particularly this part: > Early on in my own career in the industry, I felt guilty about making a “good” salary. Why did I deserve to make more money than a teacher or a nurse? Of course, I don’t — they deserve a lot more too. But if I was making less it would go straight into the pockets of investors, not other workers. Tech workers’ labor has made six of the world’s ten richest people, and today computing and the internet are an integral part of every industry. Although some workers are highly paid, the differential between investor profits and employee salary is as stark as in any other industry, because workers are not organized.
it's true that tech workers frequently make good money and we should be grateful for that, but when our industry is producing oligarchs like Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, it means that they are profiting from the things that tech workers produce. It's how inequality is increased. It's no coincidence that the rise of the tech economy has coincided with American inequality rising sharply.
My tech salary, adjusted for inflation, is almost exactly what my RN mother was making when she was my age.
Maybe our salaries aren't that extraordinary, they're just the only ones that have kept up with inflation.
Don't feel guilty about a tech salary, feel angry others been left behind.
That really puts things into perspective for me.
You can do extremely well with just a Bachelor’s in CS. Professions like nursing, medicine, law, even business have had their earning potential sapped by larger and larger costs of education. And degrees past Bachelor’s are less well supported by financial aid schemes.
Assigned moral worth or whatever "deserve" is trying to get at has nothing to do with economics.
This has to be said because collective action necessarily requires convincing a lot of people to do it. But either way this language avoids the claim of right and wrong and simply focuses on the fact that workers today get a bad deal due to poor bargaining power.
It’s also not just about markets. The federal government places severe restrictions on what organized labor can do to advocate for itself: Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 Aka “Taft-Hartley Act” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft–Hartley_Act
I'm 100% ignorant of the history of labor and of all philosophical dialectic around it, but I would love to form an opinion on this. Would someone mind steel manning both sides of that argument?
E.g. I have questions like, if I'm the founder of a company and I sell it 10 years later and make most of the upside, did I exploit my employees because they didn't make as much as I did in the end?
Traditional labor theory can make arguments for both, if you put in most of the work, then you deserve most of the benefits. However the case for equal pay is also solid, especially if the fruits of labor are abundant. How much does 5 million give you that 1 million doesn’t, and why shouldn’t you settle for 1 million if it means everyone would get more?
But from a leftist perspective there is a fault in the question (but it is still a good question). Namely that you sell the business. In an ideal left world, you wouldn’t do that. The business belongs to the workers. If the workers can all form a consensus that it is time to leave the business and sell it to another set of workers—those that leave will be bought out basically—then this is a valid scenario. However if under a new leadership, some workers are receiving more benefits then others, then that is exploitation. I would say actually that the new leadership is exploiting their previous workforce by spending the money the workers created by buying a new business without their consent.
So in short, you as the founder of the business that was bought, are enabling exploitation by selling it to a larger organization (unless you sell it to a worker owned and operated business).
Labor unions don't challenge the core structure of capitalism; even when they're working, they mostly serve to give a slightly bigger piece of the pie to workers. And in practice, they are hijacked by a certain bureaucratic caste that mostly optimizes for stability and self perpetuation. They become integrated with state sponsorship, which will never allow for substantive change. For instance, in the USA the general strike was a powerful tool in the arsenal of workers' power and drove substantial wage gains, but disrupted capital too much and as such is banned by the NLRB. Since unions' scope is limited to accounting, law, and mediation, they become mostly administrative organizations staffed increasingly by members of the professional services class. These people can never provide leadership that primarily serves the working class, as their economic interests diverge and they can't do anything that would threaten their social good standing.
Argument against:
An economy dominated by worker co-ops is just wishful thinking. We have no idea how to get from point A to B, and no idea if it would even work. The limited evidence we have for that kind of economic structure comes from post WW2 Yugoslavia and suggests it wouldn't ("they just didn't do it right!" invites the question of how we do do it right). Conventional unions do shift some of the capital pie to workers, and we shouldn't let a very hypothetical best be the enemy of the concrete good. And even if worker co-ops are the ideal, any path that gets us there requires more worker power, so stronger unions would be a good first step to getting us to that point.
