Definitely wouldn't want to be part of a union. I represent myself, thanks.
Smaller and wide set of unions in an industry can be effective, but industry wide unions are effectively a monopoly on labor supply and bad for society. Look no further than the MTA in NYC.
Terrible cost overruns and bad governance of the subway system, for what? So employees can clock extra hours and get egregiously overpaid? No thanks.
Competitive markets produce societally best outcomes, as is proven time and time again throughout history. Competition applies to labor too, by the way
Corporations bargain collectively by default; each is a large unit, with a lot of resources, composed of many people.
Unions allow individuals to bargain collectively, to match corporations in terms of leverage, because few individuals are valuable enough to even come close.
Did anyone go to jail over it? No. I doubt anyone was even fired. It was settled for $415 million split 4 ways between the companies involved[1]. So it's "illegal", but in terms of repercussions experienced by the offenders I'd say it's up there with a $150 speeding ticket.
That's a problem with elected officials/regulatory agencies.
I'm a strong believer that government's number one priority should be to maintain a competitive market, as in the long run that produces the best outcomes for broader society.
Unfortunately they've failed quite badly at it. Especially in regards to big tech.
Important to direct ire towards those that are responsible, representatives need to be held accountable
Democracy needs no apologies. You are denied choices everyday because society and government have agreed upon those choices. There will always be those upset because they feel their rights are infringed upon.
By that logic, slavery in the US was a-ok if/because it was supported by the majority. That is why rights not subject to majority exist and should exist.
And the right to determine the terms with with you negotiate away your labor is among the most sacred.
Letting others do that for you is much closer to indentured servitude or slavery.
The problem with all of these collectivsts' arguments is that they all believe themselves to be in their utopia's social planning committee rather than themselves a laborer. And that's if they made it past the "shoot all the troublemakers" phase of their revolution.
What you advocate for, not organizing, is what got us to the indentured servitude and slavery current state (US centric of course). Those who can’t recognize that are beyond hope (as they ignore the economic data clearly demonstrating the benefits), and to cater to them or entertain their desire to maintain the status quo helps no one but themselves.
Edit: This forum has some sort of empathy deficiency in aggregate.
You can work in tech and your work could be accurately described as indentured servitude. Tech if anything has a disproportionate amount of one specific kind: immigrants on employer specific visas.
First off, let's establish that the oft-abused H1-Bs have salary minimums that put them in the top 5% of earners in the United States and in most cases the top 99.9(999)% of earners in their home countries.
Second, the visas don't prevent you from seeking employment through other employers, but at certain phases of your status here between visa, green card and resident it will reset your timetable.
Third, while the timetable for people from say India is absurdly long, from many other nations it is much much shorter.
Fourth, at all times visa holders have the loophole of getting married to get a better visa. Most people living somewhere for an extended period of time at least have the social skill to negotiate setting up a family (citation: the continued survival of the human race). Even if you marry another immigrant, both visa-holders have the convenience of opting to use the shortest schedule table between both nations. You'll often see, for example, Indian visa holders marrying Australian visa holders...The current schedule for new Indian applications is like 35+ years while the Australian schedule is ~5.
So yes, there are people in somewhat abusive situations. They stay in them because it's still an opportunity that puts them ahead of at least 95% of the world's population. Is that like indentured servitude or slavery? No, not really.
Um, with polite response: a lot of these points are ethically dubious and at best say “they’re well paid, so they don’t really count”. At one point it says one can marry to get out of their indentured servitude, which… yikes, dude, imagine what a dangerous position that puts someone in if they can’t divorce a potentially dangerous relationship for fear of deportation.
Don't be ridiculous. The overwhelming majority of people are going to get married. More than 40% of them to someone they meet at work. That's just life.
Stop interpreting things the most hyperbolic way possible. Basic statistical facts paint quite a different picture than you are.
I’m not saying that marriage itself is bad, I’m saying that being in a marriage where you cannot freely leave isn’t an alternative to a job you cannot freely leave, which is an exploitation of labor that’s over represented in tech, in response to a poster who questions why tech should be trying to defend their labor. In none of your points have you reasonably addressed the original concern, which is that exploitation of labor does exist in tech, except to argue that it’s okay because of money, or they can enter a marriage that they cannot freely leave without also risking their immigration status and that’s somehow not a concern.
