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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32045 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Anyone have any examples of an employee union that improves business for both employees and employer?

The most salient feature of unions that I know about is that they prevent the employer from firing bad employees, or promoting good employees over ones with seniority. This makes sense to me because unions get their power/support from employees that need the union more than the employer needs them i.e. bad ones. A prototypical example of the leftist high-low alliance.

But there's no reason it has to be this way. It's technically possible for a union to say "fire bad employees, promote some faster than others, but pay us more". Is there any examples of this sort of thing working well?

I don't have an example of a union doing that, but there are examples of what unions should be doing good things.

Unions only exist because there are laws that force employers to negotiate with them. Absent those laws, a coalition of workers looks a lot more like a temp agency or a contracting shop. I have had good experiences working for such agencies: they find jobs, they test your skills once and then vouch for you with employers so you don't have to re-interview all the time, they negotiate with the employer on your behalf, etc. The difference is that the employer is not forced to hire only employees from that agency, so the agency is kept honest. There are obviously benefits to the employer to such an arrangement because it's totally voluntary and they still choose it over direct hiring.

Unions only exist because there are laws that force employers to negotiate with them.

100% true, just like DEI only exists because of the civil rights act.

Anyone have any examples of an employee union that improves business for both employees and employer?

This is like asking for examples of a defence lawyer making things better for the state prosecutor (barring mistakes or incompetence). That isn't their job. The relationship is adversarial in that getting better conditions (pay, breaks etc.) for employees will generally cost X and that X is money the company could have spent elsewhere or taken as profit.

The reason unions protect bad employees is the same reason that defence lawyers defend the guilty as well as the innocent. Because the companies incentives do not necessarily align with the employees and therefore a bad employee from the companies perspective is not an objective measure. In an employer friendly location like the US, it might make sense for companies to fire employees for very little as long as the labor supply is good, but socially that may not be desirable. Also its tricky to get people to join unions if you have a reputation for throwing them under the bus when they get in trouble.

The question you should be asking is in totality taking into account employees, companies and society in general are unions an improvement or not? And that is a much trickier question to answer. It's quite possible a union could be a net good but be bad for the company itself.

Having said that unions definitely can and do soft shoe things when they are dealing with poor employees. They just can't advertise that for the above reasons. But if you deal with them you can tell. Do they go for the throat and be aggressive or do they just show up at the meeting make some notes, pat the employee on the shoulder and advise them to take the written warning etc. I've fired people while dealing with public sector and private sector unions and they do have ways of dialing back support for employees they think themselves are a problem. Which is not to say they do that all the time, but they can.

This is like asking for examples of a defence lawyer making things better for the state prosecutor

Not necessarily. This is how Wagner Act unions in the U.S. work, but I'm given to understand that there are more cooperative labor organization models out there that integrate labor into the entire decision-making framework of the company.

Sure, workers coops and the like can have different dynamics. But in the standard US model that is not on the cards.

Because the companies incentives do not necessarily align with the employees

Disagree. Unless the mission is dumb, businesses fail or succeed with their employees. If the business succeeds it grows, which ends up benefitting most employees.

The public sector union would be the closest to what you've described because they as an organization can fail without (immediate) consequence. But the actions of the union are most of the reason they suck.

Under a framework that assumes companies are rational, profit-maximizing entities , the tendency of companies to resist unionization suggest this is not true. Part of the problem with unions I think is the inflexibility in the hiring and firing process, not the benefits.

But there is a huge gap between failing and being perfect. And not all companies even want to grow. Companies are not perfectly efficient or even close to it in my experience. But it is quite possible to have a business model which relies on exploiting workers in order to eke out more profit. You can also have a business which is a cooperative with all employees all being owners. But most companies are somewhere between these extremes. If you can keep replacing your employees then you can be successful even while treating your employees badly.

How does a business growing benefit its employees, assuming they don't own stock in it?

Seems like growth, contraction, and staying exactly the same are the only logical options, and staying exactly the same isn't a realistic option for any significant time period.

The business has to hire more people, raising the seniority and salary of most existing employees.

I have worked in at many companies in many trades, and this has never happened once ever to me or to anyone I know or anyone they know.

It is just kindof a silly thing to believe?

Like, have you ever worked retail, or construction, or tech?

Like, have you ever worked retail, or construction, or tech?

I've worked in retail and tech, and know people in construction. Generally folks want their business/location/franchise to grow because it comes with pay boosts, and opportunities for advancement. Sounds like you don't care about climbing the org ladder, but for people who do growth is crucial.

It depends on the size of the organization already. Obviously if your 20-person firm goes up to 80-person, that's good. But if you work for an international giant with a six figure workforce, it hardly matters if new locations are being established when they're on the other side of the planet.

Unless it doesn’t, and puts more work on said existing employees without increased compensation. Sure, they can go somewhere else...at which point it’s their replacement who might see benefits.

