Baseless/Unsubstantiated comment. Unions come in when the people who are working there feel they aren't being treated fairly. Sure Free-market AA could offer better incentives to SOME, but at the detriment to MOST.
Argentina is a model example of what happens when the pilots have a strong union: they have the highest pilot salary in south america and there are consistent service outages due to strikes on holidays.
Fear not that if union workers could collect a paycheck without showing up to work and no consequence, you would not see any working.
Fixed that for you.
If you wish to talk about the 100% estate tax I'm willing to talk about it tho. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JPdjuPPtnWA
1. People selectively choose to care about whether another person or class of people can live without needing to work, and
2. People selectively advocate for contradictory universal statements about human nature depending on which humans they're talking about (in other words, applying different "universal" rules about motivation and behavior depending on whether the hypothetical person they're talking about is already wealthy or not).
jackvalentine said that the intended goal is shared by everyone. And then I agreed.
There is nothing immoral in living without needing to work. ITs sometimes the opposite: should mentally deranged people or children be forced to work or live free? Those leeches. In the future its possible nobody will need to work. Thats just not the world we live in today.
Sounds like a pretty good benefit for everyone involved.
> there are consistent service outages due to strikes on holidays.
Sucks for consumers, but your point was about the workers, not about consumers, etc.
Yes, its just a terrible one for everyone else. Thats the whole point.
> Sucks for consumers, but your point was about the workers, not about consumers, etc.
Consumers are workers. If we talk only about pilots, its also bad: the union prevents other pilots from being hired.
This is circular logic, isn't it? It's like saying McDonald's should only pay workers $3 an hour because I, some uninvolved person who happens to be a worker elsewhere, would like a cheaper hamburger. That's not pro-worker, that's pro-hamburger.
If the question is about a fair playing field between bosses and workers, I don't understand what a strike inconveniencing people has to do with it.
The artificial increase of wages has the same effect that the artificual increase of profits
Yes they can.
So while they dont all unionize, still some workers eat others.
If you could effectively limit what CEO's make, the savings will go into the stock and investors, it will not raise wages, because wages are not set by CEO pay.
Think of the effects of a maximum wage in an economy. It cannot possibly help workers. It will definitely help investors/capitalists/employers.
Wages and bonuses are set by CEO decree. And they, across the board, set them as low as they can get away with so they hit their quarterly numbers and get their bonus.
But its not really true: wages are paid by the production of the worker himself. In a farm with a landowner, an apple picker picks 10 apples and pays 20% on the landowner. That is, his wage is 8 apples.
A guy comes in picks 100 apples. By the same rate, he would earn 80 apples, or the wage of 10 common apple producers. By the same nominal rate, he would earn 98 apples. The common producer has a lot to envy on that person, and might make a case for him getting 8 apples, 80 apples or less than 98 apples. But in any case whatever he lobbies for will go to the landowner, because the landowner already has lots of people that pick 10 apples and pay 2.
CEO pay is agreed in a market, and albeit there are interesting governance issues, it is truly drawn from investors. Personally I do believe investors are getting stiffed. ITs just not the solution to increase wages.
except it is not. A CEO of corp A is a member of the board in corp B. Disgraced ex-CEO of citi John Thain is on Uber's board now. I think Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board at some point? Point is the board is NOT representative of ordinary passive investors or even institutional investors like Vanguard. The passive investors have almost no leverage. How do you propose we level the playing field for the investors?
The easiest way to decrease CEO pay is to obviously..have more CEO's. Interestingly enough, the more the public disdains them, the less you have.
I actually agree with you more than I disagree with you. Beyond a certain point, higher wages are bad. I don't want much higher wages. I am just saying we need to cut wages at the top.
Second some jobs are easier to unionize than others due to geographicalities. Farmers in the us have below minimum incomes. Their effective unionization has no limit on how much wages they could get. But because its impossible to be cohesive with small numbes and large distances it doesnt happen.
Unions form successfully by their capcity to limit supply. Anything that can be imported breaks unions. Anything that cant helps them. Thats why teachers, cops, garbage and transport are unions in the us, but electronic manufacture isnt.
Hope this is enough!
Did you know that unions have been illegal in various countries at various points of time? People still unionised and fought to have it made legal.
It isn’t always easy, but any worker can unionise. You seem to be confusing possibility with activity.
The prohibition of unions was a terrible thing indeed, and unions themselves have also been producers of tremendous violence, murder and oppression. There are no short examples of abuse.
Nevertheless, any union that has significant effects has them by providing new limitations on labor. You don't need to ban unions to make them dissapear, you just have to let labor roam free and then they dissipate instantly.
The barrier to entry for unionizing is a lot lower than getting rich and hiring a servant. That is not a comparable situation. Incredibly poor labourers and rich professionals alike unionize.
> you just have to let labor roam free and then they dissipate instantly.
We have completely voluntary unionism in my industry and people join the union voluntarily. You seem to have a _very_ skewed view of unions that only takes the negatives.
