As unions decline, inequality rises(epi.org) |
As unions decline, inequality rises(epi.org) |
> “John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”
The Cold War and the hugely successful propaganda against communism spilled over to utterly decimate the labor movement in the US. You will however immediately lose most Americans as soon as you use the word "socialism". Let me summarize the usual rebuttals:
1. Socialism isn't communisum. The first is more about equality of opportunity. The second is more equality of outcome;
2. Socialism is not a poverty cult. Society is insanely wealthy. It's simply about sharing the wealth such that like 8 people don't own 50% of the economy;
3. Debt is built into your existence. Student debt, medical debt, housing debt, etc. This is by design to rob you of autonomy and keep you as compliant workers. Often this is referred to as "neofeudalism" or "neoserfdom".
5. There is no value without labor;
6. "The workers owning the means of production" simply means labor sharing in the value they create. And no, an Amazon warehouse worker getting paid minimum hour and being penalized for taking bathroom breaks is not "sharing";
7. Too many people have unrealistic views about their ability to negotiate and their overall ability, which is why you'll see so many comments like "I don't want to be kept down by low performers".
8. The financialization of housing turns people into NIMBYs who want to see their home values go up even though cost of housing is the leading factor in homelessness and has historically been used as a tool for segregation after explicit segregation was outlawed;
9. Creating monopolies such that companies can charge $1000/month and otherwise bankrupt you for needing lifesaving healthcare is state violence;
10. The police as an institution that exists today is a tool for protecting capital and those who own it; and
11. You are not Elon Musk. You will never be Elon Musk. Elon Musk doesn't know who you are. Elon Musk would melt you down for rocket fuel if it increased profits.
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/08/07/for-most-us...
[2]: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/328134-john-steinbeck-once-...
But in some cities, the govt is required to do work only with labor unions. In that case, joining a union might help, because the government has taking away your competition!
This is sensationalistic propaganda, not research.
At the end of WWII, the USA was the only industrial economy in the world, not significantly damaged by the fighting.
If you see, the spike of worker union participation is right after the end of WWII.
Basically, for a couple of decades the USA had a monopoly on advanced manufacturing. Then as Europe and Japan caught up, there was more of a push towards efficiency as US companies faced more competition
https://www.wikiwand.com/en/Economic_history_of_Sweden#Secon...
particularly this part: > Early on in my own career in the industry, I felt guilty about making a “good” salary. Why did I deserve to make more money than a teacher or a nurse? Of course, I don’t — they deserve a lot more too. But if I was making less it would go straight into the pockets of investors, not other workers. Tech workers’ labor has made six of the world’s ten richest people, and today computing and the internet are an integral part of every industry. Although some workers are highly paid, the differential between investor profits and employee salary is as stark as in any other industry, because workers are not organized.
it's true that tech workers frequently make good money and we should be grateful for that, but when our industry is producing oligarchs like Musk, Zuckerberg, Bezos, it means that they are profiting from the things that tech workers produce. It's how inequality is increased. It's no coincidence that the rise of the tech economy has coincided with American inequality rising sharply.
My tech salary, adjusted for inflation, is almost exactly what my RN mother was making when she was my age.
Maybe our salaries aren't that extraordinary, they're just the only ones that have kept up with inflation.
Don't feel guilty about a tech salary, feel angry others been left behind.
That really puts things into perspective for me.
You can do extremely well with just a Bachelor’s in CS. Professions like nursing, medicine, law, even business have had their earning potential sapped by larger and larger costs of education. And degrees past Bachelor’s are less well supported by financial aid schemes.
Assigned moral worth or whatever "deserve" is trying to get at has nothing to do with economics.
This has to be said because collective action necessarily requires convincing a lot of people to do it. But either way this language avoids the claim of right and wrong and simply focuses on the fact that workers today get a bad deal due to poor bargaining power.
It’s also not just about markets. The federal government places severe restrictions on what organized labor can do to advocate for itself: Labor Management Relations Act of 1947 Aka “Taft-Hartley Act” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft–Hartley_Act
I'm 100% ignorant of the history of labor and of all philosophical dialectic around it, but I would love to form an opinion on this. Would someone mind steel manning both sides of that argument?
E.g. I have questions like, if I'm the founder of a company and I sell it 10 years later and make most of the upside, did I exploit my employees because they didn't make as much as I did in the end?
Traditional labor theory can make arguments for both, if you put in most of the work, then you deserve most of the benefits. However the case for equal pay is also solid, especially if the fruits of labor are abundant. How much does 5 million give you that 1 million doesn’t, and why shouldn’t you settle for 1 million if it means everyone would get more?
But from a leftist perspective there is a fault in the question (but it is still a good question). Namely that you sell the business. In an ideal left world, you wouldn’t do that. The business belongs to the workers. If the workers can all form a consensus that it is time to leave the business and sell it to another set of workers—those that leave will be bought out basically—then this is a valid scenario. However if under a new leadership, some workers are receiving more benefits then others, then that is exploitation. I would say actually that the new leadership is exploiting their previous workforce by spending the money the workers created by buying a new business without their consent.
So in short, you as the founder of the business that was bought, are enabling exploitation by selling it to a larger organization (unless you sell it to a worker owned and operated business).
Labor unions don't challenge the core structure of capitalism; even when they're working, they mostly serve to give a slightly bigger piece of the pie to workers. And in practice, they are hijacked by a certain bureaucratic caste that mostly optimizes for stability and self perpetuation. They become integrated with state sponsorship, which will never allow for substantive change. For instance, in the USA the general strike was a powerful tool in the arsenal of workers' power and drove substantial wage gains, but disrupted capital too much and as such is banned by the NLRB. Since unions' scope is limited to accounting, law, and mediation, they become mostly administrative organizations staffed increasingly by members of the professional services class. These people can never provide leadership that primarily serves the working class, as their economic interests diverge and they can't do anything that would threaten their social good standing.
Argument against:
An economy dominated by worker co-ops is just wishful thinking. We have no idea how to get from point A to B, and no idea if it would even work. The limited evidence we have for that kind of economic structure comes from post WW2 Yugoslavia and suggests it wouldn't ("they just didn't do it right!" invites the question of how we do do it right). Conventional unions do shift some of the capital pie to workers, and we shouldn't let a very hypothetical best be the enemy of the concrete good. And even if worker co-ops are the ideal, any path that gets us there requires more worker power, so stronger unions would be a good first step to getting us to that point.
I think your question is a bit too focused on the individual and not the system. I think it's actually difficult for founders to share the upside "equitably", whatever that means. Like, are there any examples of it actually happening? I suspect that the acquiring company frequently dictates terms that won't allow you to make every employee a millionaire because then what incentive do they have to work anymore. I think once you get to the multi billion dollar level of wealth it's difficult to get objective advice - many of the people surrounding you are just trying to please you to continue getting their slice of the vast wealth that you control. So just as a human it's hard to navigate that I think (this is me being sympathetic to billionaires, which I'm generally not).
The much easier answer to me is just much higher taxes on wealth. Capitalism is not a system built to share resources equitably, but inequality can be tamed through taxes. If you as a founder see most of the upside, fine, but a lot of it will get redistributed to society through taxes, and theoretically your workers benefit from that. It also means it's not up to the whims of the individual people or companies involved in something like an acquisition to try to make it equitable.
(another way inequality in capitalism can be tamed is through unions, but I don't know if there are any examples of unions being involved in something like an acquisition or IPO in tech)
Suppose you built a successful small company but, suddenly, every employee quit at once. Could your business carry on the next day? Could it survive until you hired and trained replacements?
If the answer is "no" then you have made the case that employees both deserve to share in the business's success and will probably be incentivised by co-owning the company.
Does the janitor deserve as much of the profits as the CTO? Well, what premium do you put on your other employees not getting sick, or injuring themselves?
(Wasn't there a case where a Google chef made a fortune from stocks? Much to the chagrin of some?)
The opposite argument is that those who risk capital are the only ones who deserve the reward. Without investment, a company can't launch or grow. Workers are an operational cost - they are paid for labour and no more deserving of reward than the electricity company. Both provide a service but neither takes a risk.
prices are largely based on supply and demand, not some vague notion of "deserve"
Then we'd better unionize before AI starts doing all the easy stuff
The workers that built the foundations of these companies received stock options or RSUs over a decade ago and reached FATFIRE territory as well. Had they unionized, the companies they worked for wouldn't be able to reinvest as much money into growth, which would be compounded by a lack of external investors. In that case, they would lose to an unionized competitor.
How about the Media moguls? A pretty good argument can be made that media oligarchs produce less value, but they dominate financial and political circles.
The comment about "used to feel bad about making a lot of money" hits home for me, when I compare my wages to other family members who're struggling. Thanks for the perspective, it helps open me up a bit more about this.
