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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.
The actual history here is that unions didn't do squat about unsafe work environments. The workplace safety revolution was a top-down thing, imposed by management on a grudging and resentful labor force. Why did management do it? Because the shift to no-fault worker's compensation put a price on danger, and companies responded rationally by paying people to make the workplace safer. Often the safety rules were imposed by insurance companies in exchange for lower premiums.
This is a huge success story for well-designed incentives, the sort of thing that ought to be in every history textbook as a demonstration of how meaningful change actually happens, and yet people keep attributing it to unions for some reason.
In one memorable example, the Chicago Plumbers Union lobbied until the mid-1980s to continue requiring lead pipes until they were banned federally because only union plumbers could install lead lines. This probably had a negative safety impact for the plumbers themselves, has definitely impacted generations of Chicago residents in ways that less union-friendly jurisdictions avoided. But hey, job security!
New York City still requires lead shower pans, probably for similar reasons.
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