The US itself is an infertile landscape for unions. I guess that massive corporate spending on anti-union propaganda is working.
You cannot talk about unions online effectively, Americans come out of the woodwork with super strange anecdotes and pro-business rhetoric. Reminds me of Israel-Palestine in that regard, as soon as the topic comes up things get "strange."
When you grew up in a country where unions are healthy and working both for the employees and for the business, it is hard to see why Americans hate them so much. In particular why poorer Americans hate them, which is an affront to their own self interests.
> I guess that massive corporate spending on anti-union propaganda is working.
And if anyone doubts the anti-union bend of Amazon in particular, just look at their behaviour in Germany, where much of labour law, worker's rights and the work environment in general are based on cooperation between trade unions and private companies (and has been since the March Revolution of 1848).
> When you grew up in a country where unions are healthy and working both for the employees and for the business, it is hard to see why Americans hate them so much.
Perhaps because the borders between US unions/syndicates/mafia were thin?
> In particular why poorer Americans hate them, which is an affront to their own self interests.
It doesn't help that the mainstream union movement in North America has had a history of some corruption and some politically dubious practices. Teamsters mob connections, AFL-CIO deep integration into the cold war era establishment, etc.
And most people in North America now experience unionized employees mostly in the form of public sector union employees, which is a rather contradictory situation in that as a 'taxpayer' one is also nominally the 'employer' of public sector employees, and the right has done a great job of positioning the public sector against the population as a whole.
If you want to unleash a torrent of vitriol that you'd normally only hear from a virulent right winger, bring up teacher's unions in any professional/middle-class workplace here in Ontario.
I always find it amazing to hear my coworkers who make six figures moving around letters on a screen and eating catered gourmet lunches in the company cafe go on a screed about the amazingly overpaid people who teach their kids, deliver their mail, or pick up their garbage...
Presumably if these six figure office workers weren't producing more value than their salary they would be fired and that would be that.
Not so for the publicly unionized teachers that make the same money and never get fired regardless of if they're lazy negligent idiots or if they're dedicated molders of young minds. It's completely unfair.
When teacher's don't have a union the administration can add uncompensated hours to their work week, assign them uncompensated duties, assign them extra class loads (teach two classes at the same time) and fire the best teachers because they challenge an administrators idea of what good teaching look like.
Those things are true for all white collar exempt salaried employees, including most employees on this site. Why shouldn't teachers be treated the same way?
> I always find it amazing to hear my coworkers who make six figures moving around letters on a screen and eating catered gourmet lunches in the company cafe go on a screed about the amazingly overpaid people who teach their kids, deliver their mail, or pick up their garbage...
I think most people naturally undervalue the work of others and overvalue the work of themselves. They are underpaid, but people doing X are overpaid. So that plays directly into the public sector union stuff. A lot of people are also vehemently against the taxes they pay, so that also plays directly into anti public union rhetoric. I think those people also don't understand entirely how their tax dollars are spent. We saw that in the U.S. in the 2012 elections when President Obama talked about private companies not building the roads they drive their trucks on everyday. Rather than being logically interpreted as true and understanding that taxes get spent on infrastructure and that helps the economy, it was interpreted as the President telling private companies they weren't responsible for their company's success.
I would have guessed Canada's more liberal attitude might have caused better relations between the population and public unions, but it sounds like many of the same issues exist as they do in the U.S.
"I would have guessed Canada's more liberal attitude might have caused better relations between the population and public unions, but it sounds like many of the same issues exist as they do in the U.S."
Canada is like Hillary Clinton: left by American standards, but considered to be far to the right of center by most of the rest of the world.
Canada is liberal but not really socialist. I know this is not a distinction made in the US generally, but it is in much of the world.
There is a significant 20%ish of the population here that could be called social democratic / socialist.
But the majority of the population trends liberal, which I would characterize as very liberal on social / cultural issues, in favour of some social spending here and there (including our public health care system), activist role on environmental issues... but not in favour of social control of industries, not really pro-union, not really in favour of expanding social programs, swinging frequently towards an austerity focus when that's the way the wind is blowing...
and very much middle-class/upper-middle-class in orientation.
The taxpayer is the employer in the same way as the bank owns your house if you have a mortgage. This is just one of those fictions designed to manufacture outrage. Govt is an entity which acts with its own interests.
I was referring to the general American public's dislike of union and union ideas.
Sure, it sucks that Amazon's Warehouse, has been unable to start a union thus far. But the article sets out several reasons for that including strategic turnover.
Unions can vary considerably, and depend strongly on local culture. I'm fairly familiar with the UK, but unions here famously had a very antagonistic relationship with the business, in contrast to unions in, say, Germany.
There was a famous case, where Toyota (or some company like that) set up two identical car factories, one in Northern England and one in Germany. The one in Germany had vastly higher output per worker than the one in England, and a lot of the reason was down to the wildly different attitudes of the workers and the union - the one in England tended to put "tools down" for all kinds of silly bureaucratic reasons.
And certainly in other parts of the country and other industries - Clydeside ship building, say - unions were not blameless in helping along their decline - although the incompetence of management and the business helped there as well.
Some of this varies on both sides as well; employers in Germany are also more consensus-oriented than those in the UK, willing to consult unions ahead of time on important decisions, have joint labor-management committees to oversee things, etc. The employers in Scandinavia even moreso, where running the workplace is almost seen as a complete partnership between the employer and the unions, who both approach it in a consensus-oriented way and don't like to make changes without the other side's buy-in.
I suspect Amazon's quite antagonistic relationship with its German unions is in part because it doesn't take a very "German" approach to them as an employer, and tries to run things in a more American-style way instead. Although German employers are not quite as consensus-oriented nowadays than they were in the 1950s-1990s period either.
You're also missing out on the legal landscape. I can't recall the case, but back in the 50s (or maybe the 60s, I'm too lazy to go look it up), there was a supreme court decision that said that American unions have to support with full vigor the claims of every member. Before that point, management and unions could agree that certain people were just knuckleheads without any chance of redemption. After that point, management and unions had a decidedly more antagonistic relationship.
IIRC (and again, too lazy to look this up), it was a PoC that brought the suit because many unions were automatically inclined to agree with management that a PoC was a knucklehead.
> After [the 60s] management and unions had a decidedly more antagonistic relationship.
Union antagonism is very much cultural[0], and the US didn't wait until the 60s for that to happen, late 19th/early 20th century US management didn't shy from violently repressing strikes and busting unions, Pinkerton was often hired in that capacity and industrialists with enough clout could get the police or even the army involved (as in Blair Mountain or Ludlow)
According to "American Labor Violence: Its Causes, Character, and Outcome", as of 1969 the US had the bloodiest and most violent labor history of the first world.
[0] the UK and France both have very antagonistic labor relationships for instance
I took a couple labor management courses in college. One of the things the professor said has always stuck with me:
"Management gets the union it asks for."
Almost every union in the US and the UK was formed in the face of withering hostility from management. It's not surprising that the union would be antagonistic in response.
I suppose the UK industrialised early. It industrialised first, with workers often in appalling conditions, and unions formed in response to awful conditions and in opposition to the businesses trying to keep them down. And this was absolutely necessary, but it set the culture for a long time.
Other countries didn't necessarily have that history, and other factors - like the need to rebuild the country after a devastating war with everybody starting from nothing - might have fostered cooperation in ways not possible in the UK.
The teachers and firefighters formed unions in the face of withering hostility from management? About half of US union members are local, state, or federal government employees.
"When you grew up in a country where unions are healthy and working both for the employees and for the business"
That's rarely the case with unions however.
They usually work for the interests of a select few. They harm the business, they lobby government for special benefits and protections, and they're often willing to harm employees at the bottom of the ladder (or unemployed people who are never allowed on the ladder) to benefit employees on the top and closest to the union leaders.
I understand what the Chamber of Commerce thinks, but do you have any references, or any information independent of them? And by this, I don't mean a reference to the existence of a bad union or a bad union incident, or stories about how your dad told you that every meeting was a bunch of blind drunks voting down training and making up new holidays.
You're making a claim of prevalence, it'd be interesting to know where you got that opinion from.
Social workers are some of the lowest paid government workers in Israel, and they always participate in general strikes when requested by the Histadrut. They've helped secure higher salaries for bank unions, airport unions, electric unions and port worker unions.
But when it was there turn to strike (After decades of stagnant income), they were thrown under the bus, with the Histadrut negotiating a deal that didn't even offer a raise that would cover the lost income.
Leader of the Israeli Labor Party (Closely tied with the union leaders) Shelly Yachimovich even put out a public letter calling on social workers to end their strike. Effectively taking away any bargaining power they had left.
(Hebrew link, couldn't find coverage in English):
http://www.blacklabor.org/?p=29042
> When you grew up in a country where unions are healthy and working both for the employees and for the business, it is hard to see why Americans hate them so much.
Probably because most Americans (myself included) have never encountered a union that works for both the employees and the business.
My working-class father, twice, was working for a union and was forced to stop working for strikes, unpaid. My parents nearly lost their house when I was in elementary school because of it. One of those times the company actually shut down.
> You cannot talk about unions online effectively, Americans come out of the woodwork with super strange anecdotes and pro-business rhetoric.
Obviously America is more pro-business than most of Europe. But it seems odd that you define talking about something "effectively" and not being challenged on your opinions. I would argue it's hard (not impossible) to talk about unions online effectively because Europeans come out of the woodwork with super strange anecdotes and statements like a poor person disliking unions is inherently against their own self interest.
I worked for UPS before going to college. It was a strong union shop, and I have decidedly different memories of it. When I slipped on a set of stairs and hurt my head, my manager immediately rushed me to the doctor and gave me the day off. The pay was good for an 18 year old without a degree, and I had full health/401k.
There are many non-union shops that would have done the same thing after your fall.
In fact, I'd wager to say almost all of them with more than a handful of employees. (Mom and Pop places may have you "walk it off", but beyond that, through a combination of genuine concern for employees and HR/Safety policies, you'd be attended to.)
Agreed. I know anecdotes aren’t data, but here are some of the workplace injuries I witnessed before I got a white collar job:
Hardees - frier accident=third degree burn. Management told her to finish the dinner rush. Two days later when her leg wasn't healing she went to the doctor. The owners never paid for the doctor, fought her workers comp claim, and fired her a few weeks after she came back to work.
Little Caesar's - cook slipped and got a deep cut on his arm. The manager tried to keep him at work until he ruined a couple pizzas by bleeding on them. He drove himself to the emergency room. He quit the next month when the owners refused to pay for the emergency room bill.
UPS - When I worked at a bookstore, the UPS guy who delivered to our mall came in with a terrible limp. A stack of boxes had fallen on him as they were loading the truck. His manager told him to complete his shift since they didn’t have any other drivers. He ended up needing knee surgery and having to fight the company for months for workers comp. To UPS’s credit, they didn’t fire him and he was still working for UPS when I quit the bookstore job. (I lived in a right-to-work state, so I don’t think the UPS drivers were unionized.)
That just sounds like a nice person. Union/non union would never cross my mind if someone had a head injury.
What would cross my mind, even if I was a bad person, is that it sounds totally illegal to make someone keep working with a head injury (regardless of unions).
I don't know if it actually is, but I'm guessing mid-level UPS managers don't either.
Both parents and wife are teachers, all are at odds with their unions, but are still forced to pay dues to an organization they'd prefer not speak on their behalf. I don't see much of a need for unions anymore (note: anymore - they obviously hold a very important place in US history) as long as the government is actively involved and enforcing things like OSHA. I am also strongly for universal healthcare and maternity leave, to name a couple issues which would solve a lot of what unions are in place for.
For the record, if this were any internet discussion board other than HN, most people would read your comment as some form of "That's weird, you're weird, the US blows how could you not know that?" Not saying that's what you meant but some people here probably take it that way.
That being said, most people in the US aren't clamoring for a lot of the "protections" you'll find in western Europe.