I think your question is a bit too focused on the individual and not the system. I think it's actually difficult for founders to share the upside "equitably", whatever that means. Like, are there any examples of it actually happening? I suspect that the acquiring company frequently dictates terms that won't allow you to make every employee a millionaire because then what incentive do they have to work anymore. I think once you get to the multi billion dollar level of wealth it's difficult to get objective advice - many of the people surrounding you are just trying to please you to continue getting their slice of the vast wealth that you control. So just as a human it's hard to navigate that I think (this is me being sympathetic to billionaires, which I'm generally not).
The much easier answer to me is just much higher taxes on wealth. Capitalism is not a system built to share resources equitably, but inequality can be tamed through taxes. If you as a founder see most of the upside, fine, but a lot of it will get redistributed to society through taxes, and theoretically your workers benefit from that. It also means it's not up to the whims of the individual people or companies involved in something like an acquisition to try to make it equitable.
(another way inequality in capitalism can be tamed is through unions, but I don't know if there are any examples of unions being involved in something like an acquisition or IPO in tech)
Suppose you built a successful small company but, suddenly, every employee quit at once. Could your business carry on the next day? Could it survive until you hired and trained replacements?
If the answer is "no" then you have made the case that employees both deserve to share in the business's success and will probably be incentivised by co-owning the company.
Does the janitor deserve as much of the profits as the CTO? Well, what premium do you put on your other employees not getting sick, or injuring themselves?
(Wasn't there a case where a Google chef made a fortune from stocks? Much to the chagrin of some?)
The opposite argument is that those who risk capital are the only ones who deserve the reward. Without investment, a company can't launch or grow. Workers are an operational cost - they are paid for labour and no more deserving of reward than the electricity company. Both provide a service but neither takes a risk.
prices are largely based on supply and demand, not some vague notion of "deserve"
Then we'd better unionize before AI starts doing all the easy stuff
The workers that built the foundations of these companies received stock options or RSUs over a decade ago and reached FATFIRE territory as well. Had they unionized, the companies they worked for wouldn't be able to reinvest as much money into growth, which would be compounded by a lack of external investors. In that case, they would lose to an unionized competitor.
How about the Media moguls? A pretty good argument can be made that media oligarchs produce less value, but they dominate financial and political circles.
The comment about "used to feel bad about making a lot of money" hits home for me, when I compare my wages to other family members who're struggling. Thanks for the perspective, it helps open me up a bit more about this.
Great information in the link, too - helps to consider whether and how a Union might be attractive, under various workplace circumstances.
What are your thoughts?
You should ask your clients or employers.
Even if inequality is rising, so is wealth overall. That’s what Marx misestimated, although it wasn’t his most grievous error.
Poor people in the United States are far richer than rich people of 150 years ago.
I am personally willing to accept the he existence of some billionaires if that’s the price we pay for all this wonderful ness.
There is no material improvement in wealth over the past 20 years, but inequality has grown.
Wealth is produced by innovation, and greater concentratuon of wealth will lead to less innovation.
On the other, high inequality is socially unstable because that is not generally the case.
To be very specific, where he fell short was predicting a secular decline in the rate of profit. This wasn't a crazy error--most early economists also believed it--but it was very wrong, and his analysis of the failure of capitalism rests on that false premise.
The more competition recovered in Japan and elsewhere, the less bargaining power and surplus could be captured by Unions. The Union-driven higher costs of manufacturing also drove outsourcing, off-shoring, and did not lead to higher quality output, (if Unions were producing higher quality that would have kept Japanese-manufactured cars from dominating US car sales shortly after).
Even further, exorbitant labor costs make it worthwhile for manufacturers to do capital investments in automation, and we are seeing the output of that.
The rise in middle class should probably be attributed to investments - in equities, bonds, house purchases. Growing up in Eastern Europe, where only housing investment was an option, and unions were abundant, the middle class that sprouted came from those who invested in property and business. Labor union power and wealth was too politically and corruption influenced to be a sustainable source of growth for the country.