Great information in the link, too - helps to consider whether and how a Union might be attractive, under various workplace circumstances.
What are your thoughts?
You should ask your clients or employers.
Even if inequality is rising, so is wealth overall. That’s what Marx misestimated, although it wasn’t his most grievous error.
Poor people in the United States are far richer than rich people of 150 years ago.
I am personally willing to accept the he existence of some billionaires if that’s the price we pay for all this wonderful ness.
There is no material improvement in wealth over the past 20 years, but inequality has grown.
Wealth is produced by innovation, and greater concentratuon of wealth will lead to less innovation.
On the other, high inequality is socially unstable because that is not generally the case.
To be very specific, where he fell short was predicting a secular decline in the rate of profit. This wasn't a crazy error--most early economists also believed it--but it was very wrong, and his analysis of the failure of capitalism rests on that false premise.
The more competition recovered in Japan and elsewhere, the less bargaining power and surplus could be captured by Unions. The Union-driven higher costs of manufacturing also drove outsourcing, off-shoring, and did not lead to higher quality output, (if Unions were producing higher quality that would have kept Japanese-manufactured cars from dominating US car sales shortly after).
Even further, exorbitant labor costs make it worthwhile for manufacturers to do capital investments in automation, and we are seeing the output of that.
The rise in middle class should probably be attributed to investments - in equities, bonds, house purchases. Growing up in Eastern Europe, where only housing investment was an option, and unions were abundant, the middle class that sprouted came from those who invested in property and business. Labor union power and wealth was too politically and corruption influenced to be a sustainable source of growth for the country.
"Labor unions both sustained prosperity, and ensured that it was shared; union bargaining power has been shown to moderate the compensation of executives at unionized firms."
And give a link to a study. This result has been seen across countries, and is the CAUSAL link you're looking for.
It’s this smug idea that the workers are simply too stupid to understand that they should join the special club. Not that they don’t don’t like jt, or have made an informed decision about it, it’s because they are dumb and not capable of advocating for themselves.
I don’t want to be in your weird HOA club. Leave me alone and let me do my work and go get a job in HR so you can be a part of the PMC, which is obviously what you are after anyway.
The last thing I want is for freeloaders to essentially never get fired and for some parasitic entity to collect dues for "bargaining" that usually isn't even worth it by the time they finish negotiations. Especially in todays climate.
Sure the threat of a union may mobilize a company to be more competitive and pay more, but the actual unions themselves just seem to never work out. Expecting an entity that doesn't do much to get you all these benefits is almost insane. When has any union actually got everything they promised? Never, at least not in America.
We then get into:
> In the social sciences, the free-rider problem is a type of market failure that occurs when those who benefit from resources, public goods (such as public roads or public library), or services of a communal nature do not pay for them[1] or under-pay. Free riders are a problem because while not paying for the good (either directly through fees or tolls or indirectly through taxes), they may continue to access or consume it. Thus, the good may be under-produced, overused or degraded.[2] Additionally, it has been shown that despite evidence that people tend to be cooperative by nature, the presence of free-riders cause this prosocial behaviour to deteriorate, perpetuating the free-rider problem.[3]
Collective bargaining is a escape valve against shit employers for employees that don't have a lot of options. A standing union with mandated membership and support from laws and regulations very easily becomes something far more twisted.
More seriously, imagine where not everyone is required to be in the union and think about how easy it then becomes for management to manipulate the environment to the detriment of union employees until the union is wiped out.
The USSR, North Korea, and Cuba all have/had lower levels of inequality than the west...by making everyone poor. That is the easy way to reduce inequality/
What the left fails to realize is that absolute inequality doesn't matter. The real questions is the vast majority feel better off? In China, hundreds of millions are wealthier than they were two generations ago. They have increased absolute inequaliry and increased equality at the same time.
In fact, inequality as a concept is a ridiculous measure. What does equality in that context even mean? That everyone should make the same amount, no matter the ability or position? 90% of humanity would vehemently disagree with that. In fact, people try to flee countries who implement that sort of resource allocation.
In that sense, no I do not support economic equality. Jeff Bezos owning 10% of Amazon worth $X billion does not effect my life in any way. If he owned 50% or 0.001%, instead my life would still be the same.
I'm not sure why I need to be upset about that.
For example, if my workplace has an exclusive contract with one union, and me and my coworkers (who are all union members) don't believe the union is representing us, can we organize to take collective action against both the union and our actual employer?
I known little about unions, so feel free to explain the basics if you need.
An instructive example here is the story of the NUMMI plant in the 1980s, which clearly shows the awfulness of GM's internal culture, the cluelessness of management in the face of existential threat, and how much things can be different, even with the exact same union workers: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/561/nummi-2015
If we want unions that have a collaborative, win-win approach with management, I think we first need management that has that spirit toward the workers. But looking at how US companies are reacting to the recent uptick in unionization, I'm not very hopeful.
Read this. This is a Swedish general office worker union. Yes even IT
Confoederationes commercii delendae sunt
I know a bunch of nurses, and they still are paid badly.
What if without unions, it would be worse?
As money interests have become more politically powerful, it’s harder and harder for employees to organize. You can get fired at Walmart if 4 people are caught talking to each other.
It’s easy to rag on unions, but usually that’s a surface complaint ignoring the factors causing it. Even globalization is an example. There’s nothing etched in stone that says we need to have child labor mining in Africa for rare earth minerals to make iPhones.
Totally this.
We can't pretend that the likes of Amazon et al haven't been repeatedly caught being openly hostile and extremely agressive towards any semblance of a labour rights organization within their workforce, with union busting strategies being discussed, planned, and executed at the VP level. They went as far as executing smear campaigns in the media targeting labour representatives and activists.
No one can claim that unions are in decline due to some unavoidable law of nature when huge multinationals once led by the richest man in the world invest so much time and effort and money at the VP level to sabotage them.
This is a concern troll. If you really cared about child labor abroad, you would unequivocally support globalization as parents don't want their kids to be slaves and more jobs in these countries gives parents more options. Child labor and slavery is caused by a lack of oversight more than anything else, and unions in the US won't help that.
This is an explicit policy choice by the ruling class, and has proven awfully convenient for the owning class.
Of course there is not one single factor determining the economic, technical and social development of countries over decades of time.
But the relationship between unions, the labor movement, and social democratic policies is obvious.
Those in turn have had a large impact on equality and standard of living.
The economy benefits from having a larger base of well off consumers, and a well educated, healthy, non-striking labor force. It's a self reinforcing positive spriral.
I'm going to stop you right there because that shows you're quite literally making this up based on feelings or beliefs. You're totally misrepresenting the history of labor unions. Labor unions were on the rise all throughout the 1800s and early 1900s.
https://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/0113/the-history...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_Sta...
No there isn't. You just didn't read any of the links in the article that it used for support, IE https://www.epi.org/blog/union-decline-rising-inequality-cha...
> The Union-driven higher costs of manufacturing also drove outsourcing, off-shoring, and did not lead to higher quality output, (if Unions were producing higher quality that would have kept Japanese-manufactured cars from dominating US car sales shortly after).
You can't have it both ways in your argument. You set up an initial statement about high Union costs driving outsourcing, and then immediately drop that point as you pivoted to an argument about quality being the driver.
Gousing prices are the cause of higher cause of manufacturing. I am not sure how noone is talking that a worker in the west cannot compete eith a worker in a developing country when his rent is 10x higher. Then peolle have the guts to blame unions.
The "middle class" is a myth and is a propaganda tool for creating dissent. There are really only two classes:
1. Capital-owners. Think Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet, etc; and
2. Workers. This is anyone who trades their labor for an income. This covers everyone from the janitor to LeBron James.
The idea of the "middle class" is to create a division between them and the "lower class". The "middle class" often look down on the "lower class" and lump those who might rely on welfare, etc. The "lower class" will be blamed for many of society's ills.
The truth is there is no division. What you think of as the "middle class" and "lower class" are exactly the same and have way more in common than to the Musks, Bezos's and Buffett's of the world.
Billionaires have class solidarity. The dire situation of stagnant real wages and skyrocketing cost of living is largely a result of workers not having class solidarity.
I am far from alone. And the existence of people like me kind of blows up your neat theory.
Solidarność.
No, there isn't. The causation is self-evident, and also unsurprising since it's the whole point of unions.
It was a moment in history that will not repeated in any of our lifetimes. Anything else against this backdrop is basically a rounding error.
I was alive during the drawdown of US industrial capacity and my entire family was blue collar mostly union workers. In my teens and 20's I worked such jobs. This narrative still rings largely true to me. The amount of outright waste and fraud in these industries at the labor level was astronomical. We were begging to be outcompeted. Combined with managerial incompetence we were doomed.
