As unions decline, inequality rises | Hacker News Reader

As unions decline, inequality rises

epi.org

327 pointsvivekmgeorge458 comments

I think this is a good article for tech workers to read to provide perspective on our place in the tech economy (particularly Americans): https://organizing.work/2020/12/there-is-something-missing-f...

particularly this part: > Early on in my own career in the industry, I felt guilty about making a “good” salary. Why did I deserve to make more money than a teacher or a nurse? Of course, I don’t — they deserve a lot more too. But if I was making less it would go straight into the pockets of investors, not other workers. Tech workers’ labor has made six of the world’s ten richest people, and today computing and the internet are an integral part of every industry. Although some workers are highly paid, the differential between investor profits and employee salary is as stark as in any other industry, because workers are not organized.

it's true that tech workers frequently make good money and we should be grateful for that, but when our industry is producing oligarchs like Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, it means that they are profiting from the things that tech workers produce. It's how inequality is increased. It's no coincidence that the rise of the tech economy has coincided with American inequality rising sharply.

One of the memes that you frequently see in the upper middle class left-leaning tech worker circles is that anything less than a worker co-op is ultimately an organizational structure that is inequitable and exploitative to its labor force, leading to negative externalities for society at large.

I'm 100% ignorant of the history of labor and of all philosophical dialectic around it, but I would love to form an opinion on this. Would someone mind steel manning both sides of that argument?

E.g. I have questions like, if I'm the founder of a company and I sell it 10 years later and make most of the upside, did I exploit my employees because they didn't make as much as I did in the end?

Argument for the meme:

Labor unions don't challenge the core structure of capitalism; even when they're working, they mostly serve to give a slightly bigger piece of the pie to workers. And in practice, they are hijacked by a certain bureaucratic caste that mostly optimizes for stability and self perpetuation. They become integrated with state sponsorship, which will never allow for substantive change. For instance, in the USA the general strike was a powerful tool in the arsenal of workers' power and drove substantial wage gains, but disrupted capital too much and as such is banned by the NLRB. Since unions' scope is limited to accounting, law, and mediation, they become mostly administrative organizations staffed increasingly by members of the professional services class. These people can never provide leadership that primarily serves the working class, as their economic interests diverge and they can't do anything that would threaten their social good standing.

Argument against:

An economy dominated by worker co-ops is just wishful thinking. We have no idea how to get from point A to B, and no idea if it would even work. The limited evidence we have for that kind of economic structure comes from post WW2 Yugoslavia and suggests it wouldn't ("they just didn't do it right!" invites the question of how we do do it right). Conventional unions do shift some of the capital pie to workers, and we shouldn't let a very hypothetical best be the enemy of the concrete good. And even if worker co-ops are the ideal, any path that gets us there requires more worker power, so stronger unions would be a good first step to getting us to that point.

Also, in favor of point b, both can coexist, the same way that TV did not entirely eliminate the radio.

Nothing is stopping anyone from forming a worker coop in the US. Yet few do. Have you ever considered this?

I have, yes, and I've gone as far as finding friends and former colleagues who would be interested in joining me. Unfortunately health insurance is tied to employment in this country and we all have families. The uncertainty in that regard leaves it a non-starter for people in our situation. At least for the time being.

I'm not sure I follow on how that would stop you from forming a worker co-op. Almost all businesses who have full time employees pay for health insurance. Are you implying a co-op would make less revenue and therefore could not provide its employees insurance?

Businesses get way different insurance rates than a single individual (or 12 individuals). It costs me $240 a month for full health coverage ($1000 deductible), dentistry, and eye from my current employer; for me to get something equivalent outside this company would cost me $3,000 to $5,000 a month. I can't afford that plus rent, plus energy, plus food.

Not all businesses are equal, not all benefits are equal.

When I worked in a call center the only insurance that wasn't pure garbage cost me $300 a paycheck.

Sorry but it's expensive being poor in America.

Yeah I agree with all of that but I don't see how it is relevant to the discussion. A worker co-op should be able to provide health insurance to it's employees the same as any other business. The fact that it is worker-owned shouldn't change that at all.

Have you ever tried to start a business? Myself and five of my friends simply can't afford that level of health insurance, even with our resources pooled together.

Just because you say the word "business" doesn't make insurance cheaper for small players.

A highly successful worker coop leads to a bunch of people with comfortable lives and steady jobs.

A highly successful privately owned company leads to a handful of people with a ton of money and free time, which they can use to found other privately owned companies.

At least with startups, are most founded by affluent people with free capital and time, or by those who sign a deal with VC? Afaik YC founders aren't thousands of bored millionaires, they're average middle class people with a college degree who quit their jobs to live on their seed investment for a few years, and share the spoils in the end with their employees and investors if the project succeeds.

Can you get away without initial starting capital if your startup has a very low chance of success? You need someone to be willing to eat the 99% risk of failure in exchange for proportionally high returns.

I imagine the same problem is much ameliorated if you were opening a pizza shop, a daycare, or a hair salon, where the business is more predictable?

1) That was a statement of arguments about whether or not a worker co-op driven economy is superior to labor unions, from a pro-labor perspective. Stating an argument doesn't mean endorsement of it; that's the entire point of steel manning.

2) To the extent I buy either argument, I don't think it's subtle that my sympathies lie with the criticisms of an economy of worker driven co-ops.

This is a really good question, and there isn’t a clear answer. I’m only answering this from the left point of view though, so take it with a pinch of salt.

Traditional labor theory can make arguments for both, if you put in most of the work, then you deserve most of the benefits. However the case for equal pay is also solid, especially if the fruits of labor are abundant. How much does 5 million give you that 1 million doesn’t, and why shouldn’t you settle for 1 million if it means everyone would get more?

But from a leftist perspective there is a fault in the question (but it is still a good question). Namely that you sell the business. In an ideal left world, you wouldn’t do that. The business belongs to the workers. If the workers can all form a consensus that it is time to leave the business and sell it to another set of workers—those that leave will be bought out basically—then this is a valid scenario. However if under a new leadership, some workers are receiving more benefits then others, then that is exploitation. I would say actually that the new leadership is exploiting their previous workforce by spending the money the workers created by buying a new business without their consent.

So in short, you as the founder of the business that was bought, are enabling exploitation by selling it to a larger organization (unless you sell it to a worker owned and operated business).

Workers can bank their paychecks and walk away at any time. They would deserve more of the benefits if they bore more of the risks of failure, like investors are doing.

Yes, as a leftist, I’m not a believer in that. I’m of the opinion that the supposed risk that investors take is overstated. The average investor is quite wealthy compared to most workers, and can afford to loose a bunch of that money without it causing significant harm, even leaving the investor still significantly wealthier then the worker. On top of that, many investors have insurance, or a wide portfolio of low risk stocks, guaranteeing them continued exploitation without risking much.

Compare this to a worker, most of whom can’t afford to go without paychecks for a single month. Meaning that the loss of a job is far riskier then the investor’s supposed risk of loosing their investment.

This transaction between an investor and a worker (if you look at it as a transaction) is always biased significantly towards the investor, they will grab proportionally more of the profit and tank less of the loss. So I would say the average worker is both risking a lot more and reaping less of the benefits.

I agree that investors self-select partly by their ability to weather losses, which is why workers tend to trade away speculative upside for the certainty of wages now. But investors need a reason to take on risk, we need to steer more resources under the guidance of the most successful of the competing decision makers, and profit solves those problems.

The traditional view is that "The workers control the means of production".

Suppose you built a successful small company but, suddenly, every employee quit at once. Could your business carry on the next day? Could it survive until you hired and trained replacements?

If the answer is "no" then you have made the case that employees both deserve to share in the business's success and will probably be incentivised by co-owning the company.

Does the janitor deserve as much of the profits as the CTO? Well, what premium do you put on your other employees not getting sick, or injuring themselves?

(Wasn't there a case where a Google chef made a fortune from stocks? Much to the chagrin of some?)

The opposite argument is that those who risk capital are the only ones who deserve the reward. Without investment, a company can't launch or grow. Workers are an operational cost - they are paid for labour and no more deserving of reward than the electricity company. Both provide a service but neither takes a risk.

Neither view will do.

The company can't succeed without the workers. The company also can't succeed without capital. Both deserve to get a cut of the rewards.

Exactly.

This neglects the reality that loans exist. In an ideal leftist world your local credit union redistributes wealth by collecting pepole’s savings from the community and hands them out as loans for slightly higher interest rate. That interest rate is the “cut” of the rewards. If an enterprise goes bankrupt and is unable to pay back the loan, there is usually some kind of insurance the credit union has to prevent going under with it.

That sounds like a world in which everyone ends up worse off. Maybe it’s more equal, but I value standard of living and opportunity more than equal outcomes.

Can you build a house without a carpenter? If not, is he entitled to a part of your house even though you paid him to build it?

I would say that, yes, a carpenter is entitled to a share of the profits. They used their labour to build something which appreciates in value.

Traditionally, it has been too hard to track fractional ownership of an asset and calculate a share of profits. And most workers prefer cash up front rather than waiting for a payday which might not materialise for decades.

I'm not going to go full blockchain/NFT on this idea. But it is easy to see how in the future a long-lived guild of tradespeople could build your house at a discounted price now in return for a share of the sale profits in the future.

I don't know if that's a good or bad thing though.

And if the house depreciates, should the carpenter then help him with the mortgage payments?

Could you make the argument that the carpenter should be given the option to be paid in equity or in cash, if both parties agree to it? Is there any argument against giving people the option to choose the sort of compensation risk profile that works best for their individual situation?

No. The carpenter is entitled to pay for his work.

He's not entitled to additional value the recipient of the work may or may not get from him completing the job, unless he negotiates that up front. It seems likely that no one in their right mind would agree to pay the carpenter profit sharing for every transaction that may occur from that building. They'd find another carpenter.

This is a silly question, so silly in fact that I suspect it is only intended as reductio ad absurdum (which can be a fallacy if based on a false or inadequate premise).

A carpenter is entitled to the fruits of their labor, which can adequately be provided with money.

>> This is a silly question, so silly in fact that I suspect it is only intended as reductio ad absurdum (which can be a fallacy if based on a false or inadequate premise).

I commend you for knowing logical fallacies. Though it would be even better if you were able to demonstrate those fallacies instead appealing to your own authority.

>> A carpenter is entitled to the fruits of their labor, which can adequately be provided with money.

I agree. Unfortunately, some people here claim developers working for google are entitled to their share of google's profits and carpenters working for said developers are not entitled to a share of profits from what those developers earn.

There are plenty of examples of Reductio ad absurdum being a fallacy because of a false or inadequate premise. Zeno’s paradox[1] being a famous one. The false premise being that you can actually add infinite number of times (modern mathematics take the limit as n approaches infinity).

Here the prime candidate for the premise being wrong is to equate the work of carpenter working in their own enterprise at a project, to that of a google worker, working at Google’s enterprise for any project their management tells them to.

The former gets the fruit of their labor in full when the job is finished and paid for, the latter is suffering from a systematic exploitation as each time the stock goes up in price (or when dividends are issued) the shareholders get the fruits of the worker’s labor, as opposed to the workers them selves.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeno%27s_paradoxes

>> The former gets the fruit of their labor in full when the job is finished and paid for, the latter is suffering from a systematic exploitation as each time the stock goes up in price (or when dividends are issued) the shareholders get the fruits of the worker’s labor, as opposed to the workers them selves.

This is a bit hard to parse. Isn't the developer's work also paid for after each unit of time served. And why exactly is the developer being systematically exploited every time the stock price increases and the carpenter is not if the house appreciates? Doesn't the developer literally live in the fruits of carpenter's labor?

The difference here is in control. The carpenter has full control on which task they take, whereas the developer hasn’t. A developer is forced to work at a bad product that they know is gonna fail, but the carpenter can refuse to take on a job that they know is gonna cost them more then the customer is willing to pay. For the developer, after their project inevitably fails, it will probably cost them their job, despite the failure not being their fault. Given the option, the developer would have voted against the project, the carpenter can simply refuse it. Upper management usually never takes the responsibility of failure, opting instead to mass layoffs. Shifting the cost of failures onto their exploited workers.

Instead of looking at the house the carpenter builds, look at the carpenter as an enterprise. If the carpenter grows in skill, and is able to take on more complicated jobs, they are able to charge more. The carpenter’s enterprise grows in value, which means more pay for the carpenter them self.

This is not true of the developer. The developer might be able to demand more pay, but they are at the mercy of their upper management to relay that to the owners of the business, who might see more value in exploiting the worker for more profit for them selves. Being able to collectively bargain through a union the developer might approach the freedom of their enterprise as the carpenter, but it is still not nearly the same level as if they had direct control of the business, like the carpenter does.

> This is not true of the developer. The developer might be able to demand more pay, but they are at the mercy of their upper management to relay that to the owners of the business, who might see more value in exploiting the worker for more profit for them selves.

A typical developer at Google makes $200k-$500k. That was enough for me, I didn't feel exploited, so don't come here and tell me that I should feel exploited, I'm sure that even Marx would agree with me that such a huge salary is fair.

Please note that exploitation here is a technical term from marxism and should not be confused with how this word is commonly used in english as a synonym for oppression. In my native language of Icelandic there is a much nicer word arðrán which literally means “dividend burglary”, “profit burglary” or “stealing the fruits of your labor”. It doesn’t matter how much you personally makes, if someone else is taking money that someone else worked for, that is exploitation of labor.

I hope that clears things out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exploitation_of_labour

I didn't work for the money others were paid, I was paid the fruits of my labour, others was paid theirs, thinking that I would be worth more than I was paid is just hubris. Then after having worked a few years, getting 25% pay raises every year, I quit and can now easily work on my own projects because I made ridiculous amounts of money.

You might not feel exploited, and maybe you personally weren’t. But collectively you and your coworkers were, or at the very least, you and your coworkers were used to enable exploitation of other workers—within Google, or through Google’s third parties. The only way a shareholder of Google can make money off of Google without contributing any work is by exploiting people that do the work. In the context of distributing the wealth a company creates, who gets what is a zero sum game. And if shareholders are making money without working for it, it must be through exploitation. And given the power dynamics at play. It is the workers that are exploited. If not Google’s own workers, then the workers of the companies that are Google’s paying customers.

The Google founders did a lot of work initially. And then, my job was enabled thanks to that work and the investments.

Your point only works if the company is stable and the work is keeping that company running, but Google has expanded exponentially every year, it hasn't reached the stable rent seeking stage yet. All those profits were reinvested in the form of salaries and jobs, if those went to the early workers then I'd never have gotten a job there and I'd have to live with a much much smaller salary. Stable rent seeking businesses are a problem, yes, that is the bad kind, but modern tech is too young for companies to have reached that stage.

So with your model I'd have made less money, that isn't good for me. Your model only works momentarily, when you stop growing the company and suddenly start to pay everything to current workers. But all the future workers whose jobs were enabled by those reinvestments would then be worse off, and I'd be one of those workers since I joined close to two decades after Google was founded. By the time I left there were twice as many people working there, their salaries were paid by the labour done by the previous workers, and Google barely pays profits so far so most of this actually went back to the workers, just future workers and not current ones, that is why I can't say that I deserve more than I got, I paid it forward as thanks for those who made my job possible.

Edit: And about unions, did you know that Google also operates in countries with strong unions? I joined the company in one of those. And you know, Google started paying me much more when I moved from that country to a country where unions weren't strong? How is this possible if those strong unions would make me get more? So apparently unions don't make these jobs pay more, in my experience it is the opposite, they didn't even manage to get my salary up to par with my non union co-workers. Unions mostly cares about the median, they don't care about high end workers that already makes a lot, unions aren't for me.

With this kind of logic, you could then just as easily say the workers of google are exploiting the shareholder's capital to profit as they didn't bring any of their own with them. Just as soon as things will go bad for google, all the developers will find another jobs and shareholders will be left suffering the losses.

If the carpenter is poor and has mouths to feed, he can't pass the task even if he knows it will fail. He needs money. On the other hand google's developer has earned so much money the previous year, he can then quit any time he wants and get a new job with ease. To me it looks like the carpenter is the exploited one.