First of all, unions don't prevent employers from firing bad employees or making promotion decisions based on seniority; rather, contracts do that, and only some contracts do so. Moreover, the general rule is the US is that workers can be fired at any time without cause -- i.e., at the whim of the employer. Union contracts, in contrast, permit firing only for cause. What constitutes "cause" varies, but still, here is one benefit: Those contracts not only make it more difficult to fire bad employees; they also makes it more difficult to fire a good employee who happens to get on the wrong side of a bad supervisor, or who doesn't "get with the program," even when the program is a poor one.

Let me explain in more detail.

First, it is well established that managers of companies do not always act in the best interests of the companies themselves. For that reason, giving employees the power to push back against managers can often be in the best interests of the company. See, eg, Dilbert.

Second, let's analogize with tenure in K-12 schools (which, contrary to popular belief, means only that teachers can be fired only with cause, as opposed to, as CA courts put it re teachers before they get tenure, being fired "for any reason, or for no reason.") When I taught high school, I had tenure, and hence I (and other teachers) were able to push back on all sorts of proposals by administrators which were unlikely to inure to the benefit of students (newsflash: teachers know more about their students than administrators do). Sometimes that was about budgeting -- federal law requires decisions about spending money to be made by a committee composed of administrators, teachers, and parents. Teacher representation would be pointless if teachers on the committee have to fear getting on the wrong side of the principal). Sometimes it was about the administration pushing teachers to teach how to game multiple choice tests rather than teaching real curriculum. The list goes on and on.

Now, this is not to say that teachers always act in the best interests of their students, nor that administrators never do. Ditto re the analogous positions in private companies. Nevertheless, a system in which those in supervisory roles have unfettered power is unlikely to yield anything close to optimal results.

Sometimes it was about the administration pushing teachers to teach how to game multiple choice tests rather than teaching real curriculum.

What is the difference, in your opinion, between teaching "how to game multiple choice tests" and "test-taking skills?"

The former is a pejorative term for the latter. Neither is as valuable as teaching the actual curriculum, and neither, btw,is part of any state-adopted learning standards that I have ever heard of.

First, it is well established that managers of companies do not always act in the best interests of the companies themselves.

Very true. For example, managers are well known to keep workers who should be fired - either to maintain their "empire" or just because it's socially uncomfortable to fire people they've formed relationships with.

https://s3.amazonaws.com/real-dev.stlouisfed.org/wp/2005/2005-040.pdf https://www.nber.org/papers/w3556 https://pure.eur.nl/en/publications/cultural-influences-on-employee-termination-decisions-firing-the-

Similarly, managers - as employees themselves - are incentivized to minimize accountability and maximize their own compensation.

How do unions counteract this, in either the general case or even in specific cases like education?

were able to push back on all sorts of proposals by administrators which we disliked and rationalized as being unlikely to inure to the benefit of students (newsflash: teachers know more about their students than administrators do).

Fixed that for you. Sure is convenient that teaching methods teachers find boring (phonics, direct instruction) are bad for students and all the studies showing otherwise are wrong.

“For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,” recalls Weaver. “And we hated it.”

The teachers felt like curriculum robots—and pushed back. “This seems dehumanizing, this is colonizing, this is the man telling us what to do,” says Weaver, describing their response to the approach. “So we fought tooth and nail as a teacher group to throw that out.” It was replaced in 2015 by a curriculum that emphasized rich literary experiences.

https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers/

Fixed that for you. Sure is convenient that teaching methods teachers find boring (phonics, direct instruction) are bad for students and all the studies showing otherwise are wrong

  1. As it happens, I liked the administrators in question. THAT"S THE POINT: The nature of any organization is that agents, such as school administrators, often are incentivized to act in a manner not conducive to the mission of the organization, even if they are perfectly reasonable, ethical persons.

  2. Also as it happens, I support the teaching of phonics. But, that is irrelevant to my comments, because, as I noted, I taught high school, not elementary school. I am really not sure why you feel a need to personalize this issue.

  3. I note also that you ignored the specific examples I gave, such as pressure to teach how to game standardized tests, and pressure to rubber stamp principals' funding priorities.

  4. Note also that I EXPLICITY said: " this is not to say that teachers always act in the best interests of their students, nor that administrators never do." Why you think that citing evidence that that is true is somehow a "gotcha" is beyond me.

As it happens, I liked the administrators in question. THAT"S THE POINT: The nature of any organization is that agents, such as school administrators, often are incentivized to act in a manner not conducive to the mission of the organization,

Here's the most I can make out of your reasoning:

  1. Agents don't necessarily act in the best interest of the principal.

  2. ...

  3. A second set of agents will somehow fix or improve things.

Can you fill in (2)? The closest you come is "teachers know more about their students than administrators do", but you now seem to be backing away from this claim.

If you're not claiming the second set of agents is somehow better aligned with principals, what are you claiming? Or maybe you aren't claiming (3) at all?

such as pressure to teach how to game standardized tests, and pressure to rubber stamp principals' funding priorities.

Ok. I'll bite.

Teaching the mechanics of testing along with techniques for ballparking and figuring out certain answers are definitely wrong is not an unreasonable demand. I know there's a claim that "teaching to the test" somehow involves techniques that don't convey the material, but in the rare occasions someone has shown me what it actually involves it's mostly teaching the actual curriculum instead of whatever the teacher feels like.

