You appear to be placing blame for the situation on the party with less power in the situation, the employee, rather than the one with more power, the employer. this is a bit silly!
Consider how businesses negotiate. Each side offers something in return for better terms. They come to a mutually agreeable win-win solution.
That's what I do when I've negotiated with employers. I frame it as a friendly win-win negotiation, and both parties go away pleased with the result.
You clearly have extreme anti-union bias to the point you havent noticed how incredibly employee hostile the companies that unions form around are, to an absurd extent. It's gone so far that the magnitude of a win for the employer is so much higher than for the employee that the goal posts have shifted to absurdity.
You're still putting the onus for improving the situation on the party with far, far less power. Which makes no sense.
I am not anti-union. I am anti the tactics they use.
Unions are part of the free market. A union is a business that sells labor.
That's also a reductive view of unions. The 40 hour work week, weekends off, healthcare, and banning child labor wouldn't have resulted from your characterization.
What tactics do businesses use? Can you name any that you are against?
Healthcare benefits came about in WW2 because Roosevelt instituted a wage freeze. Companies could not offer higher wages to get the best workers, so they found a workaround by offering health care benefits. It turned out to be a big win for workers because the cost of those benefits was pre-tax, rather than post-tax. So it stuck.
Children are not freely consenting adults, which is why they get special legal protection. That's irrelevant to what we're discussing here.
Please explain how you would negotiate as an individual to get better healthcare benefits from Amazon when the benefits are provided as the same exact package to all employees. You can't. It never happens. Give even one example of an employee at a large company that has an individualized healthcare benefits package.
> Children are not freely consenting adults, which is why they get special legal protection. That's irrelevant to what we're discussing here.
And yet many businesses used child labor. These are the business you are claiming negotiate in good faith and fairly.
Allow me to repeat: Children are not freely consenting adults, which is why they get special legal protection.
> unions played in the 1940s and 1950s in negotiating far better healthcare benefits
And yet Starbucks and Amazon have had generous health care benefits without unions.
You avoided the question about why businesses were fine using child labor before the laws. Your claim seems to be that businesses are nice and negotiate fairly. Why is the special legal protection needed if businesses are nice?
You also failed to explain how you as an individual would negotiate a better healthcare package with Amazon than what is offered now.
> And yet Starbucks and Amazon have had generous health care benefits without unions.
Allow me to repeat: unions negotiated that in the 1950s and now everyone benefits. Without what already happened in the 1950s you can't claim those benefits would somehow magically appear.
And Amazon and Starbucks don't exactly have "generous" healthcare benefits. They have average benefits compared to other US companies. And that aren't nearly as good as what folks in the EU get.
One creates value for many people, the other for few. The ethics on this one is not hard.
If you believe in the LTV, which many don't. Many instead believe in the subjective (market) theory of value.
You tend not to see somebody sell a gold watch for less than the gold that's in it. Especially so if there's profit being made on the watch
Not even that. If a state doesn't have a right-to-work law, then union becomes a monopoly on the labor market for particular company or even the whole industry.
The making-demands-phase typically happens after employees and unions argued for a certain thing for years without any changes.
You don't need to demand something if you just asked for it and they said "Yes, but it would be best for the company to do it that way" and you go like "alright, fair enough". If the thing you want is that agreeable, you'd be silly to put in the energy to protest.
Companies are not the victims here, for that you just have to compare the groth of profits to the groth of median salary over the past years.
Unions form when companies take too much. And yeah, unions can be a thorn in a companies flesh after they get active. There is one simple trick to avoid unions: treat your employees in a way they don't need an union to defend their interest.
With a highly trained management team and an HR department that is the friendly face to a highly trained legal department.
You're either naive or full of hubris to think you're actually ending up with a win-win situation. Try getting the wording of a contract changed for example. Try proposing using your contract instead of theirs. Any contract you sign is in the company's favor to the full extent allowed by local law.