Yet, almost every week there's someone writing online "this happened to me what do I do?". I mainly use my union for unemployment insurance, salary statistics, contract negotiation and conflict resolution. It's more like having a human resources department on your side than anything else. It's not "protections" that makes the difference, at least not for highly skilled workers, it's the knowledge and the bargaining power. And I somewhat doubt that US people don't want those "protections" because they are highly sought after when they are instead called "perks".
The biggest protection a worker has is his ability to quit and find another employer.
All other "protections" usually end up costing you someway or another.
Mandatory vacation days are converted to lower salaries.
Maternity leave makes it more difficult for young married women to find a job.
Mandatory Insurances and Pensions are simply calculated in to the "cost of employment", reducing the actual salary.
Not being able to fire a worker means much higher hiring standards, and make it a lot more difficult for inexperienced workers to find a job.
> The biggest protection a worker has is his ability to quit and find another employer.
That's only ever a protection as long as your skills are valued and in high demand. Which means it's only a temporary protection, and only for a minority of the population.
> All other "protections" usually end up costing you someway or another.
The "other" is misplaced here, if all you have is the ability to quit, you have no stability[0], you have limited bargaining power (and are pretty systematically in a position of weakness), and the cooperative incentives with coworkers are very different, and arguably lower.
[0] and things get worse if you own property (now your "protection" is tied to property markets), a partner (now your "protection" may be tied to fucking them over) or dependents
> That's only ever a protection as long as your skills are valued and in high demand. Which means it's only a temporary protection, and only for a minority of the population.
What's wrong with that? If your skills are not valued or in high demand, you don't deserve any protection. Retool and equip yourself with valuable and skills that are in demand.
Should I be protected because I dug my head deep into MSDOS or APL and refused to catch up to the modern day ubiquitous Unix systems and C++?
> Retool and equip yourself with valuable and skills that are in demand.
So precisely how does the US allow people to do that? Which programs are available which will keep a family of 4 fed, sheltered and clothed while the parents retool because their jobs are shitty and probably doing illegal things, and they know for a fact that the second they call their company out they're going to get fired?
No, you shouldn't be protected from your job actually disappearing (past getting paid off) - but you should be protected from your employer being awful.
And of course there aren't any programs. Suppose you don't have a good education, and your only job is janitor. Should you make minimum wage for the rest of your life? Pretty much the only way for someone like that to make more money is get together with other janitors. Suppose someone is 20 years old, maybe they have time to go to night school. But if you are 45 years old, a couple of kids. It's going to be almost impossible. Suppose that janitor can't find a job with health insurance because there's no minimum protection. They get sick, and they just die? I don't see how this works out for someone like that without some group negotiation - they are too weak otherwise.
Why do you think healthcare is in such a terrible state?
The U.S. and Canadian unions in the early 20th century are a great comparison. In Canada, they pushed the government to provide healthcare. In the U.S., they pushed the corporations to provide it.
Fast forward 80 years, and as unions are being depowered, the healthcare options get worse for U.S. employees because they're not guaranteed by law.
> The biggest protection a worker has is his ability to quit and find another employer.
Which works out great for the top few percent of workers who are sufficient sought after to be able to dictate terms. Not so great for the vast majority that are easy to replace.
History has demonstrated pretty clearly that this is utter nonsense. Here's an example of the type of things that motivated unionisation in the US:
146 people dead because employers at the time saw it as perfectly acceptable to lock people in to prevent unauthorised breaks.
The 8 hour working day too - it took about a century to get it widespread - and numerous dead.
Frankly, that statement is deeply insulting to the more of the many people who have died to secure the labour rights we have today.
> Mandatory vacation days are converted to lower salaries.
I've yet to work anywhere with mandatory vacation days in the sense that I can not give them up. What I have always had, however, is the right to a certain minimum number of days. Even in Norway, which from a US point of view probably would seem quite extreme when it comes to the level of workers protections, if I truly wanted to work more I generally would be able to give up most of my vacation days.
The big difference is that the defaults in employment law in Norway provide terms that people spent decades fighting for, and to deviate from that requires explicit consideration. You can write a Norwegian employment contract in about two paragraphs. In fact, most of my Norwegian employment contracts were about that length.
But if you want to, you can find ways of deviating most protections as long as your employee is willing to pay for it.
As it happens, it turns out that most employees do not value "buying" fewer vacation days or shorter notice periods, or other abrogations of established workers rights, at nearly enough money for most of them to be willing to write it into employment contracts.
The reality is that while you may be right that salaries could be higher without some of these protections, they appear to be systematically valued higher by employees than employers once employees have actually experienced them.
> Maternity leave makes it more difficult for young married women to find a job.
Women leave employment in droves to have children whether or not they get paid maternity leave, and as such I see little reason to believe that providing right to maternity leave or paid maternity leave is likely to have a major additional impact.
One of the reasons why so many women end up leaving the workforce, often for good, on having children in many countries is that many can't afford childcare.
E.g. I'm in the UK, and childcare for a single child here can easily reach 1000 pounds/month until your kids reach school age (with some recent improvements in provision of part time government paid care). If you have a two pre-school children with care costs like that, you need a salary well above average before it is economical for both parents to work. Even if you have cheaper options available some places, you need a relatively decent paying job to be able to pay for child care for more than one child and have anything left.
And this provides an easy solution to reducing the impact of maternity leave: Provide more subsidised childcare. As it happens, that will tend to do more to bring more women into employment than maternity leave does to counteract it. In Norway, improvements to maternity pay/leave and childcare provisions have always gone in near lock-step for exactly this reason (on top of that, there has in recent years been a paternity leave provision to further reduce the disparity).
> Mandatory Insurances and Pensions are simply calculated in to the "cost of employment", reducing the actual sa...
> Which works out great for the top few percent of workers
It works out for any worker.
It's not just about quitting Microsoft to Join google, It's also about quitting Mcdonald's to join Subway, or quitting Amazon to work for Walmart.
The only workers who aren't able to quit a job are public sector workers, where the government has a monopsony on hiring.
> I've yet to work anywhere with mandatory vacation days in the sense that I can not give them up
In some countries you can give up your paid vacation days. At a cost to your employer who would have to PAY YOU additionally.
These all add up as additional costs of employment, and simply reduce the salary you earn in the first place. (As compared to what you could earn if there weren't paid leave laws in place).
Do some workers and employers prefer a lower salary for more vacation days? sure. Just agree on that as part of a contract. Don't force a one size fits all solution on everyone.
> Women leave employment in droves to have children whether or not they get paid maternity leave
I wasn't addressing that. I was explaining that in countries that have paid maternity leave, women might not even get employed (or only get employed for certain roles) in the first place.
> Mandatory insurances and pensions are not about workers protections per se most places I'm aware of.
Take Israel as an example. Mandatory pensions are considered a "triumph" of the unions, who are able to strongarm employers in to paying more into worker's pensions:
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-histadrut-employers-agree...
> Not being able to fire a worker is not a common feature of workers protections anywhere.
It's never about "not being able to fire". It's about firing flexibility. Can an employer simply send you home, or do they have to go through lots of legal beuracracy first?
"Do some workers and employers prefer a lower salary for more vacation days? sure. Just agree on that as part of a contract. Don't force a one size fits all solution on everyone."
That wasn't the question, but rather if the protection cost you anything. Now you're just taking a "pro-business" stance as described in the top comment. Almost no employers would agree to larger amounts of unpaid vacation (which is what you are describing) unless that was the norm. I don't think anyone is questioning that paid vacation is shifting your salary around or make you work less hours, that's the whole point. But you can usually choose to take your full salary and work as many hours as if you didn't have vacation, the other way (getting unpaid vacation) is usually much harder.
The crazily bad working conditions for the lower end of the US labour market tells me differently.
> At a cost to your employer who would have to PAY YOU additionally. These all add up as additional costs of employment, and simply reduce the salary you earn in the first place. (As compared to what you could earn if there weren't paid leave laws in place).
Which misses my point, which is that while this may be true, the low number of people who take up the opportunity to negotiate compensation to give up vacation days etc. demonstrate quite clearly that workers here tend to value this more than employers do.
In most parts of Europe these laws set defaults. Some make it more difficult to deviate from the default than others (Norway is notoriously hard; many contract clauses are automatically null and void unless you're very careful), but most places you can deviate from most or all of them through negotiation and various degrees of creative solutions (in Norway too, mostly). Yet my experience is that most people don't.
If any employer came to me and offered to buy back a vacation day, they could do that. If they offer enough, I might take it. To date no employer has offered me enough for it to worth it, but some have provided programmes where they offered flexible numbers of vacation days, with a default.
I'm arguing that employers value those extra days at less than most workers do, or more employers would offer to buy back vacation days or offer such flexible vacation day schemes (when they do it tends to be seen as a way to get more vacation; only rarely is it seen as a way to get more money, though occasionally people "sell" vacation days one year to be able to buy more days the following year).
In fact, in many places in Europe the norm is now to offer more paid vacation days than the statutory minimum. e.g. in the UK the minimum is 28 days which can include the 8 public holidays, but the norm in professional employment is a minimum of 25 days + the 8 public holidays, and many places this will increase with tenure, in recognition of the fact that employees tend to value this higher than the equivalent increase in salary (we see this demonstrated in that for example many notoriously low paid jobs, such as in retail, often have above average number of paid vacation days - it is "cheaper" for these extremely cost-sensitive companies to offer more vacation than to increase salary by amounts that would have been valued equally high by their potential employees)
> I wasn't addressing that. I was explaining that in countries that have paid maternity leave, women might not even get employed in the first place.
And I pointed out that this effect is easy enough to counteract, and that you can give far more women the ability to choose to continue to work by offering better childcare provisions. To the extent that in a lot of countries, childcare provisioning has been a large part of the fight for womens rights (because it is usually women that ends up pushed out of the workplace when couples can't afford to have both people working)
> Mandatory pensions are considered a "triumph" of the unions, who are able to strongarm employers in to paying more into worker's pensions:
... as a proxy because they've been unable to get government to increase pensions directly. Most places workplace pensions represent basically a political defeat, and given the right wing nature of Israeli politics I'm not surprised.
> It's never about "not being able to fire". It's about firing flexibility. Can an employer simply send you home, or do they have to go through lots of legal beuracracy first?
Which is a very, very different situation. There are good reasons for bureaucracy: Employers show time and time again that they want to fire for reasons that have nothing to do with work performance.
> The bottom line is that if it's difficult to fire someo...
> Do some workers and employers prefer a lower salary for more vacation days? sure. Just agree on that as part of a contract.
I've tried. It's never happened. I feel very cynical when I see all the oh-so-earnest discussions about "negotiating" after getting a job offer, because they all seem to assume that money is the only thing that matters, and that one can get more of it just by asking for it. Negotiating over a job offer has never gotten me jack squat, because American companies appear to be universally stuck on the idea that vacation time ought to be a function of seniority.
For big companies it's probably no so much they don't want to do it as they haven't set up their system such that they can do it. Large corporations want to see you as an interchangeable part, and anything that makes you less like an interchangeable part is a headache they feel they can do without.
I work at a very large company. They have divisions with different salary bands and benefits. When you move from one division to another it's like moving to a brand new company. I guarantee you if you negotiated extra vacation at my company they would eventually transfer your business unit to another division and you'd stop accruing the extra. HR would shrug and quote you the corporate policy.
You're probably much better off working for a smaller place where the CEO was involved in the salary negotiations.
That's been my experience with big companies entirely, which is another reason I raise an eyebrow and silently call "bullshit" when I hear people earnestly going on about the importance of negotiation. How the hell are you going to negotiate when there is no chance you will meet anyone with the power to give you what you want?
>The only workers who aren't able to quit a job are public sector workers, where the government has a monopsony on hiring.
That reads like public sector workers are not allowed to quit, and that public sector workers are some special class who are not allowed to work for private firms.
In the Soviet Union, this wasn't a problem... but it was soon noticed that a paid childcare worker would not care for a child as that child's own mother would.
