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Comment by saas_sam

My anti-union sentiment arrived from my experience working with a large established union in an industrial plant. The union protected some of the worst, laziest, most unsafe workers I had ever witnessed in any job before or sense. It blew my mind how difficult it was to remove obvious bad apples, and how the best workers were forced to wait in years-long "seniority" queues before they could get promoted. I would get threatened with grievances for trivial acts like carrying a single lightbulb myself without a union worker.

Every institution has a STATED purpose and an ACTUAL effect. Institutions become inefficient, corrupt, decoupled from their original goals. What keeps institutions aligned with their stated--noble--purpose, is the institution's internal incentive structure. Unions often have very bad internal incentive structures.

I would be SHOCKED if you could not find counter-examples where unions are great. It's a big round world we live on where silver linings abound. For anything. To me, right now, I do not find pro-union activists persuasive in the slightest. But I am open-minded.

parent saas_sam 5 years ago

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