Most programmers code to a "spec" - what they were asked to do. Only a small minority would voice their opinion if the spec is badly written or the product is not a good business idea.

Employers looking for developers: 11 Developers looking for work: 2

Austin, TX, for reference.

99.9% of the world doesn't have the leverage we do. The amount of clucking and tsk-tsk-ing HNers do at the rest of the world is sickening.

This entire "well duh, quit" argument is the employment equivalent of "let them eat cake".

Pass a law forbidding anybody from talking about what they did at work that day including to their family or friends?

The majority of jobs don't really require any real secrecy thus one size fits all fails.

The worst case scenario for them is that they find out that certain clauses are not enforceable. In reality I imagine it is often known that some may be unenforceable but they are added anyway on the basis that the employee doesn't know this.

GA is oddly enough likely more specific, even if harder to decode, than Georgia. The country is abbreviated GE.

Well, there's a big difference: they don't get to dictate anything about your personal projects, stuff you make at home, your sex tape and such. Only about stuff done at the workplace and pertaining to the work.

Which is what the whole article was about, wasn't it?

The problem is that most tech workers want incompetent workers fired, since they make other workers lives more difficult. The field also moves fast enough that credentialization is not particularly helpful. In fact, it can be harmful.

Unions would call for rules like "10% of new projects must be in COBOL" to help older workers that don't want to re-train.

German style unions aren't as opposed to guaranteeing worker performance, I'm not really sure why. That might fly, but keeping it German style would be difficult.

The other option is something along the lines of the WGA/SAG. But individual developers are treated well enough that that isn't seen as worthwhile.

Also there are the problems unions have with corrupt elections and organized crime.

My point is that unions are a mixed bag, and for many tech workers they're a bad deal.

I took at job in a grocery store where the union was on strike - the only reason I didn't have to join the union was because they were striking and I was working directly for the corporate HQ. Pay wasn't bad, though I suspect they were having to pay more to get us scabs to come in through the picket lines :)

I'd prefer union places where you could elect to join the union or not. If they actually lobbied for better conditions for union members, and got those, there'd be more incentive to join - you'd be making the union mgrs work for their jobs, essentially.

I'm no expert, but I know that in at least some jurisdictions a union-endorsed strike carries protections against worker dismissal.

A union is a cartel. I don't mean that in as a normative statement. Unions may still be worth having, even if they are a cartel in that they workers band together to raise what they charge for their labor.

But, that is the logic by which many "free market" advocates oppose unions.

As in: "if I want to have people working 20 hours per day, with no overtime for less than minimum wage, I should be FREE to do so, and people are FREE not to work for me".

That's the kind of "FREE" the free market stands for usually.

Of course, when all employers follow the same idea, or when people are desperate to find any work to survive (e.g because of a lack of jobs in their city), the latter point about "choice" becomes moot.

You can do, but die-hard free market types only ever seem to disagree with how unions currently operate, not how corporations currently operate.

I'm hard pressed to think of any advocate of a free market who wants this law in place.

But a closed shop arose not from legal statute but by an agreement between the company and the union. There's no need for government involvement, except to settle contract disagreement.

In fact, it's quite the opposite! Closed shops are illegal in the US, under Taft-Hartley Act, though they are legal in some other countries. Union shops are legal, except where the states have prohibited that practice.

The question to the audience is, shouldn't a free market advocate want to reduce both the laws which give unions specific power AND those which take power away from unions?

If your concern is about monopoly powers, well, 1) that's a restriction of free trade, so our hypothetical free market advocate might not want those restrictions either, and 2) why aren't they regulated under anti-monopoly laws, rather than specific anti-union laws?

As to the net neutrality issue, well, that's a mixture of morality and an abuse of monopoly power. I believe you're only focusing on the latter issue for now. (And I think our government is and has been entirely too closely intertwined with business, and especially big business, for too long, which has allowed these abuses to grow.)

Is an employer a sort of monopolist? I believe they are. While there are exceptions (IT in the Bay Area during the dot-com era being an obvious one), for many people it is not easy to quit and easily find new employment. Otherwise Nevada wouldn't have a 10% unemployment rate. The problem with monopolies though isn't that they are monopolies, but that they can abuse their monopoly power.

You rightly pointed out that unions can abuse their monopoly power. But so too can companies.

