Bank forced to rehire workers after lying about chatbot productivity, union says

Weird take, considering that according to the text of the article the "innovation" didn't bring any productivity gains.

The chatbots did bring productivity gains, the union argued that it wasn't significant enough for them to lay off people. I'm not as familiar with Australian union laws, but companies shouldn't be afraid to innovate like this. Wages don't go up through government force, they go up through innovation and increased efficiency

I grew up in the rust belt. I've never heard of anyone leaving to "escape unions" but rather there just being not many jobs, lots of historic pollution to deal with, and a poor future economic outlook.

Why were unions specifically to blame for your family leaving?

I don't think this was "forced" as in "a court told them to rehire them", as it seems the bank agreed to rehire them before the case got to the tribunal. I think this was "forced" as in "their innovations didn't work out as well as they had hoped, so they needed to hire people experienced in the job to make up for the people they had fired, and the only people that matched the description were the people they had fired"

> never heard of anyone leaving to "escape unions" but rather there just being not many jobs

Union versus non-union is a quality versus quantity problem. Unions restrict the labour pool to increase wages. When that protects specialisation, it increases productivity. When it artificially constrains the labour pool, it decreases it.

A unionised job market showing unemployment (or underemployment) is usually an indication of the latter.

"Wages don't go up through government force, they go up through innovation and increased efficiency" - that might seems obvious to you but it seems to be both ahistorical and a misrepresentation of what has happened here. Unions aren't government force.

> but rather there just being not many jobs, lots of historic pollution to deal with, and a poor future economic outlook

I have never seen someone leave due to pollution, other than just wanting to leave the city.

The poor economic outlook and lack of jobs is directly due to the unions. If there weren't unions, Detroit and Flint would still be the capital of the auto industry, and Erie PA would still be a major locamotive hub. Instead everyone was forced out because of the unions.

I lived in Erie and Cleveland for a while. There are non-union shops all around and the locomotive business in Erie was owned by a declining company (GE) that divested it in a fire sale along with many other parts of their business due to too much reliance on financial engineering and not real engineering.

Every comment you've made is snarky. Don't you have something better to do?

Most people who grew up around unions don't like them, hence why union enrollment in the US has gone from ~35% of the working population to less than 10%.

Locomotives have generally been on the rise for the past few decades, and have generally been profitable. Erie also had a strong union presence in terms of locomotive production, particularly with the UE. What happened in Erie was protesters in one shop would walk over to the nearby building to protest and stop more work, so they had to move facilities away from each other to reduce the union impact. Engine production was moved to Grove city, and (now wabtec) built their new, larger facility in Forth Worth, where many of the suppliers moved.

Not only is US freight traffic up, but freight traffic around the world went up as nations industrialized and raw material demands went up in places like Australia. Erie should have had its second coming, but instead everyone has seen what the UE did to the industry and workers don't want to work in union shops, and so the cities population has almost halved since its peak.

I'm not as familiar with Cleveland so I can't really speak on it.

Hard disagree. Labor should definitely be protected against exploitation from corporations.