That option isn't always available, at least in the US. Unless you live in a right-to-work state, you may be forced to join the union as a condition of employment.
If you don't like the people you're working with, you could quit.
You could also vote no on a unionization vote, or just not join. I'm sure your loyalty will get a special consideration when the next round of arbitrary layoffs (coupled with record-breaking profits) happens.
Per AA's 10-K, in 2024 87% of American Airlines employees were represented by a union[1]. So according to that source it sounds like the people who were fired were union members that didn't pay their dues.
They could surely have paid their dues and left the union and kept their jobs (or could have never joined the union to begin with).
So looks like you're right but there's also some weird language technicality for "closed shop" where it's really a "union shop".
Per the APFA contract[1] employees are forced to join the union within 60 days of assignment as a flight attendant. This is technically considered a union shop (not a closed shop) because it doesn't require people to be union members before being hired.
Under the Taft-Hartley Act a lot of states (and in some situations, court decisions) have made this illegal[2] via right-to-work laws but airlines are covered under the Railway Labor Act (45 U.S.C. § 152)[3] which allows it (upheld by the US Supreme Court in Railway Employes' Department v. Hanson, 351 U.S. 225)[4] .
So, I was wrong and the employees had no choice but continue to be union members and pay dues or be fired because of airline-specific labor law.
I don’t know about this case specifically, but airlines frequently have different labor laws. They’ll be the exception to all sorts of unqualified statements.
Or just someone in a different phase of their career than a union typically helps out.
Unions absolutely hold back young high performers from advancing rapidly and standing out from the crowd. I was part of a few in my younger years and quickly learned they were a detriment to my earnings due to them favoring seniority and status quo over everything else.
Once you hit a certain level and stop advancing quickly the equation tends to change, and you want to be the one protected from the young whipper snappers willing to outwork you.
It’s a selfish way of thinking perhaps, but jumping from union shops to non-union tripled my wages in the time I’d have made about 40% more the first few years of entering the workforce.
Not all unions need to be structured this way - but they tend to devolve into organizations whose primary focus is protecting the old guard over everything else.
At this point of my life a union would probably be a net win for me, but only because I’d be able to enter a job at a fairly high seniority/pay level. Then vote contracts that give my cohort more benefits than those starting out.
From a game theory standpoint a union would be for the greater good at the expense of the few. If you are part of the few at any given moment of time you’d be going against your interests joining a union shop.
I’ve always thought a “guild” structure would make far more sense in the tech world.
It seems entirely reasonable to pay dues for a benefit you receive. I don’t see why that’s such a big deal. You still don’t need to be involved in organising.
It’s entirely ok for the majority of workers to democratically decide that they shouldn’t have to fight for benefits that others get for free. Unions aren’t middlemen, they’re just the majority of workers in a workplace organising themselves.
I agree this isn't a very satisfying answer, but realistically how else do you expect Presidential pardons to go? Trump has pardoned over 1000 people and Joe Biden has pardoned over 4000. Do we expect them to know the intricate details of every single case?
And I mean, wasn't the last Administration effectively Autopen? Yes, the President receives recommendations and tries to make the best judgement on those.
It feels like HN is slowly turning into reddit with the comment section becoming mostly snide remarks
Instead of just commenting about being dismayed with the state of things, how about step back and speculate as to why he did this pardon, and what the implications of it are.
I don't know the answer to either, but I surely didn't learn much from what used to be an insightful, intelligent crowd
You're being downvoted but I get where you're coming from.
The dismay is from not needing to speculate, wonder or theorize about why he did this pardon. It's a quid pro quo pardon for helping the Trump family make billions of dollars in under a year using the office of the president. The corruption is entirely flagrant and open.
Yeah, it's a forum of smart people, but none of those smarts are oriented to dealing with this kind of problem. There's a system but it's non-functional, laws but they're ignored, the tools are raw political and social power. It's going to take a while to figure out what to say and do about the slide from normal, functioning democracy into semi-theocratic banana republic.
