There's a wide spectrum in "a union" just like in "management". I've had good management and bad management. There are good unions and bad unions. So, a priori, I don't have an expectation of whether "the union" - some arbitrarily picked union - will definitely help or hurt, any more than I have an expectation that arbitrary "management" will definitely help or hurt. But there are a few things:
- Just like I evaluate management when finding a new job (in my most recent job hunt I quite explicitly asked my interviewers what they thought about their management and how they thought it differed from other places they've worked, and hearing poor answers from one famous company was a reason I turned them down), I can evaluate the union when finding a new job. If I don't think the union will force management to deal with brilliant assholes, or properly equip people for success who have aptitude but the wrong background, or acknowledge that poor management is the reason certain of my colleagues are underperforming, I won't join the company.
- I have much more of a democratic voice in my union's priorities than my management's priorities.
- Management often prioritizes their own needs as individual employees, and is willing to overlook failures or mistakes if it's in the interest of their own career paths. It's hard to crack down on people failing up into management if you yourself are a manager because you failed up.
> If I don't think the union will force management to deal with brilliant assholes, or properly equip people for success who have aptitude but the wrong background, or acknowledge that poor management is the reason certain of my colleagues are underperforming, I won't join the company.
The issue is not that the management will defends the bad employee, it's that the union will.
How can you know if the union will?
I got a friend that right now have to deal (ask re-do the work of someone else constantly) because they can't fire her because the union don't want to do anything about it. How could she have known that the union would be ready to not protect one of their member?
The same way you learn if a job has bad management when considering taking a job there - reputation, sites like Glassdoor, asking friends in the industry, etc. This problem doesn't seem unique to unions, nor does it seem that not having unions solves it. Management can still refuse to fire a bad employee in a non-unionzed shop. I've seen it countless times.
> I have much more of a democratic voice in my union's priorities than my management's priorities.
In my experience, the best ideas compete easily to change management priorities. I prefer that system over a straight democracy for changing management priorities.
"The best ideas" is a pretty unclear phrase. The ideas that make the individual lives of managers the best will win. That's usually strongly correlated with profit for the company (on purpose, using mechanisms like stock grants). Depending on how things are structured, it may or may not be correlated with long-term profit for the company. And it's very likely to be poorly correlated with long-term happiness of workers. As a worker, an idea that increases my long-term happiness is "better" than one that increases the company's profitability. But that same idea is unlikely to appear "best" from management's point of view. You can quantify the cost to the company (and thus to the personal payout of management) from giving all workers a raise of X% or an office with a door instead instead of an open-plan desk or increased PTO or whatever, and it's harder to quantify the benefit to profitability.
But in the end, the "best" ideas in the sense of the most profitable ones will still win, because companies with truly bad ideas from populism (e.g., "empty the company's cash reserves into end-of-year bonuses") will just not survive. Unions don't change the fact that companies themselves participate in a market.
And if you prefer that system, you and others who agree with you can absolutely participate in the market too and compete as part of your own business. You can choose not to join unionized companies. But I don't prefer that system. That's all.
>In my experience, the best ideas compete easily to change management priorities.
I don't want to deny you your experiences, but this has not been mine. Not by a long-shot. Tons of time and effort get spent at my company trying to work around the idiosyncrasies of our capricious and out of touch management. And we're in a fast growing industry and our management seems to become more out-of-touch about the state of the technology and the market every year.
Their cognitive biases, pickled in their experiences from 8-10 years ago when they were last in touch with the real work, have a much bigger role in their priorities than any rational or dispassionate evaluation of what the "best ideas" are. The one saving grace they have is hiring subordinates who are good at manipulating them for their own benefit. Very VERY few tech companies can find that many people with the necessary soft skills to do it.
> I've had good management and bad management. There are good unions and bad unions.
One downside of this is it sounds like we get to roll the "good bureaucracy / bad bureaucracy" dice twice instead of once, if either roll comes up "bad" we're in trouble.
I don't think that's quite right: the idea is that a good union can insulate you from bad management. So you're using a different dice roll, but it's just one roll. (It is true that things are strictly worse under good management + a bad union than under good management + no union.)
Also, you usually have more influence in what your union does than what your management does. If I have to pick one of two dice to roll, I'll pick the one that's weighted in my favor, even if it sometimes comes up 1.
- Just like I evaluate management when finding a new job (in my most recent job hunt I quite explicitly asked my interviewers what they thought about their management and how they thought it differed from other places they've worked, and hearing poor answers from one famous company was a reason I turned them down), I can evaluate the union when finding a new job. If I don't think the union will force management to deal with brilliant assholes, or properly equip people for success who have aptitude but the wrong background, or acknowledge that poor management is the reason certain of my colleagues are underperforming, I won't join the company.
- I have much more of a democratic voice in my union's priorities than my management's priorities.
- Management often prioritizes their own needs as individual employees, and is willing to overlook failures or mistakes if it's in the interest of their own career paths. It's hard to crack down on people failing up into management if you yourself are a manager because you failed up.