If it made no difference why would employees bother?
It does make a negative difference for employers with potentially higher costs and lower flexibility over time.
It does make a negative difference for employers with potentially higher costs and lower flexibility over time.
Now in that scenario the worker has no power at all, even though it actually is as we all know today, a proven benefit to have resonable working hours for the company.
So if you have a union and all the workers can collectively go “we need to talk about work hours or we strike” you force through the policy that is ultimately beneficial to the company, even though management hates the idea of there being 6hours more per day that their wage slaves are not at the work benches.
Why would workers argue for fewer hours if it doesn’t end up costing the company net profits? Because they are humans, not machines, and not everything in this world boils down to pure profit driven motives.
Beyond that, you ask 'Why would workers argue for fewer hours if it doesn't end up costing the company net profits? The workers don't care about net profits, at least at the expense of their own time. Time is money, and if the company has more of your time, you have less...
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/history-of-the-40-hour-workw...
And much lower productivity. Even by recent metrics we know the modern work is twice as efficient, but apparently the average hours per week worked is around 55-60 hours.
That's part of the point. It in fact has quickly dimishing returns to work more than X hours, and past that there probably is some physical breakdown point wher ea worker loses productivety in the mid-long term (e.g. working 120 hours for 2 weeks, then sick for a month. Congrats, you lost 80 hours of productiviy + whatever middling returns happened) but companies won't budge without collective action.
that's not true. In fact, the polar opposite is true - every decision is in service to profit and the bottom line. It is only laws that prevent slavery. It is only laws that prevent over-work or exploitation.
I would say that it is better to have regulation over unions. Unions may or may not act in the interest of the employee - it's a hit or miss depending on the actual union in question. But as a citizen, you have some semblence of a vote on the gov't, and at least everybody gets the same gov't.
It’s not an either/or, there’s unions and there is labor law, and labor law is in large part written to codify the trade offs in incentives between workers and companies. Are you really trying to argue that workers should have no say in the laws written to govern them?
The worker holds all the power, so long as another worker isn't an asshole ready to screw over his fellow man. What's the company going to do if the worker balks? Hire nobody? Not going to happen.
Which is what a union ultimately serves: Establishing a brotherhood where the workers agree to not be assholes towards each other, to not screw each other over, so that when a worker decides the terms are un-agreeable another worker isn't waiting to pounce to take his position. This retains a worker's power.
But if workers had common decency to begin with...
These days, yes. They get rid of Bob and make Andy do his and Bob's work (with no extra pay, of course), promising to replace Bob over the next 6 months while the company actually has a hiring freeze.
I wish more "assholes" would realize this before trying to turn against their peers.
What on earth do you mean? If a job gets posted do you ask them “did the last person get fired? If so I don’t want this job” to have “common decency”?
I have listed two main negative differences it makes for employers. I am hard-pressed to find any positive differences for them... on the issues this touches it's pretty much a zero-sum game so if employees gain it means employers 'lose'.
If something is positive for both sides then I think the market will eventually adopt it on its own.
A happier employee is more productive and less likely to leave the company on the forst occasion or do anything hostile (stealing, selling company secrets).
This is not exactly news, it has been known for at least 150 years.
You do not contradict anything I have written nor provide any examples of how unions might be a positive for employers...
Again, if an happier, more productive employee benefits the company then the market will sort it out by itself (For instances tech companies have not needed unions to offer high pay and plenty of perks). That said, it's not an universal truth that a happier employee is a net gain.
You can scream THE MARKET until your throat is dry, but it doesn't mean that an unfettered capitalism is the best thing for the country as a whole. Everyone must be thriving, otherwise we're all failing together.
I don't think this argument in particular stands well against reality. The market is generally driven by players with concentrated power and it's very likely the interests of those players will align creating an even more one sided power imbalance. People's preferences are low entropy.
Things that are in the interest of individuals rarely "sort themselves out" without some intervention, usually from a regulatory body. And even that's less a democratic exercise than it is a lobbying one where concentrated donations are worth more than sparse individual contributions.
In the US there was a time when more people could own a house, car, and raise a family with just one family member's income. Now it's increasingly difficult to do it even with two incomes. People didn't decide to just work more and afford less. The market sorted itself to benefit those who already had more power and could influence.
I think it does. I mentioned the salaries and perks offered by tech companies. I could also mention Henry Ford.
If something benefits the company then they will do it, and if it works it will naturally spread.
> Things that are in the interest of individuals rarely "sort themselves out" without some intervention
I didn't write "in the interest of individuals", I wrote benefitting both sides, which means, crucially, also benefitting the company. But again, in many cases happier employees simply do not provide a net benefit to the company.
