> Unions depress wages for top performers, and protect incompetent staff.
Entertainers and sports professionals have unions which do not seem have this problem.
Entertainers and sports professionals have unions which do not seem have this problem.
One of the fundamental asymmetries of our corporate age is that employees have ~1 company, but companies have many employees. That gives a company enormous negotiating power: it's easier for them to find another employee than for you to find another job.
Unions act to restore balance so that companies and workers have more equal negotiating power. That doesn't come through supply restriction. E.g., in high school I worked for a grocery store and we were unionized. They could have fired all the stockers at once if they wanted, as it was not particularly hard to learn the job. But what they couldn't do was pressure me into taking less money by threatening to fire me.
The supply of lawyers isn't restricted at all, as shown by stagnant or falling median wages. Almost anyone who wants to become a lawyer can enroll in one of the "third tier toilet" private law schools, and states don't impose any limits on the number of law school graduates allowed to take the Bar exam.
The supply of lawyers is restricted through onerous education and licensing requirements. You could argue that the fall in wages means they are no longer as effective in controlling supply. But if you think the supply "isn't restricted at all" I encourage you to start offering legal advice for money and let me know how that goes for you.
I don't see anything particularly onerous about education and licensing requirements for lawyers. A sufficiently motivated student can complete law school and pass the Bar exam in a few years. So in practice there's no significant restriction on supply.
https://www.ama-assn.org/press-center/press-releases/ama-con...
Again, if you think there are no restrictions, hang out your shingle and start giving legal advice. If you're right, you should be fine.
German labour is heavily unionized, a lot of the workers are lazy and incompetent. A lot of the union leadership is well paid and almost never works. It heavily opposes remote work(for good reason, but with a slightly wrong conclusion).
Their salary negotiations have been a clusterf* in recent years. And in fact I tried them, and contributed. But attempts at protecting employee rights were not only shut down by leadership but also fellow union leadership. They were too busy cozying up to leadership instead of protecting and informing other employees of employee rights. When it comes to employer abuse they will be too "busy" to help you, so realistically you will still need your own private law insurance.
I'm not opposed to unions and I do agree that workers need better protection especially in the US. But we also ought to be able to talk about how these big institutions may no longer protect the interest of those people and at some point exist to feed their own mouths more than the workers they were intended to protect.
Is it better than nothing? Yes, absolutely. But why do man-made structure always end up like that?
SAG doesn't make it's 'wage' because production companies are forced to hire from a smaller pool of SAG workers.
SAG sets prices.
There are actually an 'unlimited number' of SAG workers who would, if it were note for those numbers, also work for $0.
Also - unions don't set their wages by 'restricting labour' - they negotiate directly using the power of being able to shut down production. (Ok, arguably this is 'restricting the labour pool to current workers' but that would mean something different).
For Doctor and Nurses - you could argue that those guilds do actually restrict the number of workers in the field to keep prices up by supply & demand, but that's generally not what unions do.
This is true, but they would slowly lose their leverage if they didn't constrict the labor supply.
In order to join SAG you have meet certain requirements (e.g. speak a certain number of lines). The vast majority of actors in a union production have to SAG members, so this effectively acts as a rate limit to the number of new members.
The same goes for other powerful unions. Ford would love to build a new factory that employs non-union workers, but they aren't allowed to.
If you support police unions for example, you're inherently supporting the notion that a police officer who is courteous and cares about the community should be paid identically to the Chauvins of the force.
Unions are not designed to maximize the effectiveness of each shareholder dollar. They exist to give all employees a safe and fair work environment. That probably means that some 40th %ile performer gets paid the same as an 80th %ile performer. But they both get water bottles when working in a hot datacenter, and they both get their bonus that was promised to them in writing. I don't think that's a bad deal. Without a union, people would be fired for complaining about unsafe working conditions, bonuses that were promised would never come, and people would be working 8 hour shifts in 85 degree datacenters with no water. That doesn't sound that great to me.
If unions are so bad for workers, why do large corporations sink millions of dollars in anti-union ads in newspapers? Probably not because they really want to give their highest performers raises, but are hamstrung by regulation, and need the public to step in and protect them from the big bad union. They do it because they want to lower wages, make the job harder and more dangerous, and go back on promised bonuses when all the employees start asking where they were. The ads work, too. The seeds of doubt have been sown, and whenever Jeff Bezos reads a comment like yours, I'm sure he smiles a little.
This is a false dichotomy, it is possible for unions to be bad for (a majority of) workers and employers at the same time. Employers don't want to be sandbagged with low performing staff any more than their coworkers do.