As money interests have become more politically powerful, it’s harder and harder for employees to organize. You can get fired at Walmart if 4 people are caught talking to each other.
It’s easy to rag on unions, but usually that’s a surface complaint ignoring the factors causing it. Even globalization is an example. There’s nothing etched in stone that says we need to have child labor mining in Africa for rare earth minerals to make iPhones.
Totally this.
We can't pretend that the likes of Amazon et al haven't been repeatedly caught being openly hostile and extremely agressive towards any semblance of a labour rights organization within their workforce, with union busting strategies being discussed, planned, and executed at the VP level. They went as far as executing smear campaigns in the media targeting labour representatives and activists.
No one can claim that unions are in decline due to some unavoidable law of nature when huge multinationals once led by the richest man in the world invest so much time and effort and money at the VP level to sabotage them.
This is a concern troll. If you really cared about child labor abroad, you would unequivocally support globalization as parents don't want their kids to be slaves and more jobs in these countries gives parents more options. Child labor and slavery is caused by a lack of oversight more than anything else, and unions in the US won't help that.
This is an explicit policy choice by the ruling class, and has proven awfully convenient for the owning class.
Of course there is not one single factor determining the economic, technical and social development of countries over decades of time.
But the relationship between unions, the labor movement, and social democratic policies is obvious.
Those in turn have had a large impact on equality and standard of living.
The economy benefits from having a larger base of well off consumers, and a well educated, healthy, non-striking labor force. It's a self reinforcing positive spriral.
I'm going to stop you right there because that shows you're quite literally making this up based on feelings or beliefs. You're totally misrepresenting the history of labor unions. Labor unions were on the rise all throughout the 1800s and early 1900s.
https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0113/the-history...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_Sta...
No there isn't. You just didn't read any of the links in the article that it used for support, IE https://www.epi.org/blog/union-decline-rising-inequality-cha...
> The Union-driven higher costs of manufacturing also drove outsourcing, off-shoring, and did not lead to higher quality output, (if Unions were producing higher quality that would have kept Japanese-manufactured cars from dominating US car sales shortly after).
You can't have it both ways in your argument. You set up an initial statement about high Union costs driving outsourcing, and then immediately drop that point as you pivoted to an argument about quality being the driver.
Gousing prices are the cause of higher cause of manufacturing. I am not sure how noone is talking that a worker in the west cannot compete eith a worker in a developing country when his rent is 10x higher. Then peolle have the guts to blame unions.
The "middle class" is a myth and is a propaganda tool for creating dissent. There are really only two classes:
1. Capital-owners. Think Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, etc; and
2. Workers. This is anyone who trades their labor for an income. This covers everyone from the janitor to LeBron James.
The idea of the "middle class" is to create a division between them and the "lower class". The "middle class" often look down on the "lower class" and lump those who might rely on welfare, etc. The "lower class" will be blamed for many of society's ills.
The truth is there is no division. What you think of as the "middle class" and "lower class" are exactly the same and have way more in common than to the Musks, Bezos's and Buffett's of the world.
Billionaires have class solidarity. The dire situation of stagnant real wages and skyrocketing cost of living is largely a result of workers not having class solidarity.
I am far from alone. And the existence of people like me kind of blows up your neat theory.
Solidarność.
No, there isn't. The causation is self-evident, and also unsurprising since it's the whole point of unions.
It was a moment in history that will not repeated in any of our lifetimes. Anything else against this backdrop is basically a rounding error.
I was alive during the drawdown of US industrial capacity and my entire family was blue collar mostly union workers. In my teens and 20's I worked such jobs. This narrative still rings largely true to me. The amount of outright waste and fraud in these industries at the labor level was astronomical. We were begging to be outcompeted. Combined with managerial incompetence we were doomed.
Here is a list of reasons for not wanting a union[1]:
- I want my underperforming colleagues to be fired quickly. It's unfair and annoying that laggards are protected and free riding off their colleagues' (my) effort, and it leads to ineffective orgs.
- I don't want seniority or rank to be rewarded. It's unfair to young people (me) who are more competent and ambitious, and it leads to ineffective orgs.
