> The anti-union messages in North American work culture were so effective it takes an incredible amount of abuse before a workforce actually seeks out a union
It's more complicated than that.
For starters, fewer industries need unions these days. Unions don't help most office-work and white-collar careers, where pay is on-average sufficient or high, and hours are standardized already (nobody in Accounting or HR is working 12 hour days on the routine).
Additionally, in some sectors, unions are a net-negative. Take software for example, where folks routinely make bananas money for regular work. In those environments, unions typically protect unproductive peers, and limit high-performer's maximum compensation.
Union does not always mean better...
As an aside, people do need to learn to say no to work. Just because you want to work on say, video games or VFX doesn't mean you should accept a job that compels you to work horrendous hours for little pay. Just say no and move on... the market forces will correct and adjust accordingly out of necessity. AI will not replace creative work anytime in the near future - these folks are needed but they accept the abuse and therefore there is no market force to correct.
I’m sorry but this is a perfect example of how anti-union messaging worked.
These are literally anti union talking points dressed up as some kind of “reasonable considerations.”
No
If you choose not to be a part of collective bargaining then you are actively ceding power to the board and your management.
You’re saying neither you nor your coworkers deserve equal say in how the organization treats you all.
None of what you say actually happens in the real world. Find me a court case or any actual third party judgement, not hearsay, that has found a Union to be shielding one of these “unproductive peers” from doing work or otherwise somehow breaking contract.
It's amazing how you can call something propaganda, while offering nothing but propaganda yourself.
Few of us actually need a union to advocate for us. We're perfectly capable of securing higher pay, and benefits through performance or threat of leaving for greener pastures.
That's not propaganda. That's worker's rights... which pro-union people are supposedly in favor of.
These days, Unions protect under-performing staff and enrich the Union leadership - all while negotiating a token raise once in a while. You can see it with your own eyes - just go work somewhere that has a union for at least one group of it's employees.
> You can see it with your own eyes - just go work somewhere that has a union for at least one group of it's employees.
I gladly had ~500 AFGE employees under me as CTO two jobs ago. I worked regularly with the Union representatives and we had multiple high stakes situations that I was glad to have them there for (I was not covered by the Union because I was too high rank).
What has been your first hand experience with unions such that you can make such claims?
I suggest you be more open to those who may be less capable, if you are so capable as to be in such high demand. Think about others.
> The goal of a union is the antithesis to this question. They enforce a minimum standard of pay and work conditions.
So the answer is that person doesn't get hired...
That person never gets the chance to grow into the job, because the union wouldn't approve it. Fun...
The idea that workers are like cattle... and that each one is the same and deserves exactly the same compensation is absurd, is demonstrably untrue, and is de-humanizing. Funny, because unions are supposed to be pro-worker, no?
> These are anti union talking points
The pro-union folks need better come-backs than "anti union talking points" or "propaganda". It's a classical technique - assert your opponent is spewing propaganda while you promote your own propaganda as "truth" in it's place.
Unfortunately we've had decades to judge unions - and people are well aware of their issues. There's plenty of reasons unions are not as pervasive today as they once were.
> and you and I both know that is not what unions do.
We do? That's news to me.
It's rather interesting seeing people support unions but won't admit any of the downsides.
It's almost like the pro-union folks have a theoretical idea of how a union should work, but that's in stark contrast with how they do work.
> I’m not going to respond after this
Almost like saying you have no real argument to offer so we'll just take our ball and go home.
Anyone who says anything negative about unions is clearly a Anti-Union shil spreading false propaganda. It's a tired tale...
Reducing people's opinions and arguments to "propaganda" or "talking points" attacks the individual instead of the argument, and attempts to misdirect through means of actual propaganda. Not one time have you offered an actual rebuttal... Which is pretty damning on its own.
You sound like a European trying to argue unions with an American. (I'm pretty sure the person you're arguing with is American.) The two of you basically live in two different universes as far as unions are concerned.
> We're perfectly capable of securing higher pay, and benefits through performance or threat of leaving for greener pastures.
Just because someone is brilliant with computers or electronics or any other tech job does not mean automatically that they're capable of securing the best working conditions, pay and benefits that they could have. Labor negotiation is a skill in itself.
We can also nit-pick regarding how great these entitlements are, especially when it comes to things like: vacation, job security, empowerment, how much you're at the mercy of someone that ruin your life and make it miserable.
These are areas unions can help with. "Good" benefits in the US can be pretty bad. I can take like 2x week long vacations. The rest gets used for odd days (which is nice). This is the "super deluxe" benefit I should be over the moon for?
