Just saying....
We get paid so much because we produce that much value. But if these allegations are true, we aren't getting paid enough.
Professional athletes are unionized. They would be earning much less money if they weren't.
Then you write "it's hard to find examples of high wage workers who aren't in some sense unionized."
And then you again add something completely contradictory.
But I do agree with you. I would say that tech workers are underpaid. Google has revenue per employee of $931,565. Most of that is profit. Is the average compensation per Googler anywhere near that?
Why shouldn't Googlers form a union and take lets say an average $500,000 per employee? Right now, Googlers get paid free-market wages that are a fraction of the value they add to the company.
When you brought up unions, I pointed out that since tech workers have less market power than doctors and lawyers, they are actually underpaid relative to these groups.
To clarify: I think that doctors and lawyers would still be highly paid if they had no market power, because their skills/abilities are valuable.
So my point of view is that market wages are in accordance to the value that people produce, but people can sometimes obtain more by having market power (or less, if the employers have market power). It seems that you think higher wages only come from market power.
On a union for Googlers, what would stop someone else from joining Google and not joining the union, in exchange for better pay/conditions in the short term.
Also, I bet bank & oil execs believe they make the world-go-round and add a lot of value too. After all, banks & oil touches pretty much all our lives as much as computers do, right?
But that would involve hiring different people (who would probably demand higher salaries), not paying existing teachers more.
The fact is that some people are more valuable than others. Not in an existential sense, but in the sense of how much their labor is worth the market.
Senior management are a special case. I think many of them are people with exceptional ability, but it is harder to argue that their wages are "market wages" because they tend to determine their own salaries. There are many market frictions that are particular to the shareholder-manager relationship. These might potentially allow senior management to extract "economic rent" i.e. wages that are beyond the value they produce.
Well, it varies by region. There are some areas where teachers get $1,000/day compensation packages. But they don't really earn that money, they just use state violence to take it from people who earned it.
Teachers work about 186 days a year, so the magic number we have to get to is $186K.
Let's say the high school gym teacher. Late 30s, been there for 15 years. Base salary, $125K.
Health benefit package worth $18K a year. Pension benefits worth maybe $40K a year.
He also gets $7K in SS taxes paid, and other assorted taxes we'll ignore.
125+18+40+7 = $190k
(I suppose to be fair we must deduct union dues from the total. I have no idea how much union dues are.)