So the modified question to the audience is: shouldn't a free market advocate want to reduce both the laws which give unions specific power AND which take power away from unions, so long as there is no abuse of the monopoly power?

Unfortunately, the easy answer by an anti-union person is that unions are, by definition, an abuse of monopoly power, so this question has no real utility. And I can't come up with a better phrasing.

I have seen references to this many times. Is this true in the States? I was once a teacher (not in the States) and did not have to sign up to any union. Apart from lawyers and medical personel and maybe a few other "special" professions you don't have to belong to a union to offer your services - at least here in the EU.

The problem being that without unions, labor becomes subject to oligopsony buying power and Ricardo's Law of Rent kicks in.

This is true not just of the employment market, but of most goods markets. There are far more buyers of cars/computers/cheese than sellers. Does this mean that pizza producers have oligopoly selling power?

Your theory is too broad. It applies to virtually everything.

In the economy at large, the situation still remains true. An employer need pay an employee no more than that employee could claim at another job (or by going into business for him or herself), given the employee's skillset.

Conversely, an employee needs to accept as wages no less than the wage he could get from another employer. This is true of any market - a purchaser needs to pay no more than market price, and a buyer needs to sell for no less than market price.

All you are describing is market pricing. Are you claiming all markets are oligopolies or oligopsonies?

Or do you think the 2009-2010 spike to 14% unemployment rate for Michigan was all due to people deciding to stay unemployed while holding out for higher paying work?

Nominal wages have increased during the recession. If employees were willing to take a pay cut to become employed, that shouldn't have happened.

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ECIWAG

http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/ECICOM

I'm not actually a Keynesian myself - I tend to subscribe to recalculation theories for this particular recession, though I definitely believe sticky nominal wages definitely play a role. But I appeal to Keynesian theories in this discussion since many union supporters tend to profess support for Keynesian economics (while oddly supporting institutions which create wage stickiness).

An employer in that situation can abuse their monopoly power, and take advantage that the switching costs for the employee to get another job are so high.

Your theory yields no reason an employee can't do the same thing. Replacing a worker also involves transaction costs, and rather high ones (look at the price of a recruiter).

Once a person is hired, there are switching costs on both sides. You have yet to demonstrate any structural difference between them.

In practice this almost never happens. Employers are very reluctant to cut nominal wages, even if they could afford to hire more workers that way and get a more economically efficient outcome. This phenomenon is called "sticky wages" and is believed to be a significant cause of unemployment in recessions.

In summary, the relationship between unemployment and labor pricing power is believed, by many economists (most notably Keynsians but also e.g. market monetarists) to be about the opposite of what you said - stickiness of wages causes greater unemployment, rather than unemployment causing downward pressure on wages.

"there is nothing preventing Hostess employees from finding alternate employment except the fact that Hostess still pays them more than their next best alternative"

And your point is that it's moral for Hostess to keep cutting wages until people start leaving for other positions?

My argument is all about morality, not economics. How morality is carried out must acknowledge the economics, but economics does not dictate the morality. I argue that there is a cultural expectation that salaries will rarely decrease, and that expectation is part of the cultural morality. The culture expectation exists, because people get a job in part to reduce risk. Otherwise we would all be contractors, and demand a higher income in order to handle the higher risk exposure. But there's a cultural difference in what it means to be an employee and what it means to be a contractor. Perhaps the distinction is that employees also trade loyalty for security, where contractors only trade services for money. I've not thought so deeply about that distinction.

"If your theories about employer monopsony power had any relation to the real world, then we would simply not observe wage stickiness."

You cannot make the observation "we would simply not observe wage stickiness" and conclude there is a lack of employer monopsony power. You have to show that there are no other reasons which can counteract that effect it, even in the face of monopsony.

Other factors may dominate. As an example, suppose a commandment in the Bible were 'employers shall not reduce the wages of their employees.' If the owners of a company followed Christian principles as well as legal ones then you would still observe wage stickiness, despite the lack of a law to that effect. Even if the employees were all non-Christian and don't care about that law per se, and wouldn't protest if the employer didn't follow that religious law.

As a more real-world example, you can't look at Chik-Fil-A and conclude that there's no market for fast-food chicken on Sundays, or that people won't work on Sundays for fast-food chicken stores.

