Comment by audunw | Hacker News Reader

Comment by audunw | Hacker News Reader

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Want to share my reply to a comment reply here that was deleted, which called this “crazy”:

It’s not crazy. It’s a very effective way of balancing the power dynamics between corporations and workers. What’s crazy is not having these rights enshrined in law. Why should the government tell workers how they can or cannot strike?

This way of doing it gets you one thing that some Americans dream of: no federal mandated universal minimum wage. I mean think about it… a universal federal minimum wage is a ridiculous idea. It’s never going to be a good level for all industries.

But if you’re going to make minimum wage something that workers and corporations can just settle between themselves, you have to give the workers real power. Not make national laws that give corporations the right to make contracts that make their workers slaves to their employers.

Some American think this is socialism. I’d argue that it’s just good capitalism that ensures healthy (labour) market dynamics. Same as how you want regulations that discourage the formation of monopolies.

> It’s not crazy. It’s a very effective way of balancing the power dynamics between corporations and workers. What’s crazy is not having these rights enshrined in law. Why should the government tell workers how they can or cannot strike?

It's like asking, why should the government tell business how they can or cannot do business? It's essentially an anti-trust issue. You don't want any organization to have too much power, whether it's a company or a union or even the government. You want power to be distributed as much as possible, but unions, like any other organization, centralize it.

The typical argument is that corporations centralize it too, but the answer to this is more anti-trust measures, not less.

Except immigrants will come to the country and be willing to work for lower wages, they will be OK without taking the union benefits. Unions are a way to enrich current members by creating an exclusive cartel.

How do you deal with the fact that there are people willing to work for less?

Icelander here. We have 90+% union participation in the country. A large portion of certain unions are immigrant workers. They have at numerous times gone on strike for better pay.

So, at least here, your hypothesis does not seem to hold.

This is probably due to the unions educating those immigrant workers on what their rights are.

Iceland also has very bizarre "union" structures that more resemble professional associations than unions in other countries. When I worked at a software company in Kópavogur, on my team of 7 there were at least 4 different unions represented.

I'm not sure bizarre would be the way I'd describe it, but it is probably not identical to how the setup is everywhere else.

There are those that fit the professional association description, for instance the union of computer scientists which mandates a university degree in cs to become a member (this union does do collective bargaining with government and municipalities but not private enterprises), but then there are more broader unions for bigger sectors that do collective bargaining against the industrial collective (samtök atvinnulífsins).

So, I'm not sure what is with the downvotes for bbarn's comment. Its a point that isn't far off.

> How do you deal with the fact that there are people willing to work for less?

By having a collective bargaining agreement setting the minimum pay the company is allowed, leveling the playing field to remove exploitative measures like that.

How is it exploitative? If people coming from other areas want to work for cheaper because they're willing, do you think they shouldn't have an opportunity to do so?

No, they shouldn't, that is the definition of exploitative, offering someone a lower pay because they are desperate enough to accept it. It's a race to the bottom and something needs to stop it.

That shouldn't happen, you need some morality in this amoral system so it can be less exploitative, one way to set some moral guidance is to have a minimum threshold of what people should be paid for a job given that others are already offered that for a similar skillset. Willing to work for less in exchange of other benefits (like moving to a different society) only creates cascading issues for the others who aren't in that desperate position, eroding the labour market.

If people were willing to be slaves, should we allow them?

I don't understand your reasoning. If an immigrant is happy to have a standard of living lower than what you consider acceptable, and willing to work for slightly lower wages, do you think it is is unfair to either:

1. Bar them from entry into your country 2. Allow them in, but prevent them from offering their services at a lower rate to compete with locals?

Because ultimately, if you let them in and don't let them work, some of them are going to be supported by social services those workers are paying for indirectly.

Norway will not issue a work permit for immigrants, if their work contract pays less than is typical in the industry. So this loophole is accounted for. Once an immigrant has permanent residency (or arrives due to marrying a Norwegian) then this could become a problem, but by then they have hopefully integrated enough, and will no longer work for peanuts. The cost of living being so high here probably discourages that anyways, and the things the sibling commenters stated also apply.

Thank you for responding, it seems like you were the only one to understand the problem and explain how it is mitigated there.

> How do you deal with the fact that there are people willing to work for less?

The answer in the Netherlands is that for most industries that have one the collective agreement has been declared universally binding. It applies to everyone in that industry, whether they're a member of one of the bargaining organizations or not, and if a company ignores it they're breaking the law.

My point is you have a societal issue if you have thousands of workers migrating who are looking to work and willing to work for less. You can either choose to house and feed them and prevent them from working, or you can realize labor is cheaper.

We have no such race to the bottom here in Sweden

Interesting. Are refugees or illegal immigrants allowed to work? Do they get social services? Would they work if they could?

Only 60% of people age 20-65 who arrived as refugees participate in the labour market (40% doesnt). And of those 60% many work part-time or in government pretend jobs (that are created to hide unemployment).

Unions ensure that workers are not pitted against one another

The one race to the bottom is workers from other countries within the European Union as the free market and movement within EU complicates things then.

Same here in Sweden - when a company doesn’t have a collective agreement they also don’t have a right to have peace with the unions, so then the unions can put pressure on them to get a collective agreement and when that succeeds there will be a collective agreement that then apply to all employees

Yea, that is a problem. In sweden it has kind of resulted in the govt pushing immigrants into welfare and different programs to make unions happy (even if of course it hurts workers in the long run that a huge part of the population doesnt work and just live on welfare).

Stop throwing the word “cartel” around as if it even means a goddamn thing! A multi-billion dollar command economy (like a corporation) can focus its efforts on the opposite thing, like making sure that wages for their employers are kept low. But a group of employees banding together? Well duh, that’s a cartel, silly. What?

(In addition: unions for employers exist as well.)

Your charge is nakedly hypocritical.

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