Here is a list of reasons for not wanting a union[1]:
- I want my underperforming colleagues to be fired quickly. It's unfair and annoying that laggards are protected and free riding off their colleagues' (my) effort, and it leads to ineffective orgs.
- I don't want seniority or rank to be rewarded. It's unfair to young people (me) who are more competent and ambitious, and it leads to ineffective orgs.
- I want to negotiate individually because I believe I will make more money as an outperformer. I don't want a centralized handicapper to blunt my compensation.
- I don't like that unions are rent seeking in nature.
- I don't like that unions often are exploited by organized crime.
- I don't like that unions interfere in the broader political process and democracy via activism and political pressure (e.g look at the fact that the new EV subsidies will be going to everyone except Tesla, it's a perversion).
- I think people should be free to organize, but I don't like that the state grants special asymmetric powers to unions.
- I don't like especially public sector unions that I believe are doing significant damage to society broadly. For example police unions that shielded Chauvin after a large number of complaints.
-in most cases, the employer is able to fire with cause. The union keeps the employer from using layoffs as a weapon.
- pay scales reward loyalty and keeps the workplace stable.
- without the union, you have almost no bargaining power. The union usually gets a better rate for everyone than any one person could have negotiated. This is in fact the point of collective bargaining. Even the presence of a union job site can lift wages across industries. I see this in Oshawa, where the CAW jobs making car bits helps waitresses and sales associates draw higher wages.
-the employer is rent-seeking on their capital. The union balances this.
-unions are not criminal organizations. The teamsters have done some things in the past. If we didn't have so much union busting, there would be more unions competing for workplaces, and this would drive bad unions out of business.
-unions are political, and need legal protections for workers. Tesla will eventually have to deal with a union or treat their workers better than the UAW.
-I don't like that the state grants asymmetric privileges to the employer class, like never prosecuting white collar crimes, and not clawing back exec severances during bankruptcy, and giving them a lower tax rate than their employees.
-there are many things wrong with policing in the us, but all could be fixed with fedral legislation. The unions are aligned with their membership, and doing great work. The wider outcomes are horrible, but that's a good union doing good work.
Something I don't like whenever these discussions come up is the condescending tone, from white collar workers. "Don't these poor people know what's good for them????"
Working class people are capable of thinking for themselves and it's not that uncommon for people to move from a union shop to a non-union shop due to the reasons outlined above.
With your unionized coworkers that might be a possibility. With the business owners that’s a certainty. Do you feel differently about these two groups of people?
Fortunately for your ability to empathize with the plebeians in the regular world, Musk has shown that software companies are probably employing at least twice as many programmers as they need, so this job market should be turning south soon.
After ten-twenty years of being employed half the time and your salary going down with every new job I'm sure you'll be mentally broken down enough to empathize with the blue collar pro-union perspective.
If you mean the federal tax credit, it was the OLD one that stopped going to Tesla (due to the per-model caps in place; caps that any competitor could also reach after enough sales, mind you). The new credit that was signed into law this year does not exclude Tesla (instead, it excludes cars manufactured overseas).
You’ve proven the point about inequality.
America unions are structured differently from Europe and some can become as distrusted by the workers as the corporation.
Your viewpoint is common but it's based on the mental model of "Unions are good. Period end of story."
But for voters like your proverbial Jerry against unions, the mental model is more about tradeoffs like this, "the proposed union by these particular set of organizers has made some promises and wants to charge me $$$ per year to negotiate with the company. Things may turn out better -- or they may turn out worse (e.g. no job)."
As an example, the Amazon union vote in Alabama failed and many blamed Amazon propaganda. No doubt that Amazon crafted many negative messages about unions. But outsiders forget that many voters had older relatives from Alabama coal mines telling them that "the union just took our dues money and didn't do shit for us".
How can pro-union advocates counter those disillusioned union coal miners spreading negative information like that? These are the kinds of scenarios Europeans are unfamiliar with.
Because coal mining is in no way the same as Amazon’s retail business? Now, I will say, some of these folks are beyond hope. In an energy transition documentary done by one of the HGTV property brothers, they interview a coal miner dying of black lung in Appalachia, and they believe that’s the job their kids and grandkids should do versus renewables or “new tech” even when considering there are other options available. [1] Belief systems are deeply ingrained and have defense mechanisms. Persuade the open minded whenever possible, of course, but ignore those who aren’t. The effort is better spent elsewhere. As Max Planck said, “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” Same deal.
I want to get up early, set big goals, work hard on them, and then see the fruits of that hard work. I take immense pride in that, and seeing the output in some sense is a big part of the payment.
Unions don’t allow for this attitude, at least none of the ones that I have ever interacted with. They’re not pro worker, they’re anti work. These people seem to believe that work is bad for workers.
So some people don’t like unions. I don’t like unions.
We have a union at my company and it’s for our creative writing and video production folks. We’re in the media space. These are some of the most effective and driven people I’ve met or had the privilege of working for.
People being lazy (or not) and wanting to do a good job (or not) is mutually exclusive of whether they are in a union (or not).
I do see why you would think this. Many media outlets and corporations spend lots of time making sure everyone thinks unions are just for lazy people. That’s not true, but after decades, many people think this now.
Hypothesis #2: This is a result of European unions having an origin as trade guilds whereas American unions have an origin as political organizers.
You might see the fruits of your hard work, but it's your boss who reaps them.
Perhaps you could serve as an example and role model that could inspire union members like Michael Jordan and Tom Brady to work harder.
I've wondered if this is because unions in the U.S. are considerably different than unions in other places?
This was an interesting article [0] I bumped into titled "Europe could have the secret to saving America’s unions".
It said that in the U.S. unionization happens at the enterprise level, leaving unionized companies at a disadvantage relative to their competitors, so individual companies are very much incentivized to fight against unionization. In other countries when a certain amount of workers call for unionization negotiations happen between the union and a federation representing all employers in the sector, and the entire sector unionizes at once, not individual companies.
The article also talked about employees receiving benefits from their unions in some (fewer) countries, like unemployment insurance, instead of from the government. This incentives workers to join the union and pay union dues, instead of forcing them to do so. The idea was thrown out there that things like health care and retirement plans could also be included with union dues for people in gig-work jobs that would otherwise not receive these benefits.
I'd add that the article didn't address a concern many in the U.S. have about unions protecting under-performing workers, to the detriment of others. I've heard that this is different in other countries, at least to a point, but the article did not get into this. Also in the U.S. there have been a lot of corrupt unions, and public employee unions that receive (expensive) preferential treatment by law, I don't know if these problems exist in other countries.
[0] https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/4/17/15290674/u...
Opposing unions is just going to lead to no changes on the union side and it's going to let the companies be as harsh on workers as they want, even on the "hard workers", because in the end, companies just care about the value that you are producing, not what you once produced. If you aren't valuable now, they'll just throw you out.
All the comments on here that say "well i don't want my lazy coworker to get paid more" highlight how well the "hustle"/"grind" and meritocracy propaganda worked on US workers. The other type of comments that talk about the bad side of unions just seem like bad faith arguments, It's just like the police violence in the US, there are a lot of bad actors and the system is ultimately flawed, but does that mean that there should be no police? No, of course not, so why is that in this context, they are actively against unions and against workers right? It quite literally makes no sense, but then again we're talking about the USA here so the notion of logic just goes out of the window.
I'm an American and I admit to having a very negative view of modern unions. When the word union comes up I immediately think of:
1) The Teamsters and their ties to organized crime 2) Police unions that shield officers from consequences 3) Teacher unions that prevent awful teachers from being fired 4) Ridiculous rules around duties on film/theater sets 5) The UAW is seen by many former workers as letting them down. Many other people feel the UAW bears some responsibilities for plant closures. 6) As supermarkets in my area started to unionize the service noticeably suffered. 7) Several friends were Verizon workers and felt that they were screwed by their union. 8) It is common for unions to fund candidates that many workers do not like.
If someone like myself has a negative view of unions it is up to people like yourself to change that perception if you want unions to gain traction in the US. Distrust of unions in the US are not always (usually?) driven by ignorance or propaganda. Unions themselves have done a very good job of alienating workers.
Maybe urs are just shit :)
To properly weigh all of the tradeoffs, you might consider asking if those Twitter jobs would even emerge in the European system and if there's a link between European labor standards and the lack of influential European tech companies. Europe is a large market that is filled with many capable and educated technology workers, yet almost always all of the tech companies we're ever talking about are American. Why is this?
What a lazy take. Unions only protect their current members. It's common for companies to hire fewer people or hire more people at only part time schedules because full time employees are required to cost exaggeratedly more or are harder to fire due to union contracts. What organization represents the people who are unemployed or underemployed because of unions? These people are much worse off than if the unions didn't exist.