Planet Money did a great podcast about this last year: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/05/871298161/police-unions-and-p...
And no, I at least personally think the Chauvins of the force shouldn't be paid at all, because maybe their 18 cases of misconduct should lead them to being removed from the force.
[0]: https://www.npr.org/2020/06/07/871751070/liability-insurance...
Unions have benefits for their employess of course, like making it impossible to fire them among other things, but then you have to work in the type of environment you get when everybody is impossible to fire.
These are the maximums for 2021 28,649,250 (players with less than 6 years experience) $40,108,95 (players with 10 years plus)
The nba was a bad example.
All proposals are the other kind. And none of them encode equal rights for immigrants in their bylaws.
The idea that all teachers and police officers in the US are paid exactly the same is wildly untrue. The pay for both those jobs varies based on all sorts of factors, especially including location and job title.
Imagine no union. Pressure from the mayor or council or the media or a connected criminal will get you fired possibility thrown in jail.
This is exactly the problem with unions. Pay for time under your belt is a stupid idea. Experience isn’t actually worth more to anyone beyond an adequate amount to do the job competently.
A police officer with 10 years of experience is not going to actually prevent more crime than one with 7 years. Additionally, an ambitious officer that takes training seriously, etc can be a much better officer than one with twice the experience.
Rewarding seniority rather than merit is literally an incentive to do the bare minimum for as long as possible.
The union absolutely could not protect sworn officers who broke the law. And if a member was in legal trouble, the local branch voted on whether to provide legal support ( good lawyers paid by the union for as long as needed). I saw an officer charged with stealing (from a found wallet) where the branch voted not to provide that support.
My advice- pay police more and expect them to behave as professionals.
As a teenager in Thailand I saw police (1990) who didn't get paid enough to live- they relied on local community giving them rice, blankets, weapons.. or they ripped off folks -mostly from outside the community. Speeding tickets for foreigners etc.
I was paid ok to do my digital forensics- but doubled then tripled my wage in 2 years of leaving- doing ~ the same stuff (what people call incident response is built into your blood after a few years of policing).
I would also argue that I was much better as a police officer after 7 years than after 2, and much better at the specialization that I choose in the police- digital forensics- after 9 years, much better... and when i left @15 years I was much, much more valuable to the service than when I joined (skilled in forensics, understood the court process, could well react to emergencies, could write policy not just follow it etc)- but my pay had gone up maybe 30%. But I didn't go up in rank because I didn't want to manage people, so my wage mostly capped.
And if anything- that is the issue with time based seniority- you force people to stop doing what they are good at and make them managers, with predictable results. (ie poor management)
Edited to not be a single wall of text
I think you underestimate what experience gives you in terms of decision making, community contacts and nerves of steel.
Entertainment and Sports unions exist for completely different reasons.
Traditional unions exist because of an asymmetric power dynamic between workers and labour, at least, historically.
Sports Unions exist so that fairly highly paid athlete's can squeeze even more money out of their employers by gaining leverage.
Actors work in an aspirational industry that is massively oversubscribed with talent, and wherein the work is generally ad-hoc or contractual and conditions vary greatly.
The vast majority of actors earn very little and probably are not full-time actors. Their Union sets a 'floor' for basic comp and expectations because otherwise there wouldn't be one - but they generally don't get into controlling roles for talent, they don't control job definitions etc..
I have a neighbour who worked at an auto-plant and his job was to sit in a room and does nothing, observing the floor. A role with kafkaesque bureaucracy and roles that simply should not exist. Family members have priority for jobs. In a nutshell - that union has considerable control and influence over the operating nature of the company whereas I don't think that's a long term benefit of unions.
My sister in law works for a government sector union and their hiring practices have almost nothing to do with merit or qualifications, it's shocking. Again, a situation wherein I think the power of the union is a detriment to the system overall.
That said it seems clear that after a wave of 'getting along' in the US, surpluses are not being shared and unions at Wallmart, Google, Amazon etc. seem like a good way to develop better equity. But I suggest it would be better for everyone if those companies just did a better job with their staff and were more gracious and generous.
Why can't tech workers unions do that?
For commodity workers in industry, without unions it's possible they are mistreated, in which case, it's better for everyone if there were to be unions (although I think some kind of agreement would be better than unions). But workers unions can also leverage considerably more power than is better for everyone and make the company and industry struggle.
Unions are a form of power, they work differently in different scenarios, and the scale and relative power matters a lot.
It's just not sufficient to say 'there's a union over there therefore we should have one' or 'unions are all evil' or 'unions are always better than not' etc..