If you want to argue this claim of mine, a great way to do so would be to a real high stakes standardized test from CA or NY and explain the mechanics of getting students to do well on this test without also learning the material well. A bad way would be saying the words "teaching to the test" or "game the test" with no specifics.

Teachers have no demonstrated ability to be administrators or competent stewards of funds, so I don't know why I should care what they think about funding priorities.

A second set of agents will somehow fix or improve things.

A principal might have more space for flourishing when existing in a conflict zone between two different agents. The principal can play the two agents against each other as opposed to being dominated by a single overpowering entity. That's true even if neither set of agents is particularly aligned with the principal.

On the other hand, the principal in question might be Poland, literally or figuratively.

In the case of employees facing unions vs employers, it's a bit of column A, a bit of column B. Both employers and unions have some level of alignment with the employee: the employer wants a productive worker (albeit at minimum cost) and has to maintain some level of happiness to avoid them switching to a competitor, and the union wants to keep its represented workers happy for fear of decert (albeit with minimal regard for the worker's career growth or more generally the long term growth of the company). This rivalry lets workers play one agent against the other, sometimes siding with the union at the expense of the employer (collective bargaining) and sometimes siding with the employer at the expense of the union (scabbing; ignoring work rules). At their best, unions push for utility increasing policies for workers at minimal cost to the worker; at their worst, they take their dues and do pretty much nothing except funnel it toward bureaucrats' salaries and political pet causes. Most of the time it's somewhere in between in the private sector, in large part depending on how easy it is to unionize (the easier, the more unions manage to extract for the worker).

Note that this is entirely speaking from the perspective of the individual worker, not society writ large.

In the teachers union example, the principal is students. Agent 1 and 2 are school administrators and teachers unions, respectively.

In the case of private sector employment, the principals are shareholders and customers, whereas agent 1 and 2 are managerial employees and ICs (possibly with the latter represented by a union).

I guess you're thinking that students can learn to read via phonics by somehow playing teachers unions against school administrators (or having their parents do so)?

Was speaking abstractly.

As far as public education goes, the issue is that there really aren't competing agents. Where they're most powerful, public sector unions don't exercise their power through competing with the employer for worker allegiance but through influencing the political process to remove their opposing agent as well as the market discipline that forces trade offs to be made. The result of that is a world where there's no accountability; if students are failing, then the issue is that the schools need more funds, which must be appropriately distributed through administrators/teachers/the union, who then use the funds to repeat the process. All the agents in public education are best thought of as a collective symbiote that has a parasitic relationship with the rest of society.

Students aren't agents here at all. Their parents might be agents, but only through the ability to vote or remove their kids from schools (which reduces funding). The political process has the latter avenue already in its sights.

I discussed #2 at some length.

Yes, teaching how to game the test is not utterly devoid of value. But that is a red herring. The issue is whether teaching that, in lieu of teaching substantive material, is in the best interests of students. It certainly is in the best interests of administrators, which is why it was pushed. And it is why,as I discussed re #2, it was valuable to students that rules making it hard to fire me were a good thing,as they allowed me to continue to teach substantive material.

Btw, I am not talking about "teaching to test," which refers to teaching only the material that will be on the test. I am talking about teaching how to game the test.

The issue is whether teaching that, in lieu of teaching substantive material, is in the best interests of students. It certainly is in the best interests of administrators, which is why it was pushed. And it is why,as I discussed re #2, it was valuable to students that rules making it hard to fire me were a good thing,as they allowed me to continue to teach substantive material.

This is all kind of silly. First, it's remarkable to hang your hat on "best interest of the students" in the immediate wake of the teacher's unions utterly fucking their students for their own benefit over covid. Second, if this problem of "teachers not being allowed to teach substantiative material" is a general structural problem, then that's a damning indictment of the entire public school system, and we should be moving to the "burn it all down" part of the discussion, which would still involve abolishing the existing union as a part of the corrupt status quo.

I am talking about teaching how to game the test.

Curious as to what this means. It takes like 5 minutes to explain, e.g., the logic of when to guess on the SATs.

First, it's remarkable to hang your hat on "best interest of the students" in the immediate wake of the teacher's unions utterly fucking their students for their own benefit over covid.

As I explicitly said in my initial post, "Now, this is not to say that teachers always act in the best interests of their students, nor that administrators never do"

Second, if this problem of "teachers not being allowed to teach substantitive material" is a general structural problem, then that's a damning indictment of the entire public school system,

I don't know why you infer that it is a general structural problem. It was simply a single example of how principal-agent problems can sometimes crop up. And, btw, I guarantee you that it is not a problem unique to public schools. Private school administrators if anything have an even greater incentive to generate high test scores, since they need to sell their school to prospective parents.

It takes like 5 minutes to explain, e.g., the logic of when to guess on the SATs

IF that is true, then that just strengthens my point, because we were asked to spend several days on it.

I discussed #2 at some length.

No, you mentioned things teachers unions do. You did not explain how they improve decision making or benefit students in aggregate. If you're merely claiming that in at least one case they do (but might be negative value in aggregate), I don't disagree with that claim.

