The whole peer pressure to join a union thing is a huge turn-off to the whole idea of unions, at least for me. Convince, don’t pressure.

What about whole management pressure, complete with massively funded astroturf campaigns, threats of layoffs, and mandatory indoctrination sessions, pressuring employees to not join a union? Is that a huge turn-on to the whole idea of unions? If not, why not?

No, similarly, I wouldn’t work for employers that act like that.

1) How can you prove that a company is not engaging in any secret anti-unionization activity?

2) If a large percentage of employers act like that (and they do) they influence the entire job market.

It’s hard, unless you work at a company small enough for everyone to know each other.

The pressure is a convincer.

If you don't care that everyone in the union will hate you and your ability to do work will also be reduced, feel free to scab.

If you want work to go smoothly with the union members, you should be in the union

Speaking personally, this pressure is incentive away from whatever you're proselytizing.

Any union that adopts such a spirit will have a culture toxic to my character. I want work to go smoothly, unconditionally. Any culture that requires conformity is a bad one, and I dare further say: a cult.

If a manager makes work bad, I will change jobs. If a union makes work bad, I will scab or change jobs. Regardless, I will do my best to deprive my value from whomever makes my productive hours less enjoyable.

This honestly sounds like mob tactics.

"It would be a shame if your life were harder if you didn't pay protection money, god forbid"

> The pressure is a convincer.

Hey if that's the game that is being played, you can't complain when people who disagree with this strategy actively work to sabotage you, through a variety of different methods (such as voting for right to work laws, or doing other things).

There are a lot of way to sabotage and cause harm just as much as the pro union people might cause harm to those who do not wish to join.

You're making an excellent case for choosing jobs with zero union presence.

It's difficult to imagine you are writing this in good faith.

Out of curiosity, how perjoratively do you use the term 'scab'? It reads of condemnation to me, which is fine if that's intended. I was just wondering if the difference in our culture (Amerimutt here) caused an incidental tone-shift.

More to the point: I've never seen a union actually benefit anyone I'm close to. The reps have all been awful and the structural incentives were all perverse. I ask, in good faith, why do you seem to imply that unions are an unqualified good? (If this is only a seeming, a bad read on my part, then I apologize; if I'm on the money, I would love to get your perspective)

>why do you seem to imply that unions are an unqualified good?

Not OP, but it's been my experience that other than orgasms (and not even always then), nothing is an unqualified good. Does something need to be so in order for you to believe it worthwhile?

That may also be a bad read on my part, but I think it's a useful discussion, especially when we're talking about standing up for what's right in the workplace.

Because the converse is a big question in this context: How bad does it need to be/get in order to start thinking about rabble-rousing internally/quitting/whistle-blowing?

I'd expect that as with unions (because unions are absolutely not all the same), the level of unethical, harmful or illegal activity is likely a continuum and different people will have different breaking points.

I certainly don't think something needs to be an unqualified good to be worthwhile. However, I often see very little nuance in the presentation of unions; either its proponents present it as an unqualified good, or its opponents present it as an unmitigatable cost.

I was originally going to reply with:

> My life, by proxy to the afflictions of my loved ones, has certainly been made worse by bad unions. I like the idea of unions, but...

I mention this to make visible the reflective opportunity our exchange granted me. Yes, my loved one have been afflicted by (bad) unions, but it also seems to me that the proposed benefits of unionization are inherently distributed and therefore likely invisible at the individual level, whereas the harm engendered by bad management (union or otherwise) is hypervisible at the individual level. Thus, the good done for my loved ones by their unions isn't so easily measured, while the harms done by poor union management makes itself as easily known as the harms by enterprise's management.

I'll have to do more thinking and reading on how to gain a better perspective. It seems to me that attaining a measurement of the good done by their unions is further complicated by how relative said goods must be and yet there often aren't easy counterfactuals to refer to. Intuitively, it seems that aggregate data would give a false perspective.

Any advice or recommendations along these lines would be helpful. I remember there was a cybernetics program to engender a science of management and organizational development; I might start there, to learn principles of analysis as opposed to blindly groping for data to mash together.

>Any advice or recommendations along these lines would be helpful.

I don't have much in the way of knowledge or experience to make such recommendations. I have never been a member of a union, and while one member of my family was a union member (he just took it for granted that it was necessary, although he did make significantly more money as a member of that union than before he joined -- although those two situations were in areas thousands of miles apart), I don't have any real insight about that.

I will say that from a historical perspective, unions, and more broadly, the labor movement (at least in the US) had a measurable positive effect on compensation and working conditions.

As for particular unions, it's difficult to say unless one is a member of that union.

I'd expect that there's value in collective bargaining, as it reduces the imbalance of knowledge and power between employers and employees. That said, those who manage/administer unions must have the best interests of their members as a primary focus.

If that isn't the case, a union is likely less of a positive for members.

As I mentioned elsewhere, unions (along with everything else) aren't an unqualified good, but it seems to me that in a market economy, limiting power/knowledge asymmetry make markets both fairer and more efficient.

I suspect that my musings aren't very helpful in terms of your search for other/broader perspectives, but it's really all I have to offer. I wish I could provide more.

That said, I appreciate the opportunity to discuss this here, as (at least in my experience) most tech workers reject (as I did for a long time) the idea that collective labor action can benefit us.

As I've aged and gained experience, I've become more convinced that incentivizing fairer markets (the labor market included) and a broader allocation of wealth has a positive effect on economic growth and stability.

That cuts across a broad swathe of policies and incentives, including but not limited to (note that this is US-centric, as I'm an American) broadly raising wages (consumer spending is 70% of the US economy -- more people having more money to spend bolsters that) while incentivizing re-investment instead of accumulation (re-investing in businesses that actually create concrete value, rather than gambling in equities/securities/real estate markets), as well as enhancing the social safety net (if you don't have to worry that your and your kids will be eating from garbage cans and sleeping in cardboard boxes, you're much more likely to act on entrepreneurial ideas you might have) creates a more robust, stable economy that's viable over the medium to long term.

I think that more power for the labor side of the capital/labor can push that forward. And in the long term would be just as beneficial for capital as it is for labor.

I've digressed a bit, but I think that it's useful to look at labor/unions from a broader economic perspective.

Your thoughts?

Scab means exactly the same thing in the US as it does in the UK; I'm pretty sure they got it from us.

> I ask, in good faith, why do you seem to imply that unions are an unqualified good?

That's not good faith.

My faith was entirely good when I asked it. What falsifies its good faith? or, perhaps a better question: how ought I to have asked?

Thank you for clarifying re: the term scab.

You said "why do you seem to imply that unions are an unqualified good" which has no support in the material you replied to.

The only information you had was that the poster held a a strikebreaker in contempt.

Right, which is why I tried to mitigate that by acknowledging it might only be a seeming on my end due to a bad reading.

As to the context:

(Grandparent) > UK has the highest tech salaries in Europeand trade unions were buried in the 70s.

(Grandparent) > I am fine if you guys seek protection of unions.

(Grandparent) > But never, ever, ever, interfere with my relations with employers.

(Parent) > As a highly paid UK tech worker, this scab does not speak for me.

The GP said that they're happy for anyone to seek the benefits of unionization, so long as they're not forced to participate. Parent simply called GP a scab for this sentiment.

This exchange, to me, seems to imply the parent believes unions to be an unqualified good- or, at least, that the simple desire for individual labor relations is worthy of unqualified condemnation.

Where do you and I diverge in this reading?

EDIT: further, how do I take better care to explicitly mitigate against my biases to ensure I engage with the full goodness of my faith?