I wish the NRLB would be much harsher against business owners and executives who engage in anti-union rhetoric and behaviors. People have the right to form unions, lying about losing benefits and lowering pay should be handled much more harshly, there should be actual penalties instead of just having to read a statement and delete a tweet.
I disagree. It should be a free market. If the employees don’t like their treatment they should leave and take a different job. I am sure there is a UAW job out there to be had.
The most likely outcome from this is that Tesla moves more and more production out of a California and into a more business friendly state, such as Texas.
calling it a free market is laughable naive. the market is lopsided in favor of businesses because many laws at the state and federal are explicitly pro-business and anti-union; see "right to work laws", the 1947 Taft-Harley act, etc. - especially over the past 20 years
and saying workers should just go and join a union backed job is even sillier when <15% of all full time workers are apart of a union [1]
Right to work is pro employee. If unions want membership they shouldn’t be able to coerce it. They should have to earn it and compete for it. If a union can’t survive based on voluntary membership then that tells you something.
it is the state infringing in the market on the side of business and capital by restricting the ability of workers to collectively bargain with employers
workers are less well off but it's ok because "individualism"
No one is being restricted from bargaining collectively. They’re just being given the choice to opt out. Unions just get upset because they lose their monopoly status to police workers voices who disagree with their position and politics.
Right to work is only anti union because it allows employees to choose whether or not to join a union. Forcing an employee to join a union is absolutely not pro-employee.
Right to work is not pro-business. It simply reduces some of the extra-contractual powers that labor laws give unions.
These laws are violating the right of business to freely contract, while reducing the opportunity for those who don't have unionized jobs to compete for those jobs. So Right to Work is anti-'exploitation of businesses and outside workers'.
In the free market, should businesses not be able to freely agree to a contract? Most anti-union laws limit the types of contracts private actors are able to voluntarily consent to, which seems less of a "free market."
Any situation where one group is forced to go along with what another group wants is tyranny, regardless of the sizes of the groups. When the first group is large and the second group is small you have an oligopoly or dictatorship. When the reverse is true you have tyranny of the majority, which isn't much of an improvement.
The democratic ideal is people coming together voluntarily to work toward their common interests, with no one being forced to participate against their will. The right to secede is key—it's not a legitimate democracy if you aren't allowed to leave.
I don't agree. Ideally, everyone could make their own decisions for their own so they aren't forced to go along with others. In that case there isn't even a need for democracy. But frequently, that is not possible – what you call "tyranny" I consider unavoidable and democracy the best way to deal with it.
Majority rule is inherently better than rule by any specific group in two respects: One, more people benefit from it. Even if you have two blocks who always vote together, it's better if 60% benefit at the expense of 40% than vice versa. Two, that doesn't actually happen: Sometimes you are on the winning side, sometimes on the losing one so it somewhat (not perfectly) cancels out.
And democracy isn't just majority rule. Separation of powers and a catalog of fundamental rights are also important to ensure everyone's interests are considered when making a collective decision. So is a culture of just doing so, when voting and in general.
And that is where we disagree. Aggression is often an easier path to achieving your goals—maybe the only viable path in some cases—but it's never "unavoidable". You just have to accept that you won't always get what you want.
> … it's better if 60% benefit at the expense of 40% than vice versa.
Maybe, if you had to choose one or the other. If you're of a utilitarian mindset (I'm not, so this 60%-vs-40% argument carries no weight with me) it would depend on exactly how much benefit vs. how much expense. And it seems to me that democracy more commonly results in a vocal, activist, well-motivated minority receiving concentrated benefits at the expense of the majority. The expense is just more widely distributed, making it hard to get the people on the losing side worked up about it. Example: If I can get $1000 in benefits in exchange for 5,000 other people paying $1 each, I have a strong incentive to lobby and vote for that arrangement. The 5,000 other people would each probably expend more effort fighting the measure (each time it's introduced!) than it would cost them to just let it pass. Not to mention that it makes them look petty and/or greedy, fighting over a mere $1 bill. Yet if the measure passes it would result in a net $4,000 loss to the group. Now repeat that for 1,000 other special-interest proposals… the group that benefits from each proposal varies, but in the end everyone loses.
