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Comment by heavyset_go | Hacker News Reader

The ownership class are able to organize and conspire with one another to pool and promote their own mutual interests, and no one notices or bats an eye. When workers try to organize in order to promote their mutual interests, the ownership class uses the power of the state to crush them. They enact laws that make such organization illegal and then enforce the laws harshly and without mercy.

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A perfect summary.

It was written 100 years earlier than the Haymarket affair (1886) and 200 years before Thatcherism and the Miner’s strike (1979, 1984).

The UK coal industry was destroyed by the labor movement, so I don't see how you imagine the coal company shareholders won that. Had contract liberty not been destroyed by the UK socialist/labor movement in the decades prior, the coal companies could have fired the strikers, and survived. That would have been better overall for UK workers.

The disappearance of UK Coal, and much of the UK manufacturing sector, played no small part in the stagnation of UK wage growth since the 1970s.

When Adam Smith's maxim, that contract freedom not be infringed upon by government, was in force, in the late 1800s, unions could not single-handedly bankrupt industries, and wages, alongside industry, grew at their fastest rate in both US and UK history.

When workers organize, to lock down the market with the assistance of government intervention, they create exactly the same kind of corruption.

For example, thanks to the dominance of public sector unions, New York now has nearly 300,000 unionized public sector employees receiving over $100,000 a year:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamandrzejewski/2020/05/26/why...

NYS public school teachers with 35 years of experience receive a pension of $87,945 per year on average:

https://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/pensions-retired-n...

When you amortize the average amount paid out in total in pension, over the work years, and add that to the other components of their annual compensation, this puts NYS public school teachers in the top 10% of income earners in the US.

It's also incredibly hard to fire New York state public school teachers:

https://www.the74million.org/article/investigation-nyc-tried...

Why this is so important was explained by Smith:

The real and effectual discipline which is exercised over a workman is that of his customers. It is the fear of losing their employment which restrains his frauds and corrects his negligence.

Without fear of dismissal, fraud and negligence multiplies, and thus we see growing inefficiency in the public sector, even as public sector unions direct an increasingly large share of economic output to their members:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/social-spending-oecd-long...

I'm not sure the points you've raised demonstrate that there are many New York teachers that should be fired that have not been. The link from the74million.com focuses more on teachers that were successfully let go.

New York city is also one of the most expensive states to live in so any financial comparison would need to be relative to cost of living.

Which is besides the point that perhaps teachers should be remunerated well.

>>I'm not sure the points you've raised demonstrate that there are many New York teachers that should be fired that have not been.

Only 75 public school teachers were fired in all of New York between 2015 and 2016, over a span of 16 months in total, coming to a rate of 56 teachers fired per year, for a work force of ~75,000 teachers. Now unless only super humans apply for teaching positions in New York, that points to an extreme lack of accountability for New York teachers.

In the real world, many people get hired for jobs they are not well suited for, or are not prepared to commit themselves to enough to do the job competently, and shortly thereafter, are let go.

>>New York city is also one of the most expensive states to live in so any financial comparison would need to be relative to cost of living.

Median income in New York is $67,000, and that's dragged up by the very high median income of the large bloc of public sector workers. So the public sector workers are the elite, even in relation to other New York residents. What's troubling is that the entire media is unionized too, so they share a common interest with the public sector unions in perpetrating the ideological narratives that keep unions in power.

New York City is dramatically different than New York as a whole. I'm not an expert in economics, but I imagine that would distort things.

With respect to the median income, I was referring to New York City, not New York the state.

Median household income is ~$64,000 in New York City:

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/newyorkcitynewy...

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