- I want to negotiate individually because I believe I will make more money as an outperformer. I don't want a centralized handicapper to blunt my compensation.
- I don't like that unions are rent seeking in nature.
- I don't like that unions often are exploited by organized crime.
- I don't like that unions interfere in the broader political process and democracy via activism and political pressure (e.g look at the fact that the new EV subsidies will be going to everyone except Tesla, it's a perversion).
- I think people should be free to organize, but I don't like that the state grants special asymmetric powers to unions.
- I don't like especially public sector unions that I believe are doing significant damage to society broadly. For example police unions that shielded Chauvin after a large number of complaints.
-in most cases, the employer is able to fire with cause. The union keeps the employer from using layoffs as a weapon.
- pay scales reward loyalty and keeps the workplace stable.
- without the union, you have almost no bargaining power. The union usually gets a better rate for everyone than any one person could have negotiated. This is in fact the point of collective bargaining. Even the presence of a union job site can lift wages across industries. I see this in Oshawa, where the CAW jobs making car bits helps waitresses and sales associates draw higher wages.
-the employer is rent-seeking on their capital. The union balances this.
-unions are not criminal organizations. The teamsters have done some things in the past. If we didn't have so much union busting, there would be more unions competing for workplaces, and this would drive bad unions out of business.
-unions are political, and need legal protections for workers. Tesla will eventually have to deal with a union or treat their workers better than the UAW.
-I don't like that the state grants asymmetric privileges to the employer class, like never prosecuting white collar crimes, and not clawing back exec severances during bankruptcy, and giving them a lower tax rate than their employees.
-there are many things wrong with policing in the us, but all could be fixed with fedral legislation. The unions are aligned with their membership, and doing great work. The wider outcomes are horrible, but that's a good union doing good work.
Something I don't like whenever these discussions come up is the condescending tone, from white collar workers. "Don't these poor people know what's good for them????"
Working class people are capable of thinking for themselves and it's not that uncommon for people to move from a union shop to a non-union shop due to the reasons outlined above.
With your unionized coworkers that might be a possibility. With the business owners that’s a certainty. Do you feel differently about these two groups of people?
Fortunately for your ability to empathize with the plebeians in the regular world, Musk has shown that software companies are probably employing at least twice as many programmers as they need, so this job market should be turning south soon.
After ten-twenty years of being employed half the time and your salary going down with every new job I'm sure you'll be mentally broken down enough to empathize with the blue collar pro-union perspective.
If you mean the federal tax credit, it was the OLD one that stopped going to Tesla (due to the per-model caps in place; caps that any competitor could also reach after enough sales, mind you). The new credit that was signed into law this year does not exclude Tesla (instead, it excludes cars manufactured overseas).
You’ve proven the point about inequality.
America unions are structured differently from Europe and some can become as distrusted by the workers as the corporation.
Your viewpoint is common but it's based on the mental model of "Unions are good. Period end of story."
But for voters like your proverbial Jerry against unions, the mental model is more about tradeoffs like this, "the proposed union by these particular set of organizers has made some promises and wants to charge me $$$ per year to negotiate with the company. Things may turn out better -- or they may turn out worse (e.g. no job)."
As an example, the Amazon union vote in Alabama failed and many blamed Amazon propaganda. No doubt that Amazon crafted many negative messages about unions. But outsiders forget that many voters had older relatives from Alabama coal mines telling them that "the union just took our dues money and didn't do shit for us".
How can pro-union advocates counter those disillusioned union coal miners spreading negative information like that? These are the kinds of scenarios Europeans are unfamiliar with.
Because coal mining is in no way the same as Amazon’s retail business? Now, I will say, some of these folks are beyond hope. In an energy transition documentary done by one of the HGTV property brothers, they interview a coal miner dying of black lung in Appalachia, and they believe that’s the job their kids and grandkids should do versus renewables or “new tech” even when considering there are other options available. [1] Belief systems are deeply ingrained and have defense mechanisms. Persuade the open minded whenever possible, of course, but ignore those who aren’t. The effort is better spent elsewhere. As Max Planck said, “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Same deal.
