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The United Auto Workers have gone on strike: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-auto-union-strike-three-detroit-three-factories-2023-09-15/
What happens if Ford and GM simply say: "okay, you're fired"? This seems to have quite a few benefits, mostly that they can get rid of union workers and remove the threat of another strike.
I'll admit that unions sortof confuse me. I didn't grow up around them and have always wondered the mechanism by which everybody gets to quit their job but then demand extra money to come back. Are the people running factory machines inside of Ford and GM (or starbucks, or a hollywood writers room) really that highly skilled?
It should be noted that Tesla is not unionized, and will not be a part of this strike. Do you guys think there is a chance that the government tries to force Tesla to stop making cars during the strike to make things more fair?
I'll be honest about my feelings towards unions: I don't get it at all, and I think I'm missing something. I do think that workers should have an adversarial relationship with their employer, but it seems to me like unions have all but destroyed the american auto industry. I think you'd be insane to not just fire anybody who joins a union on the spot. I don't get how places can "vote to unionize". Why does the employer not simply fire the people doing the organizing? Sure you can all vote to make a starbucks union, but...I just won't hire anybody in your union.
There are a lot of really good answers in this thread, reasons why historically unions have been a good idea (even if some notable examples have gone too far), but I want to point out that they almost entirely apply to private-sector unions. In the US we also have truly massive PUBLIC-sector unions, which (as far as I know) there is almost no good justification for. Their power derives from the government, which means that when they "negotiate", the government is the one on both sides of the table (negotiating about money that, as always, isn't theirs). It's always seemed insane to me, but maybe somebody here has a good justification...?
Insofar as part of the point of a union is to protect workers from abusive or unsafe work environments that would seem to apply just as well to government employees as private employees.
There is a lot of assumption here that the free market wouldn’t have done a lot of the things as we got richer anyway. Unions always claim they did that but realistically free markets would have done the same thing.
Google isn’t unionized. I hear they have some great working conditions.
Datapoint of 1, but Texas has both unionized and non-Union electricians whose pay is negotiated separately. Union electricians make more during their apprenticeships and have stricter safety on the jobsite, non-union have an easier time going out on their own. I’ve heard Union electricians are better paid than non-union in rural areas but only at the level of hearsay. Union rules make it harder to negotiate a better work life balance but also prevent the worst excesses(which can be pretty bad).
So unions probably deserve some credit, but mostly at the margins.
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Sure, it's possible that working conditions would have gotten better anyway.
As to Google I think that's more to do with the nature of software engineering as a profession. There is not nearly as much potential for harm compared to someone working a mining job or with heavy machinery or similar.
Wasnt referring to harm. But all the other benefits those firms provide. When a country gets sufficiently rich employees get to expect things like fully stocked kitchens and fancy lunches as a part of their pay.
Isn't that significantly an artifact of tax structure? At 30% income+payroll tax, a dollar spent by your employer goes 43% farther than a dollar spent by you, and the strength of that effect increases with pay under a progressive income tax.
Something else that comes to mind is that there's a bunch of cultural baggage about home cooking, fast food, frozen dinners, frequency of eating out, etc., which employer-provided chefs could bypass. Hitting a drive-through every day after work likely feels declasse to upper-middle-class specialist employees unless they're autistic enough to unlock, "just the macros, ma'am" mindset, but they are not likely going home to a wife who learned how to shop and cook in home economics class. There are multiple companies built around literally catering to this neurosis.
Have any of those companies ever made a profit? Nobody I’ve ever known to use them has kept them after the free trial period expired. ‘Being able to launder VC money’ is a pretty low bar to clear in terms of finding a marketable niche.
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You say this is a country thing but I'm pretty sure Google is a pretty large outlier on this. I work for and we definitely don't have fully stocked kitchens and free fancy lunches.
The key is that when productivity goes up employers can asks for their productivity to be paid in better benefits. Google and firms like them having super productive employers can asks for all sorts of fancy work conditions. Similar when manual labor hit a productivity level they could asks for things like 8 hr work week or safer conditions.
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