Yes, which is why unions are great.
Corporations bargain collectively by default; each is a large unit, with a lot of resources, composed of many people.
Unions allow individuals to bargain collectively, to match corporations in terms of leverage, because few individuals are valuable enough to even come close.
Only with unskilled labor.
My profession is skilled and the skillset is in demand and hard to find. I bargain for myself, thanks.
I have repeatedly and at length discussed on HN about my 3 separate union membership experiences and how I will never again repeat them.
What an extremely elitist phrase.
This! I hate when people talk about "unskilled labor" because there is no such thing. There definitely is work that requires less training than other jobs, but there is no such thing as unskilled labor.
Besides, driving a car safely is very much a skill. It's life-saving by definition.
Flying a plain certainly takes a skill. So does driving a car. Both are skills. They certainly differ in the time required to obtain that skill, but that does not change the fact than an unskilled person can't drive a car through dense urban traffic bringing you safely to your destination, neither can they land a an airplane.
If a job was really unskilled, anybody could do it without any training at all. People usually don't pay for actually unskilled things because they can do it themselves just as good
There's a meaningful labor liquidity difference between a job that takes 2 years of training and 2 days of training, and it's important for policy decisions. Sorry?
The starkest difference that I recognize between people in those jobs and people in my career is that in the former people have a hard time showing up to work on-time or at all and in the latter everyone is pretty tuned in and works hard.
It only hit me late in life that success in life really can be just as simple as showing up.
I guess what I would say here is that the kind of people who feel that they need collective bargaining agreements probably overlaps quite strongly with the group of people that have a hard time showing up.
Also you're missing the point. I didn't say anything about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. You DON'T have to work hard. I said just show up. Every day. On time. That's literally the one thing I've seen in life that differentiates people who are successful in life from those who aren't.
And I know bank security guards who show up every day and live fulfilled happy successful lives. What I was saying was that commonly you'll find in unskilled labor jobs are people who don't show up every day. Not all of them but a large number. They won't do the minimum to succeed in life. They need the coddling.
> What I was saying was that commonly you'll find in unskilled labor jobs are people who don't show up every day.
Mind sharing the study of workplace absenteeism that you're basing that opinion on?
I correlated lack of punctuality with overrepresentation in low-wage+low-skill jobs.
There are also plenty of high-social status, skilled, low-income jobs that are thoroughly dominated by the upper classes, like college professors, journalists, rank & file media/fashion, and orchestra musicians. Those jobs are not low-skill and people in them tend to show up to work.
Apparently the euphemism treadmill is on low-wage labor [1]. Which is dumb, since it literally though not conceptually covers graduate students.
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/u/unskilled-labor.asp
If you pick a job that literally anyone else can learn to do in a few days, then the cap on your salary and lack of bargaining power is on you.
The comment above was clearly using it as a pejorative.
Unskilled labor can have decent bargaining power if there's a shortage of unskilled labor.
It just so happens that there tends to more frequently be shortages of skilled labor
Not really, because that’s the definition of unskilled: it takes no special skills to do the job. So if there’s a shortage and wages go up dramatically then skilled labor can take its place. (The opposite is not possible/ advisable though.)
E.g. think about customer facing roles and social skills/aptitude. Having all friendly/nice employees can drive greater revenue for a business. Chick fil a and costco are famous for hiring friendly employees, can have meaningful results for the business
Heck, I haven't even worked for any of those yet and last I checked at least 2 of them were offering less than what I make for my role.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/tech-industry/apple-google-others-...
I'm a strong believer that government's number one priority should be to maintain a competitive market, as in the long run that produces the best outcomes for broader society.
Unfortunately they've failed quite badly at it. Especially in regards to big tech.
Important to direct ire towards those that are responsible, representatives need to be held accountable
Judging by that history, you aren't doing so well. Good luck, and hopefully things improve!
Well, that's good to know. I guess the rest of the world can stop worrying about themselves since you're taken care of.
Letting others do that for you is much closer to indentured servitude or slavery.
The problem with all of these collectivsts' arguments is that they all believe themselves to be in their utopia's social planning committee rather than themselves a laborer. And that's if they made it past the "shoot all the troublemakers" phase of their revolution.
Edit: This forum has some sort of empathy deficiency in aggregate.
Bargaining collectively = monopoly. They can raise wages up to the level of marginal profit of the employing company.