The only thing that has ever changed that is labor negotiating as a team and with their own highly trained legal team.
The reason you think things are win-win is because you've never had to go to court up against the contracts you've signed.
> They offer nothing in return.
They offer their labor in return. That's extremely valuable.
I've gotten the wording of employment contracts changed. BTW, you're far more likely to get what you want by being nice than by threats.
> you've never had to go to court up against the contracts you've signed
Yeah, I have. And I won.
You may have gotten contract wording changed with a small company, but the Amazons of the world will not do that. And these are exactly the companies where labor needs unions so they can collectively bargain against a powerful and organized management and legal team. You simply don't have the resources as an individual.
Being polite is always a good strategy but being nice would mean working for free. That would be very nice. Is that your approach?
It's also not nice to take your employer to court. What happened to your be nice strategy there? Why did you threaten with legal action? It sounds like you can't even follow your own advice.
I'm told time and again that lil' ol' me cannot negotiate. Yet I do it with department stores, doctors, dentists, car dealers, all sorts of "non-negotiable" contracts. Try it some time.
I helped a friend recently negotiate a new car. The dealer started with a non-negotiable price. He settled for about 10% less. It was all very nice and polite and friendly, with lots of joking back and forth. We just made it clear the price had to come down or no deal.
What kind of long term employment contract do you have with your doctor, dentist, department store, or car dealer?
You seem to have lost focus on the topic.
I've gotten the wording of employment contracts changed.
At which companies? Amazon? Google? Target? UPS?
It's the massive employers with huge legal teams where you need a union so you can fairly negotiate with their massive legal team. The subject that started this is unions at Amazon. Not negotiating with your local restaurant about how much they will pay you to wait on tables.
What was the nature of the change? Did you get additional healthcare benefits? The kinds of things that unions negotiate about? Or was it something trivial? The details matter.
If workers can effectively negotiate as individuals then why have wealth gaps skyrocketed in the USA as unions have weakened? The lowest wealth gaps in US history were when unions were the strongest. Wealth gaps in Germany are much lower and unions are much stronger. All evidence points to you being wrong about individuals being good negotiators at getting a bigger share of the pie. And it's just common sense. The idea that most of us are qualified to go up against a big and highly trained legal team is laughable.
Every company I've worked for.
> If workers can effectively negotiate as individuals then why have wealth gaps skyrocketed in the USA as unions have weakened?
Let's say I work for a company with big server farms as an engineer. I find a way to make the server software run 1% faster. This saves the company 1% on server costs. Server costs run into the $hundreds of millions. What's that worth to the company? I know software engineers who got pay packages worth a million bucks. None of them used a lawyer to negotiate their compensation.
The WSJ ran an article recently about how Barnes & Noble was going down the tubes, mainly because of competition from Amazon. There was much handwringing about it, and their stock was in the dumpster. B&N was headed for failure. Then, a couple years ago, B&N replaced the CEO. The CEO revamped the way their stores operated, from top to bottom. B&N has surged in profits and value.
That new CEO created $billions in wealth for the company and shareholders. It saved the workers from being tossed out in the street.
How much would you say that CEO was worth paying?
In a free market, people get paid according to the value they produce. Not the value other people produce.
To get more pay, think about how to improve the value you provide. Always be thinking about that.
Pay packages are not a change to the wording of an employment contract. What I'm talking about is a change to the contract that would have legal implications. You failed to give an example of an employee that has succeeded in doing that with a large employer.
Your example of highly in demand software engineers does not apply to the average worker - the topic is Amazon warehouse employees forming a union.
Your example of a CEO does not apply to the hundreds of millions of average workers.
In the free market labor can organize to get paid according to their collective value.
To get more pay think about being as organized and as powerful as management and the legal team of the company you are negotiating with. Always be thinking about that.
But you're annoyed at other salmon trying to stop it, because they took a break from swimming upriver.