In most cases, they do co-own the company, through stock and options grants. Particularly so for the early employees who are not replaceable.

At Google's scale, everyone is replaceable, including Jeff Dean, Sundar Pichai, and everyone else who you think is "instrumental."

I imagine the steelman version of the argument here is: yes, they do own part of the company, that portion of upside and control is so minuscule that it's almost insignificant. And thus we're back to needing unions to advocating on behalf of workers so that they get to own a bigger slice of the pie.

That's the traditional Marxist view. It is not the traditional view.

Yes

I forgot I posted this comment so just seeing this but as an upper middle class lefty tech worker I'll offer an answer.

I think your question is a bit too focused on the individual and not the system. I think it's actually difficult for founders to share the upside "equitably", whatever that means. Like, are there any examples of it actually happening? I suspect that the acquiring company frequently dictates terms that won't allow you to make every employee a millionaire because then what incentive do they have to work anymore. I think once you get to the multi billion dollar level of wealth it's difficult to get objective advice - many of the people surrounding you are just trying to please you to continue getting their slice of the vast wealth that you control. So just as a human it's hard to navigate that I think (this is me being sympathetic to billionaires, which I'm generally not).

The much easier answer to me is just much higher taxes on wealth. Capitalism is not a system built to share resources equitably, but inequality can be tamed through taxes. If you as a founder see most of the upside, fine, but a lot of it will get redistributed to society through taxes, and theoretically your workers benefit from that. It also means it's not up to the whims of the individual people or companies involved in something like an acquisition to try to make it equitable.

(another way inequality in capitalism can be tamed is through unions, but I don't know if there are any examples of unions being involved in something like an acquisition or IPO in tech)

| Why did I deserve to make more money than a teacher or a nurse?

My tech salary, adjusted for inflation, is almost exactly what my RN mother was making when she was my age.

Maybe our salaries aren't that extraordinary, they're just the only ones that have kept up with inflation.

Don't feel guilty about a tech salary, feel angry others been left behind.

Not only inflation but with debt.

You can do extremely well with just a Bachelor’s in CS. Professions like nursing, medicine, law, even business have had their earning potential sapped by larger and larger costs of education. And degrees past Bachelor’s are less well supported by financial aid schemes.

If there is one “tech disruption” I hope actually sticks is the death of credentialism and the rise of proof of ability by doing. I have only a bachelor’s in a liberal art(!) and working in tech has opened up so many doors for me, in teams where nobody cared where I went to school and my lack of a master’s was met with curious shrugs.

well, this has upsides and downsides.

proof of doing is in large part responsible for how grueling and grinding tech interviews are. you don't hire nurses by asking them to demonstrate operating on a cat. and to some degree the grueling and grinding is there because the degree doesn't indicate anything at all, and desirable companies ending up having to process a lot of underqualified applicants.

All upsides for real people and all downsides for multi-billion-dollar companies, it would seem. There is never going to be a university degree program that precisely matches what a company needs. So why bother?

At least one page complaining about tech interviews hits the front page of HN a week. That’s an upside?

Only a hundred years ago, a bunch of immigrants from places like Germany or Spain or Italy could arrive in New England (including New York City), perform manual labor, provide for their families on one income, and pool their additional money to _build whole buildings_ as social or fraternal clubs.

That really puts things into perspective for me.

"provide for their families" was also a much lower standard than it is now. Back then having a good life (for immigrants at least) didn't mean a large house in the suburbs and 3 cars, it meant an entire family of 5 sharing 1 bedroom and walking everywhere. A pair of jeans was a multi generational investment. If your family could afford one bicycle, you were living large.

This was unimaginable wealth compared to what was available back home. You had all 3 meals and even meat! Meat! The luxury.

sauce: I'm from one of those European countries where 1 in 6 people emmigrated between 1880 and 1920. Literature from the time (that we read in school) contrasts the local situation with the riches of America as reported by people who sent letters.

The quality of living a family in the suburbs has today is like what a rich person a hundred years ago would have.

I see people with houses, multiple brand new cars, TVs in every room, and who take a vacation at least once a year complain about the economy their entire life.

The fact that some people don’t know how well they have it is not evidence that everything is fine.

Watch a few news reports on poverty in America and you will see that a decent percentage of working adults live with their entire family in a small cramped apartment, can’t afford any vacation, and likely can’t afford emergency medical care if it comes up.

And even those people in the suburbs with all those TVs could have more financial security and work fewer hours if our economy was more fairly arranged.

They didn't say "everything is fine". There's a lot wrong with everyone's economy from the perspective of "we work just as hard, why don't we get the same stuff?"

However, I think you're misapprehending quite how much worse things were a century ago. Now the poor may struggle to afford a PET/CT/MRI/ultrasound scan, or a PCR test, or a dose of antibiotics, or a heart (lung, liver, kidney, bladder, pancreas, ovary, …) transplant, but 100 years ago they did not exist. Diabetes only stopped being lethal just over 100 years ago, the first successful human treatment in the beginning of 1922. Smallpox no longer exists. And so on.

No I’m not misapprehending how much worse things were a century ago. I simply believe that argument has no bearing on the discussion of a fair distribution of wealth in todays society. No one today lives 100 years ago as a matter of simple fact. Yes, we have antibiotics now, and that’s great, but that has nothing to do with the fact that workers are producing vast amounts of wealth and receiving very little of that wealth as remuneration. We have cars today that make certain kinds of transportation easier, but that has nothing to do with a lack of maternity and paternity leave for new parents. We have cell phones so we can now talk to anyone in the world but that has nothing to do with the fact that business owners will selfishly decide to ship 1000 jobs overseas with no input from the workers who will be disenfranchised.

I’m talking about unfair power imbalances today. This has nothing to do with the past.

Most, myself included, have a very limited understanding of the economy we are part of, so I'm not surprised by complaints. Every so often, someone making 2 or 3 times the national average income makes an ass of themselves on TV by claiming they're economically disadvantaged.

In some senses, you don't even have to go to the suburbs to be unimaginably better off now than it was possible to be a century ago, because a century it was not possible, at any price, to make a weekend trip between New York and London; to be immune to the common forms of seasonal flu; to have a video call with someone; to get penicillin; 3D printers, and indeed all CNC machines more complicated than a loom controlled by punched cards, would've been fantasy; and so much more besides.

TVs are cheap now. So are 3D printers, travel, and phones.

>TVs are cheap now. So are 3D printers, travel, and phones.

Being able to own disposable gadgets made in China doesn't make you rich. Those are not necessities. But you now what is? Housing, stable well paying jobs, healthcare and education , all of which are now massively out of reach for the average joe than they were a few decades ago.

And a century ago? Because that's what this sub-thread is focusing on.

And, like I said, much of what we now consider basic healthcare had not yet been invented.

And even in the last decades, those cheap Chinese gadgets you're so dismissive of, they give access for free to not just k-12 but also university and post-graduate level educational courses and materials on topics which had not been invented then either.

And the tech also lets more work remotely, changing the dynamics on housing.

> Every so often, someone making 2 or 3 times the national average income makes an ass of themselves on TV by claiming they're economically disadvantaged.

Someone making 3X the US national median income is paying roughly the US national median income in federal/state/local taxes. They're paying a median working citizens' earnings in taxes.

And?

How would you feel if someone taxed you an absolute amount that would leave 50% of your countrymen penniless? And they denied you tax breaks, like the child credit, that they grant themselves? And then that same 50% vilified you to boot?

I would be absolutely fine, because I was on 3x the national average income.

I would not go onto national television and act like earning way more than anyone else made me a modern suffragette.

Nobody said "not fine". You mentioned "economically disadvantaged". Such a person person literally is disadvantaged in some economic ways. Not all. Not most. But some.

You asked how I would feel. That's the answer to that: I'd be fine.

And as I'd be on 3x average pay, the only way a tax break could possibly be large enough to make me not better off economically was if average people get so many their tax rate is negative.

Not even close. That rich person had servants, could go on lengthy vacations, etc. and most likely they had substantial passive income.

The key thing to understand is the difference in how precarious those situations are: that affluent suburbanite has some shiny things but their cash flow is much higher than their wealth. A TV in every room is a rounding error on the $11k/year each of those new cars costs on average, and over the course of someone’s working life that kind of thing makes a huge difference in net worth.

The American healthcare system factors into this significantly: if your income depends on showing up to work daily, all of that can go away with a single health incident which leaves you unable to work. A truly rich person is considerably more likely to be able to ride something like that out.

Similarly, retirement is a source of stress for many Americans. Having given mortgage processors and car companies millions of dollars over your life won’t help you much then.

The rich people of the past had no internet, cars, air travel, or much health care by modern standards. The average 2022 American is vastly better off materially.

What they had was social status, and I think that's more what you're talking about. Social status is incredibly important for humans, so I understand focusing on it. But since it's pretty much a Zero Sum Game, nothing much changes there.

Minor quibble: they would've had cars 100 years ago. Bad ones, but they would've had them.

>The rich people of the past had no internet, cars, air travel, or much health care by modern standards. The average 2022 American is vastly better off materially.

No, while rich people in the past had no iPhones or internet, they had something far more valuable than that: income generating businesses and appreciable assets like land, housing, gold, fine art, jewelery, etc.

And no, the average American is vastly poorer now as housing, stable well paying jobs, healthcare and education, are now massively out of reach for the average joe than they were a few decades ago. Having iPhones and internet doesn't make up for these.

Commercial aviation was just getting started, yes, But a rich person in 1922 had luxury rail travel, boats, cars, horses, etc. Most importantly, they had time: air travel is important for most of us because having a paltry couple weeks per year means people try to do things like weekend trips which couldn’t otherwise work. If you’re truly rich, you have a lot more margin for having other people do the unpleasant trips for you or adjusting schedules to suit your comfort.

Health care is the biggest differential - wealth can buy you out of a lot of lifestyle factors but a hundred years ago was just before the dawn of the antibiotic revolution. That part is true, but it isn’t a factor of rising incomes and given how many Americans have stress, lower quality of life, and experience severe financial strain due to healthcare costs I don’t think it’s attributable to higher incomes.

I was trying to make the point that wealth and living standards isn't about numbers on bank statements.

It's about the material conditions you live in. And in 2022, what we take for granted would blow away pretty much anything in 1922.

I don't think I quite succeeded. Will maybe try something else next time.

My point was that this isn’t so clear cut: healthcare is great, but a lot of things are mixed because humans care about relative status and the real signifiers continue to be things which involve other humans doing labor for you. Even though Netflix exists rich people still go to the opera because it’s an experience most people can’t afford.

> if your income depends on showing up to work daily, all of that can go away with a single health incident which leaves you unable to work.

Yes, but there are long-term disability insurance policies available for purchase that largely remove that risk. It's a cost, of course.

And, at least in the US, there are public programs that provide disability coverage already figured into one's taxes: https://www.ssa.gov/ssi/

Which somewhat reduce that risk. People on SSI are usually struggling, not affluent, and actually getting those benefits can be a struggle for people with conditions less clear cut than, say, losing limbs.

I’m not saying they’re not worth having but again that there’s a big gap between someone being rich and a middle-class worker with decent active income.

Definitely, the SSI application process can be onerous. It is meant for people who can do no job not just their pre-incident job.

Definitely, SSI is not a full-time job income. That's why a worker with decent active income should look into private, long-term disability insurance.

Being able to "walk everywhere" is itself a kind of luxury nowadays, because there are limited walkable cities in the US and they have all become very expensive.

It's often actually much cheaper to live somewhere in the suburbs where you can't walk everywhere, because everything is designed around cars.

Funny enough, having everything being designed around cars is actually more expensive for society on the whole. Walkable cities everywhere would actually be cheaper, and then it also wouldn’t be a luxury.

The fact that everything is designed around cars is one of the invisible nooses around the neck of America. When you look around and notice that everything is covered in cars, that's hard to unnotice. All those cars, roads, parking lots, highways, box stores, mile of sewer and water pipe, cost a staggering amount and are going to start costing a lot more to maintain over the next decade as systems age out and need replacement or maintenance. Not to mention the cost of demolishing the country we spend the previous 300 years constructing. The vampiric system of automobilism has made everything much more expensive for everyone.

Living in a semi-crowded city, near your family and friends, should be the default, cheap option. Instead we've wasted about 10 trillion dollars pave the entire continent. Possibly the most expensive mistake ever made in history.

Nobody wants to live in apartments. Maybe 20-something’s with no prospect of family, but that’s it.

The post to which you're responding said nothing about apartments. Do you mind connecting a few dots for those of us less well-versed in the presumptions of your milieu?

The post didn't explicitly say "apartment", but it said:

> Living in a semi-crowded city, near your family and friends, should be the default, cheap option.

What kind of dwelling, apart from apartments, are there in a "semi-crowded city"? They may not be high-rises, but even if it's a "multi-family house", it's still "apartments". There's only a (usually thin) wall separating your room from your neighbor's. This is one of the main aspects people typically hate about apartments.

Apartments are fine as long as they're good apartments. Properly-built concrete walls completely mitigate the sound problem you mentioned below. In four years at my current place, I've never heard a neighbor's voice from inside my apartment.

Shitty slumlord apartments are what everyone wants to escape from, in my experience.

It disturbs me that your comment is "greyed out," whatever that means: you're speaking an obvious truth. The car-scale of American infrastructure is an impediment to physical health; it's an impediment to social capital, and therefore to democracy and to mental health, as well. It funnels us down restricted, commercial avenues--pun intended. It's physically dangerous, it's chemically toxic, it's ecologically destructive, and it's damned expensive to maintain!

It's obvious when I visit a city / countryside with poor transit and pedestrian infrastructure how much more I suffer. It's so damned obvious, it's the first thing that screams out to me right when I land / pull in / ride up.

I can't understand what literate person would take issue with the core of your assertions.

The whole point of civilization is that generation to generation, our standards of living should increase.

Instead, they are regressing. If we are comparing to 100 years ago, we sure should have been doing better! If we compare to 50 years ago, there are some key ways where we have regressed within the United States.

The key here is that when we are speaking of standards of living, we are speaking within some narrow contexts. In the developing world, standards have blossomed. Within the United States, the GDP has continued to grow but the value hasn't spread equally.

I can say that in the lower 50% of people in the US, the standard of living has markedly decreased. For 50-80%, it's mildly increased. For the top 20%, it's doing just fine, but it's never been a better time to be wealthy as the pathway for compounding growth on wealth has never had so many tools.

That has more to do with the cost of building than a lack of pay. When you don't account for higher education, buildings, and healthcare, Americans are significantly richer than they were in the past. The problem is that politicians don't bother to address the underlying perverse incentives that are the root causes of these rising costs. They can win elections just fine by throwing money at the symptoms, even though they cause even more long-term pain. Until these root causes are addressed, most of the money squeezed from employers is simply going to go to the rent seekers in areas. The most clear example of this is tech salaries going to Bay Area landlords.

I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s in Detroit. It was a place where a high school diploma could get you a secure job that would support a middle class family. It’s all changed and Detroit is now half the size it once was while cities like Houston and Austin have grown tremendously.

Why did that happen? Did corrupt unions kill the goose that laid the golden eggs? Or was it poor management of the automotive giants that allowed overseas companies to take market share. Did wages across the board fall behind inflation or was the automotive fundamentally changed by automation.

I wish I understood what happened since I actually lived through that period.

My sense is that German automotive companies dealt with Japanese competition better than American ones did, though I'd love for someone who knows about the history of the industry to chime in. Germany had strong unions and was a market leader then, similar to the US, so it suggests something was wrong with American automakers, labor unions, or the American government that led to the disaster.

I wonder if Germany was more aggressive with tariffs to protect automakers from competition.

> I wonder if Germany was more aggressive with tariffs to protect automakers from competition.

It's somewhat the opposite actually. Germany taxes imported cars, but at least it still allows them. At the behest of automakers and unions, the US banned imported cars entirely in 1988. This allowed American automakers to profit despite stagnating. It wasn't until foreign subsidiaries started capturing market share from the US that American automakers were forced to innovate again.

