Congrats to the Fastmail team!
In a free market, the best option will win. When non-union jobs are better than union jobs the need for the union should vanish (in theory).
Don't like the way your city, county or state spends the tax money? You can vote to change it or you can move. You can even do it nationally by moving to another country that you think does it better.
We still get a choice.
On balance, having a choice is always better than the alternative.
They have to compete against other businesses to hire skilled positions.
They have to create an appealing enough opportunity to get people to apply and continue to work there.
Yes, but because they are a collective when they "purchase" skilled positions they are usually asking for more than one hire. Yes they are competing against other businesses, and the perspective hires are competing against the other hires. By the numbers, there are fewer businesses hiring then there are workers looking for that position. In other words, the businesses have more leverage then the workers in the form of purchasing power. The laws of supply and demand favor the business if there are no unions.
Edit: FYI: supply and demand for labor is equal when unemployment is at 0%.
I'm not sure if you mean that generally or just around employment and unions.
If you mean it generally then, just as a random example, should we make emission control on cars an optional extra? Let the free market customer decide if they want to pay extra for a catalytic converter.
out of how many workers total?
> In a free market, the best option will win. When non-union jobs are better than union jobs the need for the union should vanish (in theory).
If UAW is the best option and people want to join it...that is the best option winning.
Eliminate collective bargaining for a corporations, and then it would make sense to see things on an equal playing field.
The reason why employees jump from one company to another for salary boosts is because a corporation collectively bargains for salary, and this happens less so between different companies.
When an employee can just as easily pit one manager at a FAANG against another manager to bid for their salary to get a boost, as they can get a higher offer at another company to get a boost then this situation will be resolved.
As long as companies can say "you'll keep the same level and pay regardless of where you transfer within the company" because they've agreed to not complete against each other and instead collectively bargain for salary (and benefits) it will be an imbalance. And the only counterbalance is for employees to do the same.
The need for collective bargaining of labor is to balance the presense of collective bargaining by management.
So's murder, and yet that still happens.
They all used every excuse they have: overhiring, wars, inflation (which they partially helped create) to flood the market TOGETHER, thereby reducing the price of our labor. All while racking in record profits. All that perfectly legal, all that a form of them collectively bargaining to lower our labor value.
I am not hinting at a conspiracy here. I am merely pointing to the fact that when the megacorps saw an opportunity to: - reduce spending by cutting off positions
- boost their stagnating stock values
- lower the bargaining power of their workers and have an excuse to keep their wages low
they immediately, did it, in a uniform fashion, in 3 big waves in the last 1.5 years. That tanked the developer market and boosted their stock.
We can only speculate how much it was coordinated, and how much they all saw the same opportunity after the unstable right-wing man-child that is Elon Musk burned Twitter to the ground. While probably nothing that they did was provably illegal, nevertheless, it was at least amoral and had the effect of dramatically cooling the market and stagnating our wages.
> reduce labor value across the entire industry is so incredibly disconnected from reality
YOU have to be very disconnected from reality to not acknowledge that there are 1000s of things that companies agree behind closed doors that we are just hearing about:
- Google having a shady deal with Spotify where Spotify doesn't pay the Google Play store fee: https://www.pcmag.com/news/spotify-doesnt-pay-google-play-st...
- Or that Google is paying Apple 36% search revenue to stay the default search engine in Safari so it can keep (and exploit) its dominant position in search: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/14/google-pays-apple-36percent-...
- Or Apple's deal with Amazon to get cleaner Amazon listing pages: https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/10/23955934/apple-amazon-de...
So what makes you think that they didn't have some friendly chats over the pesky tech workers, or "laptop class" as Elon so lovingly calls us. Somebody gotta put those ingrates back to their place, no?
While you might be happy to accept being downtrodden by your corporate overlords, and worship the psychotic man-children that Musk, Bezos, Branson and Zuck are, in other countries we don't want to become like the US. A country where capitalism rages unchecked and throws workers rights, nature, and eventually the world under the bus in a never ending chase for growth is not how we want for us.
Well you see, there are these things called interest rates which effect the cost of borrowing.
And when those interest rates go up massively, like they did, this causes a completely predictable effect of it being more expensive to borrow and spend money.
And this has economy wide effects, that are what bog standard macro economics predicts.
The same megacorps that borrowed and overhired like insane during the pandemic to boost their stock price, now scream bloody hell and cut major portion of the people they just hired during the pandemic. That also boosted their stock price.Oh, and it allowed them to crank up their pricing models to the max, again boosting their stock price. I'd argue that it's the megacorps and their greed that are the major cause of the inflation that we experience recently worldwide.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/sep/25/inflat...
And please, stop using "macroeconomic factors" as an excuse for bad management (who made them overhire during the pandemic), greed, and lack of vision.
When a CEO makes 300 times the salary of their median employee (https://www.wsj.com/business/auto-ceos-make-about-300-times-...), the best way for the company to save money is to fire their C-suite for the "leadership" that brought it to be influenced by "bad economic headwinds" in the first place.
Stop defending corporations, what they do is inexcusable, amoral, and probably, some day, and with some scrutiny, illegal.
Oh yeah. That would be the organization that is in charge of deciding what the rates are.
Which would be the federal reserve.
They quite literally decide what the rate is.
> "macroeconomic factors"
Do you not know how interest rates and borrowing costs work?
It's pretty standard econ 101 stuff, about how interest rates effect the economy and effect hiring and firing rates.
You can read it in an economics textbook.
Here, it is pretty standard stuff: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_curve
Its called the Phillips curve.
Companies have been using "macroeconomic" conditions as an excuse for increased prices and job cuts, but it doesn't hold up to the most basic scrutiny. Their profits have been increasing far beyond inflation. Whether it's FAANG or Big Egg[2], the fix is in.
Anyway, good on Fastmail employees. Makes this customer feel better about the company sticking to its principles.
1. https://www.allrecipes.com/new-ruling-in-egg-lawsuit-finds-e...
This has nothing to do with interest rates and I didn't make any comments about profits.
Here is a good overview about how interests rates are related to unemployment rates.
This is is like companies' belief that all employees are always on the bell curve, so the bottom x% has to get culled each year.
Anything to fit in the stats, right? I am actually inclined to believe that C level do think like that. This is both sad and terrifying, and also the reason why we need strong unions in the first place, so we don't end up merely a statistic on some boomer economy cultist's spreadsheet.
There is no free market. Everything is skewed to give an advantage to employers and capitalists.
Sounds like freedom of association with me.
You wouldn't complain about a corporation signing an exclusive contract with another corporation (even for supplying labor), why is it a problem when it's a collective of workers imposing that restriction rather than a corporation?
Is the free market only for corporations? Does everyone else have to just take what they can get individually?
> Sounds like freedom of association with me.
Hey as long as it goes both ways. It would equally be freedom of association to fire any union employees.
Oh wait, that's illegal.
So instead of that, a fair compromise is that it should be equally illegal for firing someone either if they join or don't union a union.
That's what right to work laws do. They give equal protections to both union and non union employees.
No. Federal law and jurisprudence prohibit making union membership a condition of employment but compel unions to represent non members. So called right to work laws allow non members to withhold payment for the compelled representation.
So the whole point is that the other person who I was responding to was wrong on the freedom of association angle.
If is not freedom of association to only give protections to union members.
Instead the fair thing would be for it to be illegal to fire either union members or non union members for their choice of whether they join the union or not.
Also, laws that merely make union or non only shops disallowed would be the fair and equal freedom of association way to do things.