Forgive me, but in NYC where I'm from nearly 100% of the people talking about unions are Wobblies (IWW people) and nearly 100% of them are tankies but even if they aren't their union advocates for a revolution anyway.
This! I hate when people talk about "unskilled labor" because there is no such thing. There definitely is work that requires less training than other jobs, but there is no such thing as unskilled labor.
So you would define an airline pilot as skilled labor but driving an Uber (I have never used Uber, so I will compare it to a taxi) as unskilled labor.
Flying a plain certainly takes a skill. So does driving a car. Both are skills. They certainly differ in the time required to obtain that skill, but that does not change the fact than an unskilled person can't drive a car through dense urban traffic bringing you safely to your destination, neither can they land a an airplane.
If a job was really unskilled, anybody could do it without any training at all. People usually don't pay for actually unskilled things because they can do it themselves just as good
It's not elitist. Some skills are effectively commoditized. They don't require specialized, rare knowledge, years of training and constant personal investment.
If you pick a job that literally anyone else can learn to do in a few days, then the cap on your salary and lack of bargaining power is on you.
"Elitist" is almost always used as a pejorative. Just looking up the definition of it points to social power, wealth, class hierarchies, etc. It is rarely used to just mean "smart, capable, skilled" in a neutral sense.
The comment above was clearly using it as a pejorative.
Back in my younger years, I worked a lot of unskilled-labor type jobs.
The starkest difference that I recognize between people in those jobs and people in my career is that in the former people have a hard time showing up to work on-time or at all and in the latter everyone is pretty tuned in and works hard.
It only hit me late in life that success in life really can be just as simple as showing up.
I guess what I would say here is that the kind of people who feel that they need collective bargaining agreements probably overlaps quite strongly with the group of people that have a hard time showing up.
Yes grampa, the disadvantaged kid who never got a chance to learn a "skilled job" should just pull himself by the bootstraps, show up, give the manager a firm handshake. Yawn.
I worked shitty jobs into my 30s before I landed on my career. Suck it up.
Also you're missing the point. I didn't say anything about pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. You DON'T have to work hard. I said just show up. Every day. On time. That's literally the one thing I've seen in life that differentiates people who are successful in life from those who aren't.
And I know bank security guards who show up every day and live fulfilled happy successful lives. What I was saying was that commonly you'll find in unskilled labor jobs are people who don't show up every day. Not all of them but a large number. They won't do the minimum to succeed in life. They need the coddling.
I'm sorry, but your impression is wrong. The biggest correlate with income is not your punctuality, not hours worked, not productivity. It is this: your parents' income. This directly contradicts the (popular) view that we live in a meritocracy where all you have to do to succeed is work hard and be smart and apply yourself.
> What I was saying was that commonly you'll find in unskilled labor jobs are people who don't show up every day.
Mind sharing the study of workplace absenteeism that you're basing that opinion on?
I correlated lack of punctuality with overrepresentation in low-wage+low-skill jobs.
There are also plenty of high-social status, skilled, low-income jobs that are thoroughly dominated by the upper classes, like college professors, journalists, rank & file media/fashion, and orchestra musicians. Those jobs are not low-skill and people in them tend to show up to work.
Skill is a proxy for supply whereas pay is a proxy of supply-demand. It might actually be a better term, since even if you do very skilled labor, you would prefer an union if there was no demand.
This is a terrible substitute, since there are a lot of low-paid high-skill jobs (ex, graduate students, TAs).
There's a meaningful labor liquidity difference between a job that takes 2 years of training and 2 days of training, and it's important for policy decisions. Sorry?
> Unskilled labor can have decent bargaining power if there's a shortage of unskilled labor.
Not really, because that’s the definition of unskilled: it takes no special skills to do the job. So if there’s a shortage and wages go up dramatically then skilled labor can take its place. (The opposite is not possible/ advisable though.)
