Unionisation and collective bargaining does achieve progress, as does regulation. Minimum wages are a great example of the latter. I'm not quite sure what is driving your passivity here.
And I don't know where you come up with the notion of passive, I'm just stating an observation.
I guess so, if you assume that the total salary envelope is fixed. In which case, minimum wages protect lower-paid workers at the expense of higher-paid workers. Which is fine in of itself.
But on top of that I think we have to assume that the salary envelope has some elasticity. Maybe minimum wage increases the total salary cost, and decreases returns on capital - so helping lower-paid workers at the expense of investors. Again, why not
Um, no, actually the complete opposite. Minimum wage protects the workers who are able to get the job at the minimum wage, at the expense of those even lower-paid -- the ones who would've been employed if the wage had been less (and now are not employed).
But maybe I'm mistaken. Maybe we don't send work offshore to lower cost countries to take advantage of wages lower than ours.
But maybe I'm mistaken.
Couldn't tell you. Never heard of that study. It sounds like one study among so many that all indicate the same.
Maybe we don't send work offshore to lower cost countries to take advantage of wages lower than ours.
People DO send work offshore for that reason, and you know it. Why so childish? Why such pointless passive aggression? Why come out with that kind of nonsense bullshit? Grow up and have an adult conversation.
So the notion that raising minimum wages doesn't affect employment just doesn't hold water unless you study it in a very isolated environment, where the effects of it get washed out by the larger absorptive capacity of the broader labor market.
Overall unemployment isn't worse historically. Not sure why you cherry-pick youth as if it invalidates the overall stat somehow. But even that stat isn't worse historically.
You're going to have to work a lot harder to prove that those two facts are related than just saying them.
Perhaps you mean that the very lowest paid jobs are those that are outsourced? Are you talking about very low-wage factory jobs, such that people in China may be paid a few dollars an hour where the same in the US would be many dollars an hour? Or are you talking about IT outsourcing, which happens at values much higher than minimum wage?
If I have to guess your arguments and make them for you, then I don't really need you in this conversation at all, I suppose.
it's not like lowering the minimum wage would change this much - if the cost of living is an order of magnitude lower in a third-world country, the labour costs are going to be an order of magnitude lower too
> Maybe we don't send work offshore to lower cost countries to take advantage of wages lower than ours.
Labor costs in the US are higher than in China, so this should and has happened anyway. You think it would happen to a larger degree and it could be correct. But it is a restricted perspective aside from the fact that not every work can just be outsourced to low wage countries.
A first start would be to stop subsidizing the transportation costs through the US Navy and oil subsidies/tax breaks
One way is to try to orient your economy around more high-value jobs, with a generous safety net for those who can't reach it. It's a very difficult question
Instead, profits take a hammering and some businesses get replaced by others with no overall reduction in employment.
If you analyze who lobbies for minimum wage hikes (labor groups) and who protests them (business) it ought to be plain as day who really gets hurt and who benefits from the narrative of "wed only hurt workers by paying them more".
What's the point in working if you're going to be paid in breadcrumbs?
Do we really want to race towards another Dickensian society?
Being able to eat. "Breadcrumbs" for you or me might not be worth it, but for someone else it could be the difference between buying food that the supermarket or stealing ketchup packets from a fast food store.
I recommend rereading “The Grapes of Wrath”, to get a taste of what poverty in this country had actually looked like, and what it actually was like to not be able to afford food. Then compare that with what currently passes as “poverty”: you get much more than that already on SNAP benefits.
I am very sympathetic to people in poverty, having grown up in it. However, let’s not pretend that poverty in today’s America is about “affording food”: everyone, no matter how poor, is able to afford food, and poverty today is less about the hunger, and more about the lifestyle you can or are forced to carry out.
The hidden assumption is that lower-paid positions are less important. They aren't. There are many minimum wage positions that are more important than higher wage positions.
They're not lower paid because they're less important, they're lower paid because they're more replaceable.
So, when you force the employer to choose between not having a janitor, or paying 3.5$ more per hour, they will certainly decide to pay 3.5$ more per hour.
Assuming that there is profit, which is a good assumption as the average surplus value rate is of around 5-7%, then what will happen is that profit will decrease, and employment will stay more or less the same.
It's very important to realize that the market values replaceability, not importance.
