This has been a knock-down drag-out fight and a lot of fun to watch. VW hates the UAW, but they can't say as much because being seen as anti-union would hurt their image back in Germany. Thanks to NRLB rules, VW can't make any statements about rewarding the workers for not unionizing, but that hasn't stopped Senator Corker from saying he heard it on good authority that VW would bring production of a second car to the Chattanooga plant if the workers rejected the UAW. That was a dirty/brilliant move on Corker's part, which both advanced his anti-union agenda and set the expectation that VW will add a second production line to its factory, which VW has been considering since the Passat hasn't been selling as well as they initially planned.
Framing the unionization effort as a "works council" was ingenious marketing on UAW's part, but apparently wasn't enough to persuade the Tennessee good old boys to take the Rust Belt gambit. If you've ever heard stories about how GM & Co. run their factories you'll be amazed anything gets built at all.
I want to ask you. Do you know anything about Detroit? Everything I read from people who've left there blame the unions for driving out the industry through ever increasing pay raises to the point where industry can't afford to stay. You seem to be more knowledgeable about the unions so I figured I'd ask you.
I think there's definitely a localization problem with Unions. If Unions were everywhere and manufacturers had nowhere to run to, we'd probably have a really healthy middle class.
Translation: everyone who wasn't an auto worker would be slightly poorer.
American auto unions fundamentally undermined any incentive auto manufacturers had to innovate. If a man with dynamite digs more holes than one with a shovel, is that man's increased productivity the result of his own effort? No. Auto unions claim pay raises proportional to increases in output per worker (productivity), regardless of the sources of these increases. This means manufacturers have no incentive to invest in better facilities or to innovate, as any profit from this innovation would be eaten up as wages.
>Translation: everyone who wasn't an auto worker would be slightly poorer.
I think the theory is that if all workers were unionized, they would be able to negotiate for a larger share of the profits that are currently taken by the owners of capital.
>Auto unions claim pay raises proportional to increases in output per worker (productivity), regardless of the sources of these increases.
You are assuming a world where the union has absolute power; The role of a union in a market system is to negotiate with the owners of capitol.
Agree or not, (and my personal beliefs are closer to yours than to the comment you are responding to.) it's important to at least understand what your opponent is trying to say.
>I think the theory is that if all workers were unionized, they would be able to negotiate for a larger share of the profits that are currently taken by the owners of capital.
How would them negotiating for a larger share of the profits be a good thing when they were already taking enough of a share of the profits to drive auto companies into bankruptcy?
>You are assuming a world where the union has absolute power; The role of a union in a market system is to negotiate with the owners of capitol.
If you have laws where only union members are allowed to work in auto factories, or that non-union members aren't allowed to work there, then the unions do have absolute power within those industries.
>It's important to at least understand what your opponent is trying to say.
I understand what they're trying to say. I'm just responding that paying auto workers more would not result in a net benefit to the middle class. If as the parent's scenario implies there is nowhere else for manufacturers to find labor (which implies no outsourcing), then for every increase in automobile prices that's brought about by increases in auto workers' wages, that means less resources available for car buyers to spend on other things.
Unions in the American style cannot make the pie bigger, they can only divide it differently. More pie to unionised workers hence means less pie for everyone else (including the other workers who now can't find work as auto makers can afford fewer employees as they have to pay them more).
>I'm just responding that paying auto workers more would not result in a net benefit to the middle class. If as the parent's scenario implies there is nowhere else for manufacturers to find labor (which implies no outsourcing), then for every increase in automobile prices that's brought about by increases in auto workers' wages, that means less resources available for car buyers to spend on other things.
There is another party to the transaction, the owners of capital. Generally speaking, pro-union people argue that capital is in too strong of a negotiating position, and the workers need to unionize to negotiate against the owners of capital. If capital takes less profit, in theory, you can have lower prices and higher wages.
Yes, in the real world, it's messier than that. But, in all real-world business deals, yes, there is surplus value, but who gets that surplus value?
But the bit you are missing here, I think, is that the owners of the capital are a third party, and the more profit they take, the less surplus value is left for consumers or workers. (I'm not saying that eliminating profit would be a good thing, or even that minimizing profit is a good goal. I'm just saying, there are three parties to that negotiation. Three parties negotiating over that surplus value.)
you said:
>Unions in the American style cannot make the pie bigger, they can only divide it differently.
Which is exactly the point. Joining a union is very much the equivalent of hiring a lawyer (or other professional negotiator) to negotiate a business deal for me.
So yes, there is a conflict of interest. but there is /always/ a conflict of interest when trying to decide who gets the surplus value.
you don't need globalization to kill the stillborn unions from the us.
the same dysfunctional individualism that make so many workers opt out for the short term (or in this case the promise of middle term) extra profit also make the leaders shaft the ones that join for a little criminal profit.
german workers have the cultural pragmatism on their favour.
> but they can't say as much because being seen as anti-union would hurt their image back in Germany.
That's not about their image. The German steelworkers union, IG Metal, has several seats on the Volkswagen board and they made sure that Volkswagen wouldn't oppose the unionization. Actually, between the Union and the Workers Councils, they hold half of the board.
It is interesting (though not surprising) that Republicans threatened retaliation against Volkswagen if their workers unionized. (Volkswagen seemed to encourage their workers to form a union)
In any case, this is a big win for the conservative movement/establishment in the US. If the workers had voted to unionize and if the (Republican led) government had penalized Volkwagen (as they threatened), it would have been interesting to see whether Volkswagen might moved to a less union-unfriendly state.