* Note: I used "I", but I don't personally feel this way. If I found out a fast food worker made more than me as an engineer, I wouldn't care. In some ways they work harder. Also, I don't think CEOs bring as much worth to a company as engineers do and they make way more, so...
I see this "embarrassed millionaires" line a lot. It seems unbelievably cynical. Do you really think a meaningful fraction of workers are thinking "I'll oppose unions because even though I'm hurting workers, it'll be good for me when I'm rich"?
And there actually are bad unions. I worked in a casino and out union was a non-striking union so even if the casino gave use some shitty contract we weren't able to strike. So what was the point?
Or is this just the prevailing narrative that's been sold to us over the past 30-50 years, and there are too few actual unions and union jobs left to effectively counter it?
Yea, it can be frustrating be barred from jobs, like construction, being a non-member, or being forced to pay union dues to a union you feel is doing nothing for you.
Small, company-sized unions have always been a lot more appealing to me than the huge behemoths the US currently has.
> Reactance is an unpleasant motivational reaction to offers, persons, rules, or regulations that threaten or eliminate specific behavioral freedoms. Reactance occurs when an individual feels that an agent is attempting to limit one's choice of response and/or range of alternatives.
When I think about the people who I know who are anti-union, they all have high reactance as a trait. If I were to try to change their mind, it would be to frame their non-union environment as more freedom-limiting than the unions alternative re: workplace democracy etc.
1. American capitalists have waged a very effective propaganda campaign against unions and
2. American unions have had a history of corruption. (Or maybe I just think that because I've been taken in by the propaganda campaign.)
It seems as though decades of corporate puppets have done a wonderful job of convincing the blue-collar worker that unions are corrupt and exist solely to milk worker's dues.
I don't understand it either.
Unions? you should be thankful!
Update: also, I went and scanned the linked article (because I'm that type). They're credible authors, but they themselves explicitly say: "In reporting correlations between unionization and managerial pay, we are not necessarily able to establish whether unions cause differences.... We try a variety of strategies to understand these issues, however each is imperfect."
Yes, but that's a different correlation vs causation issue. The point is, the phenomenon of unions equalizing pay, on the company (micro) level (which has been reproduced in other countries and time periods), can be considered to be a causal explanation for the phenomenon of rising inequality when unions decline, in the society at large.
That is very much a statement about correlation. Otherwise it would say, "Unions' Decline CAUSED Inequality". But, to anyone with a passing knowledge of statistics, that is clearly an impossible claim to make. This is one time series realization for one country.
Let's go further. Is there any mention of causality in the article. And I do mean quantified causality. The answer is "no". Is there even any mention of correlation? Again, the answer is "no".
Let's keep going. Let's evaluate the aims and intent of the article. Let's start with EPI, the publisher of this article. The Chair of EPI is "Elizabeth H. Shuler ... president of the AFL-CIO, a federation of 58 unions and 12.5 million working people". Other board members include current and former union leadership from the United Steelworkers, the UAW, the Nonprofit Professional Employees Union, Service Employees International Union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the Communication Workers of America, and the American Federation of Teachers. All huge unions.
In other words, this publication is not a work of science. It is not a credible academic publication. It is the motivated, self interested rhetoric of union leadership.
A quick glance at the chart and one could also show a link between federal income tax rates and executive compensation.
If you are taxed 73% you simply don’t have any incentive to “increase inequality” — you pay someone to show your income as a lot less than it really is. The real irony is the Reagan tax cuts resulted in more revenue because it just wasn’t worth the trouble to dodge paying taxes anymore.
Correlation, causation, lies, statistics, who knows?
More seriously, my wife and I got into an argument about the effects of unions once and this was the best summary I could find: https://www.heritage.org/jobs-and-labor/report/what-unions-d...
(yes it is by the Heritage foundation so their top-line summary probably has some ideological bias but the list of study summaries at the bottom is great) Generally, studies found that unions benefitted the unionized workers at the expense of the most and least skilled workers. And was slightly bad for company investment/earnings long term. But by far my favorite result (and the best study design from the list, imo) was a regression-discontinuity analysis that found no effect of unionization whatsoever:
"Compares companies whose workers voted narrowly for a union with companies whose workers voted narrowly against a union. Since the difference between winning and losing is close to random, this provides an estimate of the causal effect of randomly organizing a given company. Finds that workers who vote to join a union do win certification but that unions have essentially no effect on the firm or the workers. Wages do not rise, and employment and productivity do not fall. Unionized companies are no more likely to go out of business than are non-union firms."
DiNardo, John, and David S. Lee, "Economic Impacts of New Unionization on Private Sector Employers: 1984-2001," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, Vol. 119, No. 4 (November 2004), pp. 1383-1441.
Everything going to the top, and nothing going to those on the bottom.
> The USSR, North Korea, and Cuba all have/had lower levels of inequality than the west...by making everyone poor.
Seems like your examples also have things going to the people at the top.
A comment from a few years ago that I saved:
> If we suppose that the goal of society is to produce the greatest utility, and that the utility wealth provides an individual is sub-linear (i.e. twice as much money makes you less than twice as happy), then inequality is inefficient resource allocation.
> However, we also suppose that some level of inequality can lead to greater productivity, and thus greater utility overall. The question is then what level produces the best outcome? […]
Personally I think lower inequality in our society would be a good thing - but also with political influence there are more direct faults/solutions.
1) It's always paternalistic to try and explain to people how they should feel, especially when the social group in question is 55-60% of a country of 330M, it's not a matter of being right or wrong. It's a matter of Tilting at the windmills vs. not Tilting at the windmills.
2) It's impossible to solve inequality because every complex system is a Pareto system, however Pareto says nothing about the speed of the turnover of the top 20%.
> The USSR, North Korea, and Cuba all have/had lower levels of inequality than the west
> In China, hundreds of millions are wealthier than they were two generations ago. They have increased absolute inequaliry and increased equality at the same time.
Sources? Do you have any data or metrics available for your claims (outside of Facebook memes)?
> In fact, people try to flee countries who implement that sort of resource allocation.
Yes, rich people, lol. People who GET access to things like housing and healthcare remain.
[0]https://khn.org/news/highly-paid-traveling-nurses-fill-staff...
Bezos could do that with $100 million. Lobbying is not expensive.
If you open a branch office and do your own careful hiring (just like HQ would have), that can work.
Unless of course we have another world war, which isn't really unlikely given the shortages and events climate change will bring in the future.
I'd rather work in the warehouse, personally, but I can certainly see how the positions are analogous to the level we could compare expected results of a union.
# 1: Swedish unions are very different from US ones. They understand their companies and the country needs to be competitive on the world market. I have my problems with their power and policies, but they're vastly better for society than the US version.
# 2: The Swedish unions formed the Social Democratic party, that's been the main political power center of the country for a century. Don't know what relations they may have had with guilds in the 1800s.
American unions evolved in another direction. Because there was no serious risk of a communist revolution, the employers had no need to comromise. Both the employers and the unions remain more confrontational than in Europe.
1.) A grueling apprenticeship period in which you would work very long hours for very little pay. I could be wrong but I think this was a several year long process.
2.) You could skip that process if you were vouched for by an existing union member. In practice, this often meant that membership was passed down through families.
I understand that it’s similar for firefighters.
You are the perfect example - someone who's managed to squairrel away a tiny fraction of the capital pie and now imagines himself to be in a different class.
Just because you now own a sandwind does not you a capitalism make.
This is the accepted explanation, which implies that the rate of profit rises over time
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okishio%27s_theorem
Btw, marx predicted that capitalism is inevitably destroyed due to tendency for the rate of profit to fall. I believe capitalism is the strongest that it's ever been right now.
Of course, the GP might be from a country with another experience.
Contrast that with countries where unions (like health care) are not tied to an employer. The whole dynamic is very different, and I think less adversarial between unions and employees.
In the US if you have a problem with your union, you are out of luck. Make waves, and the union will make your life hell. It's a second layer of rent seeking management.
Ever since the SEIU tried to take a cut of all government benefits to families who care for disabled people in MN, it was obvious that unions here exist to serve only themselves.
No, he hasn’t; he hasn’t even shown that Twitter was doing that.
How did they end up not having enough cash on hand to cover minor emergencies, then? How are they going bankrupt over healthcare costs - even when insured through their job - while having to worry about not being able to take a day off?
Compare this to a worker, most of whom can’t afford to go without paychecks for a single month. Meaning that the loss of a job is far riskier then the investor’s supposed risk of loosing their investment.
This transaction between an investor and a worker (if you look at it as a transaction) is always biased significantly towards the investor, they will grab proportionally more of the profit and tank less of the loss. So I would say the average worker is both risking a lot more and reaping less of the benefits.
I think the above comment is saying that we can have globalization and sane work conditions simultaneously.
