Ask HN: Would you support a unionization effort at your company?
No, and I&#x27;d advise people not too.  Unions had a purpose, and sadly still do in some isolated instances, but tech (professional work in general) is not one of them.  I say sadly because businesses should have matured to the point by now to make unions unnecessary, and employees should have evolved further to see the problem.  But some business&#x2F;industries have a lot of bad actors and the union does fill part of a need, but it isn&#x27;t what employees think it is.<p>I have dealt with unions as a leader, I have dealt with a union trying to unionize employees that worked in my teams and I have dealt with union based employees in a plant and non-unionized employees in a different plant within the same company.  Guess who got better benefits and pay?  Wasn&#x27;t the union employees, too much money had to go to pay the union dues, legal fees and unnecessarily inflated benefits, so we would fight every penny and ask on that side.  And yes some states in the U.S. have rules around union employees can&#x27;t be paid less than non-union doing similar jobs, but trust me large corporations know how to work those rules properly.<p>While I have lots of opinions based on my experiences, in the end what I learned is that unions are honestly not there for the employee, they are there to raise employee wages&#x2F;benefits so that the union can collect more in fees (generally a percentage of total compensation, so salary + benefits).  The sad fact is they honestly don&#x27;t care about you, your family or making it better, they get paid more by making the business pay more wages whether the market and work demand it or not.<p>There was a good reason unions existed in the past, and I am a fan for their reasoning at the time, not today.  They are now nothing more than a big business putting their hands in your pocket to take money from you.   By the way, did you know in many states, if your fellow employees unionize but you opt out that you can still be forced to pay union dues?  Yea, this has been litigated in the recent past and some states changed that law, but just beware of what you ask for or support.