Yes, teaching how to game the test is not utterly devoid of value. But that is a red herring. The issue is whether teaching that, in lieu of teaching substantive material

If what you describe actually exists and takes a non-trivial amount of time, that would be bad. Can you please explain how to actually do this for a real standardized test in one of the 10 largest US states which was given in the last 10 years? I claim that it's not possible, except for some very trivial stuff that doesn't take much time such as "if you can rule out 2 choices out of 4, select one of the remainder at random."

I've had people tell me a few theories about how this might happen when I press the issue, but on the rare occasion they don't refuse to be specific, googling actual standardized tests suggests that their theories are impossible. Would you care to provide mechanics, as well as a link to the specific standardized test on which you think it works?

We were asked to spend about a week on that exact sort of stuff. I don't have all the details on what was in the proposed curriculum because I threw it away. And I never claimed that it worked.

Here is another example. CA has history content standards, and history analysis standards, including:

Students distinguish valid arguments from fallacious arguments in historical interpretations.

Students identify bias and prejudice in historical interpretations.

Students evaluate major debates among historians concerning alternative interpretations of the past, including an analysis of authors' use of evidence and the distinctions between sound generalizations and misleading oversimplifications.

Students construct and test hypotheses; collect, evaluate, and employ information from multiple primary and secondary sources; and apply it in oral and written presentations.

The analysis standards are not tested on state tests, or at least they were not when I was teaching. Principals, whose jobs depend on how students perform on state tests, have an incentive to push teachers to ignore the thinking standards and focus on the content standards, esp memorization etc (it is impossible to do both, given the size of the standards and the time needed to teach analysis skills). It is in the interests of students that a teacher need not fear being fired for focusing instead on the analysis standards.

I think both are definitely possible if you are teaching gifted kids who could ace the standards without even trying. And the analysis standards are impossible to teach to below average kids anyway. So, why even bother trying?

The only real issue is trying to teach to a mixed proficiency group or teaching mildly above average children who could maybe learn a bit of the analysis standards at the cost of their test scores.

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Principals, whose jobs depend on how students perform on state tests, have an incentive...[to do things that]...I never claimed...worked.

I'm pretty confused here. Principals push you to do things that don't improve performance on tests because...they are incentivized to improve performance on tests?

On the flip side:

I don't have all the details on what was in the proposed curriculum because I threw it away.

we also have teachers refusing to teach the curriculum they are assigned.

It is in the interests of students that a teacher need not fear being fired for focusing instead on the analysis standards.

At least it is if you assume some random teacher knows better about what students should learn than the semi-democratically chosen school officials who created the curriculum and decided what was important enough to be on the tests.

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a system in which those in supervisory roles have unfettered power is unlikely to yield anything close to optimal results

Disagree, for counterexamples see every military and small business ever

Well, re small businesses, where is your evidence that small businesses are particularly effective? Anyhow, truly small businesses don't have principal-agent problem that I mentioned, so they are irrelevant to my argument.

As for every military, again, where is your evidence that militaries are particularly effective at what they do? Or that militaries which give have those types of power structures are more successful than those which don't? Because all the evidence I have ever seen implies the opposite. See eg this US Army manual on leadership, which repeatedly emphasizes that effective leaders need to exercise humility and to encourage candid input from subordinates.

Historic kings needed to consider and encourage candid input from their advisors too! That didn't mean they didn't have 'absolute power'.

Hierarchical organization does not exclude using feedback from subordinates or delegating decisions.

The most efficient organizations are small businesses on their way to becoming large businesses. Founders of unicorns always talk wistfully about how awesome the company was before it got too big. The least efficient organizations are the ones that have that reputation, e.g. the Toronto Transit Commission.

The common feature of organizations that suck is that they dilute accountability, both for success and failure. Within a hierarchical organization, this is not the case. Here's another example: sports teams. The best players have the most authority, and the coach has ultimate authority. It works, because if something else worked better, everyone would do that instead.

The most efficient organizations are small businesses on their way to becoming large businesses.

Are they? Correct or not, "small businesses growing into large businesses" is a subset of small businesses, and a fairly small one at that.

The common feature of organizations that suck is that they dilute accountability, both for success and failure. Within a hierarchical organization, this is not the case.

Again, is this true? A lot of small businesses (where all the responsibility is on the owner-manager) suck quite badly despite concentrating accountability. Moreover, hierarchical organizations are great at diluting responsibility. This is true in both the public and private sector, though it is especially apparent the public sector. You can have a massive fuckup where everyone involved can - sincerely - say "I was just following instructions/official guidelines".

Subset of small businesses, that includes all large businesses.

The ones that suck do because their principal sucks. This does not say anything about the quality of the organizational structure.

hierarchical organizations are great at diluting responsibility...especially apparent the public sector.

I disagree. The public sector is the counterexample of hierarchy. If a superior can't fire his subordinates, it is not a hierarchical organization.

I disagree. The public sector is the counterexample of hierarchy. If a superior can't fire his subordinates, it is not a hierarchical organization.