Being willing to do the job is a hurdle on its own. And there is variance between employee quality for "unskilled" labor too.
E.g. think about customer facing roles and social skills/aptitude. Having all friendly/nice employees can drive greater revenue for a business. Chick fil a and costco are famous for hiring friendly employees, can have meaningful results for the business
And plenty of businesses have gone the other way and decided that the personal touch of being greeted by a human being provides less business value than a computer. E.g., McDonalds, Wendy's, your grocery store.
A union tends to be a monopoly on labor supply in most cases. Not a competitive labor market.
Bargaining collectively = monopoly. They can raise wages up to the level of marginal profit of the employing company.
Just the same as a company that's a monopoly could raise prices up to marginal value of the good to the customer.
If the company can bypass the union to hire others, then it's not a monopoly. But if the union is influential enough this may not be possible.
Distorted wages for labor is not good for broader society, only those being paid beyond their individual market power. Raises cost of goods and lowers quality for the rest
> Distorted wages for labor is not good for broader society
Real life on planet earth disagrees pretty hard with you. Google "___est countries". Pick a metric that shows policy impacts. Say, health, happiness, etc. The kind of metrics that aren't abstract BS and can't be cherry-picked.
Pick the first, say, five. Then look up their unionization rates.
I'll spoil it for you. Nordic countries win (it doesn't even matter the metric lol... they even top CATO institute freedom rankings somehow). They have massive levels of unionization. Finland has unionized entire sectors of the economy.
Counter-examples welcome. But say "GDP" and I'll show up at your house and throw a pie in your face.
The US is not particularly innovative. Due to historical and geographic circumstances, it's in a unique position to attract foreign talent and foreign innovations and to monetize them.
It's a good environment for doing business. There is plenty of capital available, and the laws are usually reasonable. It's a large country that's sufficiently centralized that you don't have to localize everything for each state. And it's a stable environment that has mostly been isolated from the rest of the world and not touched by war in over 150 years.
As a drawback, the system really favors those who own over those who work. Even in places like the Silicon Valley, how much of the wealth goes to those who innovate and how much goes to those who fund the innovations? And how much goes to local property owners who just happened to be in the right place at the right time?
Americans don't study STEM as often as people in other developed countries, because they correctly see where the money is. There are many top STEM schools, but even they largely consist of foreign talent teaching foreign talent.
If the US went the way of Europe and stopped attracting foreign talent, I have no idea what would happen to tech innovation. The innovators and the innovations would still be there, but maybe there would not be as many people capable of taking advantage of the innovations.
> As a drawback, the system really favors those who own over those who work. Even in places like the Silicon Valley, how much of the wealth goes to those who innovate and how much goes to those who fund the innovations? And how much goes to local property owners who just happened to be in the right place at the right time?
Also I said "Google it" for a reason. You picked an abstract one, and Sweden still beat us! And who could have guessed (me!), but Netherlands, Denmark, and Finland sit there in the top 10 as well :) [0]
> What do you think the cost of basic goods would rise to if all the Chinese manufacturing centers unionized?
You're not only dodging my point, but your own. You asked what was best for society.
e: Man the "mooching" argument, in this context specifically, is really gonna stick with me. In a work meeting once, someone with knowledge said that each engineer in my org was earning the company $1.5-3 million. This is against a ~$200k salary. This is kind of subjective, but as an """innovator""", the idea that Finland is the one mooching off me is _hilarious_. I'm not gonna comment on what I "deserve" though because dessert theory isn't sound anyway.
Where do you think those earnings go in the long run? In a competitive market margins get driven down, and profitability feeds into lower cost of goods.
E.g. cloud providers must provide cheaper and cheaper service to stay competitive with other cloud providers. This in turn drives down costs for all technology in society.
Sure a union could try to take that profit and feed it into wages instead, but that's worse for society in the end.
When profit margins maintain at excessive levels it's typically an indication that there's either a first mover advantage, or the company is a pseudo-monopoly.
I'd argue there are some big cases where that applies today
> Sure a union could try to take that profit and feed it into wages instead, but that's worse for society in the end.
