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Notes -
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?
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.
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.
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.)
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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.
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