It is not adversarial. It is a mutually beneficial, win-win relationship.
It's the unions who (mistakenly) frame it as a win-lose relationship, which is why businesses don't like dealing with them.
The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and resources that are impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested. Like 80 hour work weeks. Children working in manufacturing jobs. Unsafe working conditions with fire exits blocked.
Which are all things that companies were doing before unions pushed against it.
The same way you circle the square of workers wanting as much compensation as possible for the least effort possible. In other words: The market of labour.
> The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and resources that are impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested.
You win by taking your business elsewhere and start working for another employer, or start your own business. Especially in IT, which is probably the most free market humanity has right now. Everybody in IT should exploit that situation while we can.
I'm much more concerned about the deals I'm forced into without having ever accepted, such as paying tribute to the rulers.
Software Engineers are falling prey to what every other person on this planet save a very rich few live with. Welcome to reality. "The free market" always becomes a cartel. When the government stops the cartels, the cartels take over the government in the form of lobbying, campaign contributions, government employee hiring/revolving door.
And yet developed nations where unions are a facet of the labor market have fewer of these issues, and on a less grand scale.
Those jobs were all created by automation.
Competition, where people can go to the highest bidder, or start their own business if they know they can do better than working for someone else. Lack of freedom to go elsewhere features prominently in the abuses you and the article cite.
> The company is a giant thing, with lawyers, power and resources that are impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested.
People can and have prevailed against companies in all sorts of lawsuits.
> Like 80 hour work weeks. Children working in manufacturing jobs. Unsafe working conditions with fire exits blocked. Which are all things that companies were doing before unions pushed against it.
And made them illegal, ending those as major problems, and the desire of most people to go into a union now that the most exploitative practices have been eliminated, like company towns. Though it's true that the occasional idiot employer will do something like this and get sued into oblivion. I'm pretty sure there was some idiot who locked their employees in while doing inventory overnight a few years back, for example.
(those are the conditions that the article describes, not me)
Should there be?
Are the laws you're citing currently good, do you agree with them?
Is there a lawsuit that someone that isn't from a protected class can pursue to get a raise? Work less hours? Have enough coverage in a role that an employee can take holidays and vacation time? Have a consistent schedule?
Yes, the laws don't magically vanish. Also, you seem to be neglecting inflation in those numbers, which is the main reason things have gone out of whack economically.
The fact is you can have bigger numbers and less real wealth. There is greed causing that, but mostly from the political class who printed a ton of paper even though there isn't more stuff to actually buy with that paper.
It's ironic that the stock buybacks work like the inverse of this, showing that they understand the effect of printing too much, even if they're dick moves by people who are compensated mostly in stock.
But you can't really call this out without calling out our government robbing us by printing more paper in a regressive stealth tax, which is what started this whole mess. No, Putin didn't do us any favors with his bloodthirsty war, but he poured gas on a fire that was already burning strongly well before then.
> Are the laws you're citing currently good, do you agree with them?
All of them? No. But the ones keeping me from being stuck working for company scrip are pretty good.
> Is there a lawsuit that someone that isn't from a protected class can pursue to get a raise? Work less hours? Have enough coverage in a role that an employee can take holidays and vacation time? Have a consistent schedule?
You have to become more valuable for that, then you have more options. You know, invest into your own human capital. If you don't produce things that other people actually want, why should you be entitled to the things that they produce?
The thinking in this article just leads you down a downward spiral where everybody loses, when the economy is a positive sum game where we're constantly making new things that people want. If you want more of the pie, you have to start baking.
I say this as someone who has worked a crappy ass factory job. I can see why the lower end of jobs makes people feel this way, since I spent years in an awful factory working myself half to death, not feeling like I could even get vacation and not having any kind of stable schedule at all, given that I'd drive for two hours to work for 1d20 hours, not even knowing how many ahead of time.
Now I work at a place where my whole job is helping people, we work a stable schedule, and things are good. When I just naively asked for a "market" salary, they quoted a figure that was $20k higher than I expected.
And I did it by making myself more valuable, spending all the time I could get making some projects to show what I knew and finding places that valued that.