Yeah, that's the whole assumption I'm challenging with real world data.
Your ideas sound great on paper or in a vacuum, though. This conversation is way asymmetric, where I'm the only person pointing to facts you can look at with your eyes, so I'm gonna leave and wish you luck with your theories.
PS:
> Chinese manufacturing. Manufacturing that is not unionized, by the way.
Unintentional comedy? Natural language model trained on Econ podcasts? Arguing from opposite day? Or the most embarrassing gaffe you could have possibly made in this convo? Not that their unions are good. Just a funny thing to write, caveat-free.
I am not familiar enough with the data to argue one way or another. But a counterargument would involve productivity. There are several fields where good-paying shops run rings around their budget-minded peers. Even for relatively unskilled roles, e.g. Costco. Sometimes consumers care about that directly. More often, it shows up in productivity.
Again, can't argue one way or another. Removing competition opens up novel channels for corruption. But I wouldn't say that a conclusion can be reached from first principles.
In the real world competitors don't always form immediately, it can take quite awhile. But the broad strokes are true, and bear out over time, barring monopoly formation in a given sector, free information etc.
Of course Costco does have competitors, they just haven't been able to execute as well up to this point.
> It's a good thing Europe can mooch off US innovation and Chinese manufacturing. Manufacturing that is not unionized, by the way.
You have it completely wrong. The US is mooching off of EU and Chinese brain talent and has done so for the past 75 years, since the end of WWII. Most innovation that occurs in the US has been done thanks to exploiting highly educated labor that migrated here from elsewhere on the planet.
If we're talking about the tech success of Silicon Valley, again that has mostly been mooching off of the lack of regulations regarding the sale and use of personal user data. Thankfully, EU is finally beginning to install some protections in that sense.
But there’s a chicken and eg problem there. I would argue that we in Sweden have the GDP (per capita) we have because of the few large companies that were started before unionization.
It’s also kind of unsustainable in a globalized world, and even more so with remote work: The Nordic model is that you give everyone more or less the same compensation regardless of contribution. But how is that going to work 5 years from now? It’s already coming apart I would say.
> have massive levels of unionization. Finland has unionized entire sectors of the economy
There's an opportunity for tech to create a less antagonistic form of unions. Simply creating a Board seat for the ESOP, voted in by the ESOP holders (excluding senior management), would be shareholder aligned and beneficial to employees.
The Nordic union system is apparently different, the unions are responsible for distributing unemployment insurance. In places like Canada you get that everywhere as long as you’re not a contractor. So there’s a much bigger incentive to join in Nordic countries.
> The thing about unions in the Nordic countries, though, is that they’re different from unions in most other countries. I learned this in Denmark in 2007 when a union steward at Lego A/S, which had just announced plans to move a bunch of factory work to Eastern Europe, gave me an impassioned lecture on the positive economic aspects of outsourcing. Unions in Denmark saw (and presumably still see) preserving the competitiveness of Danish industry as a much higher priority than protecting specific jobs. They arrived at this mindset in part because Denmark is a small country trying to succeed in a big, scary world, but also because access to generous unemployment benefits is what leads many (perhaps most) workers in Denmark to join unions in the first place.
> Denmark, Finland and Sweden are what are called “Ghent system” countries, where unions administer the unemployment insurance program with help from government subsidies. Norway used to have a Ghent system but abandoned it in 1938. Belgium, where the actual city of Ghent is located, has a “partial Ghent system.” In recent years, the link between union membership and unemployment insurance has weakened in the remaining Ghent system countries too, with most union-affiliated insurance providers now formally independent, and scholars from those countries have written lots of papers about the pressures the system is under. But from the perspective of many outside observers it still looks pretty great in the way that it combines continued union strength with a flexible, pragmatic approach to serving workers that seems quite compatible with economic competitiveness.
> This is not to say the old style of American industrial unions will come back, or should. The mid-20th-century enterprise model, as it was called, relied on confrontational tactics to organize particular companies or factories. That may have succeeded in an era of oligopolistic, locally rooted corporations. However, in an era when even a slight increase in labor costs at a North Carolina factory sends jobs to China, organizing just a single company can boomerang against workers and management alike.