There was a combination of factors. I suggest reading the book "On A Clear Day You Can See General Motors" for some starting information. But for some information upfront, in the 1950s GM had become the largest automotive company in the world, buying makes from all over the world with the money they made from their contracts with the U.S. government during World War II and the subsequent money from their core U.S. divisions within the Sloan Ladder. GM had seen Volkswagen as a threat, but only Volkswagen thanks to their quick proliferation during the 1950s at the lower end of the market. To them the French were essentially making toys, the Spanish would never make anything worthwhile under Franco, the Italians had already gained a reputation for extremely fragile and temperamental cars, and the Japanese were producing enclosed golf carts. Only the British and the Germans were a threat, but by the mid 1960s British automotive manufacturing was nosediving, and German cars were still divided into economy and ultra luxury with almost nothing in between thanks to slow post war recovery and targeting the U.S. upscale market.

During the 1950s the U.S. had invested huge amounts of money into Japanese manufacturing in order to have a cheap place to outsource labor to, and as a good will gesture after what happened during World War II. The Japanese, taking technology from American manufacturers, started making their own advancements. By the late 1960s they were on-par with the Americans in ingenuity, but lacking in quality. This applied to everything from their radios to their cars. At the same time, the Japanese yen was inflated compared to the dollar, making it a good idea to export Japanese goods to the U.S. so that Japanese companies could then trade in U.S. dollars internationally. The goods were cheaper to manufacture and import, and it made companies like Matsushita and JVC quite a lot of money they'd use in the 1970s. Toyota and Nissan were also picking up on this, selling the Toyota Crown and Corona in the U.S. as lower cost luxury options and the Nissan Bluebird (as the Datsun 510) as a cheaper alternative to European sports sedans.

In the U.S., by 1965, GM had a majority control of every market. They had done this by essentially siloing every division and making them work on their own, with their own funds, with no collaboration between divisions without executive permission. Permission which was often not granted. This worked fine for the European and Australian divisions like Vauxhall and Holden, but it was starting to strain the U.S. divisions. Then in 1968 three disasters occurred simultaneously for GM. Semon "Bunkie" Knudsen defected to Ford. Chrysler began courting Mitsubishi for captive imports of cheaper Japanese cars. And Lee Iaccocca perfected the personal luxury coupe with the upcoming 1970 Ford LTD and Lincoln Continental Mark IV, the dominant car template of the 1970s.

In 1973 you had a massive recession thanks the the 1973 OPEC Crisis and the 1973 Stock Market crash. These new huge vehicles that Iaccocca had gotten the U.S. addicted to were suddenly much more expensive to buy and run thanks to being opulent and thirsty. Ford was not immune to this, despite the success of the Lincoln Continental and Mercury Grand Marquis. This worked in Chrysler's favor however, as they had both the Dart in the wings and their captive Mitsubishis. Chevrolet meanwhile had blown public trust with the Vega in 1970 thanks to it rusting on the dealer's lots and destroying it's engine within the first month of ownership. Then once again they took a hit with the 1971 Pontiacs and Buicks, both of which were poorly received due to polarizing styling and issues like the trunks filling with water thanks to a ventilation engineering oversight. Chrysler had misread the market with their 1968 styling, and it took costly changes to slowly update the body dies to be in line with industry styling by 1973.

This primed the Japanese manufacturers to swoop in and take over. Datsun struck first, with the B210 and the 720 taking spots in the economy car and mini truck markets that the Big Three had ignored. Honda hit next with the Civic CVCC, capitalizing on the 1973 OPEC Crisis to provide a fuel efficient vehicle to panicking Americans who weren't satisfied with the disappointing Ford Pinto and Dodge/Plymouth Aspen/Volare twins. Toyota came in last, but strongest, introducing the third generation Corolla and reworking the Celica slightly for 1976 to fit American tastes. With the combination of Americans scrambling for smaller and more fuel efficient cars, the weak Japanese yen compared to the dollar, cheaper Japanese manufacturing due to automation, and cheaper Japanese steel thanks to being untreated and of thinner gauge, Japanese cars sold like crazy after 1973 and spread from California all the way to the East Coast.

This of course caused the Big Three to panic. GM tried several times to fix the Vega and it's siblings, only managing to make just as bad a car each time in the Monza and then the Cavalier. The 1980 X cars were a disaster, with the Chevrolet Citation and it's sisters driving customers away from GM for life. The failed 1985 downsizing of the full sized cars under Ed Cole's direction left every division's cars looking like clones of eachother both inside and out. And finally the dilution of the Oldsmobile brand by naming every car Cutlass killed their last golden goose. The GM10 "W-body" cars, meant to come out by the 1984 model year and engineered to the standards of the 1980 Honda Civic, ended up five years and hundreds of millions of dollars over budget when they arrived in 1988 as 1989 model years.

Ford disregarded the 1970s oil crises almost entirely, continuing to bank on large personal luxury coupes to keep them afloat. A token gesture was placing the Mustang on the Pinto platform for 1974 and playing it up as a baby Thunderbird rather than the performance heavy brute it was in the 1960s. By 1978 these tactics had nearly bankrupted the company, forcing a scramble to the Fox platform as they quickly downsized everything and killed vaunted nameplates to scrub any ill will from the brand. Were it not for the continued sales of the Lincoln Continental Mark V and the development of the Tempo and American Escort, Ford might've followed the path of AMC in the 1980s.

Chrysler was... Chrysler. They were up and down like a spring as they had always been. They suffered through 1973, suffered the failure of the Aspen and Volare, suffered the death of their profit ensuring muscle cars due to rising insurance costs and the fuel crisis, and suffered having to sell an ailing Rootes Group and essentially leaving the European market. But before they sold the Rootes Group they filched a rather interesting piece of technology in the Talbot Horizon. A car which they reverse engineered into the Dodge Omni, the basis of the K-Cars that Lee Iaccocca would champion and eventually pervert throughout his stay at Chrysler during the 1980s. As such Chrysler was the best positioned to survive the 1980s.

But then we come back to Europe. To the already small, fuel efficient, high quality cars that GM had thought no threat in the 1960s. If, during the 1970s, GM had brought over vehicles such as the Opel Rekord and Vauxhall Astra, they would never have had to waste money developing the Vega, the Monza, and the Cavalier. The cars already fit the market GM was targeting. The same was true of Ford. If Ford had brought over the Ford Escort, Taunus, and Granada, they wouldn't have had any need to develop the Pinto, Tempo, and Fairmont. Detroit was too insular and xenophobic to take the option that would have saved them. An option they would inevitably end up adopting thirty five years later anyways.

Detroit died for a number of reasons. But the main reason was the pride of Ford and GM.

> Did corrupt unions kill the goose that laid the golden eggs?

Yes, go look up % of costs going to labor for the USA automotive industry back during the glory days of Detroit. The only reason it worked at all was there wasn't a fraction of the global competition.

My salary now adjusted for inflation is exactly where i was in 1999. Having more money in the hands of those not in the 1% would make a better country. The 1% and above engage in deeply risky behavior.

Why is sibling black_'s comment dead when they just provided an anecdote backing the parent comment? Or is the 1% talk controversial here?

That user is shadow banned.

> Why did I deserve to make more money than a teacher or a nurse?

prices are largely based on supply and demand, not some vague notion of "deserve"

> prices are largely based on supply and demand

Then we'd better unionize before AI starts doing all the easy stuff

Preserving inefficiencies for the sake of extracting money is called rent seeking.

Rent seeking is collecting money while adding no economic value. Like landlords.

if you think that then buy a house instead of renting

Let's throw in a yacht as well. Why would anyone not get one of those too?

If an AI can do your job then you add no economic value, you are just collecting rent by preventing an AI from replacing you.

Unions don't add economic value, hence why employers don't like them. The way they secure higher pay is by going on strike, not by offering more production or value.

Unions provide training, good healthcare, and safety, which very much add economic value. Employers typically have the full force of market forces to pay as little as possible. Collectivisation is the workers only means to advocate for themselves.

How would unionizing prevent you from being replaced by a machine? Striking isn't a threat when you not being there is what the company is going for anyway.

Automation is not instant, and if the clock is between “implement AI correctly to automate the work” and “run out of money because you have no workers” a strike is still effective.

If they would be based on supply and demand shouldn't nurses salaries gone through the roof recently? In every country I read the news shortage of nurses (and teachers to a lesser degree) is a huge topic and many places are badly understaffed. So why did their salaries not increase dramtically?

They did, in the US at least[0]. Just not for the saps who signaled any sort of loyalty to the company, those people got hosed. Nurses need to adopt the "f you pay me" attitude the hospital administration has, doing things like working without protective gear is a great way to tell your boss that you will accept anything he does to you.

[0]https://khn.org/news/highly-paid-traveling-nurses-fill-staff...

Would the world be a better place if supply and demand weren’t the only factors in the compensation equation?

what's the alternative?

I don’t have a reasonable answer. Though I think some element of universal compassion would be nice to embed in our economy.

Though, I don’t imagine that can ever be governed into place, given that socialism and communism ultimately end in totalitarianism.

It’ll likely take many generations and many revolutions, but I do hope someday we figure out how to stop excusing our selfishness and naturally give until everyone else has what they need.

We could create utopia today if we could successfully fight the urges of our monkey brains.

But in the near-term, I think the best we can do is survive and chip away at the notion that just because we can take more, we don’t have to.

The notion that capitalists aren't compassionate is pure propaganda. People like capitalism because it's the best economic system in terms of results [0] [1] [2] [3]. It may increase the variance in wealth but it also raises the median and that's what actually matters.

[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-gdp-per-c... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/change-energy-gdp-per-cap... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-... [3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?tab=chart...

I agree that all people show compassion at some level regardless of the economic system in which they participate.

But I believe that compassion is not inherent in capitalism and people’s individual compassion is often in conflict with the goals of the system.

Economic decisions should be viewed in terms of the incentives they create and not their stated intentions. Any economic system is one of rationing resources and this involves making tradeoffs. The apparent intent of one approach for doing this over another doesn't necessarily correlate with its results. E.g. "minimum wage" laws intending to protect workers from exploitation actually create unemployment instead (which is a zero wage, and that's less than the "minimum" wage). The "solution" is presented as being about low wages vs. high wages, so it sounds good and compassionate. But the reality is that it's about low wages vs. zero wages, and low is better than zero.

There's a film by the late economist Walter Williams called Good Intentions that is all about that kind of stuff.

Does an increase in minimum wage cause a reduction in employment?

I personally see minimum wage as a default choice for employers if it’s enough to staff their business.

does raising the price of oranges mean you sell less of them? of course it does

employment is a two way agreement, why does the government need to set a price floor for labor? anyone who doesn't want to work for $4/h can just decide not to, but the law makes it illegal for anyone who would rather do that than be unemployed. Wages generally correlate with experience and these laws are robbing teenagers and young adults of valuable experience years.

Raising the price of anything doesn’t mean you’ll sell fewer of them. In fact, that’s kind of the problem.

There’s a margin between the price you can sell a product for and the price you decide to sell a product for.

The same applies to wages. There’s a wage that you can offer and still have a healthy business, then there’s the wage you do offer because someone is willing to take the job.

Maximizing pricing and minimizing wages based on the limits you can get away with is the problem. Human decency should be a factor in setting prices and wages, not just strictly market economics and opportunity.

Insulin is too expensive and minimum wage is less than what’s needed to live reasonably well.

Those who control prices and wages can and should fix those problems. The government shouldn’t even have to intervene.

They do, but my point is, as a species, we should do better to improve conditions for others when we have the opportunity.

> There’s a margin between the price you can sell a product for and the price you decide to sell a product for.

price elasticity is irrelevant. if someone is paid $10/h and earns their employer $11/h, and the city they live in raises minimum wage to $12/h, that person is now unemployed

> minimum wage is less than what’s needed to live reasonably well

this is irrelevant and an example of how "minimum wage" is an insidious term that hides the fact that there is still a (legal) minimum of $0: unemployment. Unemployment is not better than a low wage that can help you get valuable experience as a teenager or young adult. Once again, everyone in the world who is employed can make decisions about their own employment and how much they're willing to accept in return for their work, but magically we decide that some people would be better off without jobs because they're not providing above a certain threshold of value?

> They do, but my point is, as a species, we should do better to improve conditions for others when we have the opportunity.

Again, there is no economic system that can change the fact that we live in a world with limited resources that need rationing. And preventing people from gainful unemployment is improving their condition how exactly?

How many businesses that pay minimum wage really can’t afford to pay more? By my estimation, it’s a fraction, if any.

We do live in a world with limited resources, but there are certainly enough for everyone if we collectively decided there should be.

> How many businesses that pay minimum wage really can’t afford to pay more? By my estimation, it’s a fraction, if any.

Have you never used an automated car wash or self checkout?

People can decide their own minimum wage and to be unemployed if an employer isn't offering enough. This is literally what everyone does above the minimum wage.

> We do live in a world with limited resources, but there are certainly enough for everyone if we collectively decided there should be.

Every country that "decided" this ended up with famines killing millions. Meanwhile even imperfect capitalism keeps lifting the poverty floor, life expectancy, child survival rate, etc.

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-livin...

The failure of various alternative economic systems seem to have been universally caused by malice.

Either foreign powers trying to keep dominos from falling or internal forces leveraging control to create dictatorships.

I don’t think collective economics has a chance until we’re generally more evolved as a species.

Though, if we do enter an age of abundance, it will likely be the default as the illusion of scarce resources dissolves.

The incentive structure of central planning doesn't work and it's not something that can be solved with people evolving to be more altruistic. Meanwhile even imperfect capitalism has raised the quality of life of billions of people.

> as the illusion of scarce resources dissolves

It's not an illusion. If you want gold, you need to mine it. If you mine gold, it means you're not raising chickens or writing a social networking app or cutting down trees or whatever. Everything has a trade-off, scarcity is never going away.

As opposed to John Deere or Exxon?

"deserve" doesn't exist. What does exist is "what price makes the market clear".

Assigned moral worth or whatever "deserve" is trying to get at has nothing to do with economics.

Why shouldn't we have ethical opinions about the economy?

So, things like "functioning markets are good" and "price-fixing is bad"?

And usury is awful.

Slave markets were functional. Feudalism was functional. The market for drugs and organs are functional.

Lets try tougher ones - are markets captured by cartels functional? Does OPEC inhibit free market or are they free market in action?

When tech companies create anti-poaching agreement to supress wages, is that functional?

Do you have ethical opinions for example about Newton's laws in physics? Or do you accept them for what they are?

Humans design the system in which the market operates. Obviously one cannot make an appeal to change physics.

We design car and planes just as well with physics.

This is not analogous. You likened criticizing our economy (inclusive of the state of various laws that determine how it impacts people) to criticizing physics itself (to suggest that doing so is unreasonable).

The economy is like a singular, gigantic vehicle we all occupy. It abides certain natural laws (such as human nature, and the scarcity of certain resources), but the vehicle itself is designed by some of our fellow passengers (and its design does not optimize for the things many of us feel it should).

Sure it is. You and other passengers are trying to design the vehicle by ignoring human nature, scarcity, etc. (the physics). Because you are asking yourself why does the piston deserve all the fuel and not the headlights.

And if somebody makes a shitty car that contains an extra bomb that randomly explodes and kills people we tell them that's a shitty car. We don't blame physics.

This is sarcasm I'm assuming?

I thought implying there was some sort of cosmic injustice when a software developers"deserves" more than a nurse, was some sort of sarcasm. We would never understand anything about the world if we talked like that about for example why does this rock deserves a higher potential energy than that acorn.

I'm not following you. Rocks and acorns are not outcomes of human political will, but our economy, society, and systems, among others, are. Maybe I'm missing something, I'm eager to understand your perspective further.

I hope you agree that human political will is bounded by some natural laws, the same way rocks and acorns are bound by physics. And if you want to do something useful with that political will, you better understand those laws.

Yes I agree with that, but having understood those laws (hypothetically), of which I guess you might be referring to human behaviour, evolutionary principles etc. How can we be sure that those naturalistic foundations could possibly inform the problem of 'what to do now'? Wouldn't be a bit like a mirror trying to reflect itself, or possibly, a fish trying to understand that it's in water?