I learned first hand in my last job that getting on the bad side of the wrong person can be miserable and career altering; guess you could argue that a union just adds one more of these people, but it also adds an advocate. They may defend "anyone", but that also includes people that have been marginalized and may be underrated, due to being unpopular.
You can be fired for any reason. Your employer might be hesitate to put you on the firing line for political, and legal reasons, but that's not a guarantee anything.
Labor unions have good social effects and bad social effects just like literally every other organization of people. Sometimes the good outweighs the bad, and sometimes the reverse.
> How about just not working for abusive workplaces?
You tell me, why do people work for abusive workplaces, sometimes despite sexual harrasment? Have they literally never thought of quitting, they are that dim?
So no one should make art, since it's exploited. Versus just unionizing, or investing in your suppliers a bit?
Minimum wage and weekends only exist because we rejected the "if you don't like it, work somewhere else" mentality... oh yeah, and because of unions, too.
> So no one should make art, since it's exploited.
That's a bit extreme. Nobody should agree to abusive working conditions - there is a difference.
And no, unions did not grant us minimum wage or weekends. There was a strong labor movement happening regardless of unions at the time.
Minimum wage - you probably don't want to use that as some sort of argument crutch anyway, because it's original intended purpose will not support your position.
People who support unions seem to believe unions are the only way to gain better employment opportunities or fix conditions they believe are wrong. Which is where the pro-union people lose the general population...
Unions have been mal-actors for decades. People see what they do... including doom an entire generation of children recently. People have largely rejected unions in modern times - for very good reasons.
Today's unions exist to serve the union. It's pretty sick how they turned out... but what do you expect from any sufficiently large and long-lived bureaucracy.
Ah, so you don't understand how abuse works. You should probably think about it, and maybe read up on the subject before talking about it?
People in abusive relationships often perceive that there's no other option. They think they will be lost without the relationship, or that they will find no one better.
People stick around for some really good reasons. Some people struggle to face uncertainty. Others lack the will to leave. Often, there was something that attracted them in the first place: love for the person, pride for ones job, ect.
What's crazy is you'll see examples where none of this seems to be present... it's not necessary. People with great support systems fall for people/jobs, that never treated them well, and are even flat out disgusting and stupid. (literally or metaphorically, eg. a job can be "disgusting" because of harassment)
We've all seen it. It's like "what do you see here"... but that's the thing about abuse. It's exactly what you're criticizing. Abusers see that the person can't and so will never leave the relationships, then they step in to do the abuse. So when the partner gets thrown down a flight of stairs and has her dog injured, he knows that she's gonna stay anyway. They've found a hack to exploit.
So your questions are nonsensical. It's not their fault some shady person figured out how to hurt them.
PS "Fan theory": I think there's probably some instinct in us to stay in bad relationships. First and foremost, any team is better than none.
If you think throughout history, lots of relationships have been exploitative. Perhaps it's useful not to be the one that leaves and tries to make their own way. You'll just get picked off or rounded up.
Very dark, especially considering how it effects women, who have had to put up with a lot to survive. It shouldn't be such a shock that so many women wind up in abusive relationships :(
I mean I personally know three family friends in unions who are incompetent and protected by union rules so they will never be fired. (One in immigration, one a court officer, one a public school teacher).
People in software are not making "bananas money," they are capturing just a tiny amount of the wealth that they are creating.
If you think a negotiation between a single individual vs. a company of tens of thousands (or, likely, a cartel of companies of millions of combined employees a la https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...) is anywhere close to an even fight, you're naive.
I would posit the SAG doesn't actually do much for your Brad Pitt's and Angelina Jolie's.
Those top-tier actors represent the SAG more than they are protected or benefited by the SAG.
Your top tier actors literally fill seats - so like Sports Stars they are compensated by their star power more than anything else. Brad Pitt deciding to accept or decline a role can earn or lose a movie millions.
Meanwhile, your typical working union compels high school kids to pay dues for what exactly? Minimum wage, and a lunch break?
A union in SFX will result in gatekeeping a ton of people out of the industry. It will raise wages for a select few that were blessed by the union and allowed to work in the industry, and everyone else will have to find alternate industries to work in. Doesn't sound like a net-win for everyone...
With SFX in particular, the issue is there's a zillion people willing to replace you and work for less with even more demanding hours. I don't know how you fix that industry-wide, but I'm betting a union's solution isn't as rosy as people think.
As an aside - where was the SAG during all these Weinstein and Polanski situations? These went on decades and nobody was protected from being abused by powerful gatekeepers. What does SAG even do?
Somehow I feel like asking a union to stop an employer’s criminal behavior is outside the scope of a union. Maybe you’re thinking about law enforcement?
A union represents the employee, and if that employee is prevented from securing a position unfairly, or that employee is abused while in that position, it's entirely on the union to represent that employee and demand a resolution.