> Fortunately, other models have emerged elsewhere in the world, models that can benefit both companies and labor. A well-known example, popular in Europe, is the so-called works council, which gives workers a voice in company affairs without triggering the fraught, complex process of creating a formal union. In Germany, unions can organize entire sectors, rather than particular companies, giving employers and workers incentives to cooperate in ways that improve industries’ competitive position.
> Even more intriguing is the Ghent system, successful in Denmark and Sweden, under which unions administer government-funded unemployment benefits. Providing that safety net helps unions to shift their focus from protecting individual jobs to maintaining workers’ overall income security; this in turn allows employers more flexibility in hiring and firing.
The best argument for unions is to evolve them from the large rigid bureaucratic ones that protect bad workers to ones that focus purely on wages, while keeping the country competitive (Unions 2.0 if you will).
Also I was surprised to find out France has less unionization than even the US (9% vs 13%).
Otherwise I think reducing anything to a single metric like that is silly.
Seems like there is a wide gap between a single company organizing a union for their employers and a monopoly on the labor supply. I would be more convinced by your point if this wasn't one of the first tech unions (according to headline).
It depends how it's structured. If Kickstarter can go and hire non union labor, then all is good.
If the whole union will quit unanimously if they do that, then they have effective monopoly power over labor for the company.
The company will die if they try to bypass the union. In this case they could distort compensation far above what a competitive market would bear, and consumers of Kickstarter eat the cost (e.g. broader society).
It's definitely not a free lunch where workers get paid more and there's no societal cost, as many would like to believe
Employees can join a different company. Companies can't magically become a different company. If they have a single union they are forced to work with, that union has monopoly power on labor supply.
Good for union employees, bad for the rest of society
Unions benefit the people in the union at the expense of the rest of society. There is no free lunch; when somebody gets paid more, that money comes from somewhere else
The MTA is run by New York State, and therefore at the whim of Albany cronyism [1]. This is why it’s so dysfunctional. I wouldn’t necessarily blame the transit unions.
Edit: also, there’s a history of multiple private subway companies in NYC, it didn’t work out.
Yes, combination of the misaligned incentives of government coupled with a public sector union.
Given the lack of a profit motive, a well run government needs incentive structures to motivate results towards societally good outcomes. Too bad none of the local, state, federal governments do. Would be easy to institute if the will were there though
Edit:
To address your edit, the private subway systems failed after NY instituted a price cap on fares, IIRC. And inflation destroyed their profitability over time due to this.
Once the subway system was made public, development pretty much halted entirely, outside of an extension every few decades.
It compounds them. Government has no incentive for real results, union leads to highly overpaid employees who are frequently caught not working on the clock.
Two separate problems for sure, both bad for the rest
I think unions are great for unskilled labor: When the employer sees employees 100% as a collective, then it makes sense that employees bargain as a collective too.
But it goes off the rails when there’s a big difference in productivity between employees, and it gets even worse when managers are allowed to unionize and use strict labor laws to protect them while they play corporate politics.
Source: I’m Swedish and have seen it myself from most angles.
> Competitive markets produce societally best outcomes
Define "societally best outcomes". By using the word "societally", you are saying it's not he best outcome for the business, nor is it the best outcome for the employees, nor the best outcome for the customers, but the best outcome for the society at large. Your MTA example shows that a union is great for workers. Please explain.
Considering unions are used successfully in many industries and are supported by both major parties in the US, you'll have a difficult time explaining how they are all wrong.
> Smaller and wide set of unions in an industry can be effective,
Isn't this the KickStarter union?
Also, what's a "Smaller and wide union"?
Finally, if unions are so bad, why do many of the largest companies in the world continue to hire from unions?
> Finally, if unions are so bad, why do many of the largest companies in the world continue to hire from unions?
Because it's illegal not to. I dunno if you know this but if you have a union shop, the company can't just hire non-union employees. (In most cases) Once your company unionizes you can hire union employees, or go out of business.