I don't think we need to speculate much. He did the pardon because CZ bribed him with a lot of money. The implications are that Trump will keep abusing his power to keep receiving bribes.
The Globe and Mail is a very right leaning newspaper. The National Post is a far-right echo chamber rag; it's the Toronto Sun for people who can read without moving their lips. In all cases it is important to interpret editorial content in light of their well-established biases, just as it is with any other curated source of information.
That’s the point—- definitions of culture and identity can change over time. Since I’m from the US, I don’t have much more to say about lands belonging to people, but my comment about Japan is meant to highlight problems with the idea of islands being naturally “for” people.
>That was then. Now, I wouldn't dream of it. London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third. A statistic as evident as day when you walk the streets of London now.
I find using CarPlay more dangerous than my phone. At least with my phone I’m using a familiar interface and I can use at any angle. With CarPlay my panel is awkwardly positioned, the UI is confusing, and I have to pay far more attention to what I’m doing.
I’m not suggesting at all it’s ok to use your phone while driving, and is unlawful for a good reason. Yet CarPlay, a dumbed down phone bolted to your dash, is totally fine, despite being no more safe IMO
My phone is also mounted above my dash immediately to the right of my steering wheel, allowing me to always have the road in sight.
With many in-car screens, you have to look down and right. You can’t even see the road in your peripheral anymore.
I’ve driven for over 20 years and have only slammed on my breaks 3 times in my entire life and not once in the last 10 years.
I’m going to admit: I’ve done extremely bad things while driving but for 20 years, my eyes basically have never left a small window that includes the road, even if I’m fiddling with my phone or stuffing Panda Express into my face with a stupid fork.
I literally bring a phone mount with me when I rent a car on a trip.
Mazda does a good job with screen placement. It's higher up on the dash, so you can see it clearly while looking straight ahead in normal driving position. Ie you don't have to take your eyes off the road to see it. Also, instead of touch screen to navigate and select, you use a scroll wheel that is in the center console behind the gear shifter. It's within easy reach of your right hand (in left driver side cars) and again, you don't have to take your eyes off the road to use it.
One point in the "pro" column is that every CarPlay implementation supports voice control, which is safer than taking your hands off the wheel even for physical controls.
It's been a bit buggy since its release, sometimes a voice command registers but the action doesn't perform, this is usually between updates of minor or major version of iOS. However, when it works, it works pretty well. I can do about 90% with Siri and Voice Control. The other 10% is a bit annoying - it could be that there is a voice control command and I just don't know it, but usually resort to touch which is annoying.
In my experience (3 years using CarPlay in English, in a Chevy Bolt), it does work well for the kinds of things I wanted to do while driving, which were generally related to navigation, music, and podcasts.
In my experience(English as a second language) it's actualy useless and recognizes maybe 30% of what I say. In my native tongue it's even worse than that, but that's a moot point as if I try to mix and say "[in my native tongue] navigate to [in English]Queen Victoria's Hospital" it will just never work. That combination has actual 0% success rate but it's unavoidable living in the UK. As does trying to call anyone with a non-English name, trying to do say "call Jędrzej Kazimierzowski" just leads to either it dialing someone completely unrelated or just saying "Sorry, I don't recognize that".
I don't mean this in any derogatory way what so ever, but I am curious about this in general. Does being misunderstood inspire a feeling that you should improve your accent?
No, it inspires a feeling of deep hatred towards this stupid system that cannot understand simple commands that any English person would understand without any issue whatsoever.
(and I do actually genuienly blame whatever voice recognition algorithm they are using - I use the interactive voice chat feature of ChatGPT daily and it has 100% success rate, no problems understanding my English whatsoever).
I am a native English speaker who practices my spanish pronunciation using Apple Translate and Siri (I think they use separate models), no matter how hard i try, neither can understand some words with my speaking Spanish with a southern US English accent.