It's interesting reading about the labor unions in Germany. There, they actually seem like a useful abstraction for employers, at least in some industries. Not necessarily adversarial, and little of the crazy featherbedding.
I guess it depends on whether an industry is growing in employment and importance (where any union-based programs to recruit/train/regulate employees can be helpful to everyone), vs. in declining industries (ie virtually every unionized sector in the US, in total employment in most sectors or in retail price (for services)).
Yes, you can contrast this with UK unions. German unions are smart enough to find a win-win scenario and look to the long term, it's as if they see themselves as stewards of future generations. Where as UK unions can't wait to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs, they are rapacious in their greed. I think some of this explains the reluctance of programmers to unionize; for historical reasons a lot of software culture is US/UK based, these are countries where unions have run amok with terrible consequences for their communities, no-one wants to repeat those mistakes.
The German government started early with the social welfare system in 1883, which set the tone. (even if it was only designed to keep the commies at bay, it still has a stabilizing effect on Germany today)
This made the employers not go as bat shit crazy as they did in the UK and the US - overworking people straight into hospital means that you're paying their wage for not working. The UK built its industrialization on a constant stream of new workers.
Which again let the unions run cooler compared to their UK/US counterparts since the situation wasn't _all_ that bad.
The second and third step then formed a feedback loop (with some effects on Government, too), which was cooperative in Germany, and adversarial for the Anglo-Saxons.
It looks to me as if at some point, both unions and employers in the US and the UK could claim with good reason that they're only defending themselves against the other party.
And lest people believe this is an anglo-saxon problem, french labor relations are very similar to UK/US's, although there has been less systematic dismantling of unions as the country is generally speaking more to the left of the political spectrum.
Of course - most thing I wrote about happened before Thatcher, too (German social welfare in 1883: That the UK went down a different path back then isn't Thatcher's responsibility unless we're talking time machines).
But first, according to some circles, when it's about social policy in the UK, Thatcher is always to blame. I just couldn't resist :-)
Second, I suppose Thatcher would have implemented a different policy given a different history in that area. The union/employer feedback loop influenced policy (and still does), and that includes Thatcher's for sure. Which makes that snarky first sentence a reversal of cause and effect.
I suspect the true reason there is no programmer's union is because we don't need one yet - the supply/demand balance is massively weighted in our favor and so we have no general need for the kind of protection and collective bargaining that other, more labor-saturated professions do.
Coal mines and steel mills and oil rigs are expensive to set up because they're so capital intensive. If a coal mine worker decides he'd like to start his own coal mine probably he won't have the capital or the connections to get the capital. There's no path between company-worker and company-owner or vice-versa so the two groups seem like distinct classes.
On the other hand, in programming all you need to start a company is a computer and an internet connection - and we all have those at home already. Probably you've got a few friends from university who have their own startups now. There's a clear path from being an employee to being a founder/owner, so employees and owners don't seem like distinct classes.
Yes and no. In certain sectors yes, but other sectors have suffered from outsourcing etc. And the whole industry is plagued by ageism. I'm not arguing for a system of seniority (another big turn-off about unions) but something does need to be done about that.
That's the funny thing about IT, if you do your job well no-one knows you're there. So it makes you an easy target for cost cutting. Some executive signs an outsourcing deal and looks like a business genius for saving so much money. Then the wheels come off, but by that time he's already gotten his bonus/promotion/new job.
didn't unions made outsourcing [say in auto industry] even more appealing by increasing the cost of local unionized labor?
Looking at the auto industry, i think programmers just don't want that happening to them, including the "benefit" of having one more layer of clueless bosses and additional set of processes ("work rules") - the existing managers are clueless enough and existing processes definitely a drag to add more of them.
I'm not against all unions. I'm against unions how they exist in the US - auto industry, BART workers', police, teachers - police one actually works really well for its members, though it is more like an exception because of its power as a racket organization ...
> I guess it depends on whether an industry is growing in employment and importance
No, it depends on the country's cultural background. The US (and France, for instance) have a history of adversarial labour relations, where labour negotiations are a war and the goal is to defeat the other party into submission (for labour) or destruction (for companies). Germany and scandinavian countries are rooted in much more cooperative labour relations which is why e.g. they don't need legally mandated minimum wages, they have minimum wages from collective agreements.
And when a company whose culture is rooted in the adversarial model lands in a cooperative country things get bad[0]. I'd also expect an interesting time with a company built around the cooperative model in the midst of an adversarial culture and hoped VW's TN plant could be one such, but apparently that's not going to happen.
> There, they actually seem like a useful abstraction for employers, at least in some industries. Not necessarily adversarial, and little of the crazy featherbedding.
This bothered me to, so I tried looking up why this would be true:
From wikipedia:
>Section 8(a)(2) of the NLRA makes it illegal for an employer "to dominate or interfere with the formation or administration of any labor organization or contribute financial or other support to it."
I guess the objective is to avoid "puppet" unions, though if the "formation" part was stricken from this, I feel like the problem would be solved (VW could form the union but have it be independent).
I refused to join union many times. They would charge me $80 each month and provide nothing back. As contractor untermench I would only sponsor permanent employees.
I refused to join, I was on temp contract so no value for me. This was semi private scientific institution. Money were usually used to send HR/union people to bullshit trainings on nice location.
Amazing how stupid people can be even when it comes to their self interest. Seems like the GOP depends on this fact for much of their success with the poor and working class.
Framing the unionization effort as a "works council" was ingenious marketing on UAW's part, but apparently wasn't enough to persuade the Tennessee good old boys to take the Rust Belt gambit. If you've ever heard stories about how GM & Co. run their factories you'll be amazed anything gets built at all.