This entire discussion revolves around a fictitious VFX union resolving abuses within the industry... so why would SAG receive a pass?
The SAG pretended like none of this was happening. We probably only know about the tip of the abusive-iceberg countless actresses endured.
It’s not just actresses. A friend of mine worked for entertainment news and was “propositioned” by Harvey Weinstein. As far as I know it was an open secret in the business.
A union can’t just take action by outing the women who could have complained. And largely the affected women decided that they would rather make money than be disbelieved by media and courts on a rape allegation. Let’s say the union has your back: then what? SAG can’t guarantee you won’t be silently blacklisted as a troublemaker by individual directors making hiring decisions. They can’t guarantee you’ll be taken seriously by the police and courts. #MeToo was a watershed moment, and it’s hard to see how a union could have made the social structural stars align in our entire culture any earlier than it actually happened.
See also, the NBA. The average person in tech is no where near as talented at their job, hard-working, or disciplined as the average NBA player, yet the latter has a union while the former do not.
> nobody in Accounting or HR is working 12 hour days on the routine
Do you know anybody in Accounting? Quarter end closing is a lot of work that can't be done until after the end of the quarter and must be done within a small amount of time. Public accountants suddently get an awful lot of work come the ides of March when everyone realizes their taxes are due in a month. And another bunch when the extension filers all come back when the real due date hits.
Who's to say VFX would be a creative union? Majority of the work your average VFX person does is cookie-cutter stuff. It's more similar to being a cog in a SaaS shop than being an actual artist.
>Creative unions establish minimum pay and working conditions but not maximum or promotion.
Is the type of union that you're getting up for debate when people are voting for unions? My impression is that "voting for a union" just sets up the organization, but you'd need to wait for it to be established and for the representatives to be voted in to know how it turns out. Absent a concrete plan that's being voted for, "voting for a union" could easily turn out to be a brexit type of situation, where people have different ideas on what a "union" (or brexit) is, but no single idea actually has majority support, so most people end up not liking the outcome.
> Just because you want to work on say, video games or VFX doesn't mean you should accept a job that compels you to work horrendous hours for little pay. Just say no and move on... the market forces will correct and adjust accordingly out of necessity.
Yeah, they'll go offshore instead while you try to navigate an intentionally kafkaesque maze of red tape to apply for fucking food stamps.
> try to navigate an intentionally kafkaesque maze of red tape to apply for fucking food stamps
This is a bizarre, and unrealistic take.
Realities are, so long as there's a zillion capable people willing to step in and replace you with a moment's notice, then your job will have downward pressure on compensation.
However, just because you can't get a good paying job in VFX doesn't mean you're now doomed to food stamps. There's no reality where that makes any sense...
Is it? Ever tried to file for unemployment? No matter the country, it will always be a nightmare of bureaucracy, intentionally designed to make it as difficult as possible to "nudge" people to rather accept shitty work conditions than to try to get money from the government.
The hoops and hurdles that have been placed in front of getting unemployment insurance money are, hands down, the biggest enabler of workplace exploitation.
> However, just because you can't get a good paying job in VFX doesn't mean you're now doomed to food stamps.
Either you accept a shit pay job, or you move towards a different career, or you file for unemployment. (Or you're lucky and have a partner or family that can support you)
The government doesn't have money to give. It's worker's money. Let that point sink in...
Nobody is owed money from the government. That mentality is wild and ridiculous.
> Ever tried to file for unemployment? No matter the country, it will always be a nightmare of bureaucracy,
No it's not. It's literally an online form and a follow-up phone call. It couldn't be easier actually, and it's a system filled with abuse. People live on it for months to years without seeking actual employment - stealing money away from hard working individuals.
> Either you accept a shit pay job, or you move towards a different career, or you file for unemployment.
Your outlook on work life is insanely bizarre and not grounded in any reality. You should check your assumptions, because they are absurdly false.
> Nobody is owed money from the government. That mentality is wild and ridiculous.
Or it's European. We expect that our governments take care of all our citizens, no matter their ability to work.
> No it's not. It's literally an online form and a follow-up phone call.
Supplying a truckload of documents, detailed financial statements and whatnot is definitely a bunch of work, particularly if the affected person has lost their home and/or possessions (e.g. homeless people), or can't read. Like half the US is barely literate enough to pass 6th grade reading proficiency. On top of that, processing of claims can take weeks to months because of understaffing. All of that was a massive issue during the COVID pandemic, across all Western countries but I also remember a lot of HN discussions at the time.
> Your outlook on work life is insanely bizarre and not grounded in any reality. You should check your assumptions, because they are absurdly false.
