evidence, lack of consistency in application, and lack of increased punishment for repeat problem officers; none of these problems are directly related to the contracts negotiated by police unions (obviously they are indirectly related). Blaming police unions, simply because they represent officers, which is their mandate, is an oversimplification.
Additionally, systems like arbitration, or the arbitration framework contract negotiation, is predicated on the idea that both interested parties represent their position adequately, in good faith, and without conflict of interests (among other things); this is not always the case, but is the side that is representing their position adequately and in good faith (i.e. police unions, making it harder to fire "good" officers) to blame? Another example, in other terms, many people are punished unnecessarily by judicial systems because of inadequate defense (i.e. ineffective assistance of counsel), but is the prosecutor always to blame?
It's not that other parties are necessarily at fault for failing in negotiation, but that assumes that those parties adequately represented their interests (in this case, one of those interests would be the public interest), which is certainly not a given.
> I am not claiming that unions are a net detriment to police union workers, simply that there are tradeoffs.
With this in mind, I guess I should've rephrased my initial question. I should've said "can you provide some insight into how police unions work poorly for police officers generally (i.e. their members)?" Obviously there are cases where police unions (and other unions) work poorly for individuals, but I meant where they work poorly for their members overall. This is why I think your reply fails to fit my intended framing and I was rejecting the premise from that perspective.
>Additionally, systems like arbitration, or the arbitration framework contract negotiation, is predicated on the idea that both interested parties represent their position adequately, in good faith, and without conflict of interests...
IT sounds like you are more familiar with the termination arbitration process, and I cede that there are likely processes that the non-union parties could implement to make the process more effective. I do wonder the degree to which these processes are also battlegrounds for conflict and negotiation. You bring up the interesting topic of equal footing adversarial systems, particularly around the adequacy of representation. The point I find interesting is defining what constitutes adequate representation, and the impact of the base rules of adversarial systems. System design can be uneven and determines the relative power of each party to impose costs, implications of loss, and 'skin in the game'. Such differences go beyond the competence of counsel, or even resources available.
A good example of system influence is negotiation between a prosecutor vs criminal defendant. For example, the law provides the prosecution huge systematic leverage in plea bargain negotiations. The defendant carries nearly all of the risk if negotiations fail, while the prosecution has relative risk and little at stake. I think there are analogs labor law, where there are a vast number of systemic factors involved in negotiations beyond union terms and the business cost to provide those terms (e.g. legal liability if an impasse is reached, restrictions on ability to source alternative labor, ect)
>With this in mind, I guess I should've rephrased my initial question. I should've said "can you provide some insight into how police unions work poorly for police officers generally (i.e. their members)?" Obviously there are cases where police unions (and other unions) work poorly for individuals, but I meant where they work poorly for their members overall. This is why I think your reply fails to fit my intended framing and was rejecting the premise from that perspective.
I think the simplest generally applicable failing is the retention of low performing or loose cannon officers. My understanding is that there are low performing individuals who are retained and make the job more difficult and less efficient for the rest of workers. There is a tradeoff between the ability of job security for all, and the ability to weed out such individuals that unions and their counterparties have been able to resolve. This does not preclude that the status quo may still present net benefit overall to general union members, or that the status quo is worse than the alternatives.
That said, I do think the vast majority of unions work well for most of their members. Living in California, I wholeheartedly wish that public union counterparties were more effective in negotiations, and more effective stewards of the public funds, and the work quality provided by the unions.
I'm not certain how this isn't self-evident on it's face.
The citation would be every civilization which has used slave labor to produce things. I assume they weren't/aren't using slave labor because there are vastly more efficient options but they just didn't feel like doing those.
Unions are sort of ok when there aren’t that many of them, because market forces demand some level of competitiveness, but what happens when union shops are the only or the majority option?
Again, just consider how well public sector unions work for society (ime: disastrously) and how that will work applied to the organizations that do the much of the work enabling modern society.
I guess another angle is: look at how dysfunctional politics have become, at how ~50% of Americans would gladly re-elect DJT post-January 6, and ask, do you want those people to hold the industrial economy hostage? Do we really think the average worker is able to produce better outcomes than management?
Maybe I’ve just been traumatized by the public sector unions. I don’t understand why people can’t make the connection between public sector unions, and the inevitable outcomes of private sector unions get too much traction.