Hacker News Reader

Comment by constantcrying | Hacker News Reader

>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.

View on HN

Someone would have to be incredibly full of themselves to think they have more bargaining power than an entire union would.

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

The overall bargaining power is greater, sure. But the relative power isn't. They can always just leave and work somewhere else, a union literally does not have that option.

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.

spoken like a fairly recent grad. an ambitious young person's perspective.

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.

What people fail to realize is that the leadership systems of Corporations: Boards of Directors, Executives, Management and HR are all effectively organized against them, to make sure the business gets what it wants as much as possible

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

Both can be true at the same time.

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.

> I'm happy being expendable. > It means I can just pick up my things and go somewhere else whenever I please.

You are conflating expendability with redundancy.

Two sides of the same coin, IMHO

Oh my that’s a skewed perspective. That lack of perspective—specialty of the long-gone Jack Welch—-is what’s led us to the rapid fall and third-tier engineering of Boeing today.

They are definitely not the two sides of the same coin.

> College educated people benefit far less from unionization

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

What happens when your education is no longer relevant to the market? And you’ve had kids and don’t really have the time to retool and level up your skills to regain your leverage. Or your industry becomes saturated with highly skilled people and your leverage is steadily reduced in ways you can’t address. Virtually no one is special enough to avoid some or even all of this.

Then you are of very low value to your employer and a union acts as a social benefits organization. Essentially you are payed by the people whose skills are more valuable than yours.

As I am approaching the retirement age, I don't see this happening. I actually can't even imagine education expiring somehow or marketable skills needing "retooling". But even if these scenarios all happened, you are basically advocating that somebody still have to provide highly paying job for you even though you don't have an education or skill and there are plenty of people who are higher skilled than you? Would you hire somebody like that to do work on your house or, perhaps, you'd like to receive medical treatment from a doctor like that? If not, why others should hire you?

It’s been a hot minute since I watched this episode[1] so the points aren’t fresh on my mind, but unions are good for everyone even if you aren’t in one.

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)

At some point, higher individual compensation doesn't matter much if everyone else in your community is overworked and underpaid.

I think many Dutch or French software developers are living better lives than developers in California, all things considered.

>At some point, higher individual compensation doesn't matter much if everyone else in your community is overworked and underpaid.

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.

Developers the world over earn much less than Americans. It's why I've always told American developers to be careful what they wish for when it comes to remote work.

But it might just be possible that there's more to life than money.

>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.

Housing is universally messed up everywhere in Western world, no matter salaries. Where the salaries are higher, houses prices are accordingly higher as well. Only places where housing is affordable are the ones with no jobs. Good for remote workers, but not much else.

>Housing is universally messed up everywhere in Western world, no matter salaries.

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.

This is definitely the case for me. The number one thing bringing down my quality of life is that my friends don't have time/money to do things and I'm worried about their physical, mental, and financial health.

All individual compensation is a delta over what a low skill worker would get.

Pay fast food workers 80k a year and software engineers would start at 300k.

Also known as inflation.

No. Independent from that.

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?).

Then everyone gets to benefit, no? All developing nations have far lower wages than the west, but that's often offset by lower living costs. But try to buy something out of the international market and you'll quickly feel envy. If there is an issue with higher wages then I don't see it

Nobody would benefit because if fast food workers start at 80k, then a basic hamburger would start at $20. And an iPhone pro would start at $2000.

Your argument doesn't match reality. We don't need hypotheticals here:

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.

>… 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?

Don't you know how to check?

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...

You linked an article from 2014…

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.

A hamburger meal is already $20

No, it isn't distinct from inflation. Higher wages necessarily means increased cost for product, leading to an overall increase in cost.

This is exactly what inflation is.

FWIW, I think you have this exactly backward. It’s higher incomes at the top that drive higher incomes at the bottom. Low skill workers in developed countries make more because they are part of what is essentially a labor cartel: there are certain jobs which can only be performed by, e.g., an English speaking person who understands the American cultural context and who is physically located in America. And restricted immigration and language barriers prevent competition from new entrants. So as more people are pulled into high skill, high pay work, incomes for even low skilled people go up, because their competition decreases and overall wealth in the society, ie wealth available to pay for their time, increases.

"Raise the bar at the bottom and all wages will go up"

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.

This is not true even as a rule of thumb, because it neglects that aggregate wages can increase at the expense of returns to capital (i.e. profits).

But more to the point, it neglects elasticities of demand.

Let's map that opinion to higher ed, where we can agree there's a high concentration of education:

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's very deluded and short-sighted. More often than not, investors and shareholders hold more weight in large companies than whatever you can bring to the table. Not to mention skills that are rare often don't have huge markets, otherwise there'd be colleges teaching it in a degree and it'd be no more rarer than other skills, don't you think?

I don’t think this is true - the development of the baseball players union in the 1970s is a quite strong counterpoint. I’d be interested how you think about that?

Funnily enough, even if they don't call it explicitly, some of the highest paying professions in the world - consulting, finance, law, medicine - all have pseudo-unionized structures in place. The only difference being uniformity in pay, which is a feature I've mostly seen only in US unions.

Lawers are unionized but just name it something else. Etc.

I think our are taking about a professional organization. Those do not perform the same function unions do.

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.

Lawyers essentially have a guild. They set up systems like the Bar to prevent outsiders from plying their trade.

It has similar functions as a union but predates it by several centuries.

Ah yes, as everyone knows, "having a trillion dollars" is famously no match for "being able to code".

Yes. No trillion dollar company can tell me to work for them. If they want to employee me I have all of the bargaining power I could possibly have.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com