Understanding the laws doesn't guarantee we'll be able to solve the problem. But not knowing them almost guarantees we will not do a good job.

True enough. At this point I suppose I don't disagree with you, though I've also lost the plot a bit. Hope you enjoy a restful holiday season wherever you are

I’d go further to ask why ethics shouldn’t play a more active and significant role in the governing of an economy?

I phrase things like this: the lack of real labor power through unions or ideally worker cooperatives leads to bad deals for workers. It would be in the interest of workers to build collective power and demand better compensation or start their own cooperatives to guarantee higher pay and benefits.

This has to be said because collective action necessarily requires convincing a lot of people to do it. But either way this language avoids the claim of right and wrong and simply focuses on the fact that workers today get a bad deal due to poor bargaining power.

It’s also not just about markets. The federal government places severe restrictions on what organized labor can do to advocate for itself: Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 Aka “Taft-Hartley Act” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft–Hartley_Act

People who go on about markets pretend that power dynamics and behavioural economics don't exist.

"markets" is just a word that means individuals making economic decisions for themselves

This is only true if you think "economics" and "capitalism" are the same thing.

For your three examples getting early into theses stocks, say stock compensation, or employee stock purchases would have produced outsized returns up until a few months ago. Much of the wealth is not from salary and simply stock compensation. Musk/bezos/zuck became billionaires on stock price alone. Early employees at these companies became millionaires many times over. But this is backwards looking and a survivor ship bias - for every one of these companies there companies who didn’t make it big , or value went to zero.

My worry is bringing unions in the US tech industry will just accelerate off shoring especially with super fast growing companies like Deel

What are your thoughts?

With the price of tech labor in places like Pakistan and India on the rise, that won't be sustainable for long.

Outsourcing technical work comes in waves. I've seen it up-close-and-personal 3 times. It's worked once and the magic that went into making it work (one of the founders moved back to his home country and started a consultancy that was contracted by the original business) in that specific instance isn't something that is easily replicated.

If you write a check to a body shop you’re just going to get fleeced. I’ve seen “tested deliverables” that did not compile.

If you open a branch office and do your own careful hiring (just like HQ would have), that can work.

Well if there was an actual union in place there would be general strikes. A company that lost all IT/SWE staff for the period of the strike may be more open to negotiations.

This is an intrinsically Marxist framing.

Even if inequality is rising, so is wealth overall. That’s what Marx misestimated, although it wasn’t his most grievous error.

Poor people in the United States are far richer than rich people of 150 years ago.

I am personally willing to accept the he existence of some billionaires if that’s the price we pay for all this wonderful ness.

Marx didn't predict that capitalism wouldn't generate wealth. On the contrary, he believed it was the most economically revolutionary structure the world had yet devised and would create untold wealth. That's entirely consistent with the world we see.

To be very specific, where he fell short was predicting a secular decline in the rate of profit. This wasn't a crazy error--most early economists also believed it--but it was very wrong, and his analysis of the failure of capitalism rests on that false premise.

He's referring to marx belief in the "tendency for the rate of profit to fall" which is literally objectively wrong and the opposite of it is accepted within economics.

This is the accepted explanation, which implies that the rate of profit rises over time

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okishio%27s_theorem

Btw, marx predicted that capitalism is inevitably destroyed due to tendency for the rate of profit to fall. I believe capitalism is the strongest that it's ever been right now.

I'd emphasize not only that there have been advances in theory but also in, more importantly, the empirical evidence. Marxism is a scientific theory in the sense that it can be falsified, and if you look at the rate of profit over time in most countries and periods, the evidence very strongly falsifies Marxism. Even if someone refuted Okishio, Marxism makes predictions about capitalist economics that simply aren't consistent with the world we see.

Compare to 30 years ago instead. Wealth in terms of being able to buy property is decreasing in many countries, which can be more significant than any increased ability to buy consumer gadgets (that will spy on you). And the countries with less wealth inequality don't in principle have less wealthy common people.

Nah [0]. If you live in a NIMBY hellhole you can always move somewhere more affordable.

[0] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MEPAINUSA672N

"Yah". Few generations ago, you could buy property cash in a "NIMBY hellhole", that is a place where you can find gainful employment, on a few years worth of savings. Not the case anymore. Property prices inflated much more than CPI.

> Poor people in the United States are far richer than rich people of 150 years ago.

There is no material improvement in wealth over the past 20 years, but inequality has grown.

Wealth is produced by innovation, and greater concentratuon of wealth will lead to less innovation.

There’s certainly been a technological improvement in which increasing numbers of people have access to the internet and smart phones, with an explosion of information, communication and entertainment.

On one hand, as long as your political opinions align with those of the ultra-wealthy then the inequality shouldn't bother you.

On the other, high inequality is socially unstable because that is not generally the case.

>when our industry is producing oligarchs like Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, it means that they are profiting from the things that tech workers produce

The workers that built the foundations of these companies received stock options or RSUs over a decade ago and reached FATFIRE territory as well. Had they unionized, the companies they worked for wouldn't be able to reinvest as much money into growth, which would be compounded by a lack of external investors. In that case, they would lose to an unionized competitor.

+1 Worker-Unions-conversation-point for using "oligarch" in a comment. /jk

The comment about "used to feel bad about making a lot of money" hits home for me, when I compare my wages to other family members who're struggling. Thanks for the perspective, it helps open me up a bit more about this.

Great information in the link, too - helps to consider whether and how a Union might be attractive, under various workplace circumstances.

>> Why did I deserve to make more money than a teacher or a nurse?

You should ask your clients or employers.

Why pick on those 'oligarchs'?

How about the Media moguls? A pretty good argument can be made that media oligarchs produce less value, but they dominate financial and political circles.

World War II was a much bigger reason and a cause for this. There is a problem with correlation vs causation in the article’s logic. I’d argue the unions were a bi-product of a historically rare moment in time vs cause of equality. The market bust and global world war increased taxation, demand for workers, and value of each worker in the early 40s. Much more importantly, for a few decades after WWII all other global world powers were rebuilding after being leveled by the war. The US instead remained as the last productive developed nation standing for decades and enjoyed likely huge margins as a result of both lack of competition and demand for supplies by the rest of the developed world. Those margins and the unscathed living conditions, also turned the US into a magnet for technical and scientific talent from everywhere else.

The more competition recovered in Japan and elsewhere, the less bargaining power and surplus could be captured by Unions. The Union-driven higher costs of manufacturing also drove outsourcing, off-shoring, and did not lead to higher quality output, (if Unions were producing higher quality that would have kept Japanese-manufactured cars from dominating US car sales shortly after).

Even further, exorbitant labor costs make it worthwhile for manufacturers to do capital investments in automation, and we are seeing the output of that.

The rise in middle class should probably be attributed to investments - in equities, bonds, house purchases. Growing up in Eastern Europe, where only housing investment was an option, and unions were abundant, the middle class that sprouted came from those who invested in property and business. Labor union power and wealth was too politically and corruption influenced to be a sustainable source of growth for the country.

Re. unions: especially in the Eastern Europe I don't think unions deserve to be called like that "unions". They were just facades for the "communist" political power to reach into every corner of worker's lives. Unions real meaning is negotiation power against the employers, and you must agree there was exactly zero of this in the EE. Might have been something before communism took over, but after WW2 there was no union left worth their name behind the iron curtain.

> after WW2 there was no union left worth their name behind the iron curtain.

Solidarność.

Agree on that. Still it's difficult to see it as "union", rather as grassroots opposition party.

> There is a problem with correlation vs causation in the article’s logic

No, there isn't. The causation is self-evident, and also unsurprising since it's the whole point of unions.

I think stating that something is self-evident is not a helpful argument. First, it seemingly isn’t or else parent would not have posted as such. And secondly, something being self evident is only used when you want to describe an axiom because you cannot prove otherwise.

Saying that something is merely a “correlation” (not a causation—and implying that this other thing is) and saying that something is “self-evident” are both arrogant statements when you just end up saying, hey, look at this narrative that I like instead.

As someone who lives in a country were unions were one of the major political forces during the 20th century, the impact they had on the social and economic development is truly self evident and mostly (overwhelmingly so) positive.

Of course, the GP might be from a country with another experience.

American labor unions are closer to cartels and the setup would be illegal in many European countries; in some states you aren't forced to join a union, but you still have to pay at least part of the dues that ostensibly covers contact negotiations. In other states, you must join the union as a condition of being hired.

Contrast that with countries where unions (like health care) are not tied to an employer. The whole dynamic is very different, and I think less adversarial between unions and employees.

In the US if you have a problem with your union, you are out of luck. Make waves, and the union will make your life hell. It's a second layer of rent seeking management.

Ever since the SEIU tried to take a cut of all government benefits to families who care for disabled people in MN, it was obvious that unions here exist to serve only themselves.

Ok, fair point from an individuals view. But considering that its known that unions are a controversial opinion, it would still seem rash to state its obviousness.

It's completely "self-evident" to me that the US can never re-achieve post-WWII prosperity largely for the reasons OP stated.

It was a moment in history that will not repeated in any of our lifetimes. Anything else against this backdrop is basically a rounding error.

I was alive during the drawdown of US industrial capacity and my entire family was blue collar mostly union workers. In my teens and 20's I worked such jobs. This narrative still rings largely true to me. The amount of outright waste and fraud in these industries at the labor level was astronomical. We were begging to be outcompeted. Combined with managerial incompetence we were doomed.

>It was a moment in history that will not repeated in any of our lifetimes.

Unless of course we have another world war, which isn't really unlikely given the shortages and events climate change will bring in the future.

You really need to squint at the sun to conclude that.

As money interests have become more politically powerful, it’s harder and harder for employees to organize. You can get fired at Walmart if 4 people are caught talking to each other.

It’s easy to rag on unions, but usually that’s a surface complaint ignoring the factors causing it. Even globalization is an example. There’s nothing etched in stone that says we need to have child labor mining in Africa for rare earth minerals to make iPhones.

> As money interests have become more politically powerful, it’s harder and harder for employees to organize. You can get fired at Walmart if 4 people are caught talking to each other.

Totally this.

We can't pretend that the likes of Amazon et al haven't been repeatedly caught being openly hostile and extremely agressive towards any semblance of a labour rights organization within their workforce, with union busting strategies being discussed, planned, and executed at the VP level. They went as far as executing smear campaigns in the media targeting labour representatives and activists.

No one can claim that unions are in decline due to some unavoidable law of nature when huge multinationals once led by the richest man in the world invest so much time and effort and money at the VP level to sabotage them.

>Even globalization is an example. There’s nothing etched in stone that says we need to have child labor mining in Africa for rare earth minerals to make iPhones.

This is a concern troll. If you really cared about child labor abroad, you would unequivocally support globalization as parents don't want their kids to be slaves and more jobs in these countries gives parents more options. Child labor and slavery is caused by a lack of oversight more than anything else, and unions in the US won't help that.

Tell me how globalization has improved conditions in the Congo?

Companies don't want to invest in a unstable and corrupt country. Even so, the rapid rise in HDI of the DRC aligns with the growth of their exports.

You seem to be implying that colonization is synonymous with globalization, but let me dispel this notion. The problematic part of colonization were the protectionist aspects of it. The Congolese were unable to compete for the same administrative positions of that the Belgians enjoyed.

Now you tell me how unions in the US are supposed to help the DRC.

I didn’t say that.

I said that globalization is an example of money driving policy at the exclusion of all else. High minded bullshit about resource extraction making your life better is similar to the bullshit narratives used as justification of colonialism.

We have more options than protectionism vs. Laissez faire globalization.

I think the above comment is saying that we can have globalization and sane work conditions simultaneously.

There is also the fact that the so called “globalization” enabled the free flow of capital, but not the free flow of workers. Meaning it created geographically sanctioned low-labor zones for the capitalist class to exploit, while enforcing strict border controls such that international solidarity between workers of the world could never form.

This is an explicit policy choice by the ruling class, and has proven awfully convenient for the owning class.

I think that’s always the key question. Why are most businesses so vehemently anti-union? Why does the power balance always need to be tipped heavily toward management over labor?

This is bizarre.

Of course there is not one single factor determining the economic, technical and social development of countries over decades of time.

But the relationship between unions, the labor movement, and social democratic policies is obvious.

Those in turn have had a large impact on equality and standard of living.

The economy benefits from having a larger base of well off consumers, and a well educated, healthy, non-striking labor force. It's a self reinforcing positive spriral.

So why are education levels going down? Why is health so expensive?

> There is a problem with correlation vs causation in the article’s logic.

No there isn't. You just didn't read any of the links in the article that it used for support, IE https://www.epi.org/blog/union-decline-rising-inequality-cha...

> The Union-driven higher costs of manufacturing also drove outsourcing, off-shoring, and did not lead to higher quality output, (if Unions were producing higher quality that would have kept Japanese-manufactured cars from dominating US car sales shortly after).

You can't have it both ways in your argument. You set up an initial statement about high Union costs driving outsourcing, and then immediately drop that point as you pivoted to an argument about quality being the driver.

> World War II was a much bigger reason and a cause for this.

I'm going to stop you right there because that shows you're quite literally making this up based on feelings or beliefs. You're totally misrepresenting the history of labor unions. Labor unions were on the rise all throughout the 1800s and early 1900s.

https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0113/the-history...

This backs up that labor unions grew a lot during the war and continued growing after the war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_Sta...

This argument needs to be made more. Thanks!

> The rise in middle class ...

The "middle class" is a myth and is a propaganda tool for creating dissent. There are really only two classes:

1. Capital-owners. Think Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, etc; and

2. Workers. This is anyone who trades their labor for an income. This covers everyone from the janitor to LeBron James.

The idea of the "middle class" is to create a division between them and the "lower class". The "middle class" often look down on the "lower class" and lump those who might rely on welfare, etc. The "lower class" will be blamed for many of society's ills.

The truth is there is no division. What you think of as the "middle class" and "lower class" are exactly the same and have way more in common than to the Musks, Bezos's and Buffett's of the world.

Billionaires have class solidarity. The dire situation of stagnant real wages and skyrocketing cost of living is largely a result of workers not having class solidarity.

I am a worker. I am also a capital owner, though on a small scale, from investing the surplus of my pay for my labor.

I am far from alone. And the existence of people like me kind of blows up your neat theory.

Do you employ multiple workers, either directly or through your investments, to be able to sustain yourself through profits?

You are the perfect example - someone who's managed to squairrel away a tiny fraction of the capital pie and now imagines himself to be in a different class.

Just because you now own a sandwind does not you a capitalism make.

My IRA and 401K aren't quite enough to sustain me, yet, but I'm getting there.

Not trying to start a flame war, but the Japanese are an example of an economy where unions work really well. Their constitution and labor laws were largely written by New Deal Democrat inflected occupation forces who set up labor rights that Detroit fought against (somewhat successfully) for years. Some have even gone to suggest that the competitiveness of their auto industry stems from the fact that labor is effectively a fixed cost and a controlling stakeholder so the incentives to improveme process align nicely. This isn’t a pro/con union position it is more of a nuance that some unions are better than others and the historical/legal context for unions shapes that effecitvness. Unions can be a positive force but they can also be a negative force. A one sided account for them being good or bad is just too simplistic to be credible.

> The Union-driven higher costs of manufacturing also drove outsourcing

Gousing prices are the cause of higher cause of manufacturing. I am not sure how noone is talking that a worker in the west cannot compete eith a worker in a developing country when his rent is 10x higher. Then peolle have the guts to blame unions.

I will never understand how some working class Americans can be against unions, maybe they just see themselves as embarrassed millionaires that would want to crush their workers to squeeze money out of them? It's probably my European brain, but I cannot understand how someone, say Jerry, 60 year old factory worker from idaho, can be against unions...

Ironically you’re being downvoted by the same folks who would benefit from unions. American Twitter employees, for instance, would have done a lot better with European labor protections. European Twitter employees probably have a sizable comeuppance on the horizon.

Exactly, and I'm not trying to devalue their beliefs, I'm just trying to understand how they can be against something that would benefit them.