Researching this now, I am expressing basic aspects of the search and matching model. "Jobs in the Search and Matching model are characterized by monopoly rents, due to the matching frictions that give rise to search costs and unemployment," says http://personal.lse.ac.uk/pissarid/papers/WB_ECMA.pdf .

I see that my morality issue is described as a "wage norm" in http://www.tau.ac.il/~yashiv/kl_jme2007.pdf , starting with "We employ a version of Hall’s (2005) notion of a wage norm to introduce real wage rigidity. A wage norm may arise from social convention that constrains wage adjustment for existing and newly hired workers."

I tried to understand their conclusion. It starts off "In a baseline New Keynesian model, labor market frictions render real wage rigidity potentially irrelevant for the dynamics of inflation." and continues "As one component of real marginal costs, wages, becomes less volatile, the other component, hiring and job creation costs, becomes more volatile. The mechanism emphasized by Hall (2005) and Shimer (2005) that helps the search and matching model fit the facts, appears to have a neutralizing effect in sticky price models."

I read the first part as saying that the baseline New Keynesian model isn't affected by real rage rigidity (but you disagree and say it is, correct?) If my interpretation is correct, then this is an area where non-market forces, like wage norms, can be a stronger influence because they don't directly affect the success or failure of the company.

I read the second as saying that the main effect of wage rigidity is the volatility in hiring and job creation costs. How either the dynamics of inflation or the volatility of hiring and job creation costs affects the unemployment level is beyond my understanding, but from what I understand of the paper suggests that what you see as clear evidence - wage stickiness - does not necessarily imply a lack of monopoly.

"But applying it to drivers, machine operators and burger flippers is silly."

I never said it applied to all employees. I say that employment is sometimes not fungible. You seem to both agree (as for an algebraic topologist) and disagree ("there is nothing preventing Hostess employees from finding alternate employment except the fact that Hostess still pays them more than their next best alternative").

When something isn't fungible, then its scarcity affects its price. You can hardly say that that's surprising. In that case, it's easy for an employer (or, yes, employee) to abuse the advantage. The employer's best alternative to giving in to a demand is to fire the person. The likelihood of the company going out of business while it finds a replacement is low. The employee's best alternative to giving in to a demand is to quit. The likelihood of the employee facing tight financial difficulties is higher.

"by this logic, walmart has a monopoly on "low priced goods""

Every time I've said "monopoly" in relation to jobs I've said that the issue is not monopoly but abusing monopoly power. Can you make the case that Walmart is both a monopoly and abuses its monopoly powers?

Microsoft faced monopoly charges not because it was the only supplier of Microsoft products, and primary supplier for the desktop OSes in the world, but because of claims that it abused its monopoly powers. I think the history of unions shows cases where companies have used abused their employment power, and I think the best model is to say that there is either a monopoly or cartel of employers which made that possible.

"if Hostess cuts wages from $40 to $10 and gives up their monopsony power, isn't that a good thing?"

No, because it's a risk management thing. People become employees partially to minimize long-term risk. Giving up their monopsony power (by going out of business) increases employee risk.

I'm fine with monopoly power so long as it isn't abused. I don't want to force a break-up of Microsoft just because they might abuse their monopoly power, because that breakup could be worse for the employer, the employees, and the customers.

A question for you is - do monopolies (or cartels, for that matter) ever abuse their monopoly (or oligopoly) powers? If so, do you use moral guidelines to determine what constitutes abuse?

I ask because I've talked to ardent free economy supporters who believe in no restrictions, not even to prevent monopoly abuse. Yes, even to the point of wanting to allow child labor and indentured servants. Because I believe we must use morality to guide where we want economics to take us, if you don't also believe in moral restraints on the market then this conversation will go nowhere.

I never said that. Obviously a stimulus of $100 will be ineffective, but you can draw no conclusion about "often" (or "rarely") from what I wrote.

> Sticky wages increase risk of having your wage cut to $0.

Based on the research I did yesterday, and described in http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4963624 , "In a baseline New Keynesian model, labor market frictions render real wage rigidity potentially irrelevant for the dynamics of inflation." and "The mechanism emphasized by Hall (2005) and Shimer (2005) that helps the search and matching model fit the facts, appears to have a neutralizing effect in sticky price models."