My union (Professionals Australia) takes a pragmatic view to labour relations. I resigned from my previous union because they didn't take that view and focussed on short-term gains for only a subset of their members.
I'm not making childish bets with you.
You have an... interesting... view of labour relations that I haven't come across before. Did you say you were Argentinean?
Professional licenses are one of the most classic examples of limiting supply. Classic as Adam smith, wealth of nations, 1776 classic, where he talks about the artificial restriction of a certain number of years of study to be able to exercise some labor skill.
Even if it did, I have no moral objection to labour banding together to restrict supply. It's just the free market in action. Actors (capital, labour, consumer) are free to band together and increase their functional power.
There is no perfect state of equilibrium in a market, just a temporary pause. Same goes for capital and labour - what works now won't work tomorrow and so constant tension and negotiation will occur. Some parties will lose and some will win. Either way the situation is merely temporary.
Or is the free market just for capital to band together to increase it's power?
It also has an interesting advocacy section:
- "At least 10% of the work carried out on Victoria’s major projects must be undertaken by apprentices, trainees or engineering cadets...we were able to make the case, and change Government policy."
On Privatisation of power - "As well, privatisation resulted in large reductions of the number of staff employed as well as significant outsourcing of important functions"
If you asked me, I'd say its unavoidable for unions to do these kind of actions the same way its unavoidable for private companies to try to monopolize a market. Its the basic incentive.
> Even if it did, I have no moral objection to labour banding together to restrict supply. It's just the free market in action. Actors (capital, labour, consumer) are free to band together and increase their functional power.
Sure, thats not really a problem at all. There are plenty of circumstances where that will provide real and palpable defenses against employers that have powers that shouldn't be. But dont mistake the debate of allowing unions to exist, and encouraging them.
Much like the biggest employer monopolies, the biggest union results come through the government. Unions lobby for the government to put rules, like the eng cadets or limit outsourcing, or require accreditations given by them, etc etc. If you had a union that didnt have the power of government to apply those rules, they wouldn't be very relevant.
> There is no perfect state of equilibrium in a market, just a temporary pause. Same goes for capital and labour - what works now won't work tomorrow and so constant tension and negotiation will occur. Some parties will lose and some will win. Either way the situation is merely temporary. Or is the free market just for capital to band together to increase it's power?
This is a common theme I find on this topic: capital monopolizes and gets profits they shouldnt, so why shouldnt workers do the same? Well, two wrongs dont make a right, and someone being a criminal and profiting from it doesn't mean we should all become criminals. Free markets are precisely a tool against forming monopolies, both on companies and on labor.
You can look to the TSA or the NYPD for examples of this happening in the US.
There are TSA employees who have patterns of repeatedly showing up to work drunk, sleeping on the job, or stealing from passengers' bags and have managed to keep their jobs, because
And let's not forget three years ago, when the NYPD openly refused to do their job for three weeks[0], but still got paid all the same[1].
[0] I'm not complaining that the NYPD stopped enforcing low-level drug offenses that shouldn't even be crimes in the first place, but they literally collected paychecks while openly refusing to do it.
[1] https://nypost.com/2014/12/29/arrests-plummet-following-exec...
It could mean that unions or some forms of unions (state-backing etc) are incompatible with certain cultures though.
The unions in america and Argentina are more similar to italian and spanish unions which are rent seeking and confrontational. In argentina, unions have constitutional level protection, and union leaders have pseudo diplo powers( they are harder to arrest for ex). The result is very rich union leaders and all industries where unions exist have terrible employment and costs
But please. Do go on about how unions harm most workers.
If you'd like to continue making blanket statements about unions being harmful to "most" workers, I'll be happy to give you citations of what life in the mines was like before the unions.
Im from a country where almost half the employment is under the table, and the rest is unionized. Teachers, truckers and state workers enjoy plenty of perks and would defend like you are the role of unions. They should if they simply respond to their own incentives.
The result? Logistic cost is 50% the cost of food, education tripled staff and got worse results in the last decade and state spending is 50% of gdp.
The teacher can reminisce of how sad it would be for the kids if she didnt have such benefits or were fired and would ask you a name of who is being punished by her benefits. And you couldn't answer with a persons name like the teacher could. But its still very real.
The result is much cheaper airfares and no loss in quality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1989_Australian_pilots%27_disp...
Correlation is not causation and all that fuzz.
Also, that piece of propaganda conveniently forgets that Avianca just suffered the longest ever strike in Colombia, not really the most worker or union friendly place.
I get the point. Pilots however, are super interchangeable, like software engineers. There's no reason peruvian, brasilian, paraguayan , brazilian and chilean pilots wouldnt move to argentina to work and depress wages. Except the biggest payer and employer of pilots in argentina is the State. And it doesnt hire that many foreigners, for some reason...
> Also, that piece of propaganda conveniently forgets that Avianca just suffered the longest ever strike in Colombia, not really the most worker or union friendly place.
I dont know what colombia has to do with argentinian pilots.