Suppose that somehow you could pay for that. (probably not happening even for $million per year) Would you want it? Would you want your child to see someone else as, essentially, their mom? Who will your child love? Who will your child visit, decades later, in the nursing home? You can't substitute "quality time" for total time, simply being there for every skinned knee and question about life.
Money isn't good at purchasing love, and you would be unhappy with the result if you succeeded.
"All other "protections" usually end up costing you someway or another."
That's not really how you calculate compensation. You have to look at the salaries plus benefits. Usually people undervalue what the company can pay for them so more benefits usually means greater compensation. There's plenty of people in the US who accept salaries where they can't gracefully handle getting sick, unemployed or having a family.
"Mandatory vacation days are converted to lower salaries."
You can usually get this as cash compensation instead, they just can't force you to do so. In contrast to "unlimited vacation" that some startups have where you don't get anything if you work more.
"Maternity leave makes it more difficult for young married women to find a job."
This is a much longer conversation, but more than anything I would say that it's cultural. I know many women who have both successful careers and had maternity leave. But then maternity leave is usually paid by the government.
"Mandatory Insurances and Pensions are simply calculated in to the "cost of employment", reducing the actual salary."
Usually get more for the money.
"Not being able to fire a worker means much higher hiring standards, and make it a lot more difficult for inexperienced workers to find a job."
You can still usually be fired during a grace period, something like six months, or you can work as a contractor.
Even if all workers have equal bargaining power regardless of their skills and location, that only applies to the private sector. Teachers or Firemen or whoever else mostly only have one employer - the state - which can collectively bargain on behalf of the citizenry, so the only reasonable response by employees is to collectively bargain as well.
The state is special. It can not normally go out of business, and it has the power of taxation by force.
There is thus nothing to restrain the union.
The state normally also has elections. Because unions are allowed to fund election campaigns, the union effectively gets to sit on both sides of the bargaining table. The government "opposition" is a push-over.
There is nothing to restrain the union? You just described how the state can not go out of business, can use force, and can set laws how it likes. Certainly in my country the state has spent much time and effort using these powers to restrain and curtail unions.
If unions are unrestricted it sure is odd how all the teachers I know have poor conditions and poor pay.
Because a company can go out of business, a normal union must resist demands which will cause this. If the union asks for too much, then everybody will be unemployed.
With the state, there is no such worry. The union can demand retirement at age 30, $200 per hour, 15-hour work weeks, and a pension that is 110% of normal working pay. Why not? The state can pay it; all they have to do is seize assets from the citizens. They simply raise taxes. The police will use guns to deal with any who refuse. (see Puerto Rico and Greece) When the state is in control of currency, there is also the option to just print money. (see Venezuela and Zimbabwe) This too steals from the people.
That example... is a shocking display of spine. I've really never seen that before. I guess there are exceptions, or at least one exception.
Meanwhile, lots of places are having trouble because they caved to the unions. A couple more notable ones are California and Detroit.
Note that voters are free to take the side of the employees, either by sympathy (dumb) or to get better-qualified employees. Instead of demanding that unions be legal, simply demand that the state provide good pay. (not that you get a direct say in either, but you can lobby and otherwise make it a campaign issue)
And that is a good thing for economy in general. That is reason why American companies are able to innovate at faster rate, offshore work to cheaper countries and give better services to consumers.
Because of lack of unions companies can hire people as they need and fire when they dont need which helps more people get jobs.
You want to hear an insane story about why we need teachers' unions?
This neighbor of mine was a teacher for 45 years, starting back in the 1940's. She found her first job in a little town and found a nice apartment for $45/month. The school superintendent heard about it. He called her and told her she had to rent an attic with another new teacher because there's a widow in town whose only source of income was renting to teachers. If she refused to live there, they'd fire her. The attic cost $100/month ($50 each) even though it was smaller than the apartment.
Maybe you missed the part where I said unions did serve an important part in US history. But this would never happen now (and if it did, the outrage would be enormous).
I don't think the extra $0.75 an hour or so compared to the non-union companies was doing us any favors. Not to mention the large percentage of that difference that went to union dues.
When I worked as a union employee in a grocery store (cleaning toilets, mopping up spills) my union fees were $12 a month.
I got paid $1.75/hour more than minimum wage, which is what people doing my job elsewhere would have gotten. Back then in Alberta minimum wage was $5 an hour, and I got $6.75
So even at the 15-20 hours a week I worked back then, that seems like a pretty good deal as I made back the union dues in a week.
Not to mention the additional protections I got. And that was a pretty shitty union and a pretty shitty job.
Wages within the US are in decline because of a shift to non-wage benefits. Worker compensation has done nothing but increase, there are just a bunch of laws (e.g. Obamacare) making it optimal for companies not to increase wages.
>Wages within the US are in decline because of a shift to non-wage benefits.
Median/below median wages are in decline in the US, period. Healthcare, education and housing costs have also gone up massively (with no commensurate increase in quality).
>there are just a bunch of laws (e.g. Obamacare) making it optimal for companies not to increase wages.
There is absolutely no sane economic explanation why Obamacare would prevent companies from raising wages.
Median/below median wages are in decline in the US, period. Healthcare,...
It's completely nonsensical to adjust wages for the cost of healthcare when healthcare is primarily paid by non-wage benefits. It's also nonsensical to ignore total comp and focus on wages, unless of course you are cherrypicking.
Matstroller has effectively addressed your other issues, so I feel no need to.
Note also that Branko Milanovic - the source of your graph - explicitly says that global income inequality is decreasing in his book. From a book review:
"Milanovic, like Bourguignon, stresses one encouraging fact. While inequality is rising within most countries, notably the high-income ones, global inequality of incomes, though huge, has been falling, particularly since 2000."
Of course you have to count healthcare. It's a payment that the employer makes on behalf of the employee.
You should also count company housing, company cars, an eat-all-you-want cafeteria, employee discounts, employer-paid gym membership or on-site gym, etc.
More of my fellow Americans should read up on the IWW. Which was far more serious about workplace democracy than those relatively right wing, corporate-friendly unions that the US promoted.
> But it seems odd that you define talking about something "effectively" and not being challenged on your opinions.
The US is pretty fundamentalist: over 40% believe God created humanity 10,000 years ago [1] and many have disturbing beliefs about the "invisible hand" (of divine providence, of course), which they try to impose on others. So when people try to talk about these things, highly motivated fundamentalists clog the discussion with dogma, when they numerically dominate.
These two forms of fundamentalism are strongly linked. ("Debt: the First 5000 Years" discusses this.)
Professional sports industries are examples of successful unionization that ordinary people are exposed more or less continuously. The US collegiate athletics industry offers a point of comparison for non-unionized work in the same occupations.
These examples are so severe they're not analogous to the discussion. Pro athletes can still negotiate their own salaries and compensation packages beyond the union (the union negotiates the league minimum salary), and college athletes are basically slave labor.
The vast majority of college athletic departments lose money due to the vast majority of athletes being revenue losers.
It's more like a salary cap system with the salary cap set at a scholarship. The "league" basically breaks even after making enormous profits on a few athletes, and losing on all of the rest.
Disingenuous to call it slave labor, especially considering any athlete can quit at any time for any reason.
The "league" has billion dollar revenue, multi million dollar coaching salaries, enormous capital expenditures, and more. They are not "break even."
If in fact you believe that student athletes are not exploited to an unconscionable degree, here is just a little educational material to get you started.
It's an extremely complicated issue. Trust me, I understand the points in those articles. For those unacquainted, head's up that it is hardly as unambiguous as the parent post implies.
They're also granted monopolies. Monopolies are the biggest scenario where unionization makes sense to me, since it's a much bigger imbalance of power (nowhere else for the worker to go).
My father was a sheet metal worker for many years. He always described the union meetings as a bunch of drunk* old men voting down any spending on training, something that would generally benefit younger men. Even while the pension fund is underfunded and highly dependent on younger men to pay into it.
My only direct experience with a union was when I was working for a federal govt agency. This org was steadily shrinking over the years as automated systems replaced what was once a highly labor intensive process. The leaders of the org worked hard to find a place for the techs who were slowly being displaced, literally offering them paid schooling and training programs. Those who didn't pursue these offers began to feel threatened and voted to join a union of federal employees.
My wife is a teacher. The teachers union exists solely to protect teachers. She has colleagues who are terrible at their job, doing things like failing to teach math for six months. The principals of the school look into firing them and are told by HR it takes seven years to fire anyone. This is in an environment where education colleges are pumping out tons of enthusiastic fresh meat every year. Teachers unions protect the negligent and harm the young.
Does this help you to understand why I am skeptical of unions?
* Literally drunk. The meetings were in the evenings so working people could attend them. Men would get off work, start drinking and go to the meetings three hours later.
With union = No merit based pay. Protection for the incompetent. Worst and best teacher make identical pay, and both are near impossible to fire.
Without union = race to the bottom. Where a union car assembly plant may pay workers $25 an hour, a non-union plant pays workers $10 an hour. We can't as a nation survive with so many jobs paying $10 an hour or less.
So what is the actual right path? How do you get fair pay for all workers, but not promote and protect the lazy and the incompetent?
Without caricaturing the position of bosses and unions, and constant good faith consultation and negotiation between them. And, honestly, a larger percentage of profits and productivity gains going to workers, instead of owners. If you haven't noticed, neither unions nor workers are winning; see Piketty.
More employee-friendly employment laws would go a long way in preventing unions from feeling the need to fight for ridiculous contract terms that ensure employees are basically unable to be let go.
At-will employment is a joke. 2 weeks unpaid maternity leave is a joke. Reasonable public policy would prevent unions from completing with each other on these fronts to the demise of their own organizations.
I will be the first to admit that I am generally pro-business. Earlier comments make it clear I am generally anti-union, or at best ambivalent. That being said, I can generally understand the argument of the other side, even if I disagree with it.
But I don't understand at all the sentiment that at-will employment is negative. I believe if you're bad at your job, your boss should be able to fire you. That day. The obvious straw man here is "well at-will means you can be fired for anything, so if you wear yellow shoes and your boss doesn't like yellow he can fire you," which just never happens. So that nonsense aside, I honestly do not know what the opposition to at-will employment is.
I think its something to do with, abuse by employers of vulnerable workers who can't stand up for themselves. Never mind yellow shoes; how about being critical of an abusive new rule by a sadistic manager? Unions were invented because of things like that and a hundred more; and yes I imagine somebody got fired for wearing the wrong color of shoes somewhere, sometime. And before unions, could do nothing about it.
> The obvious straw man here is "well at-will means you can be fired for anything, so if you wear yellow shoes and your boss doesn't like yellow he can fire you," which just never happens.
I feel like you set up a straw man that supports your point rather than the opposing point. How about this: A company's owners resent paying for health insurance but know that they have to do it to attract employees. To lower health insurance costs, they invent infractions to fire women and anyone age 50 or older.
Or a startup example: A company offers low pay and generous stock options that vest after 5 years of employment. Then they fire 90% of the employees in their fourth year.
> which just never happens. So that nonsense aside, I honestly do not know what the opposition to at-will employment is.
You don't understand it because you have declared that the argument of the other side to "never happen" and declared it "nonsense" to begin with.
But if you think it never happens, you are being naive and wrong. I have over the years had first hand knowledge of plenty of people being fired for reasons which have nothing to do with work performance at multiple companies. I've managed to stop some other attempts in the companies I've worked at, others were entirely out of my control to do anything about.
> I believe if you're bad at your job, your boss should be able to fire you. That day.
Even if we were to stipulate that no boss ever abuses this to fire you for unrelated reasons, this is also a strange attitude to me.
If you're bad at your job, your boss did a bad job interviewing you for the role and/or did a bad job providing adequate training. Also, if an employee is that bad at hiring the right people, I have little reason to trust that they are not also bad at ensuring they only fire people that are objectively bad at their job.
A process that does not give the employee some degree of recourse to argue their case and/or try to redeem themselves seems to me to be inherently one sided, unfair and abusive.