But if you follow this advice, you'll find yourself in a race to the bottom.
You gave a bunch of examples for why people don’t need unions, because laws will protect them, then undercut your examples with your personal anecdotes about making yourself valuable. You don’t need laws to protect if you’re “valuable.”
… but you’re only valuable until you aren’t. That was the whole point of the original article. Some of the most valuable workers in the world are currently getting kicked out on their asses by the bosses who’d been getting them massages and laundry services, free food and free transportation.
And no, becoming valuable doesn't undercut anything I said. It means you have other people willing to hire you. This is an economic problem, with real profits going down even as numbers go up thanks to inflation that got boosted by energy supply issues.
There are issues from technical disruptions, e.g. the proverbial buggy whip makers. But these are more reason to understand what you do that gives value, not less. For example, if I were an artist, I'd be learning how to use Stable Diffusion, not hoping that I can continue to live on simple image commissions.
The laws against collusion aren't going anywhere, but if you expect to do things that no longer have value for money, you're living on borrowed time even if the government mandates purchasing of your work.
It's squared by the employees wanting the maximum pay for the least amount of work. It's call "Supply & Demand". It's the Law.
> impossible for an individual to push against and win anything that is contested
Not impossible at all. I've done it many times. The power the employee has is to say "No" and go work for someone else, or start their own company.
> Like 80 hour work weeks / children working / unsafe working conditions
were necessary when productivity was much lower than today. It's no surprise that those went away when productivity increased. I can't even think of a job a 10 year old could be useful at in a modern company.
Wow. just incredible. I've never seen the take that kids working in manufacturing jobs were necessary.
Begs the question, necessary for whom?
How many children should we use to grease the wheels of capital accumulation? How good is this system if that’s what it requires.
I toured Mt Vernon recently (George Washington's estate). He was probably the richest man in America at the time. You and I live better than he did.
You seem to think there was all this wealth sloshing around at the time. Nope.
The inequality you’re pitching only ends in one place.
Something like 97% of the population worked on the farms in those days trying to raise enough food.
Do you know that women in America use to spend all day in the kitchen managing the wood stove, which was very labor intensive? Any free time they had was spent spinning, weaving, sewing, and mending.
Gas/electric stoves are modern miracles, as are sewing machines, electric refrigerators, dishwashers, clothes washers, dryers, all sorts of liberating machinery. And most especially, indoor plumbing! Who do you think ran out to the town well constantly to pump a pail of water?
Do you know that it wasn't until 1800 or so, and only in the US, where the ever-present spectre of famine was eliminated? Economies simply were unable to produce enough food. It wasn't that the rich were eating it all. There just wasn't enough food.
Which means it's all hands on deck to work. Other problems were it was very expensive to produce cloth, so for people to get clothing, lots and lots and LOTS of people were needed in the textile industry.
There's no way to sugarcoat it - this is completely false. There were many regions around the world that were prosperous, many for far longer than the United States has been around. Humans have been smart for a long time, far longer than our current global technological civilization... [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_India [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_China_befo... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_world [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Society_of_the_Mongol_Empire [5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_economy [6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greece#Economy [7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_economy [8] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_the_Ottoma... [9] https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/blighted-by-empire-what-... [10] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Latin_American_economy#History [11] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egypt#Government_and_e... [12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_agriculture [13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indus_Valley_Civilisation#Matu... [14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_history_of_Africa [15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nubia#History [16] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aztecs#Economy [17] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_the_Inca_Empire
Children found working throughout Hyundai's supply chain, 12 year olds working in manufacturing jobs in the US - https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-immi...
New proposed law in Iowa that allows children to work in meatpacking, mining, and other dangerous jobs. Employers not civilly libel if killed: - https://www.commondreams.org/news/iowa-child-labor-laws
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Nicoll#%22Brain_eater%22
Now if we were talking about a worker's co-operative (or any company where a significant portion of ownership laid with the workers), now that's a different story...
Win-lose deals are the path to poverty and misery.
If this were true, Asset Stripping and corporate raiders wouldn't exist