I worked in the public sector for most of my career and I fired a good number of people. Again you are using far too wide a brush. The public sector of the whole world is far too broad a category for you to be making these statements which are then trivially disproved.

A large business is by definition not a small business.

The ones that suck do because their principal sucks. This does not say anything about the quality of the organizational structure.

What does this mean?

The public sector is the counterexample of hierarchy. If a superior can't fire his subordinates, it is not a hierarchical organization.

You're going to lay out what you mean by 'hierarchical' then, because it clearly has some disjunction from the common usage. In particular, the above would exclude militaries, which you previously praised.

Disobeying orders in the military is called insubordination. The penalty ranges from death (historically, maybe still in some places) to a court-martial. This is functionally the same as firing.

In America, sports teams are vanity projects ultimately run by billionaires who want a boost in name recognition. Their teams are exempted from anti-trust and artificially scarce, so the owners feel relatively secure they can flip their team if they run into financial problems, elsewhere, or pass it on to their children where it will retain some value. And, if those owners are bad at hiring general mangers, it’s not too much of a problem. They just need to be liked, or at least not disliked, by the other owners in their league. (Think Donald Sterling, who all the other NBA owners hated, versus Robert Sarver who just got a one year suspension and a fine, for pretty much the same offense. Not that Sarver is everyone’s favorite.)

The Sacramento Kings, New York Jets and Buffalo Sabres are all sitting on 10+ year playoff droughts in leagues with a salary cap. They and their owners will not be removed if things don’t improve.

Also, bad GMs love churning through multiple head coaches before ownership stops letting them pass the buck.

Sports teams in America are franchises of multibillion-dollar corporations.

You must be thinking of Europe. In America, sports teams make money and several are owned by large companies.

None of your complaints about how the leagues are run has anything to do with how a team operates on the field/court/ice. The coach is the sole authority, but must delegate all of the actual playing. Players are given leeway in proportion to how good they are (e.g. Auston Matthews faces less consequence for a lazy giveaway than Aston-Reese). Players are also criticized in proportion to how good they are. Everyone on the team buys into the system, they win and lose together. When the coach starts to lose the players respect or the good players start to not care about the outcome, it's a problem that needs to be fixed ASAP.

Do you think any other model could win games? If so, why hasn't it been done? How does this example not apply more generally to every organization?

Do you think any other model could win games? If so, why hasn't it been done? How does this example not apply more generally to every organization?

We’re talking about the economy, not some game where a higher power tells every firm they’re only allowed to have the exact same number of employees and set a salary cap on their wages and restrict which company employees can sign with when entering the industry and can extract concessions or prevent an employee from changing firms if an opposing firm doesn’t offer a higher guaranteed salary. It’s apples to oranges.

A team sport is "given this number of people and this equipment, do this thing better than the other team". In addition to each player being good, the team itself has to have a certain structure. Why is the right-wing hierarchical structure the only one that's ever used?

It's the most effective, and not a coincidence that rightism and affinity for team sports are linked.

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Case study: Jerry Jones.

He's fascinating because he's so good at running the team as a business (his strategic decisions on marketing the Cowboys as America's team and separating their merchandizing rights have made them the most valuable team by far even though their market, Dallas is far from the top), but he's almost equally as bad at managing the team's on the field success. It seems like the more hands on he is the more mediocre they become, even with the luck of an undrafted All-Pro QB (that should have been an enormous advantage in his first few contracts).

Dallas is a pretty good market, to be fair. It’s the fourth-largest metro in the U.S. and the top two house a pair of teams, each, where the Bears and Cowboys have nos. 3 and 4 to themselves. Also, culturally, Texas is football mad. But 💯 on your point about Jones being a savvy businessman and bungling sportsman.

At least as regards the military, this is incredibly wrong. Not sure about the present day, but there's LOADS of scholarship out there about how the empowerment of individual soldiers to exercise discretion in how to achieve set objectives has been exceedingly important throughout the conflicts of the 20th century (auftragstaktik, British/Indian "Chindit" tactics, U.S. Marine "Distributed Operations"/"Combined Action Program", USN "Command by Negation," etc.)

Delegation is not the same thing as insubordination. Good leaders know when to listen to their employees or let them do their own thing.

Does the military get optimal results? Given how many non-officers complain about the incompetence of their superiors this seems highly unlikely. Does the US military perform well due to unfettered power from officers? or does it perform well in spite of it?

"The military" as in the current ones, disputable. It is also arguable that it is run as a true hierarchy, or answerable to e.g. a king.

Every single military historically was run this way though, and yes they got results because they won. If an alternative organizational structure produced better results, we would know about it and every military would instead have been run that way.

The more obvious (and moldbug) example is startups / large companies and their CEOs - they can more or less direct company operations as they will, with only advisory input from the board, and these run the entire modern economy. You can deny the US military is relatively effective, but apple? google? semiconductors?

Every single military historically was run this way though, and yes they got results because they won. If an alternative organizational structure produced better results, we would know about it and every military would instead have been run that way.

I think you need some evidence on this. Otherwise every organization (including unions!) should follow the same logic. If there was a better organization for them we would know about it and every union would instead have been run this way. This is setting aside that many militaries do in fact lose.