That does not mean I believe that an employee should be allowed to coast forever, but there is a massive gap from firing instantly to letting some coast forever. Such as e.g. the typical UK process, which usually involves raising a concern and formally drawing up a plan for improving performance together with the employee, followed by warnings if targets are not met, and finally termination. Yes, some people takes the piss and uses this to collect a paycheck a bit longer, others take it seriously and improves and become valuable employees; others will decide to leave on their own accord once they realise they will fail to meet requirements.
You've set up a strawman. There is no requirement that for a union to behave the way you suggest anywhere that I'm aware of. A union will generally be expected to provide certain protections, but there's a vast gap from having nobody to help you to reasonable representation is provided to even your positions vs. your employer to making the worst employees near impossible to fire.
E.g. the UK has plenty of strong unions, yet firing UK employees if you have good reason is shockingly easy for the most part seen with Scandinavian eyes. Some unions here are harder to deal with than others, sure, but it's also clearly possible to have unions that provide effective protection without making it impossible to get rid of people who do a bad job.
Part of the problem is that "doing a bad job" is sometimes used to hide cases of getting rid of people management doesn't like. It takes very few abuses of trust like that before you have a hardline union on the other side of the table that will not give a shit what arguments you have because they don't know whether or not the employer is telling the truth.
Once a relationship like that has soured, fixing it will be incredibly hard.
Remember that lives literally used to get lost over workers rights in the US (and still are many places in the world) - many unions today have a long institutional memory of people who died trying to gain concessions for their members.
E.g. AFL, now a part of the AFL-CIO was the instigator behind May Day as the international day for workers demonstrations, in part to continue the demonstrations for the 8 hour working day, in part in tribute to those who lost their lives in the Chicago Haymarket Massacre.
US unions in particular used to be on the forefront of this, and bore some of the worst brunts of violence, and many of the older US unions early became very much hardline for good reason.
Compare to unions many places in Europe where electoral success for left wing parties meant many of their demands where implement by law, allowing many unions to take a much softer approach and taking a lot of contentious issues off the table for union<->employer interactions because the hard stuff was dealt with by government.
> You've set up a strawman. There is no requirement that for a union to behave the way you suggest anywhere that I'm aware of. A union will generally be expected to provide certain protections, but there's a vast gap from having nobody to help you to reasonable representation is provided to even your positions vs. your employer to making the worst employees near impossible to fire.
Why do most/all Unions in the US end up this way? I am not sure you can say something is a straw man when literally most unions in a country act the same way. A straw man would be if I simply chose 1 union at random, like the Chicago Teachers Union. But choose more, look at the UAW or your local town teachers union. Seems pretty common.
> Why do most/all Unions in the US end up this way?
I don't know. Do they? Why do most unions elsewhere not end up this way?
Clearly there is something extremely toxic about the US relationship with unions given the kind of opinions we get to hear about them. It would be very interesting to understand exactly how that has come about.
Part of it probably does have its root in the fact that the battle lines between unions and employers in the US were drawn very early, and that the US government never got the level of union-friendly representation that large parts of Europe did that forced employers to the negotiating table and that in many countries established relatively civilized relationships between unions and employers and/or shifted many of the conflicts away from the the unions.
At the same time a lot of protection that may be extremely important to many US unionized workers doesn't matter elsewhere. Being fired in Norway, for example, is difficult, but if/when it happens, the social welfare system also makes it financially far less of a burden - there's much less of a reason for a union to take hardline positions on this in those circumstances than in a situation where the welfare system is as basic as it is in the US.
Forget employers, most people's experience is with government employee unions. 35.2% of public sector workers in the US are in unions, only 6.7% of private sector workers. They are particularly powerful in local politics, and there is a history of negotiating benefits with the politicians they elect that become unaffordable in the future.
Unions aren't inherently against merit based pay. They're against merit based pay where managers get to unilaterally decide what counts as merit.
When managers (especially non-specialist managers) are in charge, fealty normally trumps competence anyway.
>So what is the actual right path?
Either come up with an objective standard for merit that unions and management can agree on or go for the closest objective approximation - seniority and accept that some incompetent people are going to take a paycheck (the horror!).
> Either come up with an objective standard for merit that unions and management can agree on or go for the closest objective approximation - seniority and accept that some incompetent people are going to take a paycheck (the horror!).
But better people deserve more pay, not just older people. If that is the only argument, I would argue to just get rid of unions.
Do you have any evidence that "better people" (according to what measurement?) generally are the ones who get better pay?
The places I've worked it has generally seemed pretty arbitrary and largely down to who are best at negotiating. I've yet to work anywhere that have taken an anything remotely objective stance to measuring productivity and rewarding staff accordingly.
The closest I've gotten was working for Yahoo, which at least tried to gather feedback, but the system was still inherently flawed by being based on managers ranking staff members without any kind of formalized system to ensure the rankings were objective.
One year I was told that the group my team was in had too many "above expectations", and since two out of four on my team were ranked above expectations they had to arbitrarily drop one down to "meets expectations". (Not at any time while I was there did I see any kind of attempt at creating a uniform definition of what "meets expectations" or "exceeds expectations" meant; had a manager with high expectations? sucked to be you)
Since that directly affected the raises I was allowed to allocate, and since the ranges were in percent of salary, that decision cost that person several thousand pounds a year on an ongoing basis that I was unable to adjust for the following years, because some HR drone was making the reports from line managers fit his idealised curve without making any attempt at verifying whether or not the reports matched reality.
(as an aside: the origin of socialism, from Saint Simon, was the idea of a meritocracy)
For developers, better people tend to get better pay through job hopping. If an individual company only promotes brown nosers, there are other companies that are looking for talent.
Source: Looking back at my college class. 10 years later - most of the people of MEH skill are at one level of job, and most of the people of high skill are at another job level.
It's not a perfect correlation, and I am sure things like negotiation have a nontrivial impact.. but it is WAYYYYY better than looking at the staff of a local teacher union and pay rates.
No, "the horror!" is that truly competent technical people no longer enter fields like teaching.
You would have to be insane to do an extra Master's in order to earn $40k as a 'junior' CS or Math teacher when you can earn $150k in industry in SF straight out of undergrad.
Some 50% of Ontario elementary teachers cannot do Grade 5 fractions. My CS teacher in high school was trained in history and geography and was literally concurrently learning the same course one lesson ahead of us.
It's a disaster and it will never be fixed as long as the unions insist on paying STEM teachers the same as English teachers.
> Teachers in Texas are all paid the same based on years of service.
Do you have a source for this? The first thing I found on google was an article[0] which indicates teacher pay in Texas varies both with respect to location and subject taught (although admittedly not by much).
Each district determines its own payscale. That's no different than a union state. Teachers in Boston have a different payscale than teachers in Springfield, MA even though they are both part of the MTA.
CTE Teachers (Career and Technical Education) do get a $2000 stipend but they also have an extra week of work plus extracurricular duties during the school year, so it's not just "extra money".
There is no negotiating over salary or benefits.
"Employees are paid in accordance with administrative guidelines and an established pay structure. The District’s compensation plan is reviewed by Human Resource Services each year to include comparisons with other districts, an analysis of market data, as well as cost of living information. The compensation plan is adjusted as data dictates and the budget allows. The Board of Trustees approves the compensation plan on an annual basis."[1]
They do pay more in Dallas but there still is no negotiation over your salary.
It looks like Dallas is replacing the "years of service" schedule with a pay-for-performance schedule (page 8) where your salary is adjusted up or down according to "performance, student achievement and student perception surveys."[2] That went into effect last year, I believe. I wouldn't be surprised to see that spread.
My mother was a teacher, and was unionized, and got paid a good middle class income.
But from my perspective one thing her union did really well was professional development. As well as advocating for the students in terms of capping class sizes, pushing the school on various initiatives, etc.. My mother was able to complete her masters while she worked, and professional development was something the union had negotiated with management and took very seriously.
It's trendy to pick on teachers unions. And definitely it seems like where I am now, in Ontario, the teacher's unions do some dubious things. But I mostly only saw good things from my mother's union growing up.
> With union = No merit based pay. Protection for the incompetent. Worst and best teacher make identical pay, and both are near impossible to fire.
I don't think any of that is true of all unions. NFL players and Hollywood actors are essentially 100% unionized. Both have highly merit-based pay and have very little protection from being fired.
I'm optimistic about the rise of employee owned co-ops. Moots the (American style) management vs labor war. Can add better governance thru greater transparency and accountability.
"In particular why poorer Americans hate them, which is an affront to their own self interests."
Except, it's not always an affront to their self interest. Unions increase wages for their members, not people who aren't in unions. This then tends to increase the cost of the goods they provide.
Unions tend to reduce overall employment, favoring the already employed over the unemployed. They reduce job flexibility, as benefits are often tied to long term attachment to a single company. Unions make the companies more vulnerable to outsourcing. Finally, the public employee unions in the US have conspired with politicians to enact defined benefit pensions that are bankrupting many localities- a problem of short term thinking. Unions essentially create a government sponsored monopoly on labor supply, restricting both workers and companies, which is fundamentally in conflict with the values of economic liberty upon which the country was founded.
This all depends on where you are. German employers commonly extend the agreements to the non-unionized to keep people from joining the union for this reason alone.
> Unions essentially create a government sponsored monopoly on labor supply, restricting both workers and companies, which is fundamentally in conflict with the values of economic liberty upon which the country was founded.
Literally every word of what you just said about abolishing slavery. Even the bit about restricting workers, because poor landowners were told that owning a slave would enable upward mobility (it didn't really, slavery was a money sink at such small scales, this was just rhetoric to keep poor whites from questioning slavery).
Our country's history of valuing economic liberty has typically made us tolerate some awful behavior by the economically powerful. I wouldn't put it on a pedestal.
Just because Argument A can be used (improperly, perhaps?) to defend Bad Thing, and Argument A can also be used to defend Questioned Thing, does not make Questioned Thing equivalent to Bad Thing.
So rather than saying "yeah but slavery!" perhaps try actually refuting the points made.
I didn't say "yeah but slavery!" I didn't draw a false equivalence between unions and the abolition of slavery.
I was responding to someone discussing the role of "economic liberty" in America's founding. When America was founded, that phrase meant slavery. The entire point of building "economic liberty" into the foundation of the country was to compromise on slavery.
If you can't stomach slavery being mentioned in a conversation about the historical relationship between business in labor in America, and the history of the principles at hand, then you won't be able to engage the subject matter in any depth.
This is completely ridiculous comment, and I feel bad providing a response. However, the Sons of Liberty were opposed to the Stamp Act and related measures in 1765, the Tea Act in 1773- that's what the phrase meant. Slavery is not an expression of economic liberty, it is obviously a restriction on economic liberty.
Unions unfortunately continued the sordid history of racism in the US, particularly the AFL.
I feel sorry that you needed to include an insult in your comment. You could have just contributed your historical understanding.
The Stamp Act and Tea Act were opposed as taxation without representation in Parliament. They were not opposed because Americans didn't believe in taxes on principle. The spread of that belief is very new delusion.
In 1776, the freedom to use slaves to run your business was absolutely an expression of economic liberty for half of America. Thomas Jefferson and Democratic Republicans opposed the growth of the budding federal government because of the fear that a federal government could curtail local business practices, namely slavery.
You made the false claim "economic liberty meant slavery".
Freedom to enslave people is not an increase in economic liberty, it contracts the economic liberty of the enslaved persons.
It was the pursuit of the economic liberty to democratically determine the disposition of one's taxes upon which the country was founded. The country was not founded to preserve slavery. It is a pitiful and offensive rhetorical trick to suggest otherwise.
Where did my comment suggest that there was a disbelief in taxes on principle? That is your delusion, not mine.
I did construction inspections for landfill sites. I will say the Union Shops felt much better run, with fewer accident (its anecdotal I know, but when construction equipment flips, and you start to wonder how much training the guy on the backhoe has, not a question on Union sites, you know)
Union Wages are very good in NY. The migratory non-uinion crews that did liner install where quite happy getting the union wages that were required on the site.