Just the same as a company that's a monopoly could raise prices up to marginal value of the good to the customer.
If the company can bypass the union to hire others, then it's not a monopoly. But if the union is influential enough this may not be possible.
Distorted wages for labor is not good for broader society, only those being paid beyond their individual market power. Raises cost of goods and lowers quality for the rest
If the whole union will quit unanimously if they do that, then they have effective monopoly power over labor for the company.
The company will die if they try to bypass the union. In this case they could distort compensation far above what a competitive market would bear, and consumers of Kickstarter eat the cost (e.g. broader society).
It's definitely not a free lunch where workers get paid more and there's no societal cost, as many would like to believe
This is no different from having to accept any other company policies.
A company has a monopoly on its own policies, including whether joining a union is required.
Employees can join a different company. Companies can't magically become a different company. If they have a single union they are forced to work with, that union has monopoly power on labor supply.
Good for union employees, bad for the rest of society
Real life on planet earth disagrees pretty hard with you. Google "___est countries". Pick a metric that shows policy impacts. Say, health, happiness, etc. The kind of metrics that aren't abstract BS and can't be cherry-picked.
Pick the first, say, five. Then look up their unionization rates.
I'll spoil it for you. Nordic countries win (it doesn't even matter the metric lol... they even top CATO institute freedom rankings somehow). They have massive levels of unionization. Finland has unionized entire sectors of the economy.
Counter-examples welcome. But say "GDP" and I'll show up at your house and throw a pie in your face.
If the US went the way of Europe, technological innovation would slow dramatically, which I'll argue is a bad outcome for the world in the long run.
What do you think the cost of basic goods would rise to if all the Chinese manufacturing centers unionized?
IRL datapoints > counterfactuals: https://www.peoplespolicyproject.org/projects/nordic-state-i...
Also I said "Google it" for a reason. You picked an abstract one, and Sweden still beat us! And who could have guessed (me!), but Netherlands, Denmark, and Finland sit there in the top 10 as well :) [0]
> What do you think the cost of basic goods would rise to if all the Chinese manufacturing centers unionized?
You're not only dodging my point, but your own. You asked what was best for society.
0: https://www.wipo.int/pressroom/en/articles/2021/article_0008...
e: Man the "mooching" argument, in this context specifically, is really gonna stick with me. In a work meeting once, someone with knowledge said that each engineer in my org was earning the company $1.5-3 million. This is against a ~$200k salary. This is kind of subjective, but as an """innovator""", the idea that Finland is the one mooching off me is _hilarious_. I'm not gonna comment on what I "deserve" though because dessert theory isn't sound anyway.
E.g. cloud providers must provide cheaper and cheaper service to stay competitive with other cloud providers. This in turn drives down costs for all technology in society.
Sure a union could try to take that profit and feed it into wages instead, but that's worse for society in the end.
When profit margins maintain at excessive levels it's typically an indication that there's either a first mover advantage, or the company is a pseudo-monopoly.
I'd argue there are some big cases where that applies today
Yeah, that's the whole assumption I'm challenging with real world data.
Your ideas sound great on paper or in a vacuum, though. This conversation is way asymmetric, where I'm the only person pointing to facts you can look at with your eyes, so I'm gonna leave and wish you luck with your theories.
PS: > Chinese manufacturing. Manufacturing that is not unionized, by the way.
Unintentional comedy? Natural language model trained on Econ podcasts? Arguing from opposite day? Or the most embarrassing gaffe you could have possibly made in this convo? Not that their unions are good. Just a funny thing to write, caveat-free.
I am not familiar enough with the data to argue one way or another. But a counterargument would involve productivity. There are several fields where good-paying shops run rings around their budget-minded peers. Even for relatively unskilled roles, e.g. Costco. Sometimes consumers care about that directly. More often, it shows up in productivity.
Again, can't argue one way or another. Removing competition opens up novel channels for corruption. But I wouldn't say that a conclusion can be reached from first principles.
In the real world competitors don't always form immediately, it can take quite awhile. But the broad strokes are true, and bear out over time, barring monopoly formation in a given sector, free information etc.
Of course Costco does have competitors, they just haven't been able to execute as well up to this point.
It's a good environment for doing business. There is plenty of capital available, and the laws are usually reasonable. It's a large country that's sufficiently centralized that you don't have to localize everything for each state. And it's a stable environment that has mostly been isolated from the rest of the world and not touched by war in over 150 years.