You seem to be implying that colonization is synonymous with globalization, but let me dispel this notion. The problematic part of colonization were the protectionist aspects of it. The Congolese were unable to compete for the same administrative positions of that the Belgians enjoyed.
Now you tell me how unions in the US are supposed to help the DRC.
I said that globalization is an example of money driving policy at the exclusion of all else. High minded bullshit about resource extraction making your life better is similar to the bullshit narratives used as justification of colonialism.
I studied some basic economics.
The goal for a player seems to be to obtain the maximum, giving the least.
For his very role, the CEO will pay you the least amount he can get away with. Ok he won't think of a few dollars or cents, because it's not worth to think about it… but when you negotiate your salary he would give you a negative raise if he could get away with it. And during normal work days he wants you to work as much as possible.
Of course a good CEO understands that working 20h today means that you won't do a good job tomorrow… but the long term goal is that.
He only cares about employees, their compensation, and their health as much as it impacts these things. If he is altruistic, he'll care about them, but prioritize them after the above (if he's a "good CEO")
Give you an example: I know someone who owns a business making $5-6m PROFIT (take home, cash in the bank) a year. They have about 30-40 warehouse workers.
When wages were going up, they were freaking out about having to pay these workers $20/hr vs the $15 they were getting.
Sure, it's like $500k/yr. But seriously. The greed is astounding.
BTW the execs (I had access to their financials) were getting raises in the order of 2x over the next 2yrs. That's right. Double their salary over the next two years (way more than $500k/yr, btw!)
For what it is worth, I do run my own business, and yes - I give what I can to my employees.
proof of doing is in large part responsible for how grueling and grinding tech interviews are. you don't hire nurses by asking them to demonstrate operating on a cat. and to some degree the grueling and grinding is there because the degree doesn't indicate anything at all, and desirable companies ending up having to process a lot of underqualified applicants.
Though, I don’t imagine that can ever be governed into place, given that socialism and communism ultimately end in totalitarianism.
It’ll likely take many generations and many revolutions, but I do hope someday we figure out how to stop excusing our selfishness and naturally give until everyone else has what they need.
We could create utopia today if we could successfully fight the urges of our monkey brains.
But in the near-term, I think the best we can do is survive and chip away at the notion that just because we can take more, we don’t have to.
[0] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-gdp-per-c... [1] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/change-energy-gdp-per-cap... [2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-per-capita-caloric-... [3] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/life-expectancy?tab=chart...
The thing I'd like to focus on isn't nerd prestige, but good jobs, as the article was about inequality as nothing fixes social alienation and inequality more than lots of people having a good income and being part of society. These big tech companies, whatever major negatives they provide to the culture in many ways, at least employ a lot of people and give them a path to being part of that comfy middle class.
If the concern is inequality, then is a pile of great paying jobs with worse labor standards better than a few ok paying jobs with great labor standards? See where I'm going with that?
These are complex issues...I don't think I have all of the answers, but I just want to point out that there might be some tradeoffs to the good sounding things like unions and much better labor protections.
Because EU is a puppet of USA and doesn't have strong enough protections to stop USA companies to acquire every single startup that exists in EU.
Most of that amazing USA made software is not done in USA. For example some of that is made by me… a guy who has never been in USA.
oh and the Linux kernel.
Is your brain broken?
They were responding to a post specifically asking about Americans' feelings toward unions. That made it pretty clear to me where his points were coming from.
If they were responding from Finland I'd be a little confused why they were responding at all.
In general, nobody is constrained to just discussing USA unions but the particular subthread[1] that you're in which was started by gp (Zeyka) was asking specifically about America. And that's probably because this thread's article is about American unions.
That's why your clarification (to poster wallawe) was perceived as redundant and out of place.
- I don't want free speech because it is unfair to award lazy thinking free riding off established publications.
- I don't want free speech because it is often exploited by terrorists.
- I think people should be free to say things but I don't think it should grant them special protection from the government.
etc.
It isn't an exact comparison but that also isn't the point.
Exhibit A of poorly informed: grandparent poster seriously thinking he has more individual bargaining power against trillion dollar corporations than a collective bargaining agreement would.
Exhibit B: grandparent poster thinking collective bargaining _must_ entail many aspects like seniority based compensation that are totally optional.
Tom Brady is in the NFL players association. Tom Cruise is in the Screen Actors guild. Naive techies think being good at leetcode hard gives them bargaining power. A lot of ex Tweeps are getting a wake up call.
The only reason techies had the illusion of negotiation leverage is that they were generating such absurdly high revenue for their employer, the slice they got seemed huge compared to the rest of the country’s gutted middle class. Factor in inflation, housing, and that Wall St is now gunning hard to bring tech compensation down, and you’ll realize techies are the last gasp of Americas dying middle class, and that really pisses off activist hedge funds . See Elliott Managements recent takeover of Pinterest so they could “re-level” employees.
Read the emails between Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin w.r.t high tech class action lawsuit. Read about Google hiring union busting consultant firms.
If unions didn’t work, tech execs wouldn’t be so terrified of them.
Yes, poor people should also unionize. And yes, unfortunately a lot of their options are as broken and corrupt as their employers.
That doesn’t change the fundamental fact that collective bargaining is the _only_ answer .
Worse still is that these firms have been caught collectively bargaining against workers through illegal secretive non-compete clauses. Wage suppression has been going on for years, even while these companies have been at the very top of thriving businesses.
It’s simply not a question of affordability. These companies did it because they could.
I’d also like to point out that much of the union activity of a hundred years ago was also about poor working conditions, and not just compensation. Much of that was quelled by increasing government regulations that protected workers against exploitation. Is the government adequately performing this job?
You think that has anything to do with their compensation? Tom Brady has won how many Super Bowls? Tom Cruise has had how many blockbuster movies?
The opposite should be true if unions were the great equalizers, no single actor/athlete would be making hundreds of millions a year and all of them would be making enough to buy a house in Beverly Hills.
This makes no sense. Two people that are in unions are doing the thing you say they can't. What in the world?
The most important quality of life metric is mental health.
There is no way around the fact that mental health is heavily impacted by the fact that citizens feel worthless when they assess their social status vis-a-vis the top 1%
And no amount of stuff will solve this problem because social status is a zero-sum game.
It's one of those problems that simply cannot be solved.
Revolts spark because people have nothing to lose
Mass depression, bad mental health on a country level and suicides happen when people feel worthless
Even billionaires and millionaires who dont own media companies have outsized influence. They can fund politicians they prefer to an extent that a rival might not be able to match. They can pay for lobbyists. There are a myriad of ways that dollars turn into votes without a mustachioed man walking around with a bag of money being involved. Mass movements aside the working class isnt out there propping up politicians.
Murdoch's own papers claim credit for election victories. I don't know the exact conversion rate from dollars to votes, but it's absurd to suggest one doesn't exist and that Murdoch's organizations don't know what it is.
2) To the extent I buy either argument, I don't think it's subtle that my sympathies lie with the criticisms of an economy of worker driven co-ops.
A highly successful privately owned company leads to a handful of people with a ton of money and free time, which they can use to found other privately owned companies.
Can you get away without initial starting capital if your startup has a very low chance of success? You need someone to be willing to eat the 99% risk of failure in exchange for proportionally high returns.
I imagine the same problem is much ameliorated if you were opening a pizza shop, a daycare, or a hair salon, where the business is more predictable?
I mean, the intended purpose of unions is to serve their members, at the expense of non members.
Is it new/unique curriculum? Something else?
In the US those are intertwined:
> The court held 5-4 that the free speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations, including nonprofit corporations, labor unions, and other associations.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._FEC
More speech for the rich.
As an absurd example, let's say I made a law that said that people with brown eyes can slap people with blue eyes. In this world, slapping people and eye-colour would be intertwined. This doesn't mean it's inherently a problem with brown eyes, or that eye colour and slapping are inherently intertwined. The obvious fix for this would be to change the rule rather than to change everyone's eye colours.
As in the US wealth and political donations are linked, the initial problem is that those two are linked together. There is nothing inherent that says you need to reduce income inequality to reduce the impact of wealth on politics - i.e. you can reduce the impact by changing legislation so the two aren't intertwined.
edit: If you want to do something politically that would harm my business, I can just silence you, have you jailed, or kill you. No campaign finance necessary. I can sponsor debates about the degree to which you molest children in my newspapers and on my television channels every day.
Hell, the money that goes to campaigns that isn't wasted to party graft just goes back to media owners, anyway. It's like US foreign aid, denominated in store credit at US favored contractors.
You absolutely do. The most powerful bargaining power of all: the power of the alternative. It's also called "pay me, or I leave" (most often accompanied by "I have an outside offer"). I exercised this power a few times in my career. I did not need any union to bargain for me.