There were a few people (equipment operators) that definitely used the union for cover and would just disappear at noon exactly for lunch, no matter what was going on, actually causing more work.
When he was let go, he was at the gate watching to make sure nobody used the same equipment for a week (A rule to prevent short term layoffs and rehires).
Mostly pretty hard working people, doing physical labor, stuff you wouldn't want to do after 50. The laborers had training on site sometime, to keep skills up.
My (limited) experience with unions in Germany and my (also, fortunately, limited) experience with unions in the US were far different. From that (limited/anecdotal) experience, I'd say that unions in Germany were a far better thing than what I saw in the US.
It might just be that you are from a place where the origin, organizational principles, incentives and co-dependent relationship with select politicians are "better" than they are in the US.
"...it is hard to see why Americans hate them so much."
Collective bargaining requires some kind of union. It's just game theory.
"... individuals in any group attempting collective action will have incentives to "free ride" on the efforts of others if the group is working to provide public goods. Individuals will not “free ride” in groups that provide benefits only to active participants."
> “This is Amazon’s biggest fear,” said Andy Powell, a district organizer for the International Association of Machinists & Aerospace Workers who is trying to organize Amazon fulfillment center workers in Delaware and several nearby states. “The minute one falls and people see they got a better deal, it’s going to be a cancer for them.”
That's a cynical way to phrase it. You'd think a union organizer would describe their union like a medicine, not a cancer.
I'm not against unions, I'm against public sector unions.
Private sector unions can do whatever they want. Let them strike, collective bargain, walk out, sit in. The damage is isolated, the dollars involved are relegated to business owners and workers, and there's competition on both sides of the equation.
Public sector unions are were the trouble is at. Government work stoppages[1] are bullshit as are unfunded future concessions that will have to be paid by our children's children.
[1]: Yes we can all make jokes about how they're not doing anything to start but you know what I'm saying...
One problem with getting rid of public sector unions is if you try to get rid of them all at once on a federal level, that lets them pick their symbolic battleground. They will probably choose Memphis, where Dr. King died supporting the right of public sanitation workers to form a union.
> but then, how should public sector employees ask for better conditions?
The government already has to compete against the private sector. If wages rise there, whether through union action or labor shortages, then government will have to act accordingly. This works in the opposite direction as well (lowering wages/costs).
The main issue is that the current government does not have an interest in long term planning. The current mayor/governor/steward is more than willing to push the true costs of things down the road because they won't be around to account for them. That's how you end up with massive unfunded pension obligations.
Public sector unions are just one part of this problem albeit a big part.
Public sector unions have always seemed iffy to me. They put a lot of money into the political process, and unlike issues with competing interests there's really nobody on the other side, so they usually get their way. It's a case concentrated benefits and diffuse costs.
In California politicians don't cross the public sector unions, because the unions provide money for poltical campaigns. Schwartzenegger tried to reign them in and was pretty much mortally wounded in political terms.
"unions make companies more vulnerable to outsourcing"
because outsourcing is a a shark and unions cover you in blood?
the only thing that makes a company vulnerable to outsourcing is assholes in management, uncaring, shortsighted, corrupt and uncaring assholes. that's it.
unions are for the people and inherently by the people, ffs, it's a cooperative effort to run a company, but somehow people think it's the CEO and the whatever-o that make the company what it is.
Companies that think this way, ultimately fail, or loose to companies that treat their people better, unless they have regulatory capture or some other government handout to corner the market, and this causes their employees to realize that the company they work for is shit and maybe they need to form a union to protect themselves from the psychopaths running the company.
Many Americans grow up with a rather biased view of unions and with good reason.
Looking at the unions here in New York when it comes to construction you quickly end up loathing the unions.
Instead of fighting for paid sick days, longer vacation, better healthcare for their members they simply try to expand the number of members they have thus delaying constructions, putting way too many people on the constructions projects etc.
It's a shame because unions do have their time and place when the work is more or less the same and salaries not too independent.
Wallmart employees could use a strong union. Uber could.
But the problem is that once you get into the territory of fluctuating salaries for the same job and more individual employee/employer relationships it's not so easy to establish a shared vision.
Denmark have a model[1] where the employee unions and the employer negotiate minimum salaries, sick days etc. and where the government primarily is there as a mediator.
It's working pretty good although it is showing to be less effective in the more individually based job types I spoke about.
None the less. The US do need more unions but they have to be established across companies to ensure agency.
I hope it remains like that forever if Amazon has to give its services for cheaper and cheaper prices.
I come from India which remains one of the most poorest countries and most of the manufacturing sector remains underdeveloped thanks to Labor unions. That evil should be kept out of USA. Cities like Kolkata which were once impotant trading ports of the world is reduced to shit by union politics.
Teacher's union in USA remains the biggest reason why the public education is in bad shape. Doctor's Union aka American Medical Association remains one of the dominant reason why healthcare is expensive.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 220 ms ] threadYou cannot talk about unions online effectively, Americans come out of the woodwork with super strange anecdotes and pro-business rhetoric. Reminds me of Israel-Palestine in that regard, as soon as the topic comes up things get "strange."
When you grew up in a country where unions are healthy and working both for the employees and for the business, it is hard to see why Americans hate them so much. In particular why poorer Americans hate them, which is an affront to their own self interests.
And if anyone doubts the anti-union bend of Amazon in particular, just look at their behaviour in Germany, where much of labour law, worker's rights and the work environment in general are based on cooperation between trade unions and private companies (and has been since the March Revolution of 1848).
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-05-11/poultry-wo...
http://time.com/money/4317132/boss-wants-liver-donor-for-bro...
Perhaps because the borders between US unions/syndicates/mafia were thin?
> In particular why poorer Americans hate them, which is an affront to their own self interests.
That's a classical problem with Lumpen.
And most people in North America now experience unionized employees mostly in the form of public sector union employees, which is a rather contradictory situation in that as a 'taxpayer' one is also nominally the 'employer' of public sector employees, and the right has done a great job of positioning the public sector against the population as a whole.
If you want to unleash a torrent of vitriol that you'd normally only hear from a virulent right winger, bring up teacher's unions in any professional/middle-class workplace here in Ontario.
I always find it amazing to hear my coworkers who make six figures moving around letters on a screen and eating catered gourmet lunches in the company cafe go on a screed about the amazingly overpaid people who teach their kids, deliver their mail, or pick up their garbage...
Not so for the publicly unionized teachers that make the same money and never get fired regardless of if they're lazy negligent idiots or if they're dedicated molders of young minds. It's completely unfair.
I think most people naturally undervalue the work of others and overvalue the work of themselves. They are underpaid, but people doing X are overpaid. So that plays directly into the public sector union stuff. A lot of people are also vehemently against the taxes they pay, so that also plays directly into anti public union rhetoric. I think those people also don't understand entirely how their tax dollars are spent. We saw that in the U.S. in the 2012 elections when President Obama talked about private companies not building the roads they drive their trucks on everyday. Rather than being logically interpreted as true and understanding that taxes get spent on infrastructure and that helps the economy, it was interpreted as the President telling private companies they weren't responsible for their company's success.
I would have guessed Canada's more liberal attitude might have caused better relations between the population and public unions, but it sounds like many of the same issues exist as they do in the U.S.
Canada is like Hillary Clinton: left by American standards, but considered to be far to the right of center by most of the rest of the world.
There is a significant 20%ish of the population here that could be called social democratic / socialist.
But the majority of the population trends liberal, which I would characterize as very liberal on social / cultural issues, in favour of some social spending here and there (including our public health care system), activist role on environmental issues... but not in favour of social control of industries, not really pro-union, not really in favour of expanding social programs, swinging frequently towards an austerity focus when that's the way the wind is blowing... and very much middle-class/upper-middle-class in orientation.
Yeah, it could never be possible that the workers thought for themselves and just weren't interested in the terms.
Sure, it sucks that Amazon's Warehouse, has been unable to start a union thus far. But the article sets out several reasons for that including strategic turnover.
There was a famous case, where Toyota (or some company like that) set up two identical car factories, one in Northern England and one in Germany. The one in Germany had vastly higher output per worker than the one in England, and a lot of the reason was down to the wildly different attitudes of the workers and the union - the one in England tended to put "tools down" for all kinds of silly bureaucratic reasons.
And certainly in other parts of the country and other industries - Clydeside ship building, say - unions were not blameless in helping along their decline - although the incompetence of management and the business helped there as well.
I suspect Amazon's quite antagonistic relationship with its German unions is in part because it doesn't take a very "German" approach to them as an employer, and tries to run things in a more American-style way instead. Although German employers are not quite as consensus-oriented nowadays than they were in the 1950s-1990s period either.
IIRC (and again, too lazy to look this up), it was a PoC that brought the suit because many unions were automatically inclined to agree with management that a PoC was a knucklehead.
Union antagonism is very much cultural[0], and the US didn't wait until the 60s for that to happen, late 19th/early 20th century US management didn't shy from violently repressing strikes and busting unions, Pinkerton was often hired in that capacity and industrialists with enough clout could get the police or even the army involved (as in Blair Mountain or Ludlow)
According to "American Labor Violence: Its Causes, Character, and Outcome", as of 1969 the US had the bloodiest and most violent labor history of the first world.
[0] the UK and France both have very antagonistic labor relationships for instance
"Management gets the union it asks for."
Almost every union in the US and the UK was formed in the face of withering hostility from management. It's not surprising that the union would be antagonistic in response.
EDIT: typo
Other countries didn't necessarily have that history, and other factors - like the need to rebuild the country after a devastating war with everybody starting from nothing - might have fostered cooperation in ways not possible in the UK.
Even today, government employee unions face serious challenges to their existence. If Scott Walker doesn't count as management, who does?
You should not take what you see online as a reflection of the real political and economic thought of the people in real life.
That's rarely the case with unions however. They usually work for the interests of a select few. They harm the business, they lobby government for special benefits and protections, and they're often willing to harm employees at the bottom of the ladder (or unemployed people who are never allowed on the ladder) to benefit employees on the top and closest to the union leaders.
You're making a claim of prevalence, it'd be interesting to know where you got that opinion from.
Here's an example of how social workers in Israel were let down by the Histadrut - Israel's organization of trade unions. http://www.jpost.com/National-News/Social-workers-feel-let-d...
Social workers are some of the lowest paid government workers in Israel, and they always participate in general strikes when requested by the Histadrut. They've helped secure higher salaries for bank unions, airport unions, electric unions and port worker unions. But when it was there turn to strike (After decades of stagnant income), they were thrown under the bus, with the Histadrut negotiating a deal that didn't even offer a raise that would cover the lost income.
Leader of the Israeli Labor Party (Closely tied with the union leaders) Shelly Yachimovich even put out a public letter calling on social workers to end their strike. Effectively taking away any bargaining power they had left. (Hebrew link, couldn't find coverage in English): http://www.blacklabor.org/?p=29042
Probably because most Americans (myself included) have never encountered a union that works for both the employees and the business.
My working-class father, twice, was working for a union and was forced to stop working for strikes, unpaid. My parents nearly lost their house when I was in elementary school because of it. One of those times the company actually shut down.
> You cannot talk about unions online effectively, Americans come out of the woodwork with super strange anecdotes and pro-business rhetoric.
Obviously America is more pro-business than most of Europe. But it seems odd that you define talking about something "effectively" and not being challenged on your opinions. I would argue it's hard (not impossible) to talk about unions online effectively because Europeans come out of the woodwork with super strange anecdotes and statements like a poor person disliking unions is inherently against their own self interest.
In fact, I'd wager to say almost all of them with more than a handful of employees. (Mom and Pop places may have you "walk it off", but beyond that, through a combination of genuine concern for employees and HR/Safety policies, you'd be attended to.)
Hardees - frier accident=third degree burn. Management told her to finish the dinner rush. Two days later when her leg wasn't healing she went to the doctor. The owners never paid for the doctor, fought her workers comp claim, and fired her a few weeks after she came back to work.