Is it that hard to understand that someone might be in favor of something in principle, but object to its particular implementation? Or that someone could act against their own self-interest because of a belief in a broader principle? Maybe everyone's motivation isn't to blindly follow their own micro-self-interest.

Any time I hear the claim that people are against their best interests it does not quite make sense to me. My own observation leads me to believe that everyone is good at optimizing for their own priorities.

It won’t benefit them. Maybe you should try to understand their perspective from a place of you being ignorant of the subject and wrong about unions.

They think "oh no my lazy coworkers might get a bigger bonus!" rather than realising that their boss is the former lazy coworker.

Basically the american idea that deserving people (aka myself) will magically prevail.

But that's the thing, meritocracy isn't a thing, and saying no to more protections (from unions or from pro-worker laws) just doesn't make sense. Granted there was some things I didn't know about how unions worked in the US, which I learned more about in this thread, but the same questions remain for pro worker and worker protection laws, why do Americans oppose them so much.

   > meritocracy isn't a thing

One of many examples I can give to disprove this as I'm sitting here watching Croatia & Morocco in the World Cup, is looking at some of the contracts some of these players get from their clubs. Wide disparity and definitely seems to be based on a meritocracy. Taken further, why are none of these fans in the stands, many of whom who also play for fun not equally compensated or even compensated at all? After all, they can kick a ball too.

So now that we've established that meritocracy is obviously a real thing, we have to ask what evidence you have that a meritocracy wouldn't exist in other fields, like programming for instance.

> So now that we've established that meritocracy is obviously a real thing

We have? Because… a football match was played? What did it prove exactly?

Uh...no. Better players make more money (due to meritocracy). Do you think the better players should make the same as the worst players?

> Better players make more money

Well you define "better players" as "those making more money"… so in the end you are proving your statement via tautology. Which is meaningless.

In any case, even admitting that meritocracy in football works (it probably doesn't)… so what? Most workers aren't professional football players.

I feel like you're trolling, or just setting up a strawman since the argument has been lost. But in good faith, I'll try one more time.

"Better players" are defined by production on the field. That better play on the field then results in higher contracts for the better players. I'm not defining better players by the size of their contracts. Players who never perform well won't get the biggest contracts. Which is meritocratic, by definition.

   > Most workers aren't professional football players.

No, but it's just one of many examples that proves there are people who significantly outperform their peers. The idea of rewarding them more as a result of better performance is what a meritocracy is.

Italian players are paid a lot and italy didn't even qualify… are you still insisting on the correctness of your easily disproved theory?

Italy can't control what others pay, but using your example does Italy pay all of their players the same, or do they generally pay more money to their better players?

But it can control wages, and seems they are above market rate? Which of course means that wages aren't adjusted by merit.

This is 100% incorrect. They do not pay all of their players the same. The better players make more money.

> The better players make more money.

Shouldn't the better players qualify for tournaments then? Are you being obtuse on purpose?

> meritocracy isn't a thing, and saying no to more protections (from unions or from pro-worker laws) just doesn't make sense

You know that, and I know that, but the right wing has been pushing anti-union, anti-worker, pro-corporate propaganda for several decades now. That propaganda also dovetails with the preexisting Protestant work ethic and labor theory of value that have been pretty solidly in the American consciousness since...well, basically before its founding as a country.

All that combined means that for people who aren't raised in a progressive, pro-union environment, and who don't encounter such an environment until their belief systems are fairly well-established, the default background noise is pretty much "Unions? Why would you need that, you pansy? Real Men are islands unto themselves, work hard, and are paid exactly what they're worth for that work. That's how you know the poor deserve to be poor!"

You are being very patronizing. Other people in this thread have given reasonable explanations for not liking unions.

You are free to disagree, of course, but being smug about it is rude.

Like the one "office workers don't need unions because meritocracy"… if you think that's reasonable… I can only think of it as reasonable if you start from made up facts to reach the conclusion.

I never said that just like no one said "oh no my lazy coworkers might get a bigger bonus!". You seem to insist on mischaracterizing what people say. Why?

> I try and excel in my role and others are less interested in doing so. I should be promoted faster and compensated higher.

I was referring to this comment.

I really don’t understand the push for white collar tech employees to be in unions. It’s my understanding that in most union jobs, compensation and benefits are strictly based on time in role, not performance. I try and excel in my role and others are less interested in doing so. I should be promoted faster and compensated higher.

Generally the people who are advocating for a union are doing it to level the playing field for themselves against you.

Yes for example an immigrant that is under threat of being deported might want a more level playing field.

Unions are anti-immigrant.

And companies are pro-exploitation-of-immigrants… and not very pro-immigrants.

Do you have any current data on that? I think it was true of the "Reagan Democrat" variety of union worker in the 1980s, but I suspect it's an outdated stereotype now. For example, SEIU, one of America's largest unions, represents a lot of immigrants and is strongly pro-immigrant: https://www.seiu.org/justice-for-immigrants/

The only reason blue collar workers' unions changed their tune is because they were unable to stop the flow of illegal immigration. On the other hand, restricting H-1Bs and green cards is a battle that many think they can win.

It is disappointing to ask for data and get more unsubstantiated opinion.

It's not really true any longer, but it was at one point. The head of the AFL-CIO admits here that unions were strongly anti immigration for decades. Only in the past few years have they changed their official opinion.

https://www.npr.org/2013/02/05/171175054/how-the-labor-movem...

There's a big difference between being anti-immigration and anti-immigrant. All of the latter people are also the former, of course. But there are people who want lower immigration even though they have no problem with the immigrants who are here. Some union people are surely in that bucket just for "reduce job competition" reasons.

Historically, unions in the United States have been strongly anti-immigrant because they were seen as competitors who lowered wages. Anyone who has been on HN long enough has seen the undercurrent of anti-H-1B sentiment whenever the topic comes up and a union would bring that nastiness and racism out to center stage.

No, no immigrants in tech are going to want to vote for a union because a lot of its members think immigrants are part of the playing field that needs to be "leveled".

It's not racism to oppose policies that lower my salary

Probably the people who have had a boss tell them they believe minimum performance for a salaried position was 70+ hours a week.

Nobody has any idea how to properly evaluate that. So they just pick the person who works the least and talks the most, using random jargon to seem smart.

> It’s my understanding that in most union jobs, compensation and benefits are strictly based on time in role, not performance.

That is one structure, and it probably was predominant in the past because unions were historically in factories where workers were more interchangeable and had set tasks at a production line station.

Another is more 'guild-like': Jane Smith who is Waitress #2, and Tom Cruise who plays Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible, are both part of the same union/guild, but one is able to negotiate a much higher salary. But they have the same 'base' level of protection with regards to working conditions, pension, health care, etc.

Certainly Tom Cruise can go above and beyond those 'base' levels, but the union/guild simply provides a floor which everyone is entitled to.

There's no reason why a union contract could not negotiate things like working conditions, health/child care, pensions/retirement funds, etc, but leave salaries out of the collective agreement. Or perhaps have pay bands, with retention/performance bonuses that are out side of the scope of the agreement, and are 100% discretionary to the company: everyone gets a floor, but there's no ceiling.

A union is a democratically-run tool. Every tech employee I talk to hates the idea of compensation being based purely on time in role, why would they democratically vote for that to be the rule?

Because not every rule is up for vote. Ex: Majority of Americans want weed federally legal. America is a democracy. Why is that not the law? It's not up for vote.

There's two ways to unionize: roll your own, or UaaS. Rolling your own requires a lot of work, time in committee meetings, and has a risk that you'll overlook common issues or flub negotiations due to inexperience. But there's a lot of flexibility, and it can be done on the cheap. A lot of people pick the second option: a big union can send a rep, draft a contract, negotiate with your employer, etc., in exchange for the dues it pays its employees with.

Unions can be what the workers want them to be. The industrial time-in-role thing can be a reasonable match to industrial industrial jobs. But collective bargaining can include performance-based pay. E.g., the union negotiates the overall base raise and the size of the performance-based raise pool, and then managers decide on raises and promotions. They can also help you resolve situations of individual managerial unfairness, something that HR is supposed to do but is very rarely effective at.

But American tech companies would be even less likely to be created in the first place under European labor laws

Spotify, SAP, Skype, Unity, Sitecore, OutSystems, Bayer, Pfizer, Nokia, Ericson, Vodafone....

Managed just fine.

Do you think tech companies are more likely to come out of Europe or the US?

Moving goal posts, but yeah, Europe lacks a SV with venture capitalists raining money on every crazy idea, with Tony Stark like feudal lords pushing their minions to sleep in office with promises of free drinks and pizza, hoping to capitalize on the startup being sold.

Thankfully.

Not moving goalposts. Read my original post.

Examples were given, we enjoy our unions, thank you very much.

I am curious, is putting up with the occasional self-obsessed ceo not worth it?

For example Tesla has a market value greater than every European carmaker combined, having gone from approximately 0 annual car deliveries to over a million in just a few years while revolutionizing electric travel. Or with space x developing reusable rockets that have utterly transformed the industry. These companies will contribute to economic dynamism and wealth creation for years and decades.

Macron said of American space companies, “Unfortunately they’re not European, but they took a bet”. Perhaps at a certain level you need people with lots of money who are willing to risk it

Not for me, I have better things to do with my life.

No. They keep whatever actual wealth they might end up creating - if and when they even manage that - and the only thing that trickles down from them is their ego.

I prefer not being subject to their whims.

A bunch of those started 150+ years ago, when European unions essentially didn't exist.

Ok, lets remove those from my list.

Spotify, SAP, Skype, Unity, Sitecore, OutSystems, Vodafone, ...

Even though it was founded in Denmark, Unity is a US HQ company now, and Vodafone is basally a body shop now mostly (what's their latest successful product?).

Plus, naming 6 random European tech companies doesn't prove anything. Every country has tech companies. How many exactly doesn't really matter in this comparison, what matters is revenues and market cap.

Consider that the US tech sector is worth significantly more than the tech sectors of EU + UK + Switzerland + Norway combined. It blows the entire EEA out of the water. To put it simply, the US hosts most of the largest tech companies by market cap and revenues.

If you take the top 50 tech companies in the world by market cap[1], the only European companies on the list are ASML, Booking, SAP, Schneider Electric and Dassault Systemes. 6 out of 50 for Europe, while the US has about 40 out of 50, while also claiming the highest six spots at the top.

Ouch! That's not even a competition. It's why American tech workers get paid so much. Not because they don't get government mandated PTO and sick leave, or can get fired more easily, or don't pay more taxes for unemployment and socialized healthcare, as is the common myth, but because the companies they work for are so obscenely rich compared to European ones and a lot more numerous.

/QED

[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-companies-b...

Well they need the money to make up for being left alone to care for themselves.

If the European standards are so good, where are all of the influential European tech companies?

To properly weigh all of the tradeoffs, you might consider asking if those Twitter jobs would even emerge in the European system and if there's a link between European labor standards and the lack of influential European tech companies. Europe is a large market that is filled with many capable and educated technology workers, yet almost always all of the tech companies we're ever talking about are American. Why is this?

Good company to work for is not the same as big company everyone is talking about on hacker news. Those are two different things. Why should people optimize for computer nerd prestige? I might not care to work for Amazon, Microsoft, etc. Influential can be a bad thing if they are negatively influencing society.

> Why should people optimize for computer nerd prestige?

The thing I'd like to focus on isn't nerd prestige, but good jobs, as the article was about inequality as nothing fixes social alienation and inequality more than lots of people having a good income and being part of society. These big tech companies, whatever major negatives they provide to the culture in many ways, at least employ a lot of people and give them a path to being part of that comfy middle class.

If the concern is inequality, then is a pile of great paying jobs with worse labor standards better than a few ok paying jobs with great labor standards? See where I'm going with that?

These are complex issues...I don't think I have all of the answers, but I just want to point out that there might be some tradeoffs to the good sounding things like unions and much better labor protections.

Spotify, Skype, Minecraft, Battlefield, Ericsson, SAAB

oh and the Linux kernel.

Is your brain broken?

Saab makes mostly weapons. And yes some software here and there.

A simple answer is that being able to abuse workers allows businesses to move faster.

> Why is this?

Because EU is a puppet of USA and doesn't have strong enough protections to stop USA companies to acquire every single startup that exists in EU.

Most of that amazing USA made software is not done in USA. For example some of that is made by me… a guy who has never been in USA.

Why are European wages so low? Why aren't their unions extracting more meaningful pay? Why do the non-unionized US workers make so much more money?

Ha, if anything Twitter's the paragon of a European tech company. Overstaffed, politicized and unable to make money, all while their top talent flees to competitors in sf bay area.

It's because you have the blessing and privilege of working two to three jobs in a capitalist society, a very small price to pay to access all capitalism has to offer: smartphones, TVs and cleaning machines that break in a month after warranty expires, cars, a healthcare system that will take your house and your dog as collateral...

Unions? you should be thankful!

In my experience, what they oppose isn't unions as such, but compulsory union membership. They consider that a union should arise from the expression of worker needs, and a union that they are forced to join and that exists whether they want it or not might lack incentives to represent their needs instead of the needs of the union. It's kind of like the saying about organizations in general: eventually they come to serve the needs of the organization instead of the purpose for which they were originally created.

I think that's fair enough, but it's not like workers in the USA have a lot of protections or are getting fairly compensated for their work. So unions, whether compulsory or not, still benefit them in one way or another.

This isn't just uniformly true, though. As a worker you may be better off without the union you're a part of- it depends as much on the union as the company.

I mean Americans are paid far more highly than Europeans, so I don't see how this is correct.

Only highly skilled workers are paid more. Compare fast food workers and you'll see what I'm talking about.

Are they, really?

How did they end up not having enough cash on hand to cover minor emergencies, then? How are they going bankrupt over healthcare costs - even when insured through their job - while having to worry about not being able to take a day off?

> compulsory union membership

Yea, it can be frustrating be barred from jobs, like construction, being a non-member, or being forced to pay union dues to a union you feel is doing nothing for you.

Small, company-sized unions have always been a lot more appealing to me than the huge behemoths the US currently has.

I think that's part of the problem. In germany for example, we have Unions and we have working councils in the companies. And while unions are "just" associations/clubs working councils are are regulated by laws and get elected by the workers of the company. Of course there is some realtionship, but it is not unheard of, that in a working council are members from more than one union (though usually only one has negotiating powers for tariffs, but that's another topic, because usually unions negotiate with associations of companies for the whole sector. And those unions without negotiating power are sometimes not even considered real unions...), and even independent members.

When I was younger, I worked in the theater industry. We all knew that the IATSE stage hands were making great wages, but the options we had to join were:

1.) A grueling apprenticeship period in which you would work very long hours for very little pay. I could be wrong but I think this was a several year long process.

2.) You could skip that process if you were vouched for by an existing union member. In practice, this often meant that membership was passed down through families.

I understand that it’s similar for firefighters.

That's been my experience as well. It's pure reactance psychology. From the first paragraph of the wiki page

> Reactance is an unpleasant motivational reaction to offers, persons, rules, or regulations that threaten or eliminate specific behavioral freedoms. Reactance occurs when an individual feels that an agent is attempting to limit one's choice of response and/or range of alternatives.

When I think about the people who I know who are anti-union, they all have high reactance as a trait. If I were to try to change their mind, it would be to frame their non-union environment as more freedom-limiting than the unions alternative re: workplace democracy etc.

You say "loves freedom" like it's a bad thing.

"Loves freedom" isn't as clear of a maximum of utility as it's sometimes made out to be. Again, the association with those of high reactance strong.

I'm fully aware that there will be attempts to naturalize "freedom loving." That's the interesting thing about psychology and I suppose in this case sociology, particulars are often universalized into a neurosis. It's funny how this pattern holds.

Let me put it in a less-fun way: "high reactance" is in this context just another way of saying "values freedom". Describing it using a wording that expresses psychologically-educated disapproval verbally pathologizes that preference, but it doesn't constitute a supported value judgment. In neither of your comments have you offered any support, so just like my "loves freedom", it remains an empty weasel-word.