I want to get up early, set big goals, work hard on them, and then see the fruits of that hard work. I take immense pride in that, and seeing the output in some sense is a big part of the payment.
Unions don’t allow for this attitude, at least none of the ones that I have ever interacted with. They’re not pro worker, they’re anti work. These people seem to believe that work is bad for workers.
So some people don’t like unions. I don’t like unions.
We have a union at my company and it’s for our creative writing and video production folks. We’re in the media space. These are some of the most effective and driven people I’ve met or had the privilege of working for.
People being lazy (or not) and wanting to do a good job (or not) is mutually exclusive of whether they are in a union (or not).
I do see why you would think this. Many media outlets and corporations spend lots of time making sure everyone thinks unions are just for lazy people. That’s not true, but after decades, many people think this now.
Hypothesis #2: This is a result of European unions having an origin as trade guilds whereas American unions have an origin as political organizers.
You might see the fruits of your hard work, but it's your boss who reaps them.
Perhaps you could serve as an example and role model that could inspire union members like Michael Jordan and Tom Brady to work harder.
I've wondered if this is because unions in the U.S. are considerably different than unions in other places?
This was an interesting article [0] I bumped into titled "Europe could have the secret to saving America’s unions".
It said that in the U.S. unionization happens at the enterprise level, leaving unionized companies at a disadvantage relative to their competitors, so individual companies are very much incentivized to fight against unionization. In other countries when a certain amount of workers call for unionization negotiations happen between the union and a federation representing all employers in the sector, and the entire sector unionizes at once, not individual companies.
The article also talked about employees receiving benefits from their unions in some (fewer) countries, like unemployment insurance, instead of from the government. This incentives workers to join the union and pay union dues, instead of forcing them to do so. The idea was thrown out there that things like health care and retirement plans could also be included with union dues for people in gig-work jobs that would otherwise not receive these benefits.
I'd add that the article didn't address a concern many in the U.S. have about unions protecting under-performing workers, to the detriment of others. I've heard that this is different in other countries, at least to a point, but the article did not get into this. Also in the U.S. there have been a lot of corrupt unions, and public employee unions that receive (expensive) preferential treatment by law, I don't know if these problems exist in other countries.
[0] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/17/15290674/u...
Opposing unions is just going to lead to no changes on the union side and it's going to let the companies be as harsh on workers as they want, even on the "hard workers", because in the end, companies just care about the value that you are producing, not what you once produced. If you aren't valuable now, they'll just throw you out.
All the comments on here that say "well i don't want my lazy coworker to get paid more" highlight how well the "hustle"/"grind" and meritocracy propaganda worked on US workers. The other type of comments that talk about the bad side of unions just seem like bad faith arguments, It's just like the police violence in the US, there are a lot of bad actors and the system is ultimately flawed, but does that mean that there should be no police? No, of course not, so why is that in this context, they are actively against unions and against workers right? It quite literally makes no sense, but then again we're talking about the USA here so the notion of logic just goes out of the window.
I'm an American and I admit to having a very negative view of modern unions. When the word union comes up I immediately think of:
1) The Teamsters and their ties to organized crime 2) Police unions that shield officers from consequences 3) Teacher unions that prevent awful teachers from being fired 4) Ridiculous rules around duties on film/theater sets 5) The UAW is seen by many former workers as letting them down. Many other people feel the UAW bears some responsibilities for plant closures. 6) As supermarkets in my area started to unionize the service noticeably suffered. 7) Several friends were Verizon workers and felt that they were screwed by their union. 8) It is common for unions to fund candidates that many workers do not like.
If someone like myself has a negative view of unions it is up to people like yourself to change that perception if you want unions to gain traction in the US. Distrust of unions in the US are not always (usually?) driven by ignorance or propaganda. Unions themselves have done a very good job of alienating workers.
Maybe urs are just shit :)
To properly weigh all of the tradeoffs, you might consider asking if those Twitter jobs would even emerge in the European system and if there's a link between European labor standards and the lack of influential European tech companies. Europe is a large market that is filled with many capable and educated technology workers, yet almost always all of the tech companies we're ever talking about are American. Why is this?