Why would you want a less powerful version of the same thing? Even if you don't involve your union, you can still do what you're describing.
You've gained nothing unique by avoiding the union.
I doubt you can. Your boss will tell you he can't pay you more than what's on the grid negotiated with the union. My wife works in a place with a union (and is a member of it), and there is such a grid. Nobody even thinks individual bargaining is a possibility.
The tech industry has arguably developed quickly because people move around a lot, taking best practices with them. Workplace stability might appear locally great, but it hurts the industry as a whole.
/s
Managed just fine.
Thankfully.
Lets try tougher ones - are markets captured by cartels functional? Does OPEC inhibit free market or are they free market in action?
When tech companies create anti-poaching agreement to supress wages, is that functional?
That is one structure, and it probably was predominant in the past because unions were historically in factories where workers were more interchangeable and had set tasks at a production line station.
Another is more 'guild-like': Jane Smith who is Waitress #2, and Tom Cruise who plays Ethan Hunt in Mission Impossible, are both part of the same union/guild, but one is able to negotiate a much higher salary. But they have the same 'base' level of protection with regards to working conditions, pension, health care, etc.
Certainly Tom Cruise can go above and beyond those 'base' levels, but the union/guild simply provides a floor which everyone is entitled to.
There's no reason why a union contract could not negotiate things like working conditions, health/child care, pensions/retirement funds, etc, but leave salaries out of the collective agreement. Or perhaps have pay bands, with retention/performance bonuses that are out side of the scope of the agreement, and are 100% discretionary to the company: everyone gets a floor, but there's no ceiling.
No, no immigrants in tech are going to want to vote for a union because a lot of its members think immigrants are part of the playing field that needs to be "leveled".
Basically the american idea that deserving people (aka myself) will magically prevail.
You know that, and I know that, but the right wing has been pushing anti-union, anti-worker, pro-corporate propaganda for several decades now. That propaganda also dovetails with the preexisting Protestant work ethic and labor theory of value that have been pretty solidly in the American consciousness since...well, basically before its founding as a country.
All that combined means that for people who aren't raised in a progressive, pro-union environment, and who don't encounter such an environment until their belief systems are fairly well-established, the default background noise is pretty much "Unions? Why would you need that, you pansy? Real Men are islands unto themselves, work hard, and are paid exactly what they're worth for that work. That's how you know the poor deserve to be poor!"
> meritocracy isn't a thing
So now that we've established that meritocracy is obviously a real thing, we have to ask what evidence you have that a meritocracy wouldn't exist in other fields, like programming for instance.
You are free to disagree, of course, but being smug about it is rude.
Any reading of my response as judgemental is a perversion of intention and I'd encourage anyone doing so to get curious and assume positive intent rather than reading it with malicious subtext. Something is only pathological if it negatively impacts someone's life.
Edit: I can’t help but feel like I’m being trolled, so this is where the conversation ends.
I'm fully aware that there will be attempts to naturalize "freedom loving." That's the interesting thing about psychology and I suppose in this case sociology, particulars are often universalized into a neurosis. It's funny how this pattern holds.
Why did that happen? Did corrupt unions kill the goose that laid the golden eggs? Or was it poor management of the automotive giants that allowed overseas companies to take market share. Did wages across the board fall behind inflation or was the automotive fundamentally changed by automation.
I wish I understood what happened since I actually lived through that period.
I wonder if Germany was more aggressive with tariffs to protect automakers from competition.
It's somewhat the opposite actually. Germany taxes imported cars, but at least it still allows them. At the behest of automakers and unions, the US banned imported cars entirely in 1988. This allowed American automakers to profit despite stagnating. It wasn't until foreign subsidiaries started capturing market share from the US that American automakers were forced to innovate again.
During the 1950s the U.S. had invested huge amounts of money into Japanese manufacturing in order to have a cheap place to outsource labor to, and as a good will gesture after what happened during World War II. The Japanese, taking technology from American manufacturers, started making their own advancements. By the late 1960s they were on-par with the Americans in ingenuity, but lacking in quality. This applied to everything from their radios to their cars. At the same time, the Japanese yen was inflated compared to the dollar, making it a good idea to export Japanese goods to the U.S. so that Japanese companies could then trade in U.S. dollars internationally. The goods were cheaper to manufacture and import, and it made companies like Matsushita and JVC quite a lot of money they'd use in the 1970s. Toyota and Nissan were also picking up on this, selling the Toyota Crown and Corona in the U.S. as lower cost luxury options and the Nissan Bluebird (as the Datsun 510) as a cheaper alternative to European sports sedans.
In the U.S., by 1965, GM had a majority control of every market. They had done this by essentially siloing every division and making them work on their own, with their own funds, with no collaboration between divisions without executive permission. Permission which was often not granted. This worked fine for the European and Australian divisions like Vauxhall and Holden, but it was starting to strain the U.S. divisions. Then in 1968 three disasters occurred simultaneously for GM. Semon "Bunkie" Knudsen defected to Ford. Chrysler began courting Mitsubishi for captive imports of cheaper Japanese cars. And Lee Iaccocca perfected the personal luxury coupe with the upcoming 1970 Ford LTD and Lincoln Continental Mark IV, the dominant car template of the 1970s.
In 1973 you had a massive recession thanks the the 1973 OPEC Crisis and the 1973 Stock Market crash. These new huge vehicles that Iaccocca had gotten the U.S. addicted to were suddenly much more expensive to buy and run thanks to being opulent and thirsty. Ford was not immune to this, despite the success of the Lincoln Continental and Mercury Grand Marquis. This worked in Chrysler's favor however, as they had both the Dart in the wings and their captive Mitsubishis. Chevrolet meanwhile had blown public trust with the Vega in 1970 thanks to it rusting on the dealer's lots and destroying it's engine within the first month of ownership. Then once again they took a hit with the 1971 Pontiacs and Buicks, both of which were poorly received due to polarizing styling and issues like the trunks filling with water thanks to a ventilation engineering oversight. Chrysler had misread the market with their 1968 styling, and it took costly changes to slowly update the body dies to be in line with industry styling by 1973.
This primed the Japanese manufacturers to swoop in and take over. Datsun struck first, with the B210 and the 720 taking spots in the economy car and mini truck markets that the Big Three had ignored. Honda hit next with the Civic CVCC, capitalizing on the 1973 OPEC Crisis to provide a fuel efficient vehicle to panicking Americans who weren't satisfied with the disappointing Ford Pinto and Dodge/Plymouth Aspen/Volare twins. Toyota came in last, but strongest, introducing the third generation Corolla and reworking the Celica slightly for 1976 to fit American tastes. With the combination of Americans scrambling for smaller and more fuel efficient cars, the weak Japanese yen compared to the dollar, cheaper Japanese manufacturing due to automation, and cheaper Japanese steel thanks to being untreated and of thinner gauge, Japanese cars sold like crazy after 1973 and spread from California all the way to the East Coast.
This of course caused the Big Three to panic. GM tried several times to fix the Vega and it's siblings, only managing to make just as bad a car each time in the Monza and then the Cavalier. The 1980 X cars were a disaster, with the Chevrolet Citation and it's sisters driving customers away from GM for life. The failed 1985 downsizing of the full sized cars under Ed Cole's direction left every division's cars looking like clones of eachother both inside and out. And finally the dilution of the Oldsmobile brand by naming every car Cutlass killed their last golden goose. The GM10 "W-body" cars, meant to come out by the 1984 model year and engineered to the standards of the 1980 Honda Civic, ended up five years and hundreds of millions of dollars over budget when they arrived in 1988 as 1989 model years.
Ford disregarded the 1970s oil crises almost entirely, continuing to bank on large personal luxury coupes to keep them afloat. A token gesture was placing the Mustang on the Pinto platform for 1974 and playing it up as a baby Thunderbird rather than the performance heavy brute it was in the 1960s. By 1978 these tactics had nearly bankrupted the company, forcing a scramble to the Fox platform as they quickly downsized everything and killed vaunted nameplates to scrub any ill will from the brand. Were it not for the continued sales of the Lincoln Continental Mark V and the development of the Tempo and American Escort, Ford might've followed the path of AMC in the 1980s.
Chrysler was... Chrysler. They were up and down like a spring as they had always been. They suffered through 1973, suffered the failure of the Aspen and Volare, suffered the death of their profit ensuring muscle cars due to rising insurance costs and the fuel crisis, and suffered having to sell an ailing Rootes Group and essentially leaving the European market. But before they sold the Rootes Group they filched a rather interesting piece of technology in the Talbot Horizon. A car which they reverse engineered into the Dodge Omni, the basis of the K-Cars that Lee Iaccocca would champion and eventually pervert throughout his stay at Chrysler during the 1980s. As such Chrysler was the best positioned to survive the 1980s.