> Sometimes you are on the winning side, sometimes on the losing one so it somewhat (not perfectly) cancels out.
While it would obviously be a very rare individual indeed who was always on the losing side, I wouldn't say it "cancels out" (even imperfectly). Some see a significant net benefit while others can expect a significant net loss. And then you have the net loss to society as a whole, both in terms of economic overhead (the transfers are not perfectly efficient, and also result in a less productive allocation of resources) as well as morally in terms of normalizing the use of aggression as a "legitimate" means of achieving policy goals.
> And democracy isn't just majority rule.
On that we agree, but in my opinion the "catalog of fundamental rights" recognized by all democracies which fit the definition of "government" (i.e. democracies which do not treat group membership as voluntary and subject to secession, or which fail to recognize and respect the natural personal and property rights of non-members) leaves out certain inconvenient rights which are equally or more fundamental.
Sure you could count every instance of someone not getting their will, which is unavoidable when decisions affect more than one person, as tyranny. But I don't think that's a very useful definition.
Unions are anti-free market. They are monopoly cartels protected by the federal government. If people who sell peanut butter joined together to sell their products at a higher price, the DOJ would bust them up. If people who sell labor join together to do the same type of rent seeking, congress sets up the NLRB to protect them.
They can however be replaced, in which case the company doesn't need to rehire the striking workers. Potato/potato.
That's not true if the company is in violation of an existing contract though, then the company is breaking the law and must rehire everyone, but I'll reiterate: they're breaking the law to begin with.
This free market you speak of is in fact fairly sensitive to initial conditions, and will never reconcile the interests of the rich and poor on its own.
Unionized workers get what they negotiate for. Given how tech works, a Tesla union very well could demand options. It is absolutely false that unionization precludes employees getting options.
Except they usually don't... Unionized industries tend to be adversarial - if the employees get a better deal, then the employer does less well. Therefore receiving options is a poor negotiation tactic.
Only in the US setup. Europe uses codetermination and other systems that align them with their employers. Although they tend to get paid less than US tech companies, but so does everyone.
What ? Seems like I am better of without a union if I am getting more pay?. Also where is the conversation around building a better product to add more value in this union debate?
You're getting more pay for a wild variety of reasons ( VC inflation, a lot of things that pay has to compensate for, etc.), nothing to do with unions.
In France, it's mandatory for companies with more than 50 employees to have workers council and that has to be consulted on serious decisions ( changing offices, firing people, layoffs, etc.) and has some limited negotiation power. They negotiate company-wide policies (accord) on behalf of the employees that have to be at least as good as the branch-wide policies ( convention collective) - e.g. all workers in media companies get 20 days extra vacation because that's what the branch collective bargaining agreement says.
Furthermore, oftentimes ( sometimes it's mandatory), there are profit sharing schemes, e.g
in my company 1% of the profits is shared among the employees, so your incentives are directly aligned with the company ( it comes to around a salary's worth of a bonus, so it's decent).
If they do, it's going to drive out tech employers from the UK just as employers in the UK primary and manufacturing sectors were driven out or bankrupted in the 1970s after their work forces unionized.
The 1st amendment does not and should not apply to business matters. You don't even need to look far from the subject matter, Musk has gotten in trouble before over misleading tweets. I don't see anyone bring up the first amendment when discussing corporate fraud. Why is it that executives can be accountable to shareholders but not workers?
"does not and should not apply to business matters"
The problem is this: At what point does something become a "business matter"? And yes, I have opined that the SEC is playing with fire and possibly sowing the seeds of its own irrelevance with it's threats to musk.
Hey let’s not make it a freedom of speech issue. If you speak the words “if you what I dislike I’ll beat you up” you’re not asserting a 1A right, you’re just a bully
In the end I think courts will say the promised anti-union rollercoaster and yogurt complexes must be built. Fraudulent promises as part of commerce and labor negotiation are excluded from protection under pretty much every interpretation of the 1st amendment out there.
