The rise of income and wealth inequality is directly tied to the weakening of collective bargaining, corporate consolidation and globalization.
Source: https://home.treasury.gov/news/featured-stories/labor-unions....
Unionized workers are the only real backstop against corporate interests.
This is only true if you yourself do not possess greater bargaining power by having certain rare skills, that are in demand. Which is why the report shows that higher educated people benefit far less.
The point of unions is to gain bargaining power against massive corporations. If you are self employed, part of a small company or easily replaceable (which is the case for most lawyers), because your professional is only a tiny part of the company a union does nothing for you.
Professional associations exist for different reasons and have different goals.
It has similar functions as a union but predates it by several centuries.
I think many Dutch or French software developers are living better lives than developers in California, all things considered.
I think that totally depends on the individual and their circumstances.
>I think many Dutch or French software developers are living better lives than developers in California, all things considered.
European developers generally earn much less than Americans, especially after taxes you can get to a 2x difference with comparable cost of living depending on area. In generally wages in Europe are much more even, here in Germany you have a heavily bracketed income tax system, even significant increases in wage usually become much smaller if you consider the additional taxes.
But it might just be possible that there's more to life than money.
There is yes, but a house is still paid in money.
Not to the same scale though. IN Europe and especially Canada housing is way more expensive to buy than in the US relative to local wages. Americans forget how good the4y have it.
Pay fast food workers 80k a year and software engineers would start at 300k.
Jobs that require more skill or jobs that are more difficult have to offer more to get people to work for them. Raise the bar at the bottom and all wages will go up, otherwise workers will "demote" themselves. This is a distinct effect from prices raising and workers asking higher wages to counteract inflation (if they could do that why aren't they?).
McDonalds workers in EU countries earn significantly more than their US counterparts, yet a Big Mac costs the same of just a few pennies more.
What? Do you not know how to check Big mac prices online in other countries?
Danish McD's workers earn $20/hr+ but their Big Mac costs just 80 cents more.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/28/business/international/li...
Plus it doesn’t pass the smell test, there are plenty of photos online of danish mcdonalds menus going back to at least 2018, that I could find in two minutes of searching. That clearly shows a standard Big Mac meal is 60 Danish Krone. Which was 9 USD to 10 USD depending on when you pick the exchange rate in 2018.
In the US, depending on location, the same meal would have been 5.5 USD to 7 USD in 2018. Maybe a bit more in Hawaii.
Maybe there were a few places in Denmark selling it for much cheaper, and it was being compared to Hawaii prices, hence why this notion came about, but that’s a ridiculous stretch.
This is exactly what inflation is.
The people at the bottom might be making more, but they won't have spending power for very long because the cost of everything will go up. This cycle will just continue forever, unless the government starts fixing prices, which never leads to a good outcome.
When fast food workers wages are raised, we might see a few dollars more for meals. When you raise the wages in every other industry, it has a cascading effect. Just look at the number of jobs between products on the store shelf and how it gets there. Delivery, trucking, packing, shipping, etc. In this one example, it would raise prices 10X.
But more to the point, it neglects elasticities of demand.
Unless you are literally one of a kind, there's always someone out there who could replace you. Replacing all of the workers that an entire union represents is a way more difficult proposition
As an individual it is far easier to negotiate of you have an in demand skill. Which is obvious if you look at the study in the OP. College educated people benefit far less from unionization, they can negotiate for their own.
you will eventually learn that you are beyond expendable in this world, despite how 'skilled' or adept at 'negotiating' you believe yourself to be (or actually are for that matter). we all are. what you fail to see yet is that you are not more skilled nor more adept than 'The Man.' and you're characterizing yourself as being anything 'more' than non-'college educated people' is simply successful divide-and-conquer—a power struggle strategy immemorial.
When you ask your manager for a raise, they might be your biggest fan and want you to get that raise, but there is a whole system that is going to resist it, because paying you less is better for the company. You're not bargaining with a person you're bargaining with a system. And the system is built in such a way that it is incredibly difficult to persuade at an individual level
Workers can benefit from having their own system inside of the larger corporate system that is working for them, instead of this every man for themselves stuff
Companies both treat senior engineers as expendable and will fire them on a whim - while paying them whatever they dictate and rehiring them few months after the layoffs for 1.5x compensation.
I'm happy being expendable. It means I can just pick up my things and go somewhere else whenever I please - any place I go has some spot for me and will pay me many multiples of the national average wage.
You are conflating expendability with redundancy.
They are definitely not the two sides of the same coin.
They benefit far less but they still do benefit on the whole
So... Not seeing the advantage for not unionizing, unless you think you're one of the top top top performers who might potentially be capped by a union instead of one of the mass of people who would be lifted up by it
And yes, in demand skills do make it easier to bargain as an individual, however, that’s assuming those skills are needed at the level which you posses. In my field (web development) I’ve seen much less money go to far more people of a similar but lesser skill than my colleagues because you can throw a handful of people at a fairly decent project and get the desired immediate result. Long-term that code probably won’t stand, but that’s not really important for things like agency work where there’s some incentive to continue having work to do anyways.
[1] https://youtu.be/rFDP4hS7j98 - Unions Make Things Better (Even If You’re Not In One)
https://www.aaup.org/programs/collective-bargaining
https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/labor-uni...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_graduate_student_emplo...
Highly educated people (and I'm including more than terminal degree holders) may be more reluctant to join unions out of a misplaced sense of self-sufficiency and pride, or a perceived association with "class issues", despite constant pressure and complaints about their individual compensation.
That would make sense, but the data in the article do not seem to be cooperating.
1917-1950: Union membership up 3X. Top 1% share of income reduced by 2/3rds. Looks like a causal relationship!
1950-1980: Union membership is reduced by 1/2. Top 1% share of income... is reduced by 8/10ths? Huh.
1980-2020: Union membership is reduced by 1/2. Top 1% share of income goes up 10X. Basically the opposite of the previous period.
I'm sure there's a parallel in there about beating back the rentseekers and vulture capitalists.
This isn't true, and is often undesirable since unions serve workers, not customers.
Competition is what keeps corporations in check, and is most likely to benefit everyone. Of course unions are important to workers and also have their part to play.
Competition helps customers. Unionization helps workers. Both should happen in tandem, not exclusively.
The problem is just like you said, though: Wealth inequality weakens collective bargaining.
A union only holds power by being able to force a stoppage of work, but workers can only afford to stop work if they are rich. Without the arrow of wealth inequality reversing, unions will continue to falter anywhere the workers are poor.
That's just basic economics. However, figuring out how to reverse said arrow is extremely complex economics. If we knew how, we'd have done it already.