On a professional level, one of my specialties is designing Amazon Connect call centers, its gotten better over the years. But the NLU for English still struggles with my southern accent.
On the other hand, ChatGPT never struggles with my English or Spanish.
Not everyone likes Indian food. I think most people like familiar flavors. Western people didn't grow up eating veggie-based food so I don't know why this is surprising. People just want to eat familiar things.
You are really twisting things to make your argument sound plausible in the general case. More supply means less wages. Why focus on low paying jobs? Are you seriously suggesting that if we import every software engineer from India that wants to come here that my salary will increase? If so, that's very interesting why tech CEOs are lobbying so hard for this.
Your "more supply equals lower wages" argument is demolished by top economic research. A recent NBER study calculated that "immigration, thanks to native-immigrant complementarity and college skill content of immigrants, had a positive and significant effect between +1.7 to +2.6% on wages of less educated native workers" between 2000-2019.
The economy isn't zero-sum. As Milton Friedman noted, "most economic fallacies derive from the tendency to assume that there is a fixed pie, that one party can gain only at the expense of another." Immigrants create demand for housing, food, education, entertainment, and specialized services that natives often provide.
Historical evidence consistently disproves the fallacy: When women entered the workforce, it didn't cause massive job losses among men. When segregation was abolished, Black workers didn't cause mass unemployment among whites. The vast majority of Americans descend from immigrants who contributed to economic growth.
Research on H-1B visas shows that firms that get immigrant labor end up "hiring more tech workers and paying them more, because they become more efficient and sometimes scale up." In fact, studies show each H-1B worker creates approximately 1.83 jobs for native-born Americans.
The UK's Migration Advisory Committee, after reviewing studies from 2003-2018, concluded that "immigration had little or no impact on average employment or unemployment of existing workers" and "little impact on average wages."
The overwhelming consensus among economists is that immigration grows the economic pie rather than merely redistributing slices. That's why America's most immigrant-rich cities consistently have the highest wages, not the lowest.
PLEASE, I am begging you. Spend 15 minutes reading actual economic research before posting confidently incorrect Econ 101 oversimplifications. The "immigrants take our jobs" fallacy has been debunked by virtually every reputable economic study for the past 30 years. This isn't some fringe academic view. It's the overwhelming consensus of actual economists who study this for a living. Your intuition about "more workers = lower wages" seems logical but falls apart when tested against actual economic data. The real world is more complex than a supply-and-demand graph from an introductory textbook.
Nowhere in the economic research does it explain what you are so confidently stating, that wages are, somehow, the only thing in all of economics where positive supply shocks do not matter. The arguments that tend to be made are that, on a long enough time horizon, mean wages increase because overall economic output goes up, and mean economic output goes up because there is a higher supply of available labor.
You're fundamentally misunderstanding both the economic research and my argument. No one is claiming wages are "the only thing in economics where positive supply shocks don't matter."
The research shows that labor markets aren't simple supply-demand curves because of complementary productivity effects and gains from specialization, selection effects, and, of course, demand generated by the immigrants. If you have general labor size increase, in general equilibrium with a responsive central bank interest rates will lower to keep employment tight.
This isn't about "long enough time horizons" - studies find positive or neutral effects in the short and medium term too. The fundamental issue is that your model assumes a fixed economic pie that immigrants simply divide into smaller slices, when in reality immigrants help grow the pie overall.
Okay. Which other things don't see effects from positive supply shocks? You're just restating my premise about time horizons. The pie grows, with time, if a bunch of other things happen in the right order. Wages haven't grown in two decades in the UK, your original example. So, how are you defining short and medium term? Three decades?
man idk, maybe it was the long conservative rule after the crash? Maybe it was the long austerity? Maybe it was the huge mass of natives that voted to crash out of an agreement with a bloc that handles over 80% of their trade?
More seriously...