What a lazy take. Unions only protect their current members. It's common for companies to hire fewer people or hire more people at only part time schedules because full time employees are required to cost exaggeratedly more or are harder to fire due to union contracts. What organization represents the people who are unemployed or underemployed because of unions? These people are much worse off than if the unions didn't exist.
* Note: I used "I", but I don't personally feel this way. If I found out a fast food worker made more than me as an engineer, I wouldn't care. In some ways they work harder. Also, I don't think CEOs bring as much worth to a company as engineers do and they make way more, so...
I see this "embarrassed millionaires" line a lot. It seems unbelievably cynical. Do you really think a meaningful fraction of workers are thinking "I'll oppose unions because even though I'm hurting workers, it'll be good for me when I'm rich"?
And there actually are bad unions. I worked in a casino and out union was a non-striking union so even if the casino gave use some shitty contract we weren't able to strike. So what was the point?
Or is this just the prevailing narrative that's been sold to us over the past 30-50 years, and there are too few actual unions and union jobs left to effectively counter it?
Yea, it can be frustrating be barred from jobs, like construction, being a non-member, or being forced to pay union dues to a union you feel is doing nothing for you.
Small, company-sized unions have always been a lot more appealing to me than the huge behemoths the US currently has.
> Reactance is an unpleasant motivational reaction to offers, persons, rules, or regulations that threaten or eliminate specific behavioral freedoms. Reactance occurs when an individual feels that an agent is attempting to limit one's choice of response and/or range of alternatives.
When I think about the people who I know who are anti-union, they all have high reactance as a trait. If I were to try to change their mind, it would be to frame their non-union environment as more freedom-limiting than the unions alternative re: workplace democracy etc.
1. American capitalists have waged a very effective propaganda campaign against unions and
2. American unions have had a history of corruption. (Or maybe I just think that because I've been taken in by the propaganda campaign.)
It seems as though decades of corporate puppets have done a wonderful job of convincing the blue-collar worker that unions are corrupt and exist solely to milk worker's dues.
I don't understand it either.
Unions? you should be thankful!
"Labor unions both sustained prosperity, and ensured that it was shared; union bargaining power has been shown to moderate the compensation of executives at unionized firms."
And give a link to a study. This result has been seen across countries, and is the CAUSAL link you're looking for.
Update: also, I went and scanned the linked article (because I'm that type). They're credible authors, but they themselves explicitly say: "In reporting correlations between unionization and managerial pay, we are not necessarily able to establish whether unions cause differences.... We try a variety of strategies to understand these issues, however each is imperfect."
Yes, but that's a different correlation vs causation issue. The point is, the phenomenon of unions equalizing pay, on the company (micro) level (which has been reproduced in other countries and time periods), can be considered to be a causal explanation for the phenomenon of rising inequality when unions decline, in the society at large.
That is very much a statement about correlation. Otherwise it would say, "Unions' Decline CAUSED Inequality". But, to anyone with a passing knowledge of statistics, that is clearly an impossible claim to make. This is one time series realization for one country.
Let's go further. Is there any mention of causality in the article. And I do mean quantified causality. The answer is "no". Is there even any mention of correlation? Again, the answer is "no".
Let's keep going. Let's evaluate the aims and intent of the article. Let's start with EPI, the publisher of this article. The Chair of EPI is "Elizabeth H. Shuler ... president of the AFL-CIO, a federation of 58 unions and 12.5 million working people". Other board members include current and former union leadership from the United Steelworkers, the UAW, the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union, Service Employees International Union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Communication Workers of America, and the American Federation of Teachers. All huge unions.
In other words, this publication is not a work of science. It is not a credible academic publication. It is the motivated, self interested rhetoric of union leadership.
A quick glance at the chart and one could also show a link between federal income tax rates and executive compensation.
