> Truckers refused to deliver food and beer to McDonalds.
I like how the author snuck in the fact that McDonald's used to sell beer. I believe they still do in Germany - at least it used to be a fact that would regularly find its way onto reddits frontpage.
France too. It's a shame to eat McDonald's in a country with so much great food, of course, but getting a burger covered in blue cheese served with a beer is a bit better than the standard experience.
Not sure where you are talking about, but I guess US?
In the UK there are plenty of places where you can get food which is much more "real" but not necessarily healthy. There are lots of independent takeaways and cafes selling fish and chips or cooked breakfast around that price. There are plenty of places around markets where you can buy fresh food for that price, which is actually healthy. If you have access to a kitchen you can buy stuff and cook 2 meals for half that price.
Plenty of Indian and Chinese/Asian neighborhoods offer meals at incredible value too.
The only time I would consider something like McDonald's is in the motorway services where almost everything is run by big chains, the other time I go is because the kids get excited about the new happy meal toy.
Sorry, I must have missed that. Generally in Western Europe cheap food is easily available even if it's a cafe set menu, baguette or slice of pizza. In Eastern Europe you'd get a proper meal for that much.
For 5€? I would disagree. I live in Frankfurt, Germany and I don't get a lot for this price and I can't live off Döner Kebap or stuff like that. Healthy options are around 10€ or roughly $12.
There are better fast-food options too, IMO. Whenever I'm in France or Belgium and I have a sore need for a fast-food burger, I hit up Quick Burger. I wish we had them in the States.
When I was in Paris, I ate at McDonalds once for two reasons:
* Pulp Fiction (Royale with cheese! Had to do it)
* I was kind of exhausted from trying to find something substantial to eat (lots of lightweight fare, not great for big ol Americans like myself) and the language hurdles involved in doing so. I mean, most people speak English to some degree but it's not the smoothest process
> In several countries that do not customarily use United States customary units as a unit of weight, the Quarter Pounder is sold under different names. In France, Belgium and Cyprus it is called the Royal Cheese and includes cheese. In German-speaking Europe it is known as a Hamburger Royal; in Germany it includes lettuce and tomato and is branded Hamburger Royal TS (TS standing for „Tomate und Salat“, tomato and lettuce). In Russia and Ukraine, it was known as Royal Cheeseburger, and since 2016 in Russia it is called Grand Cheeseburger.
Some more random trivia: In Brazil it is known as "Quarteirão" which I find an ingenious translation. The word actually means "city block", but it is quite close to the original name, and being an augmentative ("-ão" suffix means big/large) it passes the intended message of a big burger.
Extra random trivia: in the south of Brazil, burgers are traditionally very large, so McDonald's Quarteirão (Quarter Pounder) is actually considered a small burger.
> They pay high wages because back in the 1980s, Danish unions flipped a switch and turned the whole business off, and McDonalds doesn’t want to find out whether they would do it again.
It has nothing to do with "champagne socialism". The high wages were accomplished by cooperation between working people who had organised themselves into trade unions.
> It has nothing to do with "champagne socialism" ...
The author, who does not seem to have come within a thousand miles of any other work than armchair pontification, is one for thinking it'd be great to have such labor unions everywhere.
A gallon of gasoline in Denmark $7.60. Sales tax in Denmark 25%.
I love Denmark but I am also familiar with what small business in Denmark have to put up with to survive.
it's something tangible that has gone up since last year that a certain segment of the political spectrum are using to beat the other with, intoning that it's all their fault.
In reality, gas prices are up all over the world because of pent up demand as things open up as we slowly come out of the pandemic.
One of the biggest issues right now is that we have to worry about what the future will look like? That's exactly what is meant with externalities as well, you profit from your behavior without having to compensate for or deal with the consequences. You're redefining the very definition of an externality.
"The Environmental and Energy Study Institute reported that direct subsidies to the fossil fuel industry totaled $20 billion per year, with 80% going toward oil and gas. In addition, from 2019 to 2023, tax subsidies are expected to reduce federal revenue by around $11.5 billion. Considering that production subsidies grew 28% between 2017 and 2019, the United States will be under a lot of scrutiny from other countries wanting to see evidence of reform before making their own commitments."
Perhaps you can point the exact text for the subsidies explicitly for US gasoline which are not related to how the companies subtract their costs to determine their income. There might be something for the other fossil fuels, but I see nothing as far as oil/gasoline.
Conflating cost and price is a common habit it seems.
You get paid $22. That gets you about 2.9 gallons of gasoline in Denmark which converts to about $10 in the United States.
So, talking about how much the gross pay of Danish workers is without thinking at all about what they can afford to buy with that money is a true mark of economic ignorance.
The original point was that Matt Bruenig is a champagne socialist. "Denmark is great" is not a counter-argument to that.
I'm pretty sure people in Denmark are not as tied to gasoline as they are in the USA. The country is smaller to begin with, and likely has better public transport, cycling, and pedestrian facilities.