Little Caesar's - cook slipped and got a deep cut on his arm. The manager tried to keep him at work until he ruined a couple pizzas by bleeding on them. He drove himself to the emergency room. He quit the next month when the owners refused to pay for the emergency room bill.
UPS - When I worked at a bookstore, the UPS guy who delivered to our mall came in with a terrible limp. A stack of boxes had fallen on him as they were loading the truck. His manager told him to complete his shift since they didn’t have any other drivers. He ended up needing knee surgery and having to fight the company for months for workers comp. To UPS’s credit, they didn’t fire him and he was still working for UPS when I quit the bookstore job. (I lived in a right-to-work state, so I don’t think the UPS drivers were unionized.)
I hate that phrase so much. Crushing unions described as protecting worker rights.
What would cross my mind, even if I was a bad person, is that it sounds totally illegal to make someone keep working with a head injury (regardless of unions).
I don't know if it actually is, but I'm guessing mid-level UPS managers don't either.
Original was:
> poorer Americans hate them, which is an affront to their own self interests
The tone seems different to me.
But you're right.
I find this bizarre to hear, given that the US has pretty much the weakest protections for workers of any developed country.
That being said, most people in the US aren't clamoring for a lot of the "protections" you'll find in western Europe.
I don't think most people in the US has any concept of the kind of protections you get in most of western Europe being possible.
All other "protections" usually end up costing you someway or another. Mandatory vacation days are converted to lower salaries. Maternity leave makes it more difficult for young married women to find a job. Mandatory Insurances and Pensions are simply calculated in to the "cost of employment", reducing the actual salary. Not being able to fire a worker means much higher hiring standards, and make it a lot more difficult for inexperienced workers to find a job.
That's only ever a protection as long as your skills are valued and in high demand. Which means it's only a temporary protection, and only for a minority of the population.
> All other "protections" usually end up costing you someway or another.
The "other" is misplaced here, if all you have is the ability to quit, you have no stability[0], you have limited bargaining power (and are pretty systematically in a position of weakness), and the cooperative incentives with coworkers are very different, and arguably lower.
[0] and things get worse if you own property (now your "protection" is tied to property markets), a partner (now your "protection" may be tied to fucking them over) or dependents
What's wrong with that? If your skills are not valued or in high demand, you don't deserve any protection. Retool and equip yourself with valuable and skills that are in demand.
Should I be protected because I dug my head deep into MSDOS or APL and refused to catch up to the modern day ubiquitous Unix systems and C++?
So precisely how does the US allow people to do that? Which programs are available which will keep a family of 4 fed, sheltered and clothed while the parents retool because their jobs are shitty and probably doing illegal things, and they know for a fact that the second they call their company out they're going to get fired?
No, you shouldn't be protected from your job actually disappearing (past getting paid off) - but you should be protected from your employer being awful.
The U.S. and Canadian unions in the early 20th century are a great comparison. In Canada, they pushed the government to provide healthcare. In the U.S., they pushed the corporations to provide it.
Fast forward 80 years, and as unions are being depowered, the healthcare options get worse for U.S. employees because they're not guaranteed by law.
Which works out great for the top few percent of workers who are sufficient sought after to be able to dictate terms. Not so great for the vast majority that are easy to replace.
History has demonstrated pretty clearly that this is utter nonsense. Here's an example of the type of things that motivated unionisation in the US:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_Shirtwaist_Factory_fi...
146 people dead because employers at the time saw it as perfectly acceptable to lock people in to prevent unauthorised breaks.
The 8 hour working day too - it took about a century to get it widespread - and numerous dead.
Frankly, that statement is deeply insulting to the more of the many people who have died to secure the labour rights we have today.
> Mandatory vacation days are converted to lower salaries.
I've yet to work anywhere with mandatory vacation days in the sense that I can not give them up. What I have always had, however, is the right to a certain minimum number of days. Even in Norway, which from a US point of view probably would seem quite extreme when it comes to the level of workers protections, if I truly wanted to work more I generally would be able to give up most of my vacation days.
The big difference is that the defaults in employment law in Norway provide terms that people spent decades fighting for, and to deviate from that requires explicit consideration. You can write a Norwegian employment contract in about two paragraphs. In fact, most of my Norwegian employment contracts were about that length.
But if you want to, you can find ways of deviating most protections as long as your employee is willing to pay for it.
As it happens, it turns out that most employees do not value "buying" fewer vacation days or shorter notice periods, or other abrogations of established workers rights, at nearly enough money for most of them to be willing to write it into employment contracts.
The reality is that while you may be right that salaries could be higher without some of these protections, they appear to be systematically valued higher by employees than employers once employees have actually experienced them.
> Maternity leave makes it more difficult for young married women to find a job.
Women leave employment in droves to have children whether or not they get paid maternity leave, and as such I see little reason to believe that providing right to maternity leave or paid maternity leave is likely to have a major additional impact.
One of the reasons why so many women end up leaving the workforce, often for good, on having children in many countries is that many can't afford childcare.
E.g. I'm in the UK, and childcare for a single child here can easily reach 1000 pounds/month until your kids reach school age (with some recent improvements in provision of part time government paid care). If you have a two pre-school children with care costs like that, you need a salary well above average before it is economical for both parents to work. Even if you have cheaper options available some places, you need a relatively decent paying job to be able to pay for child care for more than one child and have anything left.
And this provides an easy solution to reducing the impact of maternity leave: Provide more subsidised childcare. As it happens, that will tend to do more to bring more women into employment than maternity leave does to counteract it. In Norway, improvements to maternity pay/leave and childcare provisions have always gone in near lock-step for exactly this reason (on top of that, there has in recent years been a paternity leave provision to further reduce the disparity).
> Mandatory Insurances and Pensions are simply calculated in to the "cost of employment", reducing the actual sa...
It's not just about quitting Microsoft to Join google, It's also about quitting Mcdonald's to join Subway, or quitting Amazon to work for Walmart. The only workers who aren't able to quit a job are public sector workers, where the government has a monopsony on hiring.
> I've yet to work anywhere with mandatory vacation days in the sense that I can not give them up In some countries you can give up your paid vacation days. At a cost to your employer who would have to PAY YOU additionally. These all add up as additional costs of employment, and simply reduce the salary you earn in the first place. (As compared to what you could earn if there weren't paid leave laws in place).
Do some workers and employers prefer a lower salary for more vacation days? sure. Just agree on that as part of a contract. Don't force a one size fits all solution on everyone.
> Women leave employment in droves to have children whether or not they get paid maternity leave I wasn't addressing that. I was explaining that in countries that have paid maternity leave, women might not even get employed (or only get employed for certain roles) in the first place.
> Mandatory insurances and pensions are not about workers protections per se most places I'm aware of. Take Israel as an example. Mandatory pensions are considered a "triumph" of the unions, who are able to strongarm employers in to paying more into worker's pensions: http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-histadrut-employers-agree...
> Not being able to fire a worker is not a common feature of workers protections anywhere. It's never about "not being able to fire". It's about firing flexibility. Can an employer simply send you home, or do they have to go through lots of legal beuracracy first?
It's easy in Denmark: http://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/15/business/worldbusiness/the... But difficult in France or Germany: https://www.quora.com/Is-it-true-that-its-impossible-to-fire... https://www.wbs-law.de/eng/doing-business-germany/employment...
The bottom line is that if it's difficult to fire someone, you'll be a lot more picky and careful before hiring them.
That wasn't the question, but rather if the protection cost you anything. Now you're just taking a "pro-business" stance as described in the top comment. Almost no employers would agree to larger amounts of unpaid vacation (which is what you are describing) unless that was the norm. I don't think anyone is questioning that paid vacation is shifting your salary around or make you work less hours, that's the whole point. But you can usually choose to take your full salary and work as many hours as if you didn't have vacation, the other way (getting unpaid vacation) is usually much harder.
The crazily bad working conditions for the lower end of the US labour market tells me differently.
> At a cost to your employer who would have to PAY YOU additionally. These all add up as additional costs of employment, and simply reduce the salary you earn in the first place. (As compared to what you could earn if there weren't paid leave laws in place).
Which misses my point, which is that while this may be true, the low number of people who take up the opportunity to negotiate compensation to give up vacation days etc. demonstrate quite clearly that workers here tend to value this more than employers do.
In most parts of Europe these laws set defaults. Some make it more difficult to deviate from the default than others (Norway is notoriously hard; many contract clauses are automatically null and void unless you're very careful), but most places you can deviate from most or all of them through negotiation and various degrees of creative solutions (in Norway too, mostly). Yet my experience is that most people don't.
If any employer came to me and offered to buy back a vacation day, they could do that. If they offer enough, I might take it. To date no employer has offered me enough for it to worth it, but some have provided programmes where they offered flexible numbers of vacation days, with a default.
I'm arguing that employers value those extra days at less than most workers do, or more employers would offer to buy back vacation days or offer such flexible vacation day schemes (when they do it tends to be seen as a way to get more vacation; only rarely is it seen as a way to get more money, though occasionally people "sell" vacation days one year to be able to buy more days the following year).
In fact, in many places in Europe the norm is now to offer more paid vacation days than the statutory minimum. e.g. in the UK the minimum is 28 days which can include the 8 public holidays, but the norm in professional employment is a minimum of 25 days + the 8 public holidays, and many places this will increase with tenure, in recognition of the fact that employees tend to value this higher than the equivalent increase in salary (we see this demonstrated in that for example many notoriously low paid jobs, such as in retail, often have above average number of paid vacation days - it is "cheaper" for these extremely cost-sensitive companies to offer more vacation than to increase salary by amounts that would have been valued equally high by their potential employees)
> I wasn't addressing that. I was explaining that in countries that have paid maternity leave, women might not even get employed in the first place.
And I pointed out that this effect is easy enough to counteract, and that you can give far more women the ability to choose to continue to work by offering better childcare provisions. To the extent that in a lot of countries, childcare provisioning has been a large part of the fight for womens rights (because it is usually women that ends up pushed out of the workplace when couples can't afford to have both people working)
> Mandatory pensions are considered a "triumph" of the unions, who are able to strongarm employers in to paying more into worker's pensions:
... as a proxy because they've been unable to get government to increase pensions directly. Most places workplace pensions represent basically a political defeat, and given the right wing nature of Israeli politics I'm not surprised.
> It's never about "not being able to fire". It's about firing flexibility. Can an employer simply send you home, or do they have to go through lots of legal beuracracy first?
Which is a very, very different situation. There are good reasons for bureaucracy: Employers show time and time again that they want to fire for reasons that have nothing to do with work performance.
> The bottom line is that if it's difficult to fire someo...
I've tried. It's never happened. I feel very cynical when I see all the oh-so-earnest discussions about "negotiating" after getting a job offer, because they all seem to assume that money is the only thing that matters, and that one can get more of it just by asking for it. Negotiating over a job offer has never gotten me jack squat, because American companies appear to be universally stuck on the idea that vacation time ought to be a function of seniority.
I work at a very large company. They have divisions with different salary bands and benefits. When you move from one division to another it's like moving to a brand new company. I guarantee you if you negotiated extra vacation at my company they would eventually transfer your business unit to another division and you'd stop accruing the extra. HR would shrug and quote you the corporate policy.
You're probably much better off working for a smaller place where the CEO was involved in the salary negotiations.
That reads like public sector workers are not allowed to quit, and that public sector workers are some special class who are not allowed to work for private firms.
Of course nobody is going to buy an extra work day, even if they like to work....
In the Soviet Union, this wasn't a problem... but it was soon noticed that a paid childcare worker would not care for a child as that child's own mother would.
Suppose that somehow you could pay for that. (probably not happening even for $million per year) Would you want it? Would you want your child to see someone else as, essentially, their mom? Who will your child love? Who will your child visit, decades later, in the nursing home? You can't substitute "quality time" for total time, simply being there for every skinned knee and question about life.
Money isn't good at purchasing love, and you would be unhappy with the result if you succeeded.
