• Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    That wasn’t quite the point. What would be a good reason for a well meaning, rocking employer to not encourage unionization?

    • sugar_in_your_tea@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      Lots of reasons:

      • union dues
      • bureaucracy - need to go through the union
      • unwanted strikes - if your union goes on strike, you are not allowed to work
      • special treatment - unions try to equalize, so higher performers may not be fairly compensated

      An awesome employer shouldn’t discourage unionization, and ideally they’d encourage attempts to unionize, but they wouldn’t recommend unionization, assuming the employer intended to maintain control and monitor managers throughout the chain. If the employer can provide all of the benefits employees would get through unionization, unionizing merely adds extra BS that employees and employers need to deal with.

      • Avid Amoeba@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Alright, so let’s take a look.

        • union dues

        No escaping this one.

        • bureaucracy - need to go through the union

        What does the employer have to go through the union for?

        • unwanted strikes - if your union goes on strike, you are not allowed to work

        If the employer is rocking, why would union members vote to strike?

        • special treatment - unions try to equalize, so higher performers may not be fairly compensated

        This doesn’t feel right but I can’t quite put my finger on why so I’ll reserve judgement for now. 😄

        I can see the extra layer of overhead in the case when everything is perfect, but given the incentives in traditional for-profit corporations I can’t see that case ever being realistic. In addition, even if a company is perfect today, the way corporations are structured makes it incredibly easy for that to change especially if there’s no worker-controlled counterbalance to such change. So just on the basis of that, if I’m an awesome, perfect employer, and I presumably want this to go on, because that really is part of being awesome, I should want to create this counterbalance against change for the worse. Assuming a for-profit, not-a-co-op corporation that is. It looks to me like this overhead is the price of preserving this perfect environment over the long term. Doesn’t that make sense?