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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

> I'm not blind to the problems with unions

What problems are you referring to, specifically?

> I specifically take issue with the demand for a complete ban on automation

So there are two ways automation could affect a workplace.

The first way is that it replaces and displaces workers. With layoffs comes downward pressure on the wages for existing workers who, for fear of losing their jobs, now do more labor for the same or less money.

The second way is that automation makes your job easier, ideally so it's safer, less physically strenuous and you have to work fewer hours.

In the coming decades, this is a problem we're going to increasingly face as the more menial jobs increasingly get automated. That automation is going to get more and more sophisticated. What do we, as a society, do if we only need 20% of the labor pool to perform all the jobs?

That could either be fantastic or dystopian.

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> What problems are you referring to, specifically?

at the end of the day, unions are still ran by people. So it can be corrupted from the inside or out. They could raise dues on a whim and spend it recklessly instead of saving up for a strike or for other resources needed to advertise.

And union means that non-union (aka new workers to the industry like graduates or people making a switch to a new career) have another layer of beauracracy to go through. Beauracracy with their own whims. Elevator workers pay very well thanks to union, but it also basically means you wont be getting into that industry without knowing someone. So, double the nepotism needed.

Then the last ambivalent argument is that unions can indeed hold back technological progress. It's a hard issue to talk about because that's the exact thing opponents will argue when unions strike, but in some industries the workers have the biggest incentive not to use the most efficient means of work. Especially for businesses that can have slow times or simply run out of work to do. Basically your first point.

the second way is ideal, but we've seen over the decades that efficiency ever rewards the workers. We're something like over twice as efficient as workers 50 years ago, but our buying power has gotten worse, and we work more hours. Companies has shown we can't trust them to achieve that Jetson Utopia of doing an hour of work a day at efficiencies of entire 20th century factories as an individual. Our reward is just to manage 100 factories instead.

> it can be corrupted from the inside or out

Same for companies and gouvernements and were better with them and their drawbacks than nothing.

> in some industries the workers have the biggest incentive not to use the most efficient means of work.

… especially on an hourly wage.

Exactly how is the economy going to function if 20% of people can't afford anything if they have no way to trade for goods and services?

About like the global economy does now.

the secret ingredient is crime

The coporate idea is to focus on luxury services and not care about the lower (or future middle) class. So stuff keeps getting expensive. Government will eventually step in because less worker -> less taxes collected -> less funding for everything, but who knows how long that will take?

But I agree with the "secret ingredient" as another has put it. Crime will skyrocket if the only way to survive is to take. underground markets will help make ends meets (that the government won't get taxes off of, hence the above). And there will be riots, very violent riots, and a lot more of them. A cornered rat strikes back, and millions of cornered rats becomes a miniature civil war.

Look at how corporates plan to deal with climate change - they don’t. The largest institutions in the world do not believe it’s their problem, they do not plan ‘how do i make sure that the system I depend on does not violently collapse’

no, the workers will start to wonder why a small group of people who do barely any work are sucking up all the profit.

Currently we have 0.1% of people sucking the majority of the profit. 20% would be a vast improvement.

But, to your point, the ultimate forms of wealth redistribution are wars and revolution. What happened 200+ years ago in France can happen again. And it will if we don't start being just a little bit fairer in the distirbution of profits.

It almost did, too. The New Deal answered the question of labor unions and every day folk.

The alternative was not and would not be pretty.

The New Deal also set up time bombs in the economy. Government spending as a percentage of GDP is ever-increasing. Early 1900s this was at about 3-5%, nowadays it's 40-60%. On top of that it gave us the pension and healthcare time bombs due to birthrates decreases.

Whether we like it or not, but eventually this spending is going to grow high enough that it can't grow anymore.

None of that was New Deal and the ssi pensions were funded, all this happened well before the move to fiat.

you're hand waving over two world wars, the discovery of nuclear weapons, microwaves, and transistors the invention of automobiles, financialization of the economy, massive concentrations of wealth in a tiny percentage of ultra-wealthy people and corporation in America.

There is no need to jerk your knee so sharply at the mere mention of a historic fact.

There's other options. For example, the automation could open up other job opportunities. And it could get rid of the job completely. This is a problem we've faced for hundreds of years (if not longer).

> What do we, as a society, do if we only need 20% of the labor pool to perform all the jobs?

We wind up having other things for them to do, the exact same as we always have, when we've faced this exact problem in the past.

The concern here seems to be longshoreman is one of the highest paid blue collar jobs; there is close to zero percent chance the middle age and older guys get anything like this again. It's quite dissimilar to something like a unskilled farmhand getting fired and then moving slightly up to maintaining farm implements or something.

Sucks for them, but they can't complain when they were happy to charge the poor and lesser working class through the nose to unload their goods. They can't both have their capitalism and eat it.

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