That's not really how you calculate compensation. You have to look at the salaries plus benefits. Usually people undervalue what the company can pay for them so more benefits usually means greater compensation. There's plenty of people in the US who accept salaries where they can't gracefully handle getting sick, unemployed or having a family.
"Mandatory vacation days are converted to lower salaries."
You can usually get this as cash compensation instead, they just can't force you to do so. In contrast to "unlimited vacation" that some startups have where you don't get anything if you work more.
"Maternity leave makes it more difficult for young married women to find a job."
This is a much longer conversation, but more than anything I would say that it's cultural. I know many women who have both successful careers and had maternity leave. But then maternity leave is usually paid by the government.
"Mandatory Insurances and Pensions are simply calculated in to the "cost of employment", reducing the actual salary."
Usually get more for the money.
"Not being able to fire a worker means much higher hiring standards, and make it a lot more difficult for inexperienced workers to find a job."
You can still usually be fired during a grace period, something like six months, or you can work as a contractor.
There is thus nothing to restrain the union.
The state normally also has elections. Because unions are allowed to fund election campaigns, the union effectively gets to sit on both sides of the bargaining table. The government "opposition" is a push-over.
If unions are unrestricted it sure is odd how all the teachers I know have poor conditions and poor pay.
With the state, there is no such worry. The union can demand retirement at age 30, $200 per hour, 15-hour work weeks, and a pension that is 110% of normal working pay. Why not? The state can pay it; all they have to do is seize assets from the citizens. They simply raise taxes. The police will use guns to deal with any who refuse. (see Puerto Rico and Greece) When the state is in control of currency, there is also the option to just print money. (see Venezuela and Zimbabwe) This too steals from the people.
I just read this in the news too, amusingly enough: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-tees-36305132
Meanwhile, lots of places are having trouble because they caved to the unions. A couple more notable ones are California and Detroit.
Note that voters are free to take the side of the employees, either by sympathy (dumb) or to get better-qualified employees. Instead of demanding that unions be legal, simply demand that the state provide good pay. (not that you get a direct say in either, but you can lobby and otherwise make it a campaign issue)
Because of lack of unions companies can hire people as they need and fire when they dont need which helps more people get jobs.
This neighbor of mine was a teacher for 45 years, starting back in the 1940's. She found her first job in a little town and found a nice apartment for $45/month. The school superintendent heard about it. He called her and told her she had to rent an attic with another new teacher because there's a widow in town whose only source of income was renting to teachers. If she refused to live there, they'd fire her. The attic cost $100/month ($50 each) even though it was smaller than the apartment.
And how appreciative were you of the higher earnings yielded from him having a union that was actually prepared to strike?
>Obviously America is more pro-business than most of Europe.
Hence why average American wages are in decline while the 1% have gotten wealthier and wealthier and wealthier.
I got paid $1.75/hour more than minimum wage, which is what people doing my job elsewhere would have gotten. Back then in Alberta minimum wage was $5 an hour, and I got $6.75
So even at the 15-20 hours a week I worked back then, that seems like a pretty good deal as I made back the union dues in a week.
Not to mention the additional protections I got. And that was a pretty shitty union and a pretty shitty job.
http://www.maxroser.com/economic-world-history-in-one-chart/
Wages within the US are in decline because of a shift to non-wage benefits. Worker compensation has done nothing but increase, there are just a bunch of laws (e.g. Obamacare) making it optimal for companies not to increase wages.
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/COMPRNFB
The same trend towards within-country inequality can be seen in Europe, so any US-specific explanation is simply incorrect.
When you're not cherry picking data, not so much:
https://4.bp.blogspot.com/-kW362RyS95U/Tz7u6cqfuTI/AAAAAAAAA...
>Wages within the US are in decline because of a shift to non-wage benefits.
Median/below median wages are in decline in the US, period. Healthcare, education and housing costs have also gone up massively (with no commensurate increase in quality).
>there are just a bunch of laws (e.g. Obamacare) making it optimal for companies not to increase wages.
There is absolutely no sane economic explanation why Obamacare would prevent companies from raising wages.
It's hard to see why "one country, one datapoint" would be more relevant than weighing all persons equally.
> There is absolutely no sane economic explanation why Obamacare would prevent companies from raising wages.
Of course it doesn't prevent that. It simply makes more convenient to raise non-monetary compensation.
It's completely nonsensical to adjust wages for the cost of healthcare when healthcare is primarily paid by non-wage benefits. It's also nonsensical to ignore total comp and focus on wages, unless of course you are cherrypicking.
Matstroller has effectively addressed your other issues, so I feel no need to.
Note also that Branko Milanovic - the source of your graph - explicitly says that global income inequality is decreasing in his book. From a book review:
"Milanovic, like Bourguignon, stresses one encouraging fact. While inequality is rising within most countries, notably the high-income ones, global inequality of incomes, though huge, has been falling, particularly since 2000."
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/13603aa2-0185-11e6-ac98-3c15a1aa2e...
You should also count company housing, company cars, an eat-all-you-want cafeteria, employee discounts, employer-paid gym membership or on-site gym, etc.
> But it seems odd that you define talking about something "effectively" and not being challenged on your opinions.
The US is pretty fundamentalist: over 40% believe God created humanity 10,000 years ago [1] and many have disturbing beliefs about the "invisible hand" (of divine providence, of course), which they try to impose on others. So when people try to talk about these things, highly motivated fundamentalists clog the discussion with dogma, when they numerically dominate.
These two forms of fundamentalism are strongly linked. ("Debt: the First 5000 Years" discusses this.)
[1] http://www.gallup.com/poll/170822/believe-creationist-view-h...
It's more like a salary cap system with the salary cap set at a scholarship. The "league" basically breaks even after making enormous profits on a few athletes, and losing on all of the rest.
Disingenuous to call it slave labor, especially considering any athlete can quit at any time for any reason.
If in fact you believe that student athletes are not exploited to an unconscionable degree, here is just a little educational material to get you started.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-sham...
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1591846323/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_TTMo...
https://youtu.be/pX8BXH3SJn0
http://time.com/3586037/exploitation-is-everywhere-in-mens-c...
https://sports.vice.com/en_us/article/four-years-a-student-a...
http://www.thenation.com/article/ncaa-poster-boy-corruption-...
https://www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2016/02/21/does-ncaa-...
And I'm not alone calling it slave labor. I'm just one in a massive chorus.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ncaa+slavery&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF...
https://www.google.com/?q=why+college+athletes+should+not+be...
My only direct experience with a union was when I was working for a federal govt agency. This org was steadily shrinking over the years as automated systems replaced what was once a highly labor intensive process. The leaders of the org worked hard to find a place for the techs who were slowly being displaced, literally offering them paid schooling and training programs. Those who didn't pursue these offers began to feel threatened and voted to join a union of federal employees.
My wife is a teacher. The teachers union exists solely to protect teachers. She has colleagues who are terrible at their job, doing things like failing to teach math for six months. The principals of the school look into firing them and are told by HR it takes seven years to fire anyone. This is in an environment where education colleges are pumping out tons of enthusiastic fresh meat every year. Teachers unions protect the negligent and harm the young.
Does this help you to understand why I am skeptical of unions?
* Literally drunk. The meetings were in the evenings so working people could attend them. Men would get off work, start drinking and go to the meetings three hours later.
With union = No merit based pay. Protection for the incompetent. Worst and best teacher make identical pay, and both are near impossible to fire.
Without union = race to the bottom. Where a union car assembly plant may pay workers $25 an hour, a non-union plant pays workers $10 an hour. We can't as a nation survive with so many jobs paying $10 an hour or less.
So what is the actual right path? How do you get fair pay for all workers, but not promote and protect the lazy and the incompetent?
At-will employment is a joke. 2 weeks unpaid maternity leave is a joke. Reasonable public policy would prevent unions from completing with each other on these fronts to the demise of their own organizations.
I will be the first to admit that I am generally pro-business. Earlier comments make it clear I am generally anti-union, or at best ambivalent. That being said, I can generally understand the argument of the other side, even if I disagree with it.
But I don't understand at all the sentiment that at-will employment is negative. I believe if you're bad at your job, your boss should be able to fire you. That day. The obvious straw man here is "well at-will means you can be fired for anything, so if you wear yellow shoes and your boss doesn't like yellow he can fire you," which just never happens. So that nonsense aside, I honestly do not know what the opposition to at-will employment is.
I feel like you set up a straw man that supports your point rather than the opposing point. How about this: A company's owners resent paying for health insurance but know that they have to do it to attract employees. To lower health insurance costs, they invent infractions to fire women and anyone age 50 or older.
Or a startup example: A company offers low pay and generous stock options that vest after 5 years of employment. Then they fire 90% of the employees in their fourth year.
You don't understand it because you have declared that the argument of the other side to "never happen" and declared it "nonsense" to begin with.
But if you think it never happens, you are being naive and wrong. I have over the years had first hand knowledge of plenty of people being fired for reasons which have nothing to do with work performance at multiple companies. I've managed to stop some other attempts in the companies I've worked at, others were entirely out of my control to do anything about.
> I believe if you're bad at your job, your boss should be able to fire you. That day.
Even if we were to stipulate that no boss ever abuses this to fire you for unrelated reasons, this is also a strange attitude to me.
If you're bad at your job, your boss did a bad job interviewing you for the role and/or did a bad job providing adequate training. Also, if an employee is that bad at hiring the right people, I have little reason to trust that they are not also bad at ensuring they only fire people that are objectively bad at their job.
A process that does not give the employee some degree of recourse to argue their case and/or try to redeem themselves seems to me to be inherently one sided, unfair and abusive.
That does not mean I believe that an employee should be allowed to coast forever, but there is a massive gap from firing instantly to letting some coast forever. Such as e.g. the typical UK process, which usually involves raising a concern and formally drawing up a plan for improving performance together with the employee, followed by warnings if targets are not met, and finally termination. Yes, some people takes the piss and uses this to collect a paycheck a bit longer, others take it seriously and improves and become valuable employees; others will decide to leave on their own accord once they realise they will fail to meet requirements.
You could also be fired because you would be better at your boss' job than he is and he wants to get rid of you before his boss notices.
You could also be fired because you refuse to do something dangerous and insist that it should be done in a less-dangerous but more expensive way.
At-will employment isn't a blank check for discriminatory practices.
E.g. the UK has plenty of strong unions, yet firing UK employees if you have good reason is shockingly easy for the most part seen with Scandinavian eyes. Some unions here are harder to deal with than others, sure, but it's also clearly possible to have unions that provide effective protection without making it impossible to get rid of people who do a bad job.
Part of the problem is that "doing a bad job" is sometimes used to hide cases of getting rid of people management doesn't like. It takes very few abuses of trust like that before you have a hardline union on the other side of the table that will not give a shit what arguments you have because they don't know whether or not the employer is telling the truth.
Once a relationship like that has soured, fixing it will be incredibly hard.
Remember that lives literally used to get lost over workers rights in the US (and still are many places in the world) - many unions today have a long institutional memory of people who died trying to gain concessions for their members.
E.g. AFL, now a part of the AFL-CIO was the instigator behind May Day as the international day for workers demonstrations, in part to continue the demonstrations for the 8 hour working day, in part in tribute to those who lost their lives in the Chicago Haymarket Massacre.
US unions in particular used to be on the forefront of this, and bore some of the worst brunts of violence, and many of the older US unions early became very much hardline for good reason.
Compare to unions many places in Europe where electoral success for left wing parties meant many of their demands where implement by law, allowing many unions to take a much softer approach and taking a lot of contentious issues off the table for union<->employer interactions because the hard stuff was dealt with by government.
Why do most/all Unions in the US end up this way? I am not sure you can say something is a straw man when literally most unions in a country act the same way. A straw man would be if I simply chose 1 union at random, like the Chicago Teachers Union. But choose more, look at the UAW or your local town teachers union. Seems pretty common.
I don't know. Do they? Why do most unions elsewhere not end up this way?
Clearly there is something extremely toxic about the US relationship with unions given the kind of opinions we get to hear about them. It would be very interesting to understand exactly how that has come about.