If you are taxed 73% you simply don’t have any incentive to “increase inequality” — you pay someone to show your income as a lot less than it really is. The real irony is the Reagan tax cuts resulted in more revenue because it just wasn’t worth the trouble to dodge paying taxes anymore.
Correlation, causation, lies, statistics, who knows?
More seriously, my wife and I got into an argument about the effects of unions once and this was the best summary I could find: https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/what-unions-d...
(yes it is by the Heritage foundation so their top-line summary probably has some ideological bias but the list of study summaries at the bottom is great) Generally, studies found that unions benefitted the unionized workers at the expense of the most and least skilled workers. And was slightly bad for company investment/earnings long term. But by far my favorite result (and the best study design from the list, imo) was a regression-discontinuity analysis that found no effect of unionization whatsoever:
"Compares companies whose workers voted narrowly for a union with companies whose workers voted narrowly against a union. Since the difference between winning and losing is close to random, this provides an estimate of the causal effect of randomly organizing a given company. Finds that workers who vote to join a union do win certification but that unions have essentially no effect on the firm or the workers. Wages do not rise, and employment and productivity do not fall. Unionized companies are no more likely to go out of business than are non-union firms."
DiNardo, John, and David S. Lee, "Economic Impacts of New Unionization on Private Sector Employers: 1984-2001," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 119, No. 4 (November 2004), pp. 1383-1441.
It’s this smug idea that the workers are simply too stupid to understand that they should join the special club. Not that they don’t don’t like jt, or have made an informed decision about it, it’s because they are dumb and not capable of advocating for themselves.
I don’t want to be in your weird HOA club. Leave me alone and let me do my work and go get a job in HR so you can be a part of the PMC, which is obviously what you are after anyway.
The last thing I want is for freeloaders to essentially never get fired and for some parasitic entity to collect dues for "bargaining" that usually isn't even worth it by the time they finish negotiations. Especially in todays climate.
Sure the threat of a union may mobilize a company to be more competitive and pay more, but the actual unions themselves just seem to never work out. Expecting an entity that doesn't do much to get you all these benefits is almost insane. When has any union actually got everything they promised? Never, at least not in America.
We then get into:
> In the social sciences, the free-rider problem is a type of market failure that occurs when those who benefit from resources, public goods (such as public roads or public library), or services of a communal nature do not pay for them[1] or under-pay. Free riders are a problem because while not paying for the good (either directly through fees or tolls or indirectly through taxes), they may continue to access or consume it. Thus, the good may be under-produced, overused or degraded.[2] Additionally, it has been shown that despite evidence that people tend to be cooperative by nature, the presence of free-riders cause this prosocial behaviour to deteriorate, perpetuating the free-rider problem.[3]
Collective bargaining is a escape valve against shit employers for employees that don't have a lot of options. A standing union with mandated membership and support from laws and regulations very easily becomes something far more twisted.
More seriously, imagine where not everyone is required to be in the union and think about how easy it then becomes for management to manipulate the environment to the detriment of union employees until the union is wiped out.
The USSR, North Korea, and Cuba all have/had lower levels of inequality than the west...by making everyone poor. That is the easy way to reduce inequality/
What the left fails to realize is that absolute inequality doesn't matter. The real questions is the vast majority feel better off? In China, hundreds of millions are wealthier than they were two generations ago. They have increased absolute inequaliry and increased equality at the same time.
In fact, inequality as a concept is a ridiculous measure. What does equality in that context even mean? That everyone should make the same amount, no matter the ability or position? 90% of humanity would vehemently disagree with that. In fact, people try to flee countries who implement that sort of resource allocation.
Everything going to the top, and nothing going to those on the bottom.
> The USSR, North Korea, and Cuba all have/had lower levels of inequality than the west...by making everyone poor.
Seems like your examples also have things going to the people at the top.
A comment from a few years ago that I saved:
> If we suppose that the goal of society is to produce the greatest utility, and that the utility wealth provides an individual is sub-linear (i.e. twice as much money makes you less than twice as happy), then inequality is inefficient resource allocation.