For example militaries may be more efficient when divorced from civilian control. But it might not happen regardless due to other factors. We are not optimization machines. We often create and perpetuate inefficient organizations.

Otherwise every organization (including unions!) should follow the same logic

Well, the corporations that organize and deliver the work and economic output do follow that model - one leader (ceo).

As an organization grows, it becomes more challenging and then impossible for a single person to keep track of what's happening. Eventually they need to receive information and give orders without a way to verify whether the information is true or the orders were carried out. Add a few more layers of this, and this is why "all organizations that are not explicitly right-wing will over time become left-wing."

Left-wing of course is an organizational structure where low performers pledge their loyalty to managers in exchange for loot, which the managers extract from the productive parts of the organization using said loyalty. Every organization therefore experiences the same cycle: inception -> growth -> leftist takeover -> collapse.

Religion, nationalism, or any sort of ethos that unites people in service of some higher mission is social technology that prevents these last two parts.

Left-wing of course is an organizational structure where low performers pledge their loyalty to managers in exchange for loot, which the managers extract from the productive parts of the organization using said loyalty. Every organization therefore experiences the same cycle: inception -> growth -> leftist takeover -> collapse.

This is pure "boo outgroup" without even a pretense at providing evidence for your claim.

Seriously, people, actually read the rules in the sidebar. They have not changed significantly since we moved.

Is boo outgroup allowed if it's true?

For example: the behaviour of the "experts", media, government during COVID re: vaccine/lockdown skeptics, lab leak theorists was fully insane. It's now being walked back completely. A sober assessment of all of these events is extremely "boo outgroup". Are we allowed to say this stuff anyway, as long as it's in a somewhat civil way?

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I’ll join in the calls for Citation Needed. Passing information does not make something left-wing. Arguably, your example suggests a more reactionary, feudal structure in which the benighted peasants contract with a sovereign. It’s not a good example, given that you don’t explain how the productive end up loyal, but what should I expect from a cheap drive-by?

Also: paging that guy who wanted to prove wokeness was a religion.

Left-wing of course is an organizational structure where low performers pledge their loyalty to managers in exchange for loot, which the managers extract from the productive parts of the organization using said loyalty. Every organization therefore experiences the same cycle: inception -> growth -> leftist takeover -> collapse.

I think you will need to provide some evidence for your contention. That certainly isn't how I would define a left-wing organization, let alone "of course". There are many different organizational structures on the left from anarcho-communism through to hierarchal authoritarian communism to left-libertarianism through to neo-liberal progressive capitalism.

Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy.

Opposition to hierarchy is in the definition as per wikipedia. The force that drives these politics is a broker/manager class who profess the politics, supported by those who gain something from opposition to hierarchy i.e. those in the lower portion. Said alliance is easy to pick out in every leftist regime in history as well as on a smaller scale in organizations.

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Left-wing of course is an organizational structure where low performers pledge their loyalty to managers in exchange for loot

What makes any of that "left-wing"?

A lot, sadly. They spent over a century developing a whole ideology around it, no one else can compete

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Could you expand on this, because this seems contrary to my observation and intuition? The best militaries tend to be the ones that empower NCOs and enlisted and treat them well (conversely, the intensely hierarchical nature of militaries makes it easy for performance/morale-degrading abuses by leadership to go ignored/unnoticed/suppressed). Likewise, many (if not most) small businesses are terribly run, with leadership as a single point of failure.

First of all, unions don't prevent employers from firing bad employees or making promotion decisions based on seniority; rather, contracts do that...

Any particular type of contract with any particular group representatives negotiating them? These contracts don't just spring from the ether, fully formed, a disappointment to the union that would really prefer that they not be so. Maybe they're in the general interests of high-quality employees as well, but it's a copout to suggest that unions aren't responsible for useless employees being kept on board due to contractual arrangements.

How come you deleted the part where I said, "only some contracts do so," and that even they require only firing for cause? I am sure that SOME union contracts make it unreasonably difficult to fire bad employees, but the OP's assumption that they all do is a claim made without evidence.

Because it was entirely irrelevant to the point. Contracts that making it difficult to fire bad employees are negotiated by unions. The contract is the means to the end of making it difficult to employees, it is not the actor in the situation. The union requests such terms, not the employer. Changing the statement to there only being some unions that negotiate such contracts doesn't alter the situation that when such contracts exist, they're a product of unions that prefer such contracts.

Yes, of course it is unions which negotiate the contracts. That is not the point; the point is that the existence of a union does not, per se, imply the existence of an onerous contract provision. If the question is, to paraphrase the OP, "are unions bad," then the answer is "it depends," not, as OP implies, "Yes, because they prevent bad employees from being fired.'

OP said "Anyone have any examples of an employee union [that doesn't prevent bad employees from being fired]" and I haven't seen anyone give one

No, OP asked for "any examples of an employee union that improves business for both employees and employer?" The bracketed material in the quote completely changes the question.

These contracts don't just spring from the ether, fully formed, a disappointment to the union that would really prefer that they not be so.

MOLOCH! MOLOCH! MOLOCH!