Realistically what companies do is incorporate a subsidiary in a non-union jurisdiction and outsource the jobs to the subsidiary.
>If the Foxconn factory unionized, you can bet iPhones would cost hundreds of dollars more.
I'd be willing to bet that they don't. iPhone prices are set at the highest price that Apple determines people are willing to pay, not by the cost to produce it; even the costs that do exist are mostly materials, not labor costs. Labor costs are close to 1% of the sticker price [1]. This is the same as the argument that erroneously claims that if you paid fast food workers well it would lead to $10 big macs, when other countries with much higher wages have comparable prices to ours.
Apple sets prices based on what they think will maximize their profitability. If iPhone cost $1M dollars, there are still people who would buy it. Demand is a curve, not a fixed value.
Sorry, I was being unclear. I meant "people" in the aggregate, as perhaps a stand in for the demand curve. And that Apple sets their price based on the highest point on that curve which still maximizes revenue, then uses their absolutely ridiculous amount of cash-on-hand to reserve capacity and set the supply curve wherever it would intersect that point on the demand curve. (Which is part of why Apple weathered the chip shortage better than most)
i.e., at the scale they operate, they are beholden almost exclusively to demand, rather than supply, and what supply constraints they do have are mostly a matter of material costs and logistics as opposed to labor.
As the other commenter points out, my argument is that this pricing method (and the comparatively tiny input labor costs) mean that the cost of labor has an effectively negligible effect on pricing, and only would eat into profits.
I'm not sure what you're saying, but GP was arguing that an increase in wages for manufacturing iPhone would eat at apples profit margins, not add to the products final price.
Are you still a consultant as stated in your bio? Wouldn’t mass unionization give you even more of a leg up assuming employers rely on 3rd parties more to avoid the headache?
I personally think current market rates for contractors, esp the staff Aug kind, are still lower than they should be, all things considered
I left because the UFCW wasn’t representing me. People think that unions are simply fair by default but some are really an Animal Farm where all animals are equal, just some are more equal than others.
Yeah, there are bad unions just like bad companies. At least they tend to have contracts when companies don't. I would love to have contracts be required via legislation rather than unions.
I'm sorry but the contract was screwing me. I worked (decades ago) as a third shift janitor in a 24 hour supermarket. My responsibilities included cleaning the customer and employee restrooms and also cleaning the meat cutting room. My union negotiated maximum hourly wage was less than the starting wage for stockers and cashiers. Why? Because there were maybe 10 janitors per store, whereas there were 100+ stockers and cashiers. So the union represented votes and 10 votes per store amounted to exactly what you think it would. This is why any sort of generic 'tech union' is going to be a failure in my opinion, because if you have 150 developers and 20 QA, for example, where do you think the equality will actually land. People will vote for the common good up to a point. Single occupation unions would possibly work, i.e. a QA union, a Developers union but would introduce other problems.
Contracts and unions aren't some magical cure all. Unions are political organizations and come with all the problems that political organizations have.
>"Have you worked at a company where you were treated unfairly, were lied to, etc? How'd that work out for you?"
I feel like this happens, from time to time, in virtually every company or institution. I know of people who work for public-sector unions and this kind of thing is commonplace there as well.
Those 5% can argue for better conditions or leave. If their value is not commensurate with their asks, they won't get it.
Both labor supply and demand needs to be competitive for an efficient society.
If there's a single employer in town, and lack of mobility for residents, that's a monopoly on labor demand just the same as a union is a monopoly on labor supply
We currently have people leaving who are being replaced by others with higher salaries and similar contributions. So it's not like it's meritorious.
With the information and power imbalance between companies and workers, it seems the companies are already an oligopoly. Unions are the oligopoly on the opposing side to balance that out.
Smaller and wide set of unions in an industry can be effective, but industry wide unions are effectively a monopoly on labor supply and bad for society. Look no further than the MTA in NYC.
Terrible cost overruns and bad governance of the subway system, for what? So employees can clock extra hours and get egregiously overpaid? No thanks.
Competitive markets produce societally best outcomes, as is proven time and time again throughout history. Competition applies to labor too, by the way