On Chess and Labor Unions
So this chess thing I'm in is called the "People's Chess Championship." Anything that takes place in Berkeley and has the adjective "People's" probably has some hardcore Lefty element to it. But it turns out the TD of this event is in his 70's. Has a hearing aid and so on. Which makes me wonder how political he is, if at all.
With a few exceptions, the better a given chessplaying person is, the less likely that person is to say much about politics. Chessfolk can have weirdly degenerate ideas on politics but tend to keep their mouths shut. The two biggest counterexamples happen to be the world's two most famous chessplayers.
Garry Kasparov is responsible to an astonishing degree for the fall of the Soviet Union. I'm exaggerating but only a little. He came from the Soviet Union and won the World Championship repeatedly in the 1980s, but he despised the Soviet powers-that-be and the feeling was mutual. So he was highly... outspoken. The fall of Communism turned out to his huge political and financial advantage. Nowadays he's still quite outspoken but a lot of it is to stroke his ego or his wallet. All the same, people do some amazingly useful things even when they're in it for ego or money.
Bobby Fischer by contrast is just a nutcase. A sad, sad story. He went off the deep end a long time ago. Nobody should listen to him anymore. He's in exile now,
persona non grata from the U.S. because he helped out Milosevic or something. He's also violently anti-Semitic. He's a creep. Like I said it's sad.
Anyway, I was trying to figure out what this guy was into, whether he just used the name "People's" to trade on that which makes Berkelyites all hot and bothered. As near as I can figure (just pure speculation or imagination), he's plausibly an oldtime Union guy.
I guess there are a lot of those around, and historically it makes perfect sense. The problem is that (with apologies to anyone who's strongly committed to them) labor unions
run against everything I believe about how the world works.
Let's start with collective bargaining. The idea, I guess, is that everyone who does a similar job will get their negotiations taken care of all at once and all get paid the same and all get the best possible deal. The problem here is that outside of the extremes of particular assembly lines,
no two workers are alike. We all have subtly different talents, not to mention subtly different work ethics. We all contribute to a given enterprise's bottom line to subtly different extents.
My conceit is that in a given situation I'll be marginally more clever than other people I'm working with and perhaps also marginally more singlemindedly focused on the work itself. So a company will be more profitable (in
most cases) if I'm doing the job they want me to do than if someone else is doing that job. I'm cocky enough to believe that my results will speak for themself. Or
maybe I can do some inconspicuous lobbying but the point is that I believe I can convince you that I'm more valuable than someone else you might have hired. With that in mind,
I want to be paid accordingly.
Oh, so you think you're hot shit, don't you? Well, um... guess so, yeah. Actually, much like both George W. Bush and Uriah Heep, I think of myself as an 'Umble man, false modesty aside.
Another facet to collective bargaining is the set of rules and regulations that both sides have to live with. The rigidity of all this makes my spine stiffen, my shoulders tense, and involuntarily hisses escape clenched teeth. Maybe it's just me but in a perfect world everybody can get a lot further if they work together to figure out what they want, with a whole bunch of give-and-take going in both directions. This seems to be exactly how Vectiv's product team operated and it helps explain why my relationship with them was absolutely fantastic. Union rules often get in the way of this.
Then there's the whole idea of "both sides." I'm very much
not an adversarial kind of guy. I suppose in a lot of situations the side that's willing to take the Us against Them mold will enjoy some successes. But there will be a lot of dead-weight loss, a lot of positive-sum situations turned into zero-sum, or worse yet
zero-sum situations turned into negative-sum.
Finally, in my inherent distrust of conventional wisdom and weakness for the underdog, I think
"scabs" get a raw deal. The name "scab" tells you everything, I suppose. The problem is, of course, that these are people just like anyone else, who want to provide for their families too. Solidarity is nice in principle but it never put food on the table. Yes, crossing a picket line is a often a weasely thing to do. But at some point you have to just let go. I know there are people out there who still remember which pro athletes were "scabs" in various strike seasons. This bothers me, and it oddly enough makes me
root for the
Rick Reed's and the... well I can only think of Reed but there are definitely others.
Oh yeah, and there's the whole
Right to Work thing. This was a big issue in Oklahoma in the mid-1980s. To my oversimplistic mind, especially growing up, this seemed like a cut-and-dried issue of
freedom of association. So the second Letter to the Editor I ever wrote (both were published by either the
Tulsa World or the now-defunct
Tulsa Tribune) was in favor of Right to Work laws. The first, for what it's worth, was in support of the "freedom fighters" (Contras) in Nicaragua.
In any case, various disclaimers...
Aren't you a Harvard boy? Um, yeah. And I freely admit that this gets me certain advantages. Vectiv's CEO went to Harvard, as did one of the executives I interviewed with last week. My parents (dirt poor as of the early 1970s) worked very very hard so that they could send one kid to Harvard and another to the University of Chicago. They wanted their kids to have the good life, and I suppose also their grandkids and so on. While I am indeed lucky to have parents like that (a lefty demagogue would say I "won life's lottery" or whatnot), I resent the idea that someone else can come along and tell my parents that
even though they worked so hard, they can't provide that kind of life for their descendants after all.
How are labor unions any worse than the corporate ladder? Really not
that much worse. There are a lot of corporate cultures I resent and will do my best to avoid, especially the big companies that have Pointy-Haired Bosses and promotions based on who's willing to suck up the most. Last time I checked, though, no corporate culture had
compulsory dues, especially not compulsory dues that would later (and illegally!) fund political campaigns of even candidates that particular rank-and-file members might disagree with.
Would you ever cross a picket line? It's unclear. I'm going to try my damnedest never to join a labor union in the first place. In the world of software development, with people who think basically the way I do about individualism and cocky hotshitness, I doubt I'll ever be unionized. Maybe I'd cross a picket line at a supermarket or something. Then again, I'm also the person who sometimes goes out of his way to buy things that other people are boycotting, in that case just to be a dick.
Aren't you glad you don't have to work in a sweatshop? Hell yeah, who wouldn't be? Presumably labor unions deserve a lot of credit for this, including whatever role they played in getting relevant regulations passed. But I strongly suspect that a century's worth of ever-growing prosperity has just as much to do with it. Also, by the time any given piece of regulation was passed, the thing that it banned was already really really unpopular anyway. This would be a good topic for historical revisionism but this space can't even come close to treating it fairly. In any case,
today's union's have (IMHO) outlived their usefulness and become irrelevant. To me. Perhaps in some industries they're highly relevant, perhaps they're the good guys in those industries. Thank God I'm not in any of those industries.