I guess the next major costs to compare are rent and health insurance?
Health care is free in Denmark. You don't need insurance. If you really want to you can buy insurance to lower the cost of some treatments that are not covered like physiotherapy, dentistry etc.
The need for gasoline in the US is by design and Denmark does not force you to own a car like in the US. Also, US gasoline is heavily subsidized so I guess you should count that as a tax break as well for the US scenario which makes the entire comparison even less normal.
This website [0] will offset your carbon at $5 per 1000 pounds which is about 50 gallons of gas giving a per gallon offset cost of only 10 cents (just an example). Roads on the other hand at whopping 416 billion dollars in the US in 2014 [1] would add a lot more if you paid for them all with a fuel tax. At 123 billion gallons of gas [2] and 44 billion gallons of diesel [3], that would require $2.50 worth of tax per gallon. Gas near me is $3.40 with a 60 cent tax so I'd say $5.40 sounds about right to me.
You can't just throw out numbers like "25% sales tax" and think that it paints a clear picture of how it is to live and work in a country like Denmark. I'm Danish and have lived in the US for 13 years. I have owned companies in both countries. Denmark is without question superior in almost every aspect when it comes to running a business.
As a note, my personal tax rate in the US is not that much lower than my Danish tax, and in Denmark I get free health care, free education, free support if I'm struggling, and a unified, digital service for registering and running my company.
You do realize that Denmark is consistently ranked as one of the easiest countries to do business in, in front of countries like the US (not much a head of the US).
> The author, who does not seem to have come within a thousand miles of any other work than armchair pontification, is one for thinking it'd be great to have such labor unions everywhere.
Thinking it's a good idea to have strong trades unions, if you don't happen to be in a union, does not mean you are a "champagne socialist".
Trade unionism and state socialism are not the same.
I think the domain and author need to be contextualised. Regardless of everything else, this isn't just a non political author writing an interesting story.
If you have a point to make you should make it. I have no idea who this is (or why what is on his wikipedia is relevant) and I don't know what you mean with (what I assume is euphemistically stated) "contextualised".
Is there any author of any article who does need to be "contextualized" by your standards? Are there authors out there that exist outside of a context?
That's exactly what unions do. They consider what a reasonable salary for their members are, usually in long and meticulous negotiations with the employers. They are not idiots. They know that if you drive labor prices too high then there are fewer jobs to go around. It's about striking a balance where businesses get to be profitable and expansive, while some of that gets redistributed to workers.
The reason that we don't want the government to set minimum wages and benefits is because that's too crude a tool. The best trade-offs, sacrifices and share of spoils varies, and having the unions of different sectors negotiate with the employers (themselves usually organized in unions) is that you can optimize a lot more so that everyone wins.
Unions have an incumbency problem in which, yes, they're concerned with the effects of pushing too hard, but only insofar as it affects their existing members. See also: significantly tenure-based pay scales for unskilled labor.
The contracts the unions negotiate in the nordics apply to everyone in the sector. So it makes no difference whatsoever for the pay of anyone if they are a union member or not.
The main benefits of being part of an union here is stuff like union lawyer being made available to you if you have a dispute with your employer. And obviously more voice in who will represent you in the negotiations between the government, employers and employees.
This is definitely not true - and a misunderstanding of the power equation.
Unions represent their members (sometimes not equally).
That's it.
They try to extract the most.
That's it.
They are not looking out for anyone's best interests but their own, they are not setting prices necessarily rationally, they are not acting for the benefit of the community at large.
There are 5 'factions' in a companies power dynamic:
+ Arguably 'other financiers' (i.e.lenders) make up a 6th.
+ There are externalities, like 'the environment'
The surpluses will be divided among those parties given wherever the power equilibrium rests.
If a company is very weak compared to it's customer (like having Apple as a main customer), it won't make a lot of profit so not a ton of surpluses for the other groups. This is called a 'Monopsony' (i.e. Apple has power over it's supply chain).
If a company is very weak compared to it's supply chain (like a small retail store), they're not going to capture much surplus either.
If the investors have great leverage because capital is sparse, they get more surplus. If money is everywhere, they have less leverage.
Union power is an odd one because it's driven by non-market forces i.e. the regulatory limits of what unions can and cannot do given the local laws. In some regions, they are very powerful with (aka Germany, Denmark) with varying kinds of influence.
In the US, the auto-workers Unions are incredibly powerful, so much so that the standards that they establish fold-over into the non-unionized plants.
In a sense, the government roughly sets union wages by imparting the degree of power that unions have to strike etc...
> They are not looking out for anyone's best interests but their own
So you don’t think they care that their members can keep their jobs long-term? Is that not in their interest?
To imply that all unions without fail will push for maximum possible compensation in the short-term, at the expense of any other concern, is simplified to such a degree that it no longer matches reality.
"So you don’t think they care that their members can keep their jobs long-term? Is that not in their interest?"