Supposedly German unions use apprenticeship systems and generally produce a minimum level of quality.

That purported role is frequently filled by occupational licensing and unreasonable education requirements in the US (e.g. college degrees for daycare) which serve the same "protect our jobs from competition/give us more money" role that unions do.

Some of these are 'hard' cartels, like doctors who meticulously prevent competition by limiting med school and residency places

Do you have any evidence that doctors actually lobby for the limitation of med school and residency places? I've heard this claim several times here, but never any evidence to back it up. Some quick googling led me to contrary evidence.

In other countries doctors have done much worse at creating labor cartels; the UK is flooded with a continuous supply of doctors from Southern Europe, Africa, India and so on, which is why salaries for doctors are 1/4 or less of what they are in the US.

See also discussions about how medical costs in the US are unreasonably high, and we should reduce them to UK levels. That can only be done by reducing employee compensation to UK levels.

But some blue collar professions, particularly in the Germanic countries, have arguably done better.

Germany due to culture just seems to value high quality labor a lot.

Apprenticeship infinitely better than education, I support this

contrary to what the right would have you believe, welfare is very cheap (this is where i disagree with conservatives) relative to other programs and can be done at scale, provided provisions are put in place to ensure the money is not wasted on booze and drugs. I think this is better than creating unnecessary or overpaid work that costs employers. Most union workers in the trades probably still have IQs in the 90s to low 100s range (you have to be somewhat competent to do labor and trades work), which is not low-IQ per say.

Simple - we stop paying for old people to eke out a few more years of life. Everyone on welfare gets X per month, if they can't pay for medical care or spend it on drugs instead of food, they die.

Agree: the rising IQ floor for entry level jobs is an issue worth investigating

welfare is very cheap... I think this is better than creating unnecessary or overpaid work

Disagree: welfare is a death sentence. Unnecessary work is dumb, but without purpose life is ugly. See: the blacks

Unnecessary work is dumb, but without purpose life is ugly. See: the blacks

Rather than blacks I think your statement would be more accurate if it called out every high IQ idiot who's ever complained about "dysgenics" or "ariska" (however its spelled).

Purposelessness is a disease of the narcissist.

Agreed. Welfare is cheap in a monetary sense... but I think we need some sort of make-work program, if only to get the masses more happy with their lives. I'm convinced the 'mental health' epidemic is a consequence of people lacking meaning in their lives.

How exactly would make-work generate meaning? Can't a person get all the benefit (or more) of make-work by like, working out? I just fail to see how any of the positive feelings people associate with a job well done or a step forward in a career path could come from a job that is essentially a placebo.

Also i find the sentiment distastefully close to "the plebs need to be reminded of their place (working, even if it is literally meaningless work) lest they become restless and uppity"

See: the blacks

I now suspect that you are running some sort of false flag operation.

"Speaking plainly is bad" -Gdanning

If "speaking plainly" means expressing the opinion that "the blacks" have ugly lives without purpose, you are going to have to take heed to a few of our other rules, like not weakmanning your outgroup, speaking about individuals and not entire groups, and speaking like you want everyone to be included. You're definitely failing to be kind, and bordering on being egregiously obnoxious.

You will also cease this petty personal sniping.

I am also very sympathetic to "low IQ honest workers should make a living wage," but I would do it through cutting immigration and discouraging women from working. These are the two most important factors in real wages decoupling from productivity starting in about 1970. Leftist dominated unions aren't doing much for real wages.

I agree public sector unions are a joke. They are the worst of the worst.

I would recommend the history of coal mines as a primer on whether limits to immigration and women in the workforce would suffice to make working conditions and pay reasonable in the absence of unions or regulation. While immigration does have a role in wage suppression and worker abuse, the local residents in West Virginia were exploited to such an extent that it damaged labor movements elsewhere in the country. In the absence of worker coordination, there is ample opportunity to capital to stomp on labor, even if the labor supply doesn't have the sort of surplus that immigration creates.

The most salient feature of unions that I know about is that they prevent the employer from firing bad employees, or promoting good employees over ones with seniority.

They also allow people to negotiate over working conditions in a manner other than simply changing jobs. I slung cardboard in a FedEx unload bay in college where I was reduced to an hourly total, and their entire staffing model was to pay one tick above minimum wage and then burn through employees at whatever rate occurred. The management style was, whenever understaffed and for however many months, to tell the grunts to work yet harder. It’s very common for FedEx sort facilities to have over 100% turnover in a year on average. And, we didn’t have it Amazon bad.

It wasn’t horrible for someone like me because I knew I was out of there and on to better things in a short time. But if you’re a HBD, heritable-intelligence type, then there are going to be some folks for whom that’s their lot in life. And I’ve met a few of them. If they’re, say, loading four delivery vans at 300-400 boxes a van, and arranging boxes based on the seven-to-eight digit code that organizes the boxes along the delivery route, that’s more than honest work for one shift. I one-hundred percent want people for whom that’s their level in life to have a union say, “No, you can’t put someone on more than a four-truck pull during the holiday-season peak. You can adequately staff your shifts, or you can have management come in and start loading trucks for failing to do their job.”