- for US: The newest NBER IV estimates put the wage effect of all 2000-19 US immigration at +2 % for non-college natives. Show me a UK study of similar vintage that finds anything near –2 %.
- for UK: UK real wages tracked productivity one-for-one after 2008; BoE and NIESR pin that on capital deepening, Brexit and austerity. Not on immigration, which the MAC finds moved wages by _at most_ –1% (aggregate, not yearly!) and the final report was ~0.1%, basically a null finding.
- We've already been through lump of labor, so I don't know why you've been banging on equilibrium.
And to finally address your time horizons: Short-run? Mariel-style shocks still show null effects. Medium-run? 2009-20 UK data flips positive. Long-run? Productivity wins. Pick your horizon. Immigration is at worst a rounding error next to TFP, which is positively associated with migration.
Happy to dive deeper, but at this point the burden of proof is on anyone claiming large negative wage effects. The best evidence, across multiple methods and countries, just isn’t there.
Got a link to that NBER study? It's not that I don't believe you or think you're making it up, but I would like to understand what instrumental variable they were using to make the claim that an increase of low skilled immigration makes wages for non-college educated natives go up.
I skimmed this and read a few sections closely. Most econometric papers spend too much time rambling on about stuff that most people who actually seek out and read these things already know. Anyway, +2.6% in wages for non-college educated natives, over 20 years, is not a ringing endorsement. I honestly doubt anyone would notice this, and over two decades that's just noise, frankly. If I'm understanding one of the central claims correctly, it's not that low skilled immigrants "took" jobs from natives, it's that natives ended up working more, and as a result their earning power increased. That's ... also not a ringing endorsement. Sure, you didn't get fired in favor of an immigrant, but you had to take a second shift to stay in the game. Wow what a benefit.
I'm also going to quibble a bit with how they constructed this Instrumental Variable. The way it's constructed, the higher the turnover (for lack of a better term) from native to foreign, the better the predictor it is (because in their theory, it's exogenous to wages at the local level). Does anyone really believe this? Immigrants respond to incentives just like anyone else. They're not choosing to immigrate to Sac City, Iowa, or any other low-COL/low-wage town, for a reason. It also doesn't answer my original question, which was central to my initial claim: why? The "why" is going to answer a lot of other layered questions about hostility to ever-increasing immigration. Are firms moving in that exploit low-wage immigrants, generating other adjacent economic activity? Probably! Not controlled for or referenced at all in this, and this paper is by no means a definitive conclusion that high low-skill immigration is good (even on a two decade timeline, which even typing that is just absurd).
The +2.6% is hourly pay, not extra hours; it’s the difference between flat wages and one more year of raises. Every credible quasi-experiment, from Denmark’s refugee lottery to U.S. enforcement crackdowns, confirms that more immigrants leave natives at least as well paid, often better off, because firms invest, prices fall and natives climb the job ladder. Shift-share IVs have been combed over by three separate methodological papers and pass; drop them and refugee lotteries STILL give you the same answer. UK stagnation is a productivity story (zoning, anyone?), not an immigration one. So unless you have a better identification strategy that overturns all of these results, the weight of the evidence says immigration grows the pie, and natives get a slice (if you can't believe any synergy than at least just bearing a smaller share of defense spending).
I'm also going to flip it around for a second. As I said with the Mariel boatlift study, where a 7% increase in the labor force yielded more or less no impacts on hyperlocal labor force, even considering (possible? I know little havana right now is mostly spanish but idk what it was back then) language and skills barriers. How do you explain that? That is the most short term of local supply shocks with basically no short term employment or wage impact. Thirty-five years of re-checks (Card 1990 → Borjas 2015 → Clemens-Hunt 2019 → Peri-Yasenov 2019 → Lewis et al.) still show more or less zero effect on native wages or jobs (once you fix compositional glitches in Borjas’s sample). If a shock that extreme can’t push wages down, the `more workers = lower pay` story is busted.
