Unions Did Great Things for the American Working Class

It's during times of decline that you normally expect inequality to decline. After all, the rich collect the profits while the poor collect wages. Wages are relatively fixed while profits vary wildly.

To put it a different way, which year are we allowed to start measuring without it being tainted by WWII?

Does that mean if I decide to start a venture, my venture will have healthcare from day 0? If so, that's a pretty neat idea.

EDIT: I just also thought that the interests of a union of startup developers and union of enterprise/large-co developers are quite different. Does this mean there are two different unions?

I really appreciate the benefits I could enjoy thanks to their work.

Additionally in countries where being an Informatics Engineer is a proper certified title, the college also helps in some negotiations.

But even if I did agree that worker rights and wellbeing decrease innovation, then it sounds like a worthwhile tradeoff.

But this isn't a forgone conclusion, for example worker relations seem to work fine in general in Germany which has actually institutionalized worker representation at a fairly high level in corporations.

1950 = 1000 thousand tonnes, 2018 = 4000 thousand tonnes

And what destroyed the textile mills of North and South Carolina, which were barely organized at all? They were and still are the states with the lowest unionization rates in the country.

The difference is Michigan union activists like Larry Page's grandfather sent his son to college, and then his son writes a search engine while doing his doctorate.

Meanwhile, the profits of Carolina textile mills went elsewhere, and the people in those towns are worse off than ever.

Not saying those things you describe didn't happen.

However, one should wonder why almost the entire rest of the world manages to do this just fine.

The local manifestations of those industries were destroyed by globalization (which unions fought tooth and nail), not unions.

Those industries simply weren't where America's comparative advantage was in a globalized marketplace.

> The classic example is the unions not allowing the Toyota Lean Production system in,

The UAW did, in fact, let TPS in—not some loose copy, but the actual thing itself—at NUMMI.

GM had trouble copying the parts some of its leadership wanted of TPS for its own internal use, but those included massive resistance from their own internal managers as well as labor. And it probably wouldn't have worked for GM because of path dependence; TPS is a system relying on a substantial degree of mutual trust between labor and management, but while a new relationship can start with a clean slate, a strong established history is hard to erase.

None of this is true.

The AMA does not control training in the medical profession. That's determined by the number of residency positions available, which is capped by the AAMC, not the AMA. However, removing the cap wouldn't increase the number of positions, because those are funded by Medicare. The AMA does not control who can practice the profession either; only 25% of practicing physicians even belong to the AMA.

(The AMA is also not a union because it does not invoke a monopoly claim over the members of a bargaining unit, which is something that basically every union in the US does - and conversely, something which basically no unions outside the US claim - but that's all a separate matter).

Going by what happens in other industries, you'd reasonably expect a flattening of wages (both inter and intra firm) and an increase in the average wage. You'd also expect entry into the field to become harder, and exit from the field (both voluntary and involuntary) to become rarer. Fewer workers would be employed overall, though per capita productivity would increase; the overall effect would probably mean more money allocated to labor, less to capital holders, and higher costs for consumers. Work rules would increase, e.g. no one allowed to be on call for more than X hours a year, or a SWE not being allowed/required to take on job responsibilities outside the scope of the initial job offer except as facilitated by formal processes.

Many of these effects will disproportionately benefit women and racial minorities (this is a rare case where "racial minorities" includes Asians of various sorts, as they're paid less than white people in the field, though that's in large part to the power employers have over visa holders).

Employers will likely react I a counter productive manner to this threat - e.g. mandating 100% unit test coverage which would be achieved with cryptic tests that actually make the code even harder to work with.

This could lead to a decline in overall software quality in America if the relationship between developers/ops and management really sours.

Management knows that already, so they'll do whatever they can to stop unionization. Retaliating against attempts to unionize are illegal, but internal anti-union propaganda campaigns are common in other industries, and I think you can expect not just what already exists, but better-funded campaigns and targeted to people more like you.

Management would also try other methods to get around the union. More outsourcing, contracting entire projects out and requesting documentation or support contracts. These don't work well - they always cost more than expected, take longer than expected, and are a pain to maintain - but they do work some, so with unions raising wages that'd move the bar towards a little more outsourcing. I'd also expect it to take management a while to relearn that outsourcing doesn't work very well, since it's been a while. Many companies will be willing to pay more for outsourced labor than union labor, because strong unions are a long-term threat to the investor class. If the union covers multiple companies it'll be more resistant to all of this and generally more effective.

The effects on the workers depends on the union's goals and determination. The biggest test is its first strike; how many employees actually go through with it and how long can they last. That depends a lot on the strike fund; even though we're a wealthy industry that should be able to make a strong strike fund, I'd expect a lot of programmers to be suspicious about it (then again I've heard more union talk this year than I have in the rest of my career combined, so maybe they're coming around). I expect the union will achieve all of its goals, as software engineers will drastically underestimate how much striking power they have. Judging by conversations I've had, I'd expect priorities to be: major commitments to privacy/security/ethics/maintainability, improved working conditions (less dense open offices, maybe an end to open offices), and maybe more vacation time. Increased pay seems to be a low priority among workers I've talked to.

Everyone thinks unions are some great system but they suck in actual practice. The absolutely suck--it's just more egos and personalities in the way of you making a living. The best thing about tech is the low barriers to entry--that is populist, not unions. If you are good you succeed, if you are not good, you become an architect or a manager or leave.

> [Freeman and Medoff] showed that contrary to popular belief, unions actually decreased racial wage disparities.

> A recent paper by economists Henry Farber, Daniel Herbst, Ilyana Kuziemko and Suresh Naidu concludes that unions were an important force reducing inequality in the U.S. [...] The authors find that as unionization rises, inequality tends to fall, and vice versa. Nor is this effect driven by greater skills and education on the part of union workers; during the era from 1940 through 1970, when unionization rose and inequality fell, union workers tended to be less educated than others. In other words, unions lifted the workers at the bottom of the distribution. Black workers, and other nonwhite workers, tended to benefit the most from the union boost.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/07/24/us/politics/d...