IANAL, but if it's not in writing, I believe you have to prove that musk never intended to deliver, and that's gonna be hard to prove. Otherwise you can nail people down to a few hundred prosecutable offenses a year and that is not a recipe for social success when there are sufficient numbers of vindictive jerks around.
? Not at all. I'm not quite sure why people on HN think the 1st amendment is such a golden bullet, but it is not. There are lots of exceptions, including threatened retaliation, to what might be permissibly said in the workplace.
If, for instance, as you were hiring people, you told them "we don't hire black people", even if you did hire black people, you would still be opening yourself up to suit, even with freedom of speech.
It's not "free" speech when the audience is being coerced into hearing it.
Before you say it, yes, the workers are being coerced. The implicit threat is that they will lose their jobs if they don't listen to the employer's anti-union rhetoric.
"Oh, but they can just quit and not be forced to listen to it," you say? Well, no, the average American worker can't afford to just walk away from a job. Thus, it's coercion.
Would somebody like to explain how a job is a "free association" for people who may not be able to cover a $400 expense without borrowing money? Or are we just interested in hitting that down arrow hard enough to make it all go away?
Isn't the entire point of a union to give you negotiating leverage?
If you need the government to effectively do the negotiating for you by levying fines and such whenever the company goes against the union, what exactly is the point of the union?
The problem is that collective action is difficult before you have the union, and companies/executives have a lot of power to dissuade people from forming unions. In the past that's involved physical threats and actual violence. Nowadays I expect it's more posturing and economic threats, but they can still have the desired effect.
The point of these sorts of laws is to give unions a fighting chance to take hold in places where employees want them, but are afraid of retaliation if they tried to form one.
Don't roads exist to facilitate vehicle transportation? If you need to do construction in order to make roads, what exactly is the point of them?
I don't understand what your thinking here is. You're comparing the expected results of a thing existing with possible actions to facilitate conditions for that thing to exist. Why are these supposed to be somehow equivalent or comparable?
I think their point is that the American form of unionization is bunk. If you look to Europe workers are free to choose between many associations of voluntary unions which advocate for their specific interests. They are not forced to have a single representative for negotiations with their employer and are free to abstain from of participation as well.Much like the American voting system and American Congress, unions are winner take all majority rule. If you are in the minority of a union it may not advocate for your interest and you have no option to turn to.
On paper, that means you don't have to join the union in order to get a job - just pay the union fees and work under the union contract (which is to say, almost all the downsides of joining but without any actual say in how the union is run). In practice, I think people who do this tend to get blacklisted by the union and have trouble getting jobs in future. I know the Hollywood unions in particular are very aggressive and public about threatening anyone who takes that option with blacklisting, and there are zero consequences for them for doing this.
The law bans employers from requiring people to be union members before they are hired. In states without right to work laws it is still legal to require employees to join the union after being hired.
This isn't about any actual negotiation though. This is about a public statement aimed at discouraging even attempting to unionize. This is well before the point where the union and company would be negotiating.
I think it makes a lot of sense to regulate this kind of activity. It's not about forcing companies to 'give in' or not to unions, but about helping to protect the ability for the union to form in the first place.
We can argue forever about how much company statements might influence the ability for unions to form, but at the end of the day the actual regulation here is basically just stopping the company from setting up their own strawmen in hopes of influencing workers. Naturally, it's very easy to talk tough when you're just pretending to negotiate against yourself. Not doing this seems like a pretty mild restriction, so I don't think it's a particularly onerous regulation.
The workers aren’t unionized yet. What the law is clear about, is that you’re not allowed to threaten workers for the act of trying to unionize the workplace.
“We give our workers stock options now. We do not expect to do so under a union contract.”
I don’t see that as “threatening workers”, but as a reasonable communication between employer and employees and a proper counterbalance against union claims that the workers will be better off if they unionize.
