For me, this is the most surprising quote from the article. It really shows how us Plebians are ground into dust by the healthcare industry.
For me, this is the most surprising quote from the article. It really shows how us Plebians are ground into dust by the healthcare industry.
The Biggest tech union on the UK just merged with BECTU (the eqvielent of IATSE)
You could work in the industry for years and never get in. Others get lucky and get in within a few months. A lot of people are SAG Eligible but can't afford the initial fees to get in.
It's not like a standard union where you show up to work every day for months and you are in. Non-union basically do the exact same thing as union folk, but get paid less per hour. In contrast, there is a budget limit to how many SAG workers can be on set, so while your hourly is higher, the quantity of work you have is much lower.
Most SAG members are background extras, who don't earn very much money, and can't work more if they wanted to.
Definitely not the union you'd want to emulate. Film and TV actors are all temporary workers.
Quite an interesting concept though that their rates don't seem to up no matter if you just get by or make millions...
In the case of a properly functioning public healthcare system, I totally buy and support it, though.
The difference is, I think, in the word "insurance". If a USAn doesn't pay for health insurance, they have to pay for healthcare. I don't particularly know how Germany's system works, but I'd assume that non-payment of taxes, while it probably has other repercussions, does not preclude receiving healthcare.
As someone linked below, you can actually see here that employer is kicking in another 15%+ for premiums, which at $50k per year is $625 per month and at $100k per year is $1250 per month:
http://www.sagaftraplans.org/employers/agreements
Employer portion plus at least $133 from the employee = at least $500-$600 per month, if not $1,200+ for the higher earners which seems about what you get on healthcare.gov. I didn't look into what deductibles and copays were, but I'd be surprised if it was much lower than what most employer based health insurance plans offer.
Or the benefits of collective bargaining, even in limited context like procuring healthcare.
Collective bargaining is a feature of a free market. If you don't like the idea of unions and collective bargaining, you don't like free markets.
I have a caveat in that I don't support laws that interfere with such bargaining or artificially increase one party's market power (closed shop laws). In the US this identifies me as being "right to work" which is often seen as anti-union.
For example I don't support the UAW due to their long history of using the state to increase their market power.
That's a fair caveat from a libertarian standpoint. It's just that most of the self-declared libertarians I meet seem to have the idea that the state should forbid unions from interfering with their idea of a free market. Which sounds very unlibertarian to me.
This is similar to the procedural loophole of registering manifestations where the mayor or other redeposit body can virtually countermand the right to organize. It happens all the time.
People disagree about the finer points of political ideas all the time. But drawing a line in the sand doesn't immediately signify gatekeeping, it signifies normal debate. This is especially evident if you compare the example I gave to what you're calling gatekeeping: it would be unreasonable to require all fans of a band to have episodic recollection and deep opinions on every song ever recorded by the band. But it would not be unreasonable to assume a libertarian with philosophical fidelity to the school of thought supports collective bargaining. Again, it might not be correct, but it's not ridiculous.
As a meta point, I'm noticing a trend online where people will give a quick driveby dismissal using terms from the popular zeitgeist. Typical, recent examples include "gatekeeping", "whataboutism" and "gaslighting." Sometimes these are appropriate criticisms to levy at someone's argument and they draw a real insight. But they're also frequently abused or pigeonholed into discussion in contrived ways. From my perspective this seems like a more subtle equivalent of collecting logical fallacies to point out in other people's arguments online. It's symptomatic of something larger: that snark is the modern saboteur of reasoned debate.
Very, very rarely is a single sentence critique of another person's point anything more than a middle brow dismissal. It sounds intellectual but there's no deconstruction or antithesis involved. If you wanted to substantially critique the commenter's point, it would probably have been more appropriate to cite "No True Scotsman" instead of "Gatekeeping". Better still would be to skip the trite idiom altogether and explain why you consider it an error with substantive depth. A pithy comment only convinces those who already agree with you. A meaningfully persuasive one convinces the audience, if not the original commenter.
For each person, the most advantageous outcome is if everybody but them participates in a union. The end result is that nobody participates in a union, making things worse for everybody.
This depends on what you mean by "be for collective bargaining". As in most things, the details matter, and the slogan "be for unions" is almost meaningless.
In the sense that people should be able to form and/or join unions etc, then absolutely, I think most libertarians would be totally for it.
But often when people say you're for or against unions, they're talking about specific laws with specific consequences. For example, should an employer have the right to fire an employee who is attempting to start a union? A libertarian might well say that both sides have liberties that shouldn't be taken away in this case. If the employee manages to start a union and gets collective bargaining power - good for them! But the government shouldn't intrude on the employer's right to fire employees if it so chooses, no matter what the cause.