> However, we also suppose that some level of inequality can lead to greater productivity, and thus greater utility overall. The question is then what level produces the best outcome? […]
Personally I think lower inequality in our society would be a good thing - but also with political influence there are more direct faults/solutions.
1) It's always paternalistic to try and explain to people how they should feel, especially when the social group in question is 55-60% of a country of 330M, it's not a matter of being right or wrong. It's a matter of Tilting at the windmills vs. not Tilting at the windmills.
2) It's impossible to solve inequality because every complex system is a Pareto system, however Pareto says nothing about the speed of the turnover of the top 20%.
> The USSR, North Korea, and Cuba all have/had lower levels of inequality than the west
> In China, hundreds of millions are wealthier than they were two generations ago. They have increased absolute inequaliry and increased equality at the same time.
Sources? Do you have any data or metrics available for your claims (outside of Facebook memes)?
> In fact, people try to flee countries who implement that sort of resource allocation.
Yes, rich people, lol. People who GET access to things like housing and healthcare remain.
In that sense, no I do not support economic equality. Jeff Bezos owning 10% of Amazon worth $X billion does not effect my life in any way. If he owned 50% or 0.001%, instead my life would still be the same.
I'm not sure why I need to be upset about that.
For example, if my workplace has an exclusive contract with one union, and me and my coworkers (who are all union members) don't believe the union is representing us, can we organize to take collective action against both the union and our actual employer?
I known little about unions, so feel free to explain the basics if you need.
An instructive example here is the story of the NUMMI plant in the 1980s, which clearly shows the awfulness of GM's internal culture, the cluelessness of management in the face of existential threat, and how much things can be different, even with the exact same union workers: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015
If we want unions that have a collaborative, win-win approach with management, I think we first need management that has that spirit toward the workers. But looking at how US companies are reacting to the recent uptick in unionization, I'm not very hopeful.
Read this. This is a Swedish general office worker union. Yes even IT
Confoederationes commercii delendae sunt
I know a bunch of nurses, and they still are paid badly.
What if without unions, it would be worse?
> “John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
The Cold War and the hugely successful propaganda against communism spilled over to utterly decimate the labor movement in the US. You will however immediately lose most Americans as soon as you use the word "socialism". Let me summarize the usual rebuttals:
1. Socialism isn't communisum. The first is more about equality of opportunity. The second is more equality of outcome;
2. Socialism is not a poverty cult. Society is insanely wealthy. It's simply about sharing the wealth such that like 8 people don't own 50% of the economy;
3. Debt is built into your existence. Student debt, medical debt, housing debt, etc. This is by design to rob you of autonomy and keep you as compliant workers. Often this is referred to as "neofeudalism" or "neoserfdom".
5. There is no value without labor;
6. "The workers owning the means of production" simply means labor sharing in the value they create. And no, an Amazon warehouse worker getting paid minimum hour and being penalized for taking bathroom breaks is not "sharing";
7. Too many people have unrealistic views about their ability to negotiate and their overall ability, which is why you'll see so many comments like "I don't want to be kept down by low performers".
8. The financialization of housing turns people into NIMBYs who want to see their home values go up even though cost of housing is the leading factor in homelessness and has historically been used as a tool for segregation after explicit segregation was outlawed;
9. Creating monopolies such that companies can charge $1000/month and otherwise bankrupt you for needing lifesaving healthcare is state violence;
10. The police as an institution that exists today is a tool for protecting capital and those who own it; and
11. You are not Elon Musk. You will never be Elon Musk. Elon Musk doesn't know who you are. Elon Musk would melt you down for rocket fuel if it increased profits.
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328134-john-steinbeck-once-...
But in some cities, the govt is required to do work only with labor unions. In that case, joining a union might help, because the government has taking away your competition!
This is sensationalistic propaganda, not research.
At the end of WWII, the USA was the only industrial economy in the world, not significantly damaged by the fighting.
If you see, the spike of worker union participation is right after the end of WWII.
Basically, for a couple of decades the USA had a monopoly on advanced manufacturing. Then as Europe and Japan caught up, there was more of a push towards efficiency as US companies faced more competition
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Economic_history_of_Sweden#Secon...