But then we come back to Europe. To the already small, fuel efficient, high quality cars that GM had thought no threat in the 1960s. If, during the 1970s, GM had brought over vehicles such as the Opel Rekord and Vauxhall Astra, they would never have had to waste money developing the Vega, the Monza, and the Cavalier. The cars already fit the market GM was targeting. The same was true of Ford. If Ford had brought over the Ford Escort, Taunus, and Granada, they wouldn't have had any need to develop the Pinto, Tempo, and Fairmont. Detroit was too insular and xenophobic to take the option that would have saved them. An option they would inevitably end up adopting thirty five years later anyways.
Detroit died for a number of reasons. But the main reason was the pride of Ford and GM.
Yes, go look up % of costs going to labor for the USA automotive industry back during the glory days of Detroit. The only reason it worked at all was there wasn't a fraction of the global competition.
This was unimaginable wealth compared to what was available back home. You had all 3 meals and even meat! Meat! The luxury.
sauce: I'm from one of those European countries where 1 in 6 people emmigrated between 1880 and 1920. Literature from the time (that we read in school) contrasts the local situation with the riches of America as reported by people who sent letters.
It's often actually much cheaper to live somewhere in the suburbs where you can't walk everywhere, because everything is designed around cars.
Living in a semi-crowded city, near your family and friends, should be the default, cheap option. Instead we've wasted about 10 trillion dollars pave the entire continent. Possibly the most expensive mistake ever made in history.
I see people with houses, multiple brand new cars, TVs in every room, and who take a vacation at least once a year complain about the economy their entire life.
Watch a few news reports on poverty in America and you will see that a decent percentage of working adults live with their entire family in a small cramped apartment, can’t afford any vacation, and likely can’t afford emergency medical care if it comes up.
And even those people in the suburbs with all those TVs could have more financial security and work fewer hours if our economy was more fairly arranged.
The key thing to understand is the difference in how precarious those situations are: that affluent suburbanite has some shiny things but their cash flow is much higher than their wealth. A TV in every room is a rounding error on the $11k/year each of those new cars costs on average, and over the course of someone’s working life that kind of thing makes a huge difference in net worth.
The American healthcare system factors into this significantly: if your income depends on showing up to work daily, all of that can go away with a single health incident which leaves you unable to work. A truly rich person is considerably more likely to be able to ride something like that out.
Similarly, retirement is a source of stress for many Americans. Having given mortgage processors and car companies millions of dollars over your life won’t help you much then.
In some senses, you don't even have to go to the suburbs to be unimaginably better off now than it was possible to be a century ago, because a century it was not possible, at any price, to make a weekend trip between New York and London; to be immune to the common forms of seasonal flu; to have a video call with someone; to get penicillin; 3D printers, and indeed all CNC machines more complicated than a loom controlled by punched cards, would've been fantasy; and so much more besides.
TVs are cheap now. So are 3D printers, travel, and phones.
Instead, they are regressing. If we are comparing to 100 years ago, we sure should have been doing better! If we compare to 50 years ago, there are some key ways where we have regressed within the United States.
The key here is that when we are speaking of standards of living, we are speaking within some narrow contexts. In the developing world, standards have blossomed. Within the United States, the GDP has continued to grow but the value hasn't spread equally.
I can say that in the lower 50% of people in the US, the standard of living has markedly decreased. For 50-80%, it's mildly increased. For the top 20%, it's doing just fine, but it's never been a better time to be wealthy as the pathway for compounding growth on wealth has never had so many tools.
But I believe that compassion is not inherent in capitalism and people’s individual compassion is often in conflict with the goals of the system.
There's a film by the late economist Walter Williams called Good Intentions that is all about that kind of stuff.
I personally see minimum wage as a default choice for employers if it’s enough to staff their business.
Traditionally, it has been too hard to track fractional ownership of an asset and calculate a share of profits. And most workers prefer cash up front rather than waiting for a payday which might not materialise for decades.
I'm not going to go full blockchain/NFT on this idea. But it is easy to see how in the future a long-lived guild of tradespeople could build your house at a discounted price now in return for a share of the sale profits in the future.
I don't know if that's a good or bad thing though.
He's not entitled to additional value the recipient of the work may or may not get from him completing the job, unless he negotiates that up front. It seems likely that no one in their right mind would agree to pay the carpenter profit sharing for every transaction that may occur from that building. They'd find another carpenter.
A carpenter is entitled to the fruits of their labor, which can adequately be provided with money.
I commend you for knowing logical fallacies. Though it would be even better if you were able to demonstrate those fallacies instead appealing to your own authority.
>> A carpenter is entitled to the fruits of their labor, which can adequately be provided with money.
I agree. Unfortunately, some people here claim developers working for google are entitled to their share of google's profits and carpenters working for said developers are not entitled to a share of profits from what those developers earn.
At Google's scale, everyone is replaceable, including Jeff Dean, Sundar Pichai, and everyone else who you think is "instrumental."
The company can't succeed without the workers. The company also can't succeed without capital. Both deserve to get a cut of the rewards.
Plus, naming 6 random European tech companies doesn't prove anything. Every country has tech companies. How many exactly doesn't really matter in this comparison, what matters is revenues and market cap.
Consider that the US tech sector is worth significantly more than the tech sectors of EU + UK + Switzerland + Norway combined. It blows the entire EEA out of the water. To put it simply, the US hosts most of the largest tech companies by market cap and revenues.
If you take the top 50 tech companies in the world by market cap[1], the only European companies on the list are ASML, Booking, SAP, Schneider Electric and Dassault Systemes. 6 out of 50 for Europe, while the US has about 40 out of 50, while also claiming the highest six spots at the top.
Ouch! That's not even a competition. It's why American tech workers get paid so much. Not because they don't get government mandated PTO and sick leave, or can get fired more easily, or don't pay more taxes for unemployment and socialized healthcare, as is the common myth, but because the companies they work for are so obscenely rich compared to European ones and a lot more numerous.
/QED
[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-companies-b...
The economy is like a singular, gigantic vehicle we all occupy. It abides certain natural laws (such as human nature, and the scarcity of certain resources), but the vehicle itself is designed by some of our fellow passengers (and its design does not optimize for the things many of us feel it should).
Not all businesses are equal, not all benefits are equal.
When I worked in a call center the only insurance that wasn't pure garbage cost me $300 a paycheck.
Sorry but it's expensive being poor in America.
Just because you say the word "business" doesn't make insurance cheaper for small players.
For example Tesla has a market value greater than every European carmaker combined, having gone from approximately 0 annual car deliveries to over a million in just a few years while revolutionizing electric travel. Or with space x developing reusable rockets that have utterly transformed the industry. These companies will contribute to economic dynamism and wealth creation for years and decades.
Macron said of American space companies, “Unfortunately they’re not European, but they took a bet”. Perhaps at a certain level you need people with lots of money who are willing to risk it
I prefer not being subject to their whims.
I was referring to this comment.
However, I think you're misapprehending quite how much worse things were a century ago. Now the poor may struggle to afford a PET/CT/MRI/ultrasound scan, or a PCR test, or a dose of antibiotics, or a heart (lung, liver, kidney, bladder, pancreas, ovary, …) transplant, but 100 years ago they did not exist. Diabetes only stopped being lethal just over 100 years ago, the first successful human treatment in the beginning of 1922. Smallpox no longer exists. And so on.
I’m talking about unfair power imbalances today. This has nothing to do with the past.
We have? Because… a football match was played? What did it prove exactly?
Well you define "better players" as "those making more money"… so in the end you are proving your statement via tautology. Which is meaningless.
In any case, even admitting that meritocracy in football works (it probably doesn't)… so what? Most workers aren't professional football players.
It's obvious when I visit a city / countryside with poor transit and pedestrian infrastructure how much more I suffer. It's so damned obvious, it's the first thing that screams out to me right when I land / pull in / ride up.
I can't understand what literate person would take issue with the core of your assertions.
Shitty slumlord apartments are what everyone wants to escape from, in my experience.
> Living in a semi-crowded city, near your family and friends, should be the default, cheap option.
What kind of dwelling, apart from apartments, are there in a "semi-crowded city"? They may not be high-rises, but even if it's a "multi-family house", it's still "apartments". There's only a (usually thin) wall separating your room from your neighbor's. This is one of the main aspects people typically hate about apartments.
employment is a two way agreement, why does the government need to set a price floor for labor? anyone who doesn't want to work for $4/h can just decide not to, but the law makes it illegal for anyone who would rather do that than be unemployed. Wages generally correlate with experience and these laws are robbing teenagers and young adults of valuable experience years.
There’s a margin between the price you can sell a product for and the price you decide to sell a product for.