Another example - many countries have laws that say that if some percentage of the workforce, say 30%, agrees to form a union, then all employees are now automatically part of that union. This makes it much easier to form unions, obviously, and you might make the case that it helps protect the usually-less-powerful employees from the usually-more-powerful employer. On the other hand, this often means that individual employees don't have the freedom to negotiate their own specific terms with the employers, even if they prefer not to be part of the union. Or that the employees now must pay money into the union, whether they want to or not.
Again, all of these are legitimate debates and most of the sides of this can be defended. But the slogan "you should be for collective bargaining and unions" just doesn't include enough nuance to even being to address how you should react to each of the above - which are the specific laws that people are talking about when talking about unions.
The need for labor unions is a product of the free market, and a way to build a unique value proposition. With employees that are totally fungible, totally replaceable parts, the marginal value of labor itself is driven to zero. Wages become a race to the bottom, and working becomes unprofitable. But by saying "Only members of the union can work here", the union sharply decreases the available labor pool, thus creating a unique value proposition.
In other words, it's a market response to a market problem.
The people who call for "free markets" and rail against unions basically don't understand what it is they're asking for. They're in love with an ideal, not thinking about how profit actually works in the real world, as a function of economics. It's straight-up ignorance reinforced by puritan idealism.
"Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition all profits get competed away. If you want to create and capture lasting value, don't build an undifferentiated commodity business."
- Peter Theil, Zero to One
I think that's a general good feature of the free market. Collusion is hard until you get down to only a few providers of a service. (In this case, labor.)
The real problem here is that employees generally have no power, because they have no flexibility. We have a nationwide, intergenerational case of people living paycheck to paycheck when even modest savings would've lead to fantastic wealthbuilding. In short, we wouldn't need unions if employees had a BATNA.
This is a financial education problem. But it's one that could be temporarily solved by susbsidizing a BATNA for workers, rather than enforcing labor laws that lead directly to inefficiency.
I have a handful of friends that work in Hollywood as actors and producers. They get paid amazingly well and get insane amounts of time off.
...all because they have organized labor. Most people would be amazed how much an extra gets paid once they have their SAG card.
Many take advantage of unemployment as well since they typically work on contracts. Have several friends that will work for 6 months on a show and then take 3-4 months off while collecting unemployment and figuring out what contract they want to take next.
(The U.S. is nearly $10k a year)
However, on average the U.S. government (thus taxpayer) funds half of the health care costs, meaning that the private sector has to fund about $5k per person per year. That would suggest the SAG employer is paying $3500 a year and the SAG employee $1500 a year.
On top of that you have a ~€380 deductible. Everything except medicine costs goes from this deductible first. If you really trust your health (or have the money to cover it) you can raise the deductible to ~€800, which will drop your monthly premium by ~€20.
GP visits are free and act as a sort of filter for access to the ‘real’ healthcare system. Anything minor (prescriptions for various minor diseases, mole removal, etc) goes through him and if he thinks something warrants further research you get blood work done or see a specialist, waiting times usually 1 week, 2 weeks tops.
All in all its a really nice ‘hybrid’ sort of system. It isn’t 100% socialized like some countries around us, but the end result is that we have the best healthcare system in Europe (and thus probably the world) :)
The Netherlands spends $5385 per year per person on healthcare, 80% of that is spent by the government.
The UK spends $4192 per year, again 80% is by the government. The UK has trickier cost areas to handle too (healthcare in Scottish islands is far more per person than in Rotterdam)
Measuring the objective quality of a health care system is almost impossible (it varies dramatically on your subjective priorities), let alone measuring value per dollar, but I don't think I've ever seen one that claims the Netherlands is better than Scanadavian ones.
The problem with comparing worldwide is that the WHO does an annual health report, but this focusses on a different aspect each year, instead of a general outlay. It has been done in 2000, with data from 1993-1997. The Netherlands switched from a completely socialised system ('Ziekenfonds') to the hybrid system in 2006. A lot of our improvements are because of that, and thus aren't in the 2000 WHO ranking.
The only other source I could find is the Legatum Institute prosperity index[2], which puts us 6th behind: Luxembourg, Singapore, Switzerland, Japan, Austria, Sweden, Norway. As their healthcare research is only part of a bigger picture (and thus less focused), I tend to give it less weight.
As a sidenote, aside from a small bit of extra pride its not very important where a country sits in the top 15, all these countries their healthcare systems can be regarded as top notch. The only places to attain a higher level of care would be in (usually foreign) private institutions, which come with such high costs that they are only accessible to an elite few.
[1]https://healthpowerhouse.com/media/EHCI-2017/EHCI-2017-repor...
Sweden didn't shoot up until 2010.
The Netherlands has spent a lot on healthcare, especially after 2006 - not as much as Norway (which I suspect has higher costs due to sparsely populated areas), Switzerland, and Luxemburg, but more than the rest of Europe. If you pay more, you get more.
Are you sure the benefits of your hybrid system aren't because you increased health spending by over 50% (about 7% pa) from 2004 to 2010, where Sweden only increased by about 30% (about 4% pa)?