The lack of empathy and unfavorable labeling of opinions that differ from your own is not something you should get in the habit of.

Rather, it is precisely an empathic explanation. It attempts to find an underlying basis for such an opinion rather than writing it off as unfounded. People with high reactance have an emotional response when compelled to action and this emotional response is what I'm empathizing with.

Any reading of my response as judgemental is a perversion of intention and I'd encourage anyone doing so to get curious and assume positive intent rather than reading it with malicious subtext. Something is only pathological if it negatively impacts someone's life.

That is not empathy. That is labeling them based on what you think their perspective is and using that label to reason why you understand their point of view. Characterizing another persons mental reasoning by putting it into some generic box is, by definition, NOT empathy.

Edit: I can’t help but feel like I’m being trolled, so this is where the conversation ends.

Please try to put yourself in my shoes and give me the benefit of the doubt.

as we say in america when someone is right about something, "i think you just hit the nail on the head."

Because some people take pride in their work, and being essentially forced to do a bad job hurts them psychologically.

I want to get up early, set big goals, work hard on them, and then see the fruits of that hard work. I take immense pride in that, and seeing the output in some sense is a big part of the payment.

Unions don’t allow for this attitude, at least none of the ones that I have ever interacted with. They’re not pro worker, they’re anti work. These people seem to believe that work is bad for workers.

So some people don’t like unions. I don’t like unions.

Hypothesis #1: European unions aren't like American unions in this way: they are far less oppositional to the objectives of the companies.

Hypothesis #2: This is a result of European unions having an origin as trade guilds whereas American unions have an origin as political organizers.

European unions have their roots in revolutionary communism. They then evolved towards social democracy, which is effectively a compromise between socialism and capitalism. This social compromise, where the unions accepted market economy and private property and the employers accepted moderate unions, made the unions what they are today.

American unions evolved in another direction. Because there was no serious risk of a communist revolution, the employers had no need to comromise. Both the employers and the unions remain more confrontational than in Europe.

As a Swede who emigrated to the US:

# 1: Swedish unions are very different from US ones. They understand their companies and the country needs to be competitive on the world market. I have my problems with their power and policies, but they're vastly better for society than the US version.

# 2: The Swedish unions formed the Social Democratic party, that's been the main political power center of the country for a century. Don't know what relations they may have had with guilds in the 1800s.

I find this is true for some unions but not all.

We have a union at my company and it’s for our creative writing and video production folks. We’re in the media space. These are some of the most effective and driven people I’ve met or had the privilege of working for.

People being lazy (or not) and wanting to do a good job (or not) is mutually exclusive of whether they are in a union (or not).

I do see why you would think this. Many media outlets and corporations spend lots of time making sure everyone thinks unions are just for lazy people. That’s not true, but after decades, many people think this now.

I think your characterization of unions is a propaganda driven falsehood, and your argument ignores the fact that Most people see less and less of the fruits of their labor.

> I want to get up early, set big goals, work hard on them, and then see the fruits of that hard work.

You might see the fruits of your hard work, but it's your boss who reaps them.

> I want to get up early, set big goals, work hard on them, and then see the fruits of that hard work.

Perhaps you could serve as an example and role model that could inspire union members like Michael Jordan and Tom Brady to work harder.

I used to work with UAW in the 90s and it was excruciating. I'd be on the floor with one of our machines and I wasn't allowed to even take a panel off with a screwdriver. There was one guy whose job allowed him to unscrew the panel and he was somewhere else, or on a smoke break. I spent so much time sitting around twiddling my thumbs, waiting for this or that person. It was the opposite of having a productive day, I'd never want to work like that.

For the same reason that people oppose monopolies. Unions are effectively a monopoly on the labor market.

With specific exemption from federal anti trust legislation.

>It's probably my European brain, but I cannot understand how someone [...] can be against unions...

America unions are structured differently from Europe and some can become as distrusted by the workers as the corporation.

Your viewpoint is common but it's based on the mental model of "Unions are good. Period end of story."

But for voters like your proverbial Jerry against unions, the mental model is more about tradeoffs like this, "the proposed union by these particular set of organizers has made some promises and wants to charge me $$$ per year to negotiate with the company. Things may turn out better -- or they may turn out worse (e.g. no job)."

As an example, the Amazon union vote in Alabama failed and many blamed Amazon propaganda. No doubt that Amazon crafted many negative messages about unions. But outsiders forget that many voters had older relatives from Alabama coal mines telling them that "the union just took our dues money and didn't do shit for us".

How can pro-union advocates counter those disillusioned union coal miners spreading negative information like that? These are the kinds of scenarios Europeans are unfamiliar with.

> How can pro-union advocates counter those disillusioned union coal miners spreading negative information like that?

Because coal mining is in no way the same as Amazon’s retail business? Now, I will say, some of these folks are beyond hope. In an energy transition documentary done by one of the HGTV property brothers, they interview a coal miner dying of black lung in Appalachia, and they believe that’s the job their kids and grandkids should do versus renewables or “new tech” even when considering there are other options available. [1] Belief systems are deeply ingrained and have defense mechanisms. Persuade the open minded whenever possible, of course, but ignore those who aren’t. The effort is better spent elsewhere. As Max Planck said, “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Same deal.

[1] https://youtu.be/MgRa5spkfXw

Both involve manual labor acquiring, packing, and shipping valuable good for use by others; in enclosed areas, surrounded by large, dangerous equipment; where workers are paid below the perceived value of the position, and with top management who grow richer daily while ignoring the plight of the "little man"...

I'd rather work in the warehouse, personally, but I can certainly see how the positions are analogous to the level we could compare expected results of a union.

There are also public sector unions which appear to only serve a special interest group at the expense of everyone else. Teacher unions are an example--they appear to protect bad teachers, stifle innovation, and it isn't even clear that they are great at getting pay for teachers.

> unions which appear to only serve a special interest group at the expense of everyone else

I mean, the intended purpose of unions is to serve their members, at the expense of non members.

Not necessarily. As I understand it, in the Nordics, employment conditions and benefits are protected by unions, regardless of an individual's membership.

I see how you read it that way, but I meant non members in a wider sense, as in the employer, and the general public.

Mind elaborating on what you mean by innovation?

Is it new/unique curriculum? Something else?

A lot of people have had bad experience with unions. Often times, it's only people with high seniority that see the most benefit from unions. This is why the railroad unions negotiated for more pay instead of paid sick days. Pension payouts are based on the average of the highest 60 paying months. Senior employees who are due to retire in a few years just need bear a few more tough years to enjoy their significantly fatter pensions.

Have they really? Personal bad experiences?

Or is this just the prevailing narrative that's been sold to us over the past 30-50 years, and there are too few actual unions and union jobs left to effectively counter it?

Because all they see is "that union is taking money out of my pay check!" and they don't see the positives.

And there actually are bad unions. I worked in a casino and out union was a non-striking union so even if the casino gave use some shitty contract we weren't able to strike. So what was the point?

Replace the word unions with cops (in the us) and then see if you come to the conclusion that there should be no cops because the system isn't working right now. The answer is most likely "No, of course not". So why do so many come to the conclusion that since unions aren't working well right now, you should just get rid of them altogether?

If this is your take, you're not being honest about the downsides of unions.

Here is a list of reasons for not wanting a union[1]:

- I want my underperforming colleagues to be fired quickly. It's unfair and annoying that laggards are protected and free riding off their colleagues' (my) effort, and it leads to ineffective orgs.

- I don't want seniority or rank to be rewarded. It's unfair to young people (me) who are more competent and ambitious, and it leads to ineffective orgs.

- I want to negotiate individually because I believe I will make more money as an outperformer. I don't want a centralized handicapper to blunt my compensation.

- I don't like that unions are rent seeking in nature.

- I don't like that unions often are exploited by organized crime.

- I don't like that unions interfere in the broader political process and democracy via activism and political pressure (e.g look at the fact that the new EV subsidies will be going to everyone except Tesla, it's a perversion).

- I think people should be free to organize, but I don't like that the state grants special asymmetric powers to unions.

- I don't like especially public sector unions that I believe are doing significant damage to society broadly. For example police unions that shielded Chauvin after a large number of complaints.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28958674

I think you have a very US-centric lens on unions. In the Nordic countries, for example, unions operate entirely differently. So you need to be clear where your points come from.

> So you need to be clear where your points come from

They were responding to a post specifically asking about Americans' feelings toward unions. That made it pretty clear to me where his points were coming from.

If they were responding from Finland I'd be a little confused why they were responding at all.

Because Finland is a great example of unions working for the benefit of employees? Why are we constrained to only discussing how (some, not all) unions are in the US?

>Why are we constrained to only discussing how (some, not all) unions are in the US?

In general, nobody is constrained to just discussing USA unions but the particular subthread[1] that you're in which was started by gp (Zeyka) was asking specifically about America. And that's probably because this thread's article is about American unions.

That's why your clarification (to poster wallawe) was perceived as redundant and out of place.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34028480

Because in USA every union is a battle. There isn't much to talk about with respect to Scandinavian unions, if you don't want to be in one just don't be, if you want to be in one just join, it is much simpler, while in USA one side forces the other side to take the same route, so you can't choose union other votes for what union you are in etc.

The above comment was clearly in response to another comment about how Americans feel about unions, thus it is obvious it was looking at American unions.

> It's unfair and annoying that laggards are protected and free riding off their colleagues' (my) effort

With your unionized coworkers that might be a possibility. With the business owners that’s a certainty. Do you feel differently about these two groups of people?

All great points. To add: As someone who's worked blue collar jobs, it is all too common for unions to protect assholes from getting fired. This leads to a hostile work environment created by the "high seniority" workers.

Something I don't like whenever these discussions come up is the condescending tone, from white collar workers. "Don't these poor people know what's good for them????"

Working class people are capable of thinking for themselves and it's not that uncommon for people to move from a union shop to a non-union shop due to the reasons outlined above.

Poor people? I think rich techies are crazy - or rather, badly misinformed- not to start a union.

Exhibit A of poorly informed: grandparent poster seriously thinking he has more individual bargaining power against trillion dollar corporations than a collective bargaining agreement would.

Exhibit B: grandparent poster thinking collective bargaining _must_ entail many aspects like seniority based compensation that are totally optional.

Tom Brady is in the NFL players association. Tom Cruise is in the Screen Actors guild. Naive techies think being good at leetcode hard gives them bargaining power. A lot of ex Tweeps are getting a wake up call.

The only reason techies had the illusion of negotiation leverage is that they were generating such absurdly high revenue for their employer, the slice they got seemed huge compared to the rest of the country’s gutted middle class. Factor in inflation, housing, and that Wall St is now gunning hard to bring tech compensation down, and you’ll realize techies are the last gasp of Americas dying middle class, and that really pisses off activist hedge funds . See Elliott Managements recent takeover of Pinterest so they could “re-level” employees.

Read the emails between Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin w.r.t high tech class action lawsuit. Read about Google hiring union busting consultant firms.

If unions didn’t work, tech execs wouldn’t be so terrified of them.

Yes, poor people should also unionize. And yes, unfortunately a lot of their options are as broken and corrupt as their employers.

That doesn’t change the fundamental fact that collective bargaining is the _only_ answer .

> Read the emails between Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin w.r.t high tech class action lawsuit. Read about Google hiring union busting consultant firms.

Worse still is that these firms have been caught collectively bargaining against workers through illegal secretive non-compete clauses. Wage suppression has been going on for years, even while these companies have been at the very top of thriving businesses.

It’s simply not a question of affordability. These companies did it because they could.

I’d also like to point out that much of the union activity of a hundred years ago was also about poor working conditions, and not just compensation. Much of that was quelled by increasing government regulations that protected workers against exploitation. Is the government adequately performing this job?

> Tom Brady is in the NFL players association. Tom Cruise is in the Screen Actors guild.

You think that has anything to do with their compensation? Tom Brady has won how many Super Bowls? Tom Cruise has had how many blockbuster movies?

The opposite should be true if unions were the great equalizers, no single actor/athlete would be making hundreds of millions a year and all of them would be making enough to buy a house in Beverly Hills.

> The opposite should be true if unions were the great equalizers, no single actor/athlete would be making hundreds of millions a year and all of them would be making enough to buy a house in Beverly Hills.

This makes no sense. Two people that are in unions are doing the thing you say they can't. What in the world?

All the things you dislike about unionized working environments are things that can go wrong in any working environment. If we had more unions, you'd have more of a choice, instead of the situation now where only the most corrupt survive.

Thank you for articulating this so well!

I don't think you quite understand how the unions work.

-in most cases, the employer is able to fire with cause. The union keeps the employer from using layoffs as a weapon.

- pay scales reward loyalty and keeps the workplace stable.

- without the union, you have almost no bargaining power. The union usually gets a better rate for everyone than any one person could have negotiated. This is in fact the point of collective bargaining. Even the presence of a union job site can lift wages across industries. I see this in Oshawa, where the CAW jobs making car bits helps waitresses and sales associates draw higher wages.

-the employer is rent-seeking on their capital. The union balances this.

-unions are not criminal organizations. The teamsters have done some things in the past. If we didn't have so much union busting, there would be more unions competing for workplaces, and this would drive bad unions out of business.

-unions are political, and need legal protections for workers. Tesla will eventually have to deal with a union or treat their workers better than the UAW.

-I don't like that the state grants asymmetric privileges to the employer class, like never prosecuting white collar crimes, and not clawing back exec severances during bankruptcy, and giving them a lower tax rate than their employees.

-there are many things wrong with policing in the us, but all could be fixed with fedral legislation. The unions are aligned with their membership, and doing great work. The wider outcomes are horrible, but that's a good union doing good work.

> pay scales reward loyalty and keeps the workplace stable.

The tech industry has arguably developed quickly because people move around a lot, taking best practices with them. Workplace stability might appear locally great, but it hurts the industry as a whole.

The tech industry is flooded with money, but is enormously inefficient. How many projects are you familiar with that got trashed, often after key people moved on?

You forgot the part where they are all founded on organized crime.

> without the union, you have almost no bargaining power.

You absolutely do. The most powerful bargaining power of all: the power of the alternative. It's also called "pay me, or I leave" (most often accompanied by "I have an outside offer"). I exercised this power a few times in my career. I did not need any union to bargain for me.

You're describing a bargaining power that unions have, except instead of "pay me or I leave" it's "pay me or we leave".

Why would you want a less powerful version of the same thing? Even if you don't involve your union, you can still do what you're describing.

You've gained nothing unique by avoiding the union.

> you can still do what you're describing.

I doubt you can. Your boss will tell you he can't pay you more than what's on the grid negotiated with the union. My wife works in a place with a union (and is a member of it), and there is such a grid. Nobody even thinks individual bargaining is a possibility.

So you leave, like you said.

"Pay me or I leave" is bargaining. "I leave" is not bargaining.

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills, we are directly talking about a scenario where a worker says "pay me more or I leave" and the company says "Our union doesn't want nonmembers to be paid more" or "We can't pay you more because of the union" and you're telling me "then leaving" is not bargaining.

I go to a store and I tell them I want to buy item X, but the price is too high. If they don't want to lower the price, I'll go somewhere else. They say they can't change the posted price. I leave the store. Do you call that bargaining? If you do, you have a very peculiar definition of the word.

Yes, because it is bargaining. You offered an agreement: You stay and work, they pay more. The alternative is leave. They chose for you to leave.

It is not bargaining if you can't possibly get what you want.

If you are in a union shop, you can't get paid more than what's on the grid. If you want more, you need to resign and get somewhere else. But don't pretend you have a choice to do "individual bargaining".

Unions eliminate the individual bargaining power of people.

Except, of course, if we choose to use your definition, and call resigning and moving to another job "bargaining".

They chose the union rules over giving you individually more money. There was a choice.

You not liking their choice doesn't mean there was no choice.

Just join the union, you'll get paid more anyways.

Your argument was that the union gives you more power via the collective bargaining, but that you still retain your individual bargaining power.

You don't.

If you were to come to my company and try to convince me to start a union, I'd say "thanks, but no thanks".

Just now, you are trying to convince me that I'd be retaining my individual bargaining power, if I accept to use a different definition.