Maybe they end up with 60-80% of the janitorial coverage that they had before.
I suspect but cannot prove; a lot of elasticity. Those graphs showing productivity and wages decoupling; all that wealth is going somewhere. It's going to rich people. As you suggest, we could "just" (ha!) change where it goes; instead of to rich people, to workers.
Imagine someone today capable of creating $1 of variable gross profit for their employer every 5 minutes before they were paid. Under a free labor market or a $10/hour minimum wage, that employee has stable and good employment prospects. Make the minimum wage $15/hour and change nothing else and that employee is on shakier ground. Either they must hope that their employer doesn’t know their individual productivity (likely somewhat true), that there is so much money being generated elsewhere that the company doesn’t care if they lose some here, that their job is practically required structurally (no one will close their shop from 10-12 and 2-4 just because the foot traffic drops off and those hours lose some money), or that their employer feels charitable but wants to dress that charity up in work clothes.
Total wages have some elasticity. I have to believe it’s not generally beyond what is advantageous to the employer and their customers (who are paying all the wages ultimately).
I’m not saying companies will invest right up to break even, but that they will attempt to avoid going beyond that point.
If you assume that the market clearing price for non-minimum wage labor is set, as all market prices are set, by the interaction of a supply and demand curve, then it becomes clearer that there’s no mechanism by which the redistribution from one worker to another would happen.
No, because empirical studies demonstrate that u employment doesn't go up when the minimum wage is raised, profits instead get lowered.
There is an enormous lobbying industry dedicated to telling us what is bad for them is bad for us though.
The fear that other people might benefit in some way.
And the mechanism to break them are easily available. Just insert special interests for local conditions or identity politics like race or gender and the union is as good as busted, you don't need to do much. Unions need unity and that won't stand for 10 minutes in todays world. Current civil liberty movements were often driven apart by this.
You still need to be competitive because someone needs to be able to pay the minimum wage. If there is a discrepancy in wealth between countries, you need either taxes or let the worker class fall down to some international level for cheapest labor.
Where I am from (the UK) unions are relatively commonplace, I have even been in one in the past (the university and colleges union), they seem like very stable organisation to me. I've never even heard of a union closing in the UK, although I guess it happens occasionally.
They have been slowly dying. They resist in the public sector (like the one you joined), in manufacturing (a shrinking sector in itself), and in call-centres. Everywhere else, they don’t really have a meaningful presence anymore. Part of the reason is the atomization of work in smaller and smaller companies, and temp-agencies being normalized; traditional union practices and laws struggle to fit these conditions. This is absolutely on purpose and effectively government-encouraged since the Thatcher years.
> I’ve never even heard of a union closing
They don’t “close”, they merge when membership falls below sustainable levels. You can look at the statistics on union membership to see the actual story.
A tactic of union busters is to seed such strive and there are countless approaches to that. For example, if a group A forms a union against working conditions at X, X makes concessions to a subset A' of A by highlighting arbitrary differences. This can result in conflict between A and A'. If A and A' cannot reconciliate, X wins. The standard divide and conquer tactic.
You can pick your example yourself, but race, sex, age, nationality, religion are prime examples of arbitrary differences not relevant to the topic or goals that brought a group together in the first place.
We evaluate public political discourse differently and I am not saying I am correct about it, but I do think that "identity politics" has caused massive rifts between political camps formerly working together.
I don't have or want to produce formal evidence because it would just be counterproductive against my political position, but I think the picture is more clear than blurry.
I have no idea how producing formal evidence can ever be counterproductive to your political position. That statement does not make sense to me.
The rest of the group would feel put aside and would direct their anger towards the preferred group. That is a basic "flaw" in human psychology. Being called names by a friend hurts more than from a bystander and the same effect is abused here to direct anger from the former target to your own group.
> I have no idea how producing formal evidence can ever be counterproductive to your political position.
I presented it as I see it. I think unions can be very important and it is in my interest that people don't mangle themselves on superficial differences. That happens a lot lately. I am no tycoon to likes union busting.
Salaries and indirect salaries are a direct consequence of the context.
Check out the hours worked per worker, for one. Working hours per year are a lot shorter and French people enjoy much greater leisure time and quality of life as a consequence.
But we don’t have « more » than in USA.
Some people may therefore prefer to be able to spend all they've got without having to think of hard times. Because they may think "it won't happen to me" / "I'll save tomorrow".