As a drawback, the system really favors those who own over those who work. Even in places like the Silicon Valley, how much of the wealth goes to those who innovate and how much goes to those who fund the innovations? And how much goes to local property owners who just happened to be in the right place at the right time?
Americans don't study STEM as often as people in other developed countries, because they correctly see where the money is. There are many top STEM schools, but even they largely consist of foreign talent teaching foreign talent.
If the US went the way of Europe and stopped attracting foreign talent, I have no idea what would happen to tech innovation. The innovators and the innovations would still be there, but maybe there would not be as many people capable of taking advantage of the innovations.
The crucial paragraph.
You have it completely wrong. The US is mooching off of EU and Chinese brain talent and has done so for the past 75 years, since the end of WWII. Most innovation that occurs in the US has been done thanks to exploiting highly educated labor that migrated here from elsewhere on the planet.
If we're talking about the tech success of Silicon Valley, again that has mostly been mooching off of the lack of regulations regarding the sale and use of personal user data. Thankfully, EU is finally beginning to install some protections in that sense.
> Google "___est countries".
How about I Google which countries have the largest revenues for their technology companies, and the senior-level salaries of their employees?
It’s also kind of unsustainable in a globalized world, and even more so with remote work: The Nordic model is that you give everyone more or less the same compensation regardless of contribution. But how is that going to work 5 years from now? It’s already coming apart I would say.
> The thing about unions in the Nordic countries, though, is that they’re different from unions in most other countries. I learned this in Denmark in 2007 when a union steward at Lego A/S, which had just announced plans to move a bunch of factory work to Eastern Europe, gave me an impassioned lecture on the positive economic aspects of outsourcing. Unions in Denmark saw (and presumably still see) preserving the competitiveness of Danish industry as a much higher priority than protecting specific jobs. They arrived at this mindset in part because Denmark is a small country trying to succeed in a big, scary world, but also because access to generous unemployment benefits is what leads many (perhaps most) workers in Denmark to join unions in the first place.
> Denmark, Finland and Sweden are what are called “Ghent system” countries, where unions administer the unemployment insurance program with help from government subsidies. Norway used to have a Ghent system but abandoned it in 1938. Belgium, where the actual city of Ghent is located, has a “partial Ghent system.” In recent years, the link between union membership and unemployment insurance has weakened in the remaining Ghent system countries too, with most union-affiliated insurance providers now formally independent, and scholars from those countries have written lots of papers about the pressures the system is under. But from the perspective of many outside observers it still looks pretty great in the way that it combines continued union strength with a flexible, pragmatic approach to serving workers that seems quite compatible with economic competitiveness.
https://archive.ph/2ExBA#selection-6089.0-6961.1
From “ The Conservative Case for Unions”:
> This is not to say the old style of American industrial unions will come back, or should. The mid-20th-century enterprise model, as it was called, relied on confrontational tactics to organize particular companies or factories. That may have succeeded in an era of oligopolistic, locally rooted corporations. However, in an era when even a slight increase in labor costs at a North Carolina factory sends jobs to China, organizing just a single company can boomerang against workers and management alike.
> Fortunately, other models have emerged elsewhere in the world, models that can benefit both companies and labor. A well-known example, popular in Europe, is the so-called works council, which gives workers a voice in company affairs without triggering the fraught, complex process of creating a formal union. In Germany, unions can organize entire sectors, rather than particular companies, giving employers and workers incentives to cooperate in ways that improve industries’ competitive position.
> Even more intriguing is the Ghent system, successful in Denmark and Sweden, under which unions administer government-funded unemployment benefits. Providing that safety net helps unions to shift their focus from protecting individual jobs to maintaining workers’ overall income security; this in turn allows employers more flexibility in hiring and firing.
The best argument for unions is to evolve them from the large rigid bureaucratic ones that protect bad workers to ones that focus purely on wages, while keeping the country competitive (Unions 2.0 if you will).
Also I was surprised to find out France has less unionization than even the US (9% vs 13%).
Otherwise I think reducing anything to a single metric like that is silly.
There's an opportunity for tech to create a less antagonistic form of unions. Simply creating a Board seat for the ESOP, voted in by the ESOP holders (excluding senior management), would be shareholder aligned and beneficial to employees.