Well, I was born in a Communist country, where they were fond of changing definitions. We were free to vote for whomever we wanted, as long as it was someone on the list presented to us. We had no say in who was on that list. Of course, we were free to not vote at all, right? Boys had to do mandatory military service. You know how they were called when they were conscripted? "Volunteers". That was the official name.

So, yes, I'm used to the tactic of changing definitions. But if you are serious about presenting an argument, you should no use this tactic.

Take your reasons, which are really more opinions, and insert "free speech" instead of "unions" (after the appropriate changes) and you might understand why people would disagree.

How does "free speech" reward seniority, protect underperforming colleagues, prevent negotiating individually, etc?

That is why I said make the appropriate changes.

- I don't want free speech because it is unfair to award lazy thinking free riding off established publications.

- I don't want free speech because it is often exploited by terrorists.

- I think people should be free to say things but I don't think it should grant them special protection from the government.

etc.

It isn't an exact comparison but that also isn't the point.

You're right, it's not a comparison at all.

It is it just isn't an exact comparison which is also what I said.

The way that many union bosses have become part of the political class is something I rarely see discussed when talking about union benefits. The bosses seem to be well removed from the rank and file members and can have completely different goals and priorities. The definition of a union does not really seem like it should have anything to do with politics either. I am sure that people will defend union bosses by pointing out that union leadership jobs have a different nature than what the members do which may be so. But I would like to point out that it seems pretty rarely people talk about exploitation and corruption of and by union bosses themselves as if this can't possibly exist. I would argue there is potential for union leadership to be exploitative of union members and this is worth discussing.

tldr: I think I can get more money, and screw the rest.

You’ve proven the point about inequality.

> - (e.g look at the fact that the new EV subsidies will be going to everyone except Tesla, it's a perversion).

If you mean the federal tax credit, it was the OLD one that stopped going to Tesla (due to the per-model caps in place; caps that any competitor could also reach after enough sales, mind you). The new credit that was signed into law this year does not exclude Tesla (instead, it excludes cars manufactured overseas).

Beautiful sentiments. Young programmers in the hottest job market in history don't need a union.

Fortunately for your ability to empathize with the plebeians in the regular world, Musk has shown that software companies are probably employing at least twice as many programmers as they need, so this job market should be turning south soon.

After ten-twenty years of being employed half the time and your salary going down with every new job I'm sure you'll be mentally broken down enough to empathize with the blue collar pro-union perspective.

> Musk has shown that software companies are probably employing at least twice as many programmers as they need

No, he hasn’t; he hasn’t even shown that Twitter was doing that.

He's shown enough for the tech elite hive-mind to trample workers into the dirt for a few years. It's not like the amount of staffing SV companies have makes any sense anyway.

I think it in part comes from being trained generation after generation that if I work harder than you, I deserve more than you. So if people want to make things more equal, I will have worked so hard for nothing and that makes me unhappy.

* Note: I used "I", but I don't personally feel this way. If I found out a fast food worker made more than me as an engineer, I wouldn't care. In some ways they work harder. Also, I don't think CEOs bring as much worth to a company as engineers do and they make way more, so...

Two big factors:

1. American capitalists have waged a very effective propaganda campaign against unions and

2. American unions have had a history of corruption. (Or maybe I just think that because I've been taken in by the propaganda campaign.)

as an American, my casual observation is that "real, political Leftists in Unions of America" were pushed out by any means (media,legal pressure,illegal intimidation and harassment), leaving the far-Right shady people to run them (literally Mafia in many locations, and with the Teamsters). This is a political trade-off paralleling other anti-Communist countries. USA Americans do not have a real impression of the horrific power struggles that can occur within a labor & tax system, and as these comments show, also do not have a real impression of a working, daily Union doing it's job without drama.

I'm curious what you mean when you say "leaving the far-Right shady people to run them (literally Mafia in many locations, and with the Teamsters)". How are you defining "far-right" in this context?

sustained, organized indentured servitude was a fact of work life in many populated parts of the world for more than a thousand years, and is found today in most military structures, hotels and casinos, for example. Here, a working definition of "far-Right" is, descendants of those that enable hierarchical work structures parallel to indentured work, with control & reward structures associated with that.

It has been demonized and propagandized against by people with the deepest pockets in the world, and it’s working in some cases.

A quick look at the comments on here answers that pretty well... It's quite sad that those that are against unions for various reasons are also against any changes to them. It just seems like bad faith.

> I will never understand how some working class Americans can be against unions

It seems as though decades of corporate puppets have done a wonderful job of convincing the blue-collar worker that unions are corrupt and exist solely to milk worker's dues.

I don't understand it either.

> I will never understand how some working class Americans can be against unions

I've wondered if this is because unions in the U.S. are considerably different than unions in other places?

This was an interesting article [0] I bumped into titled "Europe could have the secret to saving America’s unions".

It said that in the U.S. unionization happens at the enterprise level, leaving unionized companies at a disadvantage relative to their competitors, so individual companies are very much incentivized to fight against unionization. In other countries when a certain amount of workers call for unionization negotiations happen between the union and a federation representing all employers in the sector, and the entire sector unionizes at once, not individual companies.

The article also talked about employees receiving benefits from their unions in some (fewer) countries, like unemployment insurance, instead of from the government. This incentives workers to join the union and pay union dues, instead of forcing them to do so. The idea was thrown out there that things like health care and retirement plans could also be included with union dues for people in gig-work jobs that would otherwise not receive these benefits.

I'd add that the article didn't address a concern many in the U.S. have about unions protecting under-performing workers, to the detriment of others. I've heard that this is different in other countries, at least to a point, but the article did not get into this. Also in the U.S. there have been a lot of corrupt unions, and public employee unions that receive (expensive) preferential treatment by law, I don't know if these problems exist in other countries.

[0] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/17/15290674/u...

Thanks for the interesting read, I think that US unions should definitely change, and this is still in line with my original comment, because of course you can dislike the way unions work right now, but still be pro-union in the long term.

Opposing unions is just going to lead to no changes on the union side and it's going to let the companies be as harsh on workers as they want, even on the "hard workers", because in the end, companies just care about the value that you are producing, not what you once produced. If you aren't valuable now, they'll just throw you out.

All the comments on here that say "well i don't want my lazy coworker to get paid more" highlight how well the "hustle"/"grind" and meritocracy propaganda worked on US workers. The other type of comments that talk about the bad side of unions just seem like bad faith arguments, It's just like the police violence in the US, there are a lot of bad actors and the system is ultimately flawed, but does that mean that there should be no police? No, of course not, so why is that in this context, they are actively against unions and against workers right? It quite literally makes no sense, but then again we're talking about the USA here so the notion of logic just goes out of the window.

You don’t know many working class Americans or you could ask them. I do and have and they report exploitation and misaligned incentives. Unions are like corporations, they can have poor leadership with goals that are incongruous with the goals of the members. Union dues can feel like you pay a lot of your hard earned cash to just have your money siphoned off to a politicians that literally hate you. But usually they have agreed that in general it’s good that unions exist. Better to have them around than to not have them, in the abstract.

> see themselves as embarrassed millionaires

I see this "embarrassed millionaires" line a lot. It seems unbelievably cynical. Do you really think a meaningful fraction of workers are thinking "I'll oppose unions because even though I'm hurting workers, it'll be good for me when I'm rich"?

It's rarely a specific and conscious line of thought during the decision-making process. The more common case is making the working class feel like they're "just like" the wealthy—playing on the narrative that "anyone can get rich in America"—and then selling them on policies that actively work against their own interests, and for the interests of the wealthy. This step often looks like talking about things that would primarily affect the very wealthy as if they would hurt everyone. Things like "taxation is theft", "increasing taxes punishes success", "government small enough to drown in a bathtub", etc.

> maybe they just see themselves as embarrassed millionaires that would want to crush their workers to squeeze money out of them?

What a lazy take. Unions only protect their current members. It's common for companies to hire fewer people or hire more people at only part time schedules because full time employees are required to cost exaggeratedly more or are harder to fire due to union contracts. What organization represents the people who are unemployed or underemployed because of unions? These people are much worse off than if the unions didn't exist.

You say you will never understand why some American working class workers oppose unions. Well then I guess you will need be able to convince them otherwise. If your starting point is that the union experience is obviously a good one and you must be stupid to not see that, you have lost any chance of a serious conversation. People have reasons for feeling the way they do. Dismissing them as falling for propaganda is once again just calling them stupid.

I'm an American and I admit to having a very negative view of modern unions. When the word union comes up I immediately think of:

1) The Teamsters and their ties to organized crime 2) Police unions that shield officers from consequences 3) Teacher unions that prevent awful teachers from being fired 4) Ridiculous rules around duties on film/theater sets 5) The UAW is seen by many former workers as letting them down. Many other people feel the UAW bears some responsibilities for plant closures. 6) As supermarkets in my area started to unionize the service noticeably suffered. 7) Several friends were Verizon workers and felt that they were screwed by their union. 8) It is common for unions to fund candidates that many workers do not like.

If someone like myself has a negative view of unions it is up to people like yourself to change that perception if you want unions to gain traction in the US. Distrust of unions in the US are not always (usually?) driven by ignorance or propaganda. Unions themselves have done a very good job of alienating workers.

Here is how Swedish unions work :)

Maybe urs are just shit :)

https://www.unionen.se/in-english/this-is-unionen

To everybody who thinks this is just correlation and not causation - read the post properly. They mention:

"Labor unions both sustained prosperity, and ensured that it was shared; union bargaining power has been shown to moderate the compensation of executives at unionized firms."

And give a link to a study. This result has been seen across countries, and is the CAUSAL link you're looking for.

I don’t have any real opinion about the direction of causality. If anything the idea of unions contributing to more wage equality makes sense to me. But, linking to a single study as “proof” of anything is a big no no. It is very easy to cherry pick studies so that you get the “true” outcome. The only way to make a halfway convincing argument is to look at every piece of evidence on the question and aggregate them. This is why we believe global warming is man made and severe despite a few studies that suggest otherwise. One other caveat I would add is that if you read the linked study, they’re only reporting correlations. There doesn’t appear to be a causal identification strategy there. Which isn’t to say it isn’t interesting and worthwhile. Only that one should take the results with an appropriate level of caution.

Let's just read the title: "As unions decline, inequality rises"

That is very much a statement about correlation. Otherwise it would say, "Unions' Decline CAUSED Inequality". But, to anyone with a passing knowledge of statistics, that is clearly an impossible claim to make. This is one time series realization for one country.

Let's go further. Is there any mention of causality in the article. And I do mean quantified causality. The answer is "no". Is there even any mention of correlation? Again, the answer is "no".

Let's keep going. Let's evaluate the aims and intent of the article. Let's start with EPI, the publisher of this article. The Chair of EPI is "Elizabeth H. Shuler ... president of the AFL-CIO, a federation of 58 unions and 12.5 million working people". Other board members include current and former union leadership from the United Steelworkers, the UAW, the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union, Service Employees International Union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Communication Workers of America, and the American Federation of Teachers. All huge unions.

In other words, this publication is not a work of science. It is not a credible academic publication. It is the motivated, self interested rhetoric of union leadership.

Mr Always-grumbles-about-correlation-studies reporting in here. Maybe it's a nice causal study, but the jump from "moderates compensation of top executives" to "reduces equality across the whole income spectrum" is a big stretch.

Update: also, I went and scanned the linked article (because I'm that type). They're credible authors, but they themselves explicitly say: "In reporting correlations between unionization and managerial pay, we are not necessarily able to establish whether unions cause differences.... We try a variety of strategies to understand these issues, however each is imperfect."

"In reporting correlations between unionization and managerial pay, we are not necessarily able to establish whether unions cause differences"

Yes, but that's a different correlation vs causation issue. The point is, the phenomenon of unions equalizing pay, on the company (micro) level (which has been reproduced in other countries and time periods), can be considered to be a causal explanation for the phenomenon of rising inequality when unions decline, in the society at large.

Right, the paper cites a lot of other papers which looked more relevant on the broader topic of what unions do to pay.

My theory is unions thrive when there's a labor shortage, so workers will get paid more just because there's a labor shortage, decreasing inequality. If there's a labor glut, the union model falls over because it can't maintain its monopoly, and executives pat themselves on the back for lowering production costs, even though it was mostly driven by the macro environment.

Oh wow, they have a study! Definitely definitive then, case closed.

More seriously, my wife and I got into an argument about the effects of unions once and this was the best summary I could find: https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/what-unions-d...

(yes it is by the Heritage foundation so their top-line summary probably has some ideological bias but the list of study summaries at the bottom is great) Generally, studies found that unions benefitted the unionized workers at the expense of the most and least skilled workers. And was slightly bad for company investment/earnings long term. But by far my favorite result (and the best study design from the list, imo) was a regression-discontinuity analysis that found no effect of unionization whatsoever:

"Compares companies whose workers voted narrowly for a union with companies whose workers voted narrowly against a union. Since the difference between winning and losing is close to random, this provides an estimate of the causal effect of randomly organizing a given company. Finds that workers who vote to join a union do win certification but that unions have essentially no effect on the firm or the workers. Wages do not rise, and employment and productivity do not fall. Unionized companies are no more likely to go out of business than are non-union firms."

DiNardo, John, and David S. Lee, "Economic Impacts of New Unionization on Private Sector Employers: 1984-2001," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 119, No. 4 (November 2004), pp. 1383-1441.

> To everybody who thinks this is just correlation and not causation - read the post properly.

A quick glance at the chart and one could also show a link between federal income tax rates and executive compensation.

If you are taxed 73% you simply don’t have any incentive to “increase inequality” — you pay someone to show your income as a lot less than it really is. The real irony is the Reagan tax cuts resulted in more revenue because it just wasn’t worth the trouble to dodge paying taxes anymore.

Correlation, causation, lies, statistics, who knows?

The exact attitude in this thread is why people don’t like unions.

It’s this smug idea that the workers are simply too stupid to understand that they should join the special club. Not that they don’t don’t like jt, or have made an informed decision about it, it’s because they are dumb and not capable of advocating for themselves.

I don’t want to be in your weird HOA club. Leave me alone and let me do my work and go get a job in HR so you can be a part of the PMC, which is obviously what you are after anyway.

It's quite annoying when people just assume that a union would be the best thing for you. They clearly have no idea and just read on the internet that a union would be good for workers so obviously they have to align with that view.

The last thing I want is for freeloaders to essentially never get fired and for some parasitic entity to collect dues for "bargaining" that usually isn't even worth it by the time they finish negotiations. Especially in todays climate.

Sure the threat of a union may mobilize a company to be more competitive and pay more, but the actual unions themselves just seem to never work out. Expecting an entity that doesn't do much to get you all these benefits is almost insane. When has any union actually got everything they promised? Never, at least not in America.

I have mixed feelings about unions. On one hand – should workers be able to associate freely and bargain collectively against employers? Yes! But, should some groups of workers be able to impose on everyone that they must join their association in order to be a worker at X company, or an actor, or something? No, I don't see why.

Exactly! If conditions are so bad in a company that 99% of it's workers immediately sign on to a union then that means something very different than when you can only get 51% of workers to eventually sign on.

Collective bargaining is a escape valve against shit employers for employees that don't have a lot of options. A standing union with mandated membership and support from laws and regulations very easily becomes something far more twisted.

> But, should some groups of workers be able to impose on everyone that they must join their association in order to be a worker at X company, or an actor, or something? No, I don't see why.

We then get into:

> In the social sciences, the free-rider problem is a type of market failure that occurs when those who benefit from resources, public goods (such as public roads or public library), or services of a communal nature do not pay for them[1] or under-pay. Free riders are a problem because while not paying for the good (either directly through fees or tolls or indirectly through taxes), they may continue to access or consume it. Thus, the good may be under-produced, overused or degraded.[2] Additionally, it has been shown that despite evidence that people tend to be cooperative by nature, the presence of free-riders cause this prosocial behaviour to deteriorate, perpetuating the free-rider problem.[3]

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-rider_problem

A company should be able to set different salaries for unionized vs. non-unionized workers.