A significant part of what is driving unionization pushes at places like Starbucks, Amazon, etc. are working conditions.

In your specific case of cardboard wrangling, couldn't those who wanted a more stable union job doing the exact same thing have gone across the street to UPS instead of FedEx?

Well, not everyone, no. Maybe if UPS was opening a brand new sort facility in that area. But a few, sure.

Work rules are, quite explicitly, something that does not improve business. It makes businesses less able to engage in process improvements, particularly since any process improvement becomes a new opportunity for employees to grab more without adding value.

Work rules are generally more harmful than just demands for more money due to this deadweight loss. As an example of this, consider port of LA workers opposing any kind of productivity increasing automation under the guise of work rules.

But there’s a place for sacrificing efficiency to prevent Amazon warehouse-like treatment. Yes, obviously the LA port workers behavior is bad and shouldn’t be encouraged. But employees should also get some way to push back against being asked to wear diapers at work.

But employees should also get some way to push back against being asked to wear diapers at work.

They do. It's called McDonald's, Walmart, or any other non-Amazon job which - according to /u/limestheif - pay more than the competition in return for demanding more from workers. This isn't some kind of monopsony-ish situation where only one employer in the state needs their specialized skillset.

You seem to want to eliminate the opportunity to work harder and get more money for those that want it, I guess cause you know better than they do or something.

(I'm ignoring the fact that the diaper story is mostly FUD based on exaggerations/universalization about a problem that happens to many older adults.)

Right. The efficiency engineers at Amazon didn’t have any business incentive to budget in time to allow people to walk the distance required to urinate in a bathroom when picking orders. The plan was, pay $15-18 an hour when that was above most other entry level jobs and the labor market was weaker, and replace anyone who places a higher price on their dignity. The end result is ultimately people on the line pissing in bottles. The union does not exist to make the business efficient. It exists to give current employees bargaining power, where they’d otherwise be on the short end of an imbalance.

I completely agree that's what a union should be. But in practice why do they always spent so much of their negotiating power on protecting employees who should be fired?

Signaling to the rest of union members and the employer. Staking out a strong position for an incompetent worker indicates obstinate adherence to certain principles. Importantly, it makes observers think that genuinely predatory or abusive actions won't be tolerated, scaring the employer and giving assurances to members.

It has obvious costs, but it appears somewhat effective.

Do they? Or is it that working conditions and wages are hammered out only every so-many years during contract negotiations, and that, by intent and structure, isn’t going to be something that can occur just whenever.

  1. Unions are fiercely protective of brutal employees

  2. This costs the employer a lot of money, and they would pay to remove this stipulation

"We'll let you fire some guys, but you have to pay the rest of us more" -no union leader ever

They also have to maintain solidarity. The union is an organization and the business is an organization.

When the MİT murders some mouthy Kurds in Turkey, the PKK doesn’t want the heat that a retaliatory killing is going to bring, but if they don’t offer one up every now and again they will lose support from their base.

I don't know what American unions or American employers are like, so let's get that out of the way first.

Okay, now let me say that I'm fed-up of union bashing. Any employment I had where I got decent pay and conditions was down to unions. Any non-union workplaces where I was employed screwed over their staff, because what are you gonna do, get the union involved? Ha ha, no union here!

So I'm pro-union all the way.

When unions manage to make the news in the US, it's normally for things like police unions protecting their own after a bad shoot or various teacher's unions refusing to return to teaching in-person classes. It skews a lot of US perceptions of what benefits unions actually provide.

I was in a member of CUPE in during my chemistry PhD. The leadership wanted to strike in my second year so I went to the meeting to vote against it. The open mic session sounded like a DSA convention. Just a big line of antifa-looking dweebs complaining about how they are being taken advantage of, even though each of them signed the deal to do this less than 5 years ago and the terms hadn't changed. It boiled down to arts students in departments where graduate outnumbered undergrad and they weren't getting enough TA hours. So they used the rest of us, who were happy but needed by the university (science, engineering, etc) to eventually get subsidized. In the middle of the leftist speeches, a compsci student got on the mic and said "if I've already completed all my hours for this semester, will I still get paid if you guys strike?". Nobody even knew, it was perfect. We then got to do the same song and dance 2 years later, which luckily didn't pass.

Aside from that, the union implemented some classic leftist policies. They made it so that professors were not allowed to use TA reviews to determine assignments, and there was a strict order of seniority that had to be used.

My experience lines up with everything I've heard from others who have been in unions. I was just wondering whether some counterexamples existed.

It boiled down to arts students in departments where graduate outnumbered undergrad

is this really a thing? what could they possibly need so many grad students for?

Tuition revenue.

Mostly money. From the administrators' point of view it's all about the tuition fees. And not just for the masters students, in some humanities programmes even the PhD students have to pay.

From the professors' point of view, postgraduates help support their supervisors' research, plus they're much more interesting to work with than undergrads.

HR and DEI at your workplace. They draw from a highly educated unskilled pool of workers. And then I get mandatory training about how gaslighting and microagressions need to be proactively resisted in the workplace.

Humanities grad students mostly go on to become commissars

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