Yeah I got that part, maybe you're misreading. You seem to be interested in advertising that you've read all this stuff, which is great, a lot of people have. But you aren't really addressing the problem statement, so I'll state it clearly: no one gives a shit about a 2.6% hourly wage increase over 20 years. They don't care because immigration comes with a bunch of other externalities, that are very near term, that academics deliberately remove from their models. "Natives get a slice ... of 1.7-2.6% ... over the course of 20 years" is not a convincing argument, which is why most of the quantitative debate about immigration is largely academic. If the benefits were so obvious we wouldn't need a team of nerds to tell us that, well, actually your hourly wages do go up ... eventually. Insofar as you care about some sort of policy outcome here, you are going to have to figure out a different way to frame this.
I'm not familiar with zoning laws in the UK to comment, so, sure. Maybe a byzantine zoning bureaucracy is the problem there, that does ring distinctly "British" to me.
I haven't read the Mariel study, and honestly I don't really have any interest in it because the underlying story is that Cubans just replicated their own economic structures in a hyper-contained locality, with significant ethnic solidarity given a shared history of hardship. Again, there's qualitative aspects to this that economists - especially the econometricaly inclined - struggle with.
> Cubans just replicated their own economic structures in a hyper-contained locality, with significant ethnic solidarity given a shared history of hardship
Damn if only there was a way to study assimilation. Wait, there is, we have, and if you look a few replies up you'll see that its basically a complete success with sufficient NGO support that vastly boosts social participation.
> If the benefits were so obvious we wouldn't need a team of nerds to tell us that, well, actually your hourly wages do go up ... eventually.
This kind of thinking leads to Trump. Unironically. Handwaving about "if it were real I'd know of it" is what leads to terrible economic policy.
Well, if it were real people wouldn’t have voted for Trump. What you’ve presented is, like I keep saying, the most unconvincing tidbit of minor benefits. You seem totally uninterested in addressing the problem, that no one cares about this study and what it says because it’s such a tiny effect on the margins, utterly impossible to translate into daily life.
I’ll keep making whatever claims I want, and you can keep gatekeeping (or attempting to) as much as you like (now I really won’t read the Mariel study, nevermind that you are conditioning success on Uncle Sam handing over money to make it work). The force with which state something as plainly obvious only appears as such inside the spreadsheets, so enjoy them.
spite driven willful ignorance is something that I didn't expect to find when starting this conversation.
I'm mostly looking for you to retract your claim about how short-run supply shocks must obviously show up in wages and employment.
EDIT: also nowhere does it require fiscal outlays for assimilation, the single biggest thing is expedited provision of work permits, which is obviously fiscally positive.
Strawman. You're talking about wages and jobs in aggregate which wasn't my argument at all. Nothing you said addresses how my salary is affected in the industry the person is joining.
Sure, in total, other jobs may be created and growth is increased -- it's essentially a tautology.
I don't know why you think you're entitled to any particular job due to government policy, that seems like a really poor and inefficient way to run an economy.
This is how I think about unlimited data plans haha. I think a rate limit is easier to stomach (e.g., X requests per hour where they bank up to one hour so you can burst up to 2X for especially crazy hours or something).
I noticed if I need something hard to find I have to do a dozen+ different queries (and sometimes not find anything because it doesn't exist). Both with Kagi and Google the result is the same but with Kagi I also rack up a bunch per one attempt to find something. And if I need something easy to find but lazy both Google and Kagi reliably show the first correct result.
So it's either unlimited or nothing. But since I know Google's search operators well I don't have trouble finding things if they exist so $10 per month is hard to justify. Plus, you're anonymous with Google but you're not anonymous with Kagi since you pay them.
But Kagi can be good for tech illiterate relative you want to shield from sus sites.
> Plus, you're anonymous with Google but you're not anonymous with Kagi since you pay them.
The idea that you're anonymous with Google is laughable. The amount of data they aggregate is well known. Their entire business model is to know who you are.
reply