The same applies to wages. There’s a wage that you can offer and still have a healthy business, then there’s the wage you do offer because someone is willing to take the job.
Maximizing pricing and minimizing wages based on the limits you can get away with is the problem. Human decency should be a factor in setting prices and wages, not just strictly market economics and opportunity.
Insulin is too expensive and minimum wage is less than what’s needed to live reasonably well.
Those who control prices and wages can and should fix those problems. The government shouldn’t even have to intervene.
They do, but my point is, as a species, we should do better to improve conditions for others when we have the opportunity.
price elasticity is irrelevant. if someone is paid $10/h and earns their employer $11/h, and the city they live in raises minimum wage to $12/h, that person is now unemployed
> minimum wage is less than what’s needed to live reasonably well
this is irrelevant and an example of how "minimum wage" is an insidious term that hides the fact that there is still a (legal) minimum of $0: unemployment. Unemployment is not better than a low wage that can help you get valuable experience as a teenager or young adult. Once again, everyone in the world who is employed can make decisions about their own employment and how much they're willing to accept in return for their work, but magically we decide that some people would be better off without jobs because they're not providing above a certain threshold of value?
> They do, but my point is, as a species, we should do better to improve conditions for others when we have the opportunity.
Again, there is no economic system that can change the fact that we live in a world with limited resources that need rationing. And preventing people from gainful unemployment is improving their condition how exactly?
https://www.npr.org/2013/02/05/171175054/how-the-labor-movem...
Here the prime candidate for the premise being wrong is to equate the work of carpenter working in their own enterprise at a project, to that of a google worker, working at Google’s enterprise for any project their management tells them to.
The former gets the fruit of their labor in full when the job is finished and paid for, the latter is suffering from a systematic exploitation as each time the stock goes up in price (or when dividends are issued) the shareholders get the fruits of the worker’s labor, as opposed to the workers them selves.
This is a bit hard to parse. Isn't the developer's work also paid for after each unit of time served. And why exactly is the developer being systematically exploited every time the stock price increases and the carpenter is not if the house appreciates? Doesn't the developer literally live in the fruits of carpenter's labor?
Instead of looking at the house the carpenter builds, look at the carpenter as an enterprise. If the carpenter grows in skill, and is able to take on more complicated jobs, they are able to charge more. The carpenter’s enterprise grows in value, which means more pay for the carpenter them self.
This is not true of the developer. The developer might be able to demand more pay, but they are at the mercy of their upper management to relay that to the owners of the business, who might see more value in exploiting the worker for more profit for them selves. Being able to collectively bargain through a union the developer might approach the freedom of their enterprise as the carpenter, but it is still not nearly the same level as if they had direct control of the business, like the carpenter does.
Someone making 3X the US national median income is paying roughly the US national median income in federal/state/local taxes. They're paying a median working citizens' earnings in taxes.
Being able to own disposable gadgets made in China doesn't make you rich. Those are not necessities. But you now what is? Housing, stable well paying jobs, healthcare and education , all of which are now massively out of reach for the average joe than they were a few decades ago.
And, like I said, much of what we now consider basic healthcare had not yet been invented.
And even in the last decades, those cheap Chinese gadgets you're so dismissive of, they give access for free to not just k-12 but also university and post-graduate level educational courses and materials on topics which had not been invented then either.
And the tech also lets more work remotely, changing the dynamics on housing.
If you are in a union shop, you can't get paid more than what's on the grid. If you want more, you need to resign and get somewhere else. But don't pretend you have a choice to do "individual bargaining".
Unions eliminate the individual bargaining power of people.
Except, of course, if we choose to use your definition, and call resigning and moving to another job "bargaining".
What they had was social status, and I think that's more what you're talking about. Social status is incredibly important for humans, so I understand focusing on it. But since it's pretty much a Zero Sum Game, nothing much changes there.
Health care is the biggest differential - wealth can buy you out of a lot of lifestyle factors but a hundred years ago was just before the dawn of the antibiotic revolution. That part is true, but it isn’t a factor of rising incomes and given how many Americans have stress, lower quality of life, and experience severe financial strain due to healthcare costs I don’t think it’s attributable to higher incomes.
It's about the material conditions you live in. And in 2022, what we take for granted would blow away pretty much anything in 1922.
I don't think I quite succeeded. Will maybe try something else next time.
No, while rich people in the past had no iPhones or internet, they had something far more valuable than that: income generating businesses and appreciable assets like land, housing, gold, fine art, jewelery, etc.
And no, the average American is vastly poorer now as housing, stable well paying jobs, healthcare and education, are now massively out of reach for the average joe than they were a few decades ago. Having iPhones and internet doesn't make up for these.
Yes, but there are long-term disability insurance policies available for purchase that largely remove that risk. It's a cost, of course.
And, at least in the US, there are public programs that provide disability coverage already figured into one's taxes: https://www.ssa.gov/ssi/
I’m not saying they’re not worth having but again that there’s a big gap between someone being rich and a middle-class worker with decent active income.
Definitely, SSI is not a full-time job income. That's why a worker with decent active income should look into private, long-term disability insurance.
"Better players" are defined by production on the field. That better play on the field then results in higher contracts for the better players. I'm not defining better players by the size of their contracts. Players who never perform well won't get the biggest contracts. Which is meritocratic, by definition.
> Most workers aren't professional football players.
We do live in a world with limited resources, but there are certainly enough for everyone if we collectively decided there should be.
Have you never used an automated car wash or self checkout?
People can decide their own minimum wage and to be unemployed if an employer isn't offering enough. This is literally what everyone does above the minimum wage.
> We do live in a world with limited resources, but there are certainly enough for everyone if we collectively decided there should be.
Every country that "decided" this ended up with famines killing millions. Meanwhile even imperfect capitalism keeps lifting the poverty floor, life expectancy, child survival rate, etc.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-population-livin...
Either foreign powers trying to keep dominos from falling or internal forces leveraging control to create dictatorships.
I don’t think collective economics has a chance until we’re generally more evolved as a species.
Though, if we do enter an age of abundance, it will likely be the default as the illusion of scarce resources dissolves.
A typical developer at Google makes $200k-$500k. That was enough for me, I didn't feel exploited, so don't come here and tell me that I should feel exploited, I'm sure that even Marx would agree with me that such a huge salary is fair.
I hope that clears things out.
You not liking their choice doesn't mean there was no choice.
Just join the union, you'll get paid more anyways.
You don't.
If you were to come to my company and try to convince me to start a union, I'd say "thanks, but no thanks".
Just now, you are trying to convince me that I'd be retaining my individual bargaining power, if I accept to use a different definition.
Well, I was born in a Communist country, where they were fond of changing definitions. We were free to vote for whomever we wanted, as long as it was someone on the list presented to us. We had no say in who was on that list. Of course, we were free to not vote at all, right? Boys had to do mandatory military service. You know how they were called when they were conscripted? "Volunteers". That was the official name.
So, yes, I'm used to the tactic of changing definitions. But if you are serious about presenting an argument, you should no use this tactic.
I would not go onto national television and act like earning way more than anyone else made me a modern suffragette.
And as I'd be on 3x average pay, the only way a tax break could possibly be large enough to make me not better off economically was if average people get so many their tax rate is negative.
> as the illusion of scarce resources dissolves
It's not an illusion. If you want gold, you need to mine it. If you mine gold, it means you're not raising chickens or writing a social networking app or cutting down trees or whatever. Everything has a trade-off, scarcity is never going away.
Your point only works if the company is stable and the work is keeping that company running, but Google has expanded exponentially every year, it hasn't reached the stable rent seeking stage yet. All those profits were reinvested in the form of salaries and jobs, if those went to the early workers then I'd never have gotten a job there and I'd have to live with a much much smaller salary. Stable rent seeking businesses are a problem, yes, that is the bad kind, but modern tech is too young for companies to have reached that stage.
So with your model I'd have made less money, that isn't good for me. Your model only works momentarily, when you stop growing the company and suddenly start to pay everything to current workers. But all the future workers whose jobs were enabled by those reinvestments would then be worse off, and I'd be one of those workers since I joined close to two decades after Google was founded. By the time I left there were twice as many people working there, their salaries were paid by the labour done by the previous workers, and Google barely pays profits so far so most of this actually went back to the workers, just future workers and not current ones, that is why I can't say that I deserve more than I got, I paid it forward as thanks for those who made my job possible.
Edit: And about unions, did you know that Google also operates in countries with strong unions? I joined the company in one of those. And you know, Google started paying me much more when I moved from that country to a country where unions weren't strong? How is this possible if those strong unions would make me get more? So apparently unions don't make these jobs pay more, in my experience it is the opposite, they didn't even manage to get my salary up to par with my non union co-workers. Unions mostly cares about the median, they don't care about high end workers that already makes a lot, unions aren't for me.