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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2674 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 6, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

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Why hasn’t an online secretive / semi-anonymous labor union movement developed? The biggest problem with forming a union is that your employer finds out before you have the potential to disrupt operations. But if a sufficient number of employees are organizing clandestinely online through a semi-anonymous community, then they can declare days of disruption without the risk of being fired. This would wildly increase the ability of employers to negotiate for higher wages, because for many businesses a disruption that occurs at the right time would spell ruin for their business. Low-wage employees have an easier time finding another job, whereas the employer might suffer disastrous losses if the labor activity becomes a regular occurrence. This seems like the most expedient way to increase worker’s rights and conditions in America if you’re into that kind of stuff. We could see Amazon drivers increase their wages like Dockworkers.

If your so-called-union doesn't have legal recognition, then

  • 51% of the members can't strongarm the other 49% into line, and certainly can't extort union dues from them.
  • the terms of your contract don't bind non-union workers
  • Hiring replacement workers is as simple as hiring workers

EDIT: I may have misread that. I interpreted it as "a union movement for semi-anonymous labour", like the gig economy. The biggest problem with forming a union is that workers don't want to be in a union. Any workplace that has majority support (by definition) could gather memberships, call a vote, and unionize.

If workers can discover the secret platform, so can employers; so the only real benefit is anonymity. The employer still knows people are organizing, approximately how many, and whether there are any planned Days Of Disruption.

If everyone is genuinely anonymous, you have no idea if there are a thousand workers on your side, or one very bored troll with a thousand accounts.

It's still pretty easy to punish everyone who was absent on the Days Of Disruption; you might get a few false positives, but employers don't seem inclined to mind that.

There are easy ways to structure the platform so that an employer is not aware of organizing plans. If the users have signed up under the promise that they will strike when announced, then only a small number of administrators behind the platform have to know how many employees at x company are ready to strike. When a strike is announced, the members stop working. If this occurs during an important time period for the company (like: holidays for Amazon), then the costs associated are far greater than the mere cost of hiring new workers. This would force the hand of employers to negotiate for no other reason than it is less costly to do so. This can be repeatedly infinitely, because low wage workers who are fired can work at a new company. Plausibly, employers may create a list of employees who have engaged in union activity and publicly release it, but the plausible deniability of the platform could lead them to be sued. There are ways to strengthen such a platform against trolls, like by requiring the employee to identify themselves to an administrator only.

Employers can also create a platform that keeps a list of "unreliable employees" who just so happen to have participated in 2+ strike days, and collude to never hire these people. You don't have to bother going public, and of course you would never claim that they're striking, just "unreliable", which is obviously true. Carve out a half-assed exemption process for anyone who has a legally protected absence, to give yourself an extra fig leaf.

Or just pay one of your thousands of workers $100 for their login, so you know what's going on. Or have every employee install an app on their phone, then use that app to check for the evil union app. Keeping secrets amongst thousands of people with varied levels of commitment is not a problem anyone in the world has ever solved. Management's counter-attacks only need to be secret amongst a small group of especially invested people, so it's a deeply asymmetrical challenge.

You also lose all legal protections, since you're not actually a union, you're not legally declaring a strike, and so on. Which makes retaliation vastly easier, because they don't even need to find other excuses, they can fire you directly for this. I'm honestly a bit surprised that "coordinating to destroy a business" is even legal outside of a union/strike? I'd think if my employees all conspired to try and ruin me, I'd have a decent legal position to sue them.

All objections aside, it also seems like you could easily prototype it over email or something; you only really need a dedicated platform if you want to go big. If you really believe in the idea, you just need to find a group of workers willing to try it out. I really don't think it will go well, but it's absolutely an experiment you could run if you believe differently

But you don’t need to keep it secret among thousands of people. You would sign up anonymously, convey some form of proof or likelihood of employment to a handful of die-hard administrators, and then simply don’t go to work when the administrator tells you. Only the administrator would need to know how many strikers work at z company. The financial damage caused by this couldn’t be made up by hiring new people, and if you’ve persuaded a sufficient number of the low wage employee base to do this, a corporation has no choice but to negotiate because otherwise they simply don’t have workers.

Simple economics.

Labor unions compete with compete with non-union labor.

You can compare the economic effects of most unions to something like a plague that kills only teenagers or inexperienced workers.

Any employer in that situation would try to keep their current employees, possibly pay them more, or provide other non-monetary side benefits to keep them.

But there is an obvious loser in both situations: the teenagers and inexperienced workers.

An anonymous online forum would actually allow the teenagers and inexperienced workers to anti-coordinate with the striking workers. What's a great time to walk in and get a job ... The same day half the workers are no shows.

Unions are hugely privileged under US labor law. There's no need to organize in secret, because employers aren't allowed to fire workers for trying to unionize. I believe that what you're describing would be an unprotected strike, and that employers could legally fire workers for it.

I think the workers would also be in legal trouble.

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