The search and matching model is the one I hand-waved here. Inflation isn't the same as unemployment, so this quote isn't directly transferable. But it seems that wage stickiness or lack thereof doesn't have as much effect on the economy. Instead, it increases the volatility of hiring and job creation costs.

I referenced the paper of Krausea and Lubikb, http://www.tau.ac.il/~yashiv/kl_jme2007.pdf . It includes a term for what I've been saying is a cultural morality to have sticky wages. "We employ a version of Hall’s (2005) notion of a wage norm to introduce real wage rigidity. A wage norm may arise from social convention that constrains wage adjustment for existing and newly hired workers."

> employees choose to spend the money on consumer goods rather than mitigating their risk

Because people don't make fully rational economic decisions. You might as well ask why so many people smoke, even with the knowledge of how it affects their health, or ask why I've stopped exercising despite knowing its positive benefits. Why did the banks make so many subprime mortgages? Why did so many people agree to them even with high chances of not being able to pay?

If you want, I think you can model things like "I really wanted a new computer" as a random external event akin to an unexpected medical problem or broken plumbing, and bring the analysis back into the rational hypothesis.

> To determine "market power" in any model I've seen, ...

Really? The Krausea and Lubikb paper says "The parameters describing the household are standard. We choose a coefficient of relative risk aversion σ = 2." A constant relative risk aversion implies a decreasing absolute risk aversion, so the more money one has the more willing one is to take risks.

This makes it sound like many economic models - or at least those based on the search and matching model - include risk taking as part of the analysis. Can you square my observation with your statement? Perhaps it's because their model isn't used to determine market power per se?

> your point about transaction costs does show that there is wiggle room

I'm afraid I've lost the point of this thread. I say that employment can be viewed as a monopoly, and more importantly, that an employer can abuse those monopoly powers. And yes, an employee, and especially a union of employees, can be viewed as a monopoly and also abuse its monopoly powers.

You do not believe this is the correct analysis, and you believe that the various economic models back you up.

Do these quotes help show that economist have considered my hand-waving models in much more depth?

- There are search-and-matching frictions in every sector and firms post vacancies in order to attract workers. The cost of posting vacancies and the matching process generate hiring costs. Moreover, search-and-matching frictions generate bilateral monopoly power between a worker and his firm, as a result of which they engage in wage bargaining. -- http://restud.oxfordjournals.org/content/77/3/1100.full

- A specific class of models argues that wage rigidity might arise in the context of risk- averse workers and risk-neutral firms. In a seminal contribution, Thomas and Worrall (1988) develop a model with self-enforcing wage contracts whereby risk-neutral firms provide insurance to risk-averse workers. In their model agents cannot commit, but contacts are nevertheless self-enforcing due to an extreme reputation assumption, ac- cording to which an agent who reneges on a contract is forced to trade on the spot market forever after. Efficient contracts are contained in a certain interval and when- ever the wage leaves this interval, the agents update the wage by the smallest possible change that puts the wage back into the interval (i.e., on the bounds of the interval). Rudanko (2009) embeds this kind of model into an equilibrium model of directed search with aggregate shocks. In her model a constant wage emerges if both agents can fully commit, in which case the risk-neutral firms provide insurance to risk averse workers through optimal long-term wage contracting. In contrast to Hall (2005), her micro- founded model of perfect wage rigidity does not lead to a substantial increase in the cyclical volatility of unemployment. -- http://www.econ.upf.edu/eng/graduates/gpem/jm/pdf/paper/Pape...

The description model of Rudanko sounds like your statement - that wage rigidity leads to increased unemployment during recessions - isn't necessarily true.

Quoting from her site at https://sites.google.com/site/leenarudanko/ : In this paper I develop a tractable extension of a Mortensen-Pissarides style matching model that allows for risk averse workers with limited ability to smooth consumption. I show that this leads to a form of equilibrium wage rigidity. This rigidity arises because the inability of workers to smooth their consumption across unemployment and employment spells changes how unemployed workers value wage offers, and hence also the offers that employers find profitable to make.

Aren't these quotes in opposition to what you've been describing, and more in line with the ideas I've described here?

That's not saying that the model is right, or that I'm right, only that there are economic models which agree with my views, so my views are not outright rejected by economic theory, while you think they are.