Only management should be able to impose their will on employees and should be able to do so without competition. On the job, and during their “free-time”.

More seriously, imagine where not everyone is required to be in the union and think about how easy it then becomes for management to manipulate the environment to the detriment of union employees until the union is wiped out.

What does inequality mean in this context?

The USSR, North Korea, and Cuba all have/had lower levels of inequality than the west...by making everyone poor. That is the easy way to reduce inequality/

What the left fails to realize is that absolute inequality doesn't matter. The real questions is the vast majority feel better off? In China, hundreds of millions are wealthier than they were two generations ago. They have increased absolute inequaliry and increased equality at the same time.

In fact, inequality as a concept is a ridiculous measure. What does equality in that context even mean? That everyone should make the same amount, no matter the ability or position? 90% of humanity would vehemently disagree with that. In fact, people try to flee countries who implement that sort of resource allocation.

So you are saying there is nothing wrong with a country where a few own everything and everyone else doesn't even have access to healthcare?

> In fact, people try to flee countries who implement that sort of resource allocation.

Yes, rich people, lol. People who GET access to things like housing and healthcare remain.

I feel like you are mischarecterizing OPs argument. His argument is that rather than focus on inequality we should focus on increasing everyone's standard of living overall.

> > we should focus on increasing everyone's standard of living overall

The most important quality of life metric is mental health.

There is no way around the fact that mental health is heavily impacted by the fact that citizens feel worthless when they assess their social status vis-a-vis the top 1%

And no amount of stuff will solve this problem because social status is a zero-sum game.

It's one of those problems that simply cannot be solved.

i dont think people revolt because they feel bad when they compare themselves to the 1%. People revolt because they have nothing to lose. Their material conditions are the most important thing in this equation. I'm sure that a populace can tolerate inequality to a point (look at the inequality in the US and Europe, for example) but once a large enough slice of the population has nothing to lose then it's choppy boy time.

You are right, but it’s desirable to prevent suicides and mass depression just as much as it’s desirable to prevent revolts.

Revolts spark because people have nothing to lose

Mass depression, bad mental health on a country level and suicides happen when people feel worthless

> What does inequality mean in this context?

Everything going to the top, and nothing going to those on the bottom.

> The USSR, North Korea, and Cuba all have/had lower levels of inequality than the west...by making everyone poor.

Seems like your examples also have things going to the people at the top.

A comment from a few years ago that I saved:

> If we suppose that the goal of society is to produce the greatest utility, and that the utility wealth provides an individual is sub-linear (i.e. twice as much money makes you less than twice as happy), then inequality is inefficient resource allocation.

> However, we also suppose that some level of inequality can lead to greater productivity, and thus greater utility overall. The question is then what level produces the best outcome? […]

* https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14505342

Why aren't poor Americans immigrating elsewhere if they have "nothing"? The poor in other countries are risking their lives to come to America.

> "nothing"

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/proverbial

* https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/literal

I think your point about "feel better off" is critical, but I wonder if that stems more from comparison across generations or across the current population.

There are some things, like political campaigns, where absolute inequality does matter. One man one vote may be true in theory, but in practice Rupert Murdoch has fat more political sway than anyone on this thread precisely because of his wealth.

Is that a problem with income inequality, or a problem with political campaign financing rules/influence in a system which has wealthy people?

Personally I think lower inequality in our society would be a good thing - but also with political influence there are more direct faults/solutions.

> Is that a problem with income inequality, or a problem with political campaign financing rules?

In the US those are intertwined:

> The court held 5-4 that the free speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations, including nonprofit corporations, labor unions, and other associations.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC

More speech for the rich.

The New York Times is funded by the rich. Should their speech be restricted too?

In the context elections and political sway, if you want to be closer to one-person-one-vote, then the New York Times would be restricted when it comes to elections so they do not have more sway than a random blogger.

What I mean is that they are only intertwined because of that campaign financing rule - they aren't inherently intertwined. And the more obvious and immediate solution (to me) is to change that rule and stop them from being intertwined rather than to somehow fix all wealth inequality.

As an absurd example, let's say I made a law that said that people with brown eyes can slap people with blue eyes. In this world, slapping people and eye-colour would be intertwined. This doesn't mean it's inherently a problem with brown eyes, or that eye colour and slapping are inherently intertwined. The obvious fix for this would be to change the rule rather than to change everyone's eye colours.

As in the US wealth and political donations are linked, the initial problem is that those two are linked together. There is nothing inherent that says you need to reduce income inequality to reduce the impact of wealth on politics - i.e. you can reduce the impact by changing legislation so the two aren't intertwined.

There's no way to make a sane case that it is the fault of a single law, or an idiosyncrasy of US campaign financing, that the amount of money you have has an decisive effect on politics. It's not a question of blue eyes vs. brown eyes, it's a question of wolves vs. kittens.

edit: If you want to do something politically that would harm my business, I can just silence you, have you jailed, or kill you. No campaign finance necessary. I can sponsor debates about the degree to which you molest children in my newspapers and on my television channels every day.

Hell, the money that goes to campaigns that isn't wasted to party graft just goes back to media owners, anyway. It's like US foreign aid, denominated in store credit at US favored contractors.

This is shocking news to me. How many extra votes does Rupert Murdoch get? What is the exchange rate from dollars to votes, precisely?

I don't know these numbers, but I bet someone on Murdoch's staff does, at a statistical level.

Is this sarcasm? I actually cannot tell.

is this a serious comment? Rupert murdoch is a global media baron, he literally owns news outlets that encourage people to vote in one way or another. Do you think those news outlets are free of his ideology? do you think the washington post is free of Bezos' ideology?

Even billionaires and millionaires who dont own media companies have outsized influence. They can fund politicians they prefer to an extent that a rival might not be able to match. They can pay for lobbyists. There are a myriad of ways that dollars turn into votes without a mustachioed man walking around with a bag of money being involved. Mass movements aside the working class isnt out there propping up politicians.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/It%27s_The_Sun_Wot_Won_It

Murdoch's own papers claim credit for election victories. I don't know the exact conversion rate from dollars to votes, but it's absurd to suggest one doesn't exist and that Murdoch's organizations don't know what it is.

Rupert Murdoch has sway because he owns the most watched news network in America. He could give away all his money tomorrow and his sway would stay the same because he controls a major news network.

When people talk about wealth, they generally include assets such as the companies owned.

> > What the left fails to realize is that absolute inequality doesn't matter.

1) It's always paternalistic to try and explain to people how they should feel, especially when the social group in question is 55-60% of a country of 330M, it's not a matter of being right or wrong. It's a matter of Tilting at the windmills vs. not Tilting at the windmills.

2) It's impossible to solve inequality because every complex system is a Pareto system, however Pareto says nothing about the speed of the turnover of the top 20%.

> 90% of humanity would vehemently disagree with that.

> The USSR, North Korea, and Cuba all have/had lower levels of inequality than the west

> In China, hundreds of millions are wealthier than they were two generations ago. They have increased absolute inequaliry and increased equality at the same time.

Sources? Do you have any data or metrics available for your claims (outside of Facebook memes)?

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/size-poverty-gap-countrie...

Do China and similar powers have pervasive unions? If the rest of the wold doesn't, unionizing in the US may be a very temporary victory as union demands encourage even more offshoring and automation. We compete globally now. Globalization may be the bigger source of inequality in the first place.

Globalization moves money to people most in need of it (i.e. developing countries with cheap labor/resources).

Many people don't want equality... especially those who see themselves as superior.

You can see it in the comments of this thread, even.

Yep, like the people who say they are better than their coworkers and say unions would make them compensated less… USA propaganda succeeded… they don't even realise the enemy is their CEO.

Why would the CEO be my enemy? A specific CEO maybe but that is a very broad claim to make.

> Why would the CEO be my enemy?

I studied some basic economics.

The goal for a player seems to be to obtain the maximum, giving the least.

For his very role, the CEO will pay you the least amount he can get away with. Ok he won't think of a few dollars or cents, because it's not worth to think about it… but when you negotiate your salary he would give you a negative raise if he could get away with it. And during normal work days he wants you to work as much as possible.

Of course a good CEO understands that working 20h today means that you won't do a good job tomorrow… but the long term goal is that.

Would you not try to do something similar in working as minimally as possible for the pay? Does that make someone a bad person? Everyone tries to min-max life. Doesn’t make them enemies or bad people, it just makes them…people.

Yes of course I'm doing the same. I'm not saying CEO should be put to death… I'm saying that people have to understand their natural allies are people in their same situation.

I’ve always thought of minimum wage as a company declaring they will pay as low a wage possible without being thrown in jail… not a penny more. That should an embarrassing position to take… and yet.

CEO's interest is the shareholders (private or public), the company's profits, and his personal profit and success.

He only cares about employees, their compensation, and their health as much as it impacts these things. If he is altruistic, he'll care about them, but prioritize them after the above (if he's a "good CEO")

Give you an example: I know someone who owns a business making $5-6m PROFIT (take home, cash in the bank) a year. They have about 30-40 warehouse workers.

When wages were going up, they were freaking out about having to pay these workers $20/hr vs the $15 they were getting.

Sure, it's like $500k/yr. But seriously. The greed is astounding.

BTW the execs (I had access to their financials) were getting raises in the order of 2x over the next 2yrs. That's right. Double their salary over the next two years (way more than $500k/yr, btw!)

For what it is worth, I do run my own business, and yes - I give what I can to my employees.

I want society to get richer. I want poor people (in all nations including China, India, and Vietnam) to earn more money. This is not the same thing as wanting equality.

In that sense, no I do not support economic equality. Jeff Bezos owning 10% of Amazon worth $X billion does not effect my life in any way. If he owned 50% or 0.001%, instead my life would still be the same.

I'm not sure why I need to be upset about that.

The actual number is not upsetting, it's that 1) he achieved that number by exploiting workers (pee in a bottle, stay in the warehouse during a tornado, et cetera) and 2) not paying taxes.

It does affect you though. Cause Bezos then lobbies that unions are evil and does everything under the sun to keep wages low. Including yours.

Amazon led the way to $15

Bezos could do that with $100 million. Lobbying is not expensive.

Politics aside, there might not be a causative link between unions and inequality—just a correlation. Supporting unions may or may not reduce inequality

As unions grow they begin to resemble that which they were meant to counter-balance. I've wondered, if a subgroup of union members are unhappy, can they organize? Can they form a union within the union?

For example, if my workplace has an exclusive contract with one union, and me and my coworkers (who are all union members) don't believe the union is representing us, can we organize to take collective action against both the union and our actual employer?

I known little about unions, so feel free to explain the basics if you need.

Ha! This is a best loosely coupled. EPI discloses labor unions fund them. Labor Unions did nothing for families in the 60s,70s,80s, and 90s when all manufacturer jobs were driven out of the US due to bad labor negotiations. Joining a union is about as helpful for your job as joining a country club except you don’t get any real perks.

Laying all of the US's industrial decline at the feet of unions is a bit much. I think a lot of the management-hostile, zero-sum thinking that drove bad union behavior was a clear response to previous management behavior filled with both exploitation that drove the rise of unions and hostility when they couldn't get away with as much.

An instructive example here is the story of the NUMMI plant in the 1980s, which clearly shows the awfulness of GM's internal culture, the cluelessness of management in the face of existential threat, and how much things can be different, even with the exact same union workers: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015

If we want unions that have a collaborative, win-win approach with management, I think we first need management that has that spirit toward the workers. But looking at how US companies are reacting to the recent uptick in unionization, I'm not very hopeful.

Seems like less regulation and less government leads to greater efficiency. The rich get richer often because of government loopholes. Carried interest is a simple one but in the 77,000+ pages of the tax code the rich have the resources to use lawyers and accountants to avoid paying taxes. Anyone getting a W2 has very limited wiggle room on avoiding the tax bite.

I think unions in private companies have value. The unions at least know they can’t demand too much or their companies will be out of business. On the other hand, I don’t get unions in public institutions: the government is unlikely to go out of business, so what is possibly the check and balance of the unions?

I think that’s the point. Workers want to be paid more if they feel like they are more deserving.

Lots of American cope in this thread.

Read this. This is a Swedish general office worker union. Yes even IT

https://www.unionen.se/in-english/this-is-unionen

What is the impact of inequality in a job seekers market? The perception I have is that employers are seeing difficulty in hiring. Would not inequality and diversity increase in such markets, as employers lower barriers and reduce leverage?

As does global warming, and pandemics. Why assume their is a causal relationship?

Every time I read something on HN about immigrants I know what a tech union would look like. Like the AFL CIO of old, it will be anti-immigrant. That specifically does not work for me.

Confoederationes commercii delendae sunt

As the government share of gdp rises, so does inequality. Increasing tax rates, and increasingly progressive tax rates, provide an increasing barrier to moving up.

"The Economic Policy Institute is a 501 non-profit American, left-leaning think tank based in Washington, D.C."

In Germany at least, I have the feeling the Unions don't do much.

I know a bunch of nurses, and they still are paid badly.

Are you German?

What if without unions, it would be worse?

Not saying unions don't equalize, but 1940-1945 had something else going on besides being peak union.

we should stop worrying about inequality and instead fixate on these two metrics: (1) how well off are the poorest and those unable to work and (2) how well off is the middle class

Inequality rises due to overpopulation. It’s a numbers game.

Fair means inequal.

Can we start a union for developers that sell in the App Store?

This is spot on. The evisceration of unions is the legacy of the Reagan/Thatcher years (ie the 1980s). Real wages have been stagnant for 40+ years [1]. Much of modern American culture can be summed up with this quote [2]:

> “John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

The Cold War and the hugely successful propaganda against communism spilled over to utterly decimate the labor movement in the US. You will however immediately lose most Americans as soon as you use the word "socialism". Let me summarize the usual rebuttals:

1. Socialism isn't communisum. The first is more about equality of opportunity. The second is more equality of outcome;

2. Socialism is not a poverty cult. Society is insanely wealthy. It's simply about sharing the wealth such that like 8 people don't own 50% of the economy;

3. Debt is built into your existence. Student debt, medical debt, housing debt, etc. This is by design to rob you of autonomy and keep you as compliant workers. Often this is referred to as "neofeudalism" or "neoserfdom".

5. There is no value without labor;

6. "The workers owning the means of production" simply means labor sharing in the value they create. And no, an Amazon warehouse worker getting paid minimum hour and being penalized for taking bathroom breaks is not "sharing";

7. Too many people have unrealistic views about their ability to negotiate and their overall ability, which is why you'll see so many comments like "I don't want to be kept down by low performers".

8. The financialization of housing turns people into NIMBYs who want to see their home values go up even though cost of housing is the leading factor in homelessness and has historically been used as a tool for segregation after explicit segregation was outlawed;

9. Creating monopolies such that companies can charge $1000/month and otherwise bankrupt you for needing lifesaving healthcare is state violence;

10. The police as an institution that exists today is a tool for protecting capital and those who own it; and

11. You are not Elon Musk. You will never be Elon Musk. Elon Musk doesn't know who you are. Elon Musk would melt you down for rocket fuel if it increased profits.

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...

[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328134-john-steinbeck-once-...

Of course, correlation does not equal causation!

But in some cities, the govt is required to do work only with labor unions. In that case, joining a union might help, because the government has taking away your competition!

This article puts together two graphs and absolutely give no backing as to which one is the causation of the other beyond "see?" or if there's any backing model for their correlation than one could go and test.

This is sensationalistic propaganda, not research.

You would honestly think that in 2022 someone would critically ask the author if they’re falling into a “correlation implies causation” fallacy.

Considering I'm being downvoted on top of that, I might have overvalued this community as well.

This analysis ignores the effects of WWII.

At the end of WWII, the USA was the only industrial economy in the world, not significantly damaged by the fighting.

If you see, the spike of worker union participation is right after the end of WWII.

Basically, for a couple of decades the USA had a monopoly on advanced manufacturing. Then as Europe and Japan caught up, there was more of a push towards efficiency as US companies faced more competition

Sweeden too cope cope cope cope cope cope

https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Economic_history_of_Sweden#Secon...

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