“We give our workers stock options now. No other automaker working under a union contract does so.” is something that I don't think anyone could reasonably find as threatening (even I don't think the first one is either, some may).
As an employee, I benefit from more information from both sides of the issue rather than having the union organizers be able to communicate unfettered and the company communications be restricted from pointing out any possible or foreseeable downsides.
That's real easy to say when there isn't a union yet. And the company has zero incentive to give any kind of realistic and useful information in this situation. They can say whatever they want, and it doesn't mean anything. They don't even know what the non-existent union will want or care about later, so how they can have any accurate expectations even if they are perfectly rational and honest. The only purpose these statements serve is to try to prevent unionization.
Part of why this is not a simple "both sides" issue is because we're talking about one side that exists and one side that might one day exist. The non-extant union can't weigh in on company statements or make any statements of their own.
So these rules exist to help ensure the workers are not unduly influenced by the company when they consider making that union finally exist. I don't see a problem with this.
I agree that they shouldn't be unduly influenced by the company when contemplating joining a union.
But if they're paying the workers part in cash and part in options, and the union organizers are pitching that they'll raise their wages, I think it's fair for the company to point out that that is likely to result in moving some of the comp from options into cash.
Even that is itself a weird quasi-bad-faith statement though. A potential union would not be unaware of stock options, nor how to value them. They could just as easily request higher cash pay and that stock options remain as they are. That's a valid position, and arguably a likely one.
On what possible basis could Musk be making a fully good-faith statement that he has good reason to believe it is impossible for a union to negotiate on such grounds? Obviously he is free to stick on that point in actual negotiations, but again he can't in any kind of good faith negotiate in public with an entity that doesn't exist yet.
As for UAW, that's kind of getting into the detailed specifics of this instance. Maybe there's more room to argue for looser regulations when there are extant industry unions? But that would also seem to push things more in favor of larger, more encompassing unions rather than smaller more specific ones, which I imagine most people in favor of less regulation wouldn't be fond of either.
Everything you're saying applies to union organizers though, which do exists before the union is formed.
And the entire point is that the union forming could be bad for workers in various ways, so if I was a worker I would want to be made aware of what could possibly go wrong before I joined the effort to unionize and no longer had a choice in the matter after the union is fully formed and going strong.
First of all, that’s not what Elon said. He said something to the effect of “why do you want to join a union and lose stock options?” Just like someone who approaches you on a dark street and says “nice car, wouldn’t want anything to happen to it.” Of course, when you call the police, he’s going to explain that he genuinely appreciates a fine automobile and was expressing his concern given the troubles in the neighborhood.
Musk has a significant say in whether employees continue to receive options, and I can’t see why the union would ask to take that away, given that options are presumably very popular with their members.
Saying that life will get worse with a union is one thing. Saying that it will get worse because I will make it worse is another.
The union doesn’t exist yet at their site. The government provides the guarantee of a fair election on whether to unionize, free of threats from either management or the union. Once the site is unionized, the union can indeed defend itself by negotiating with management.
No, this is suggesting that government should enforce workers' rights to decide freely if they want to unionize. Companies routinely skirt this right by taking explicit anti-unionization efforts, and there are many firms specializing in this.
> This is suggesting the government should treat unions preferentially, not equitably.
Equity is in the eye of the beholder. I don't see how this law is treating unions preferentially, and am interested in how you distinguish it with the aforementioned minority shareholder protections.
The idea here seems to be that unions can interfere with the running of a business however they want (strikes, etc), but businesses should not be allowed to "interfere" with the formation of union, where "interfere" seems to be a very low bar in terms of what is unacceptable.
When I say equitable treatment, I'm looking for symmetry, and I'm not seeing it here.
Seems like you are saying owners of small businesses can get together and collude under a combined business, with shares and voting, but individual workers must be atomized or if they do try to coordinate to bargain against the businesses, they get no similar help to do so as the shareholders get.
The governments role should be to ensure a level playing field between employers and labor. That means the government at a minimum needs to protect those who want to organize.