Back to the point: The claim that unions benefit both sides is naive and a fairy tale. Obviously unions do not benefit companies hence why they are opposing them as much as they are legally able to.
Short-term, the demands that trade unions make do indeed make workers more productive.
But long-term, the company owners (and here I of course mean actors who hold significant amount of concentrated shares, not your average stockholder) and top management may see this as only the first step down the road where they do not wish to go. By this line of thinking, if you allow unions to establish a foothold with those basic demands, they will use that as a beachhead to make further and further demands that favor labor interests over those of the capital, with the end goal being a worker-owned business (i.e. socialism) which excludes the people who currently own the capital entirely. Naturally, they do see it as a threat to themselves - it is very much intended to be! And so they are willing to forgo some things that would be more profitable short-term.
> You do not contradict anything I have written (...)
I mean, you directly contradict me in the previous paragraph about what the purpose of unions is, can we at least agree to disagree?
> (For instances tech companies have not needed unions to offer high pay and plenty of perks)
That's true, some companies do well without unions, but this does not make unions universally useless.
This is such a weird take. Why would employees do that? Employees benefit when the company benefits. If the company increases profits by 10%, that's 10% more that could potentially go to employee benefits, salaries, etc.
I want my employer to make as much profit as possible, because that guarantees my long-term employment and allows me to ask for a higher salary. If the company folds, the union folds, and everybody loses their jobs. Nobody wants that to happen.
Obviously employees want the company to do well, at the same time unions are there to extract as much as they can on behalf of their members. Both are true and not mutually exclusive.
In your example, if profits go up 10% unions might push of big salary increases, indeed.
if you work at a good company, maybe. If a company put profts back to the employees, we wouldn't need unions.
I think the interpretation of unions sucking companies dry is uncharitable. But many companies these past few decades have definitely shown they need someone to keep them in check.
This has left Delta very motivated to make sure their flight attendants are happy so that they won’t unionise.
The end result is better workers, happier customers, and more productive workplace. But this wouldn’t happen without the threat of unionising hanging over Delta’s head.
I personally think a good outcome in situations like Apple is having maybe half their stores union, half not - Apple would be very motivated to keep the non-union employees happy. Customers could end up seeing which stores work better. A competitive marketplace, if you will.
You know that when the big non unionized auto workers recebtly got raises? Right after the unionised ones fought for and got their own.
The union is the only thing that drives wages up. Non union shops, including your example of Delta flight staff, only get benefits because the unions are there. Without the other unions in that space, they would get nothing.
You know what would ensure Delta gets all the same benefits as the unionized staff around them? Joining the same union.
Due to millions of regulations already in place, the market is not really free, but very distorted. So even if the "free market" would always go for the best solution, current state is nonproof for anything.
Otherwise you might argue, that europe would be a proof, because unions here are strong.
So, yes, the market isn't really free, and never has been, when you don't selectively exclude some kinds of regulation from consideration.
In fact, I think that even seems like a very plausible hypothesis, given that treating your employees worse can have advantages (reduction in costs and headcount) and disadvantages (less motived and potentially productive employees, worse retention, difficulties attracting people) for the employer, so those two may roughly cancel out under a whole lot of different conditions.
So for the employer there may be no benefit (but also not really a downside) to treating employees better, but add to the mix this strong cultural idea in US business circles that unions are the worst and you get this taboo against unions and no market pressure to change that.
Obviously this is a quite horrific situation to be in because we get worse outcomes for employees and unchanged outcomes for employers. So no one benefits and most people have worse outcomes. Bad all around.
Note that I am not saying one side is inherently better than the other. I’m saying it’s a choice with consequences. It is essentially a question about what you value in life.
It might also be that Denmark is half the size of South Carolina (approximately). While the US is the whole size of the US.
That's probably not what you meant, but that's been my experience at every role so far. 5 weeks would be a dream for me.
We sadly gave up proper benefits/balance of life for higher income. Which of course hoodwinked us when economy tightened up. Some states have it slight better, but I haven't had a proper vacation since college. Unless you count being laid off with no notice.
Then you have loopholes as usual. Layoffs in some states SHOULD be noticed in advance, but only if it's something like > X people laid off. So why not instead make rounds of layoffs over the months? Great for morale!
>> despite the data showing little negative impact of unionization to overall productivity nor company survival. *
Employees should bother to improve their own lives, not to decrease productivity or affect company survival.
* Emphasis mine.