As said, I'm European. That y'all don't even seem to know how good a life Europe provides is a continuous source of disappointments.
Lol, so fuck you, I've got mine basically. Just because the pay is decent doesn't mean they can't exploit you. When you talk about "protecting unproductive peers" are you sure they aren't protecting minorities, people with disabilities, or who may be marginalized from the group, and not given a fair chance?
It's interesting that you think we should take it for granted that "maximizing high performer's pay" is a good idea. You seem to be convinced you're one of those. Maybe you're just friends with the boss.
I have some beef with unions, but there's plenty of reasons to have them in the office.
I figure unions can be very helpful in addressing actual contemporary worker concerns, like setting ethical code of conduct and norms when it comes to ethics surrounding for example treatment of personal data of users.
> For starters, fewer industries need unions these days. Unions don't help most office-work and white-collar careers, where pay is on-average sufficient or high, and hours are standardized already (nobody in Accounting or HR is working 12 hour days on the routine).
I routinely hear about people doing super long hours in loads of industries. Sit-down jobs. Hell, loads of people in IT get put through the wringer.
> Additionally, in some sectors, unions are a net-negative. Take software for example, where folks routinely make bananas money for regular work. In those environments, unions typically protect unproductive peers, and limit high-performer's maximum compensation.
Would you rather make the obscene amount of money or work with a bunch of people who aren't permanently stressed out from internal rat races? How many stories about people getting chewed up at places like Amazon do we need to hear about?
> As an aside, people do need to learn to say no to work. Just because you want to work on say, video games or VFX doesn't mean you should accept a job that compels you to work horrendous hours for little pay. Just say no and move on... the market forces will correct and adjust accordingly out of necessity.
Unions and labor action can make all of this happen on a way smoother time scale, and without squeezing half a generation of people dry. Why sit around and wait for a bunch of companies to collapse, people to go jobless, when you could instead coordinate efforts, figure out what people want, and move towards that in a coordinated way?
There's nuance, but employers negotiate as a bloc (in that even a single company has its own overall policies), having employees do the same just feels like common sense.
A bit of an aside: I do think it's important to look at what actual union agreements look like. Places like Netflix got better deals when they were smaller. Unions often end up with tiered payments anyways. Agreements get made over multi-year periods offering a good amount of stability. The idea that a union forces everyone to get paid the same and for a strike to be inevitable the instant the kind bars disappear from the break room is prevelant, but the reality is much more nuanced (partly because people usually just want to do work and get paid and do what they want to do).
> Would you rather make the obscene amount of money or work with a bunch of people who aren't permanently stressed out from internal rat races?
You offer this like they're mutually exclusive. They're not - and that point needs to be understood by pro-union people.
Just because a place is non-union does not mean the staff are automatically abused.
Plenty of places offer lucrative compensation and sane work hours.
> How many stories about people getting chewed up at places like Amazon do we need to hear about?
Despite the narrative, there's still thousands of engineers happily working for Amazon. Has it ever occurred to the pro-union folks that maybe some people don't share that "experience"? Or perhaps that "experience" was being touted by disgruntled, unproductive employees that found Amazon difficult to coast at...?
> There's nuance, but employers negotiate as a bloc (in that even a single company has its own overall policies
This isn't true for every company of course - and eve for companies where it is true, there's often exceptions that can be carved out for desirable people or high performers.
> Unions and labor action can make all of this happen on a way smoother time scale
Or people can just stop accepting crappy jobs? Unions once-upon-a-time fought for a standardized 8 hour workday. Today, if unions disappeared tomorrow, would anyone agree to work standard 14 hour days again? I think not...
The problem with VFX and that sub-industry in particular is the glut of people willing to do the work for next to nothing and endure absurd hours just for the opportunity of working on some project.
So unions will come in, demand absurd pay, and gatekeep tons of people out of the industry. A select blessed few will be allowed to work, and the rest will have to find a different industry anyway... so what's the difference?
It's more complicated than that.
For starters, fewer industries need unions these days. Unions don't help most office-work and white-collar careers, where pay is on-average sufficient or high, and hours are standardized already (nobody in Accounting or HR is working 12 hour days on the routine).
Additionally, in some sectors, unions are a net-negative. Take software for example, where folks routinely make bananas money for regular work. In those environments, unions typically protect unproductive peers, and limit high-performer's maximum compensation.
Union does not always mean better...
As an aside, people do need to learn to say no to work. Just because you want to work on say, video games or VFX doesn't mean you should accept a job that compels you to work horrendous hours for little pay. Just say no and move on... the market forces will correct and adjust accordingly out of necessity. AI will not replace creative work anytime in the near future - these folks are needed but they accept the abuse and therefore there is no market force to correct.