As such, I would be very curious to see some actual numbers to be able to do as objective a comparison as possible. Because indeed, if in the US the prices are overall higher relative to the wages, the deal might not be as good in a bad situation. From France, this doesn't seem to be the case, mostly because (outside of SF) pretty much everything looks cheaper. Housing, food, entertainment, cars / gas, electronics, etc. The only issue seems to be related to healthcare. So I'd like to have that actually quantified.
The issue in France is that in addition to the fact that "having a 140k salary is impossible", taxation is very, very high.
If an employer pays 100k in total for an employee, the actual, cash in hand, after income, social security and medical insurance (1) for the employee is around 55-60k. Once said employee has his 60k in hand, practically everything has a 20% VAT [2]. Oh, and since this is France, you also have taxes on taxes. For example, VAT is levied on some taxes related to electricity.
So out of a 100k USD total paid by the company, how much would a US employee have in hand after tax?
I've also noticed that for similar positions in the US (outside of SV) a software engineer can expect twice the salary compared to Paris. And mind, Paris is very expensive for the basics (food and housing).
It would be interesting to see how this compares to professions other than IT. In France, you're mostly barely above minimum wage for blue collar jobs. And minimum wage is nation-wide, the same in Paris and in some village in the middle of nowhere.
[1] Only "basic" health care is actually "free". If you need anything more "advanced", such as dental work or glasses, you better have a "mutuelle", which is basically private insurance. This is usually provided by the employer, but what is actually covered varies.
[2] Food, "necessities" and some other items have a lower VAT, 5.5% I think. There's also a 10% VAT for restaurants in some cases.
1/3 are illegal immigrants. Those folks would be excluded from the universal healthcare system of nearly every EU country. France and Spain are the exceptions, but France is under a lot of pressure to scrap that.
1/3 are eligible for Medicaid but haven’t signed up.
1/3 can afford Obamacare premiums but choose not to buy insurance. The Obamacare premiums are capped at 9.5% of income. That’s about the same as the employee-side healthcare tax would be in France or other countries with universal healthcare.
1. It's dependent on employment.
2. It comes with various forms of limits, out of pocket payments, and other caveats.
3. It comes with a profit motive for the insurance company to decline coverage.
etc
So fundamentally, "Am I under the threat of financial ruin if I were to get ill?" is still very much alive even with health insurance.
Does that include all of the people who live in states that haven't expanded Medicare?
That country is going to end up in debt.
What is the point of having an advanced economy if you don't use it to make people's lives easier, fix poverty, and provide decent public services and pleasant public spaces?
It is also essentially impossible to be paid less than ≈$22k (minimum wage of 18 473 € annually [1] at current exchange rates). Collective bargaining helps those who'd have a hard time bargaining individually, not top earners for whom frequent international travel appears perfectly affordable. (40% of Americans have never left the country, apparently. [2])
[1] https://www.service-public.fr/particuliers/vosdroits/F2300#t...
[2] https://yourmileagemayvary.net/2020/11/07/survey-percentage-...
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe there is no universe where an American worker could do the reverse (fly to Paris for two weeks to enjoy themselves, without needing to plan it for years).
The point is, the basement standard of life in France is not close to the basement standards of the US.
These are well known features of a rigid unionized labor laws.
The lowering of working hours and new paid leaves in 1936 where enacted by the newly elected left-wing government. The lowering of working hours to 35h per week in France was also voted by a left-leaning government.
Healthcare systems in France and the UK were also setup by left-leaning governments.
Collective action may work within a single company but if your after general social measures then the action is to be taken at the polling station.
In France unions in private companies are very weak these days, and overall the protections and rights of employees are extensive so people no longer have strong needs for this, anyway.
The key point is that in a democratic country things happen if the majority wants it and votes accordingly.
There is a reason Europe moved past min-wage laws, but Americans seem to be hell bent on not listening. Like most children, they have to make the same mistake on their own in order to learn from the consequences. I have personally given up on trying to reason with people about this.
Minimum wages set at national or state levels is more common in countries where labor unions don't exist to negotiate.
Note that in Sweden unions aren't company specific so there is no way to prevent people from joining one.
Arguing about the legality is a harmful modern fetish that especially in contexts such as these does not help us move along.