I don't care one way or the other. I'm saying that a Union is an organized body of power that protects it's own self-interest, and nobody else's.
"To imply that all unions without fail will push for maximum possible compensation in the short-term, at the expense of any other concern, "
I didn't write or imply that.
I'm wrote that Unions will use their power to maximize the returns above all else. Obviously, if they try to negotiate $200K salaries for their staff, they know they will be out of jobs.
However - every single dollar of profit to shareholders, added surplus to buyers/suppliers would be considered 'their money' in this equation, to the extent they can, they'll want to take all of those surpluses - exactly like other participants. Do you think their suppliers will sell for a dime less than they can? Will their customers pay a dollar more than they have to? Will management want to pay more than they have to?
A Union is not a benevolent thing, it's just a power centre acting in it's own interest and that's it.
Well, that’s how I interpreted it, in large part because you flat-out replied ”this is definitely not true” to the person who was making the point I pretty much reiterated in response to you.
> A Union is not a benevolent thing, it's just a power centre acting in it's own interest
Yes, the interest of its members, which is the whole point.
Yeah so what? The other side does the same thing and runs into the very same issues. If unions go to far they struggle with job retention. If employers go too far they struggle with employee retention. These forces balance closer to the middle than if you only had one of them.
Now, you know what's stupid? Letting the government become the union of last resort via the minimum wage. The government doesn't negotiate with anyone. It doesn't know what wages are justified. So it will get it wrong. Either it's too low or it's too high. No feedback from the actual economy. With no clue whether it makes things better, worse or simply does nothing (95% of the time).
I'll choose the unions rather than the government.
What this means is that using Unions, arbitrary employees can possibly take over companies and consume all of the surpluses, which is not good.
"Now, you know what's stupid? Letting the government become the union of last resort via the minimum wage. "
It seems odd because a 'min. wage' is a broad, crude measure, and a 'negotiation' feels more market oriented.
The problem is, those negotiations are not market oriented.
Union-Company negotiations are based on a very arbitrary power that we give to Unions to basically hold the operations of the company hostage unless certain demands are met.
It's not efficient at all.
Given that, I think it's just better if government sets a floor for work.
They could improve it by 1) using economic measures instead of making it political, and 2) possibly have different min wages for different sectors.
In reality - we don't need Unions. Where they are 'most needed' today is where pay is really how, and or there are some unfair practices, arguably at Wallmart and Amazon.
If we increased minimum wage to something reasonable, and got a bit more nuanced with regulation and enforcement ... then that would solve most of the problem.
Worker safety + regulations take care of most of the reasons unions needed to exist and min wage takes care of most of the rest.
Non-unionized auto workers make well above min-wage salary because market-driven salaries work well enough in those areas.
My understanding from the text was that McDonald's had to abide by sectoral pay regulations, so the they're paying the minimum wage but Denmark has a much finer grained approach to that minimum?
I didn't read that they'd strike until a specific pay number was reached from that page, just that McDonald's had to operate under the same conditions as their same industry peers
Exactly, they didn't just go straight to $22 an hour, they agreed to follow the deal made between their sector of industry and the unions for that sector. People seem to have the impression that the unions dictate the compensation and benefits, they do not. It's a negotiation between the companies and the unions, and the state is observes (unless negotiations fail).
The Danish model allow for continuous adaptation of the compensation and benefits. The companies have just as much influence as the unions do. The model allows companies to avoid a minimum wage, which may not be beneficial to companies if a particular sector has a slowdown.
Finland is same. And it really makes some sense. Why should each individual employer negotiate individually with their workers, when both sides can pool together for more leverage. Also it removes some aspects of competition you don't need to worry that you have to pay more for your labour than the other burger chains.
Not where we need to get to. A segment of the population is overriding the government in Denmark. That's a 'shadow government' and seems very wrong.
If you want the wages to be reasonable, then the government should take action to make it so. Not a private organization, by essentially extorting the public.
Joining the union is voluntary. It's simply a way of coordinating action. And strikes are well within the legal rights of workers -- it's the way the system is designed to work, bit a fluke. This article just points out how a system like that may actually be effective.
I am sympathetic to your position but consider a counter theory: not everybody can agree, but perhaps they can agree to have a group of people make a reasonable decision, hopefully after asking for and getting good advice.
So what should the speed limit be? I don’t really know but they probably aren’t far off given the way the roads are built, people’s reaction times etc. Plus I know they have some people who have studied unexpected factors (e.g. too many stop signs cause speeding).
Such a system is hardly guaranteed to be “right” but is supposed to be alterable and easier to live with than people whipsawing the decision.
BTW in the case of speed limits: during a burst of sensible lawmaking, California set speed limits but also modulated them with the idea that people are sensible: if the speed limit on a road is set to 25, but the dominant traffic is at 35, the presumption is that the proper limit is actually 35.
> BTW in the case of speed limits: during a burst of sensible lawmaking, California set speed limits but also modulated them with the idea that people are sensible: if the speed limit on