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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?
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.
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.
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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?
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.
https://time.com/6205084/phonics-science-of-reading-teachers/
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.
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.
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.
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.
Here's the most I can make out of your reasoning:
Agents don't necessarily act in the best interest of the principal.
...
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?
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 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.
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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.
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.
Curious as to what this means. It takes like 5 minutes to explain, e.g., the logic of when to guess on the SATs.
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"
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.
IF that is true, then that just strengthens my point, because we were asked to spend several days on it.
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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.
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:
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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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:
we also have teachers refusing to teach the curriculum they are assigned.
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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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'.
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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.
Are they? Correct or not, "small businesses growing into large businesses" is a subset of small businesses, and a fairly small one at that.
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.
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.
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A large business is by definition not a small business.
What does this mean?
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.
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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?
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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
Well, the corporations that organize and deliver the work and economic output do follow that model - one leader (ceo).
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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.
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.
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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.
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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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.
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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.
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MOLOCH! MOLOCH! MOLOCH!
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