Part of it probably does have its root in the fact that the battle lines between unions and employers in the US were drawn very early, and that the US government never got the level of union-friendly representation that large parts of Europe did that forced employers to the negotiating table and that in many countries established relatively civilized relationships between unions and employers and/or shifted many of the conflicts away from the the unions.
At the same time a lot of protection that may be extremely important to many US unionized workers doesn't matter elsewhere. Being fired in Norway, for example, is difficult, but if/when it happens, the social welfare system also makes it financially far less of a burden - there's much less of a reason for a union to take hardline positions on this in those circumstances than in a situation where the welfare system is as basic as it is in the US.
Unions aren't inherently against merit based pay. They're against merit based pay where managers get to unilaterally decide what counts as merit.
When managers (especially non-specialist managers) are in charge, fealty normally trumps competence anyway.
>So what is the actual right path?
Either come up with an objective standard for merit that unions and management can agree on or go for the closest objective approximation - seniority and accept that some incompetent people are going to take a paycheck (the horror!).
But better people deserve more pay, not just older people. If that is the only argument, I would argue to just get rid of unions.
Getting rid of unions does nothing to further merit based pay.
Without unions - You negotiate a fair market value for your wage.
You see no reason how without union could lead to better pay? How much could DHH get a job consulting Ruby for, vs someone who can hardly code?
The places I've worked it has generally seemed pretty arbitrary and largely down to who are best at negotiating. I've yet to work anywhere that have taken an anything remotely objective stance to measuring productivity and rewarding staff accordingly.
The closest I've gotten was working for Yahoo, which at least tried to gather feedback, but the system was still inherently flawed by being based on managers ranking staff members without any kind of formalized system to ensure the rankings were objective.
One year I was told that the group my team was in had too many "above expectations", and since two out of four on my team were ranked above expectations they had to arbitrarily drop one down to "meets expectations". (Not at any time while I was there did I see any kind of attempt at creating a uniform definition of what "meets expectations" or "exceeds expectations" meant; had a manager with high expectations? sucked to be you)
Since that directly affected the raises I was allowed to allocate, and since the ranges were in percent of salary, that decision cost that person several thousand pounds a year on an ongoing basis that I was unable to adjust for the following years, because some HR drone was making the reports from line managers fit his idealised curve without making any attempt at verifying whether or not the reports matched reality.
(as an aside: the origin of socialism, from Saint Simon, was the idea of a meritocracy)
Source: Looking back at my college class. 10 years later - most of the people of MEH skill are at one level of job, and most of the people of high skill are at another job level.
It's not a perfect correlation, and I am sure things like negotiation have a nontrivial impact.. but it is WAYYYYY better than looking at the staff of a local teacher union and pay rates.
You would have to be insane to do an extra Master's in order to earn $40k as a 'junior' CS or Math teacher when you can earn $150k in industry in SF straight out of undergrad.
Some 50% of Ontario elementary teachers cannot do Grade 5 fractions. My CS teacher in high school was trained in history and geography and was literally concurrently learning the same course one lesson ahead of us.
It's a disaster and it will never be fixed as long as the unions insist on paying STEM teachers the same as English teachers.
Do you have a source for this? The first thing I found on google was an article[0] which indicates teacher pay in Texas varies both with respect to location and subject taught (although admittedly not by much).
[0] http://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/headlines/20150627-...
Here is the payscale for my district: https://docs.google.com/a/roundrockisd.org/file/d/0B13hERGxq...
Each district determines its own payscale. That's no different than a union state. Teachers in Boston have a different payscale than teachers in Springfield, MA even though they are both part of the MTA.
CTE Teachers (Career and Technical Education) do get a $2000 stipend but they also have an extra week of work plus extracurricular duties during the school year, so it's not just "extra money".
There is no negotiating over salary or benefits.
"Employees are paid in accordance with administrative guidelines and an established pay structure. The District’s compensation plan is reviewed by Human Resource Services each year to include comparisons with other districts, an analysis of market data, as well as cost of living information. The compensation plan is adjusted as data dictates and the budget allows. The Board of Trustees approves the compensation plan on an annual basis."[1]
This is the Dallas pay schedule: http://www.nctq.org/docs/DISD_2015-2016_Salary_Handbook_FINA... (page 9)
They do pay more in Dallas but there still is no negotiation over your salary.
It looks like Dallas is replacing the "years of service" schedule with a pay-for-performance schedule (page 8) where your salary is adjusted up or down according to "performance, student achievement and student perception surveys."[2] That went into effect last year, I believe. I wouldn't be surprised to see that spread.
[1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B13hERGxqDqDR19OcW1WRHpEd0U... (page 15) [2] http://tei.dallasisd.org/current-teachers-2/
But from my perspective one thing her union did really well was professional development. As well as advocating for the students in terms of capping class sizes, pushing the school on various initiatives, etc.. My mother was able to complete her masters while she worked, and professional development was something the union had negotiated with management and took very seriously.
It's trendy to pick on teachers unions. And definitely it seems like where I am now, in Ontario, the teacher's unions do some dubious things. But I mostly only saw good things from my mother's union growing up.
I don't think any of that is true of all unions. NFL players and Hollywood actors are essentially 100% unionized. Both have highly merit-based pay and have very little protection from being fired.
Except, it's not always an affront to their self interest. Unions increase wages for their members, not people who aren't in unions. This then tends to increase the cost of the goods they provide.
Unions tend to reduce overall employment, favoring the already employed over the unemployed. They reduce job flexibility, as benefits are often tied to long term attachment to a single company. Unions make the companies more vulnerable to outsourcing. Finally, the public employee unions in the US have conspired with politicians to enact defined benefit pensions that are bankrupting many localities- a problem of short term thinking. Unions essentially create a government sponsored monopoly on labor supply, restricting both workers and companies, which is fundamentally in conflict with the values of economic liberty upon which the country was founded.
Literally every word of what you just said about abolishing slavery. Even the bit about restricting workers, because poor landowners were told that owning a slave would enable upward mobility (it didn't really, slavery was a money sink at such small scales, this was just rhetoric to keep poor whites from questioning slavery).
Our country's history of valuing economic liberty has typically made us tolerate some awful behavior by the economically powerful. I wouldn't put it on a pedestal.
Just because Argument A can be used (improperly, perhaps?) to defend Bad Thing, and Argument A can also be used to defend Questioned Thing, does not make Questioned Thing equivalent to Bad Thing.
So rather than saying "yeah but slavery!" perhaps try actually refuting the points made.
I was responding to someone discussing the role of "economic liberty" in America's founding. When America was founded, that phrase meant slavery. The entire point of building "economic liberty" into the foundation of the country was to compromise on slavery.
If you can't stomach slavery being mentioned in a conversation about the historical relationship between business in labor in America, and the history of the principles at hand, then you won't be able to engage the subject matter in any depth.
Unions unfortunately continued the sordid history of racism in the US, particularly the AFL.
The Stamp Act and Tea Act were opposed as taxation without representation in Parliament. They were not opposed because Americans didn't believe in taxes on principle. The spread of that belief is very new delusion.
In 1776, the freedom to use slaves to run your business was absolutely an expression of economic liberty for half of America. Thomas Jefferson and Democratic Republicans opposed the growth of the budding federal government because of the fear that a federal government could curtail local business practices, namely slavery.
It was the pursuit of the economic liberty to democratically determine the disposition of one's taxes upon which the country was founded. The country was not founded to preserve slavery. It is a pitiful and offensive rhetorical trick to suggest otherwise.
Where did my comment suggest that there was a disbelief in taxes on principle? That is your delusion, not mine.
Slavery is a noun. So is union. I'll let you draw your own conclusions...
It's funny how basic economics seems to go out the window when it comes to unions.
Pushing up wages in one company that is competing for labor pushes other non-unionized companies to pay more or face an exodus of talent.
Basic supply and demand.
http://www.epi.org/publication/briefingpapers_bp143/
There were a few people (equipment operators) that definitely used the union for cover and would just disappear at noon exactly for lunch, no matter what was going on, actually causing more work. When he was let go, he was at the gate watching to make sure nobody used the same equipment for a week (A rule to prevent short term layoffs and rehires).
Mostly pretty hard working people, doing physical labor, stuff you wouldn't want to do after 50. The laborers had training on site sometime, to keep skills up.
It might just be that you are from a place where the origin, organizational principles, incentives and co-dependent relationship with select politicians are "better" than they are in the US.
Collective bargaining requires some kind of union. It's just game theory.
"... individuals in any group attempting collective action will have incentives to "free ride" on the efforts of others if the group is working to provide public goods. Individuals will not “free ride” in groups that provide benefits only to active participants."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Logic_of_Collective_Action
I leave it others smarter than me to explain the "strange", tortured, counter-factual, misanthropic rationalizations of the anti-union rhetoric.
That's a cynical way to phrase it. You'd think a union organizer would describe their union like a medicine, not a cancer.
Private sector unions can do whatever they want. Let them strike, collective bargain, walk out, sit in. The damage is isolated, the dollars involved are relegated to business owners and workers, and there's competition on both sides of the equation.
Public sector unions are were the trouble is at. Government work stoppages[1] are bullshit as are unfunded future concessions that will have to be paid by our children's children.
[1]: Yes we can all make jokes about how they're not doing anything to start but you know what I'm saying...
I am not a fan of public service, but public sector unions seem to be abstractly as reasonable as private ones.
The government already has to compete against the private sector. If wages rise there, whether through union action or labor shortages, then government will have to act accordingly. This works in the opposite direction as well (lowering wages/costs).
The main issue is that the current government does not have an interest in long term planning. The current mayor/governor/steward is more than willing to push the true costs of things down the road because they won't be around to account for them. That's how you end up with massive unfunded pension obligations.
Public sector unions are just one part of this problem albeit a big part.
private companies compete against other private companies, by this reasoning unions are not necessary in the private sector either.
Also, in some areas the government does not compete against the private sector, I think. Don't police forces or firefighters have unions in the US?
In California politicians don't cross the public sector unions, because the unions provide money for poltical campaigns. Schwartzenegger tried to reign them in and was pretty much mortally wounded in political terms.
the only thing that makes a company vulnerable to outsourcing is assholes in management, uncaring, shortsighted, corrupt and uncaring assholes. that's it.
unions are for the people and inherently by the people, ffs, it's a cooperative effort to run a company, but somehow people think it's the CEO and the whatever-o that make the company what it is.
Companies that think this way, ultimately fail, or loose to companies that treat their people better, unless they have regulatory capture or some other government handout to corner the market, and this causes their employees to realize that the company they work for is shit and maybe they need to form a union to protect themselves from the psychopaths running the company.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11706155 and marked it off-topic.
Looking at the unions here in New York when it comes to construction you quickly end up loathing the unions.
Instead of fighting for paid sick days, longer vacation, better healthcare for their members they simply try to expand the number of members they have thus delaying constructions, putting way too many people on the constructions projects etc.
It's a shame because unions do have their time and place when the work is more or less the same and salaries not too independent.
Wallmart employees could use a strong union. Uber could.
But the problem is that once you get into the territory of fluctuating salaries for the same job and more individual employee/employer relationships it's not so easy to establish a shared vision.
Denmark have a model[1] where the employee unions and the employer negotiate minimum salaries, sick days etc. and where the government primarily is there as a mediator.
It's working pretty good although it is showing to be less effective in the more individually based job types I spoke about.
None the less. The US do need more unions but they have to be established across companies to ensure agency.
[1] https://danishbusinessauthority.dk/danish-labour-market-mode...
I come from India which remains one of the most poorest countries and most of the manufacturing sector remains underdeveloped thanks to Labor unions. That evil should be kept out of USA. Cities like Kolkata which were once impotant trading ports of the world is reduced to shit by union politics.
Teacher's union in USA remains the biggest reason why the public education is in bad shape. Doctor's Union aka American Medical Association remains one of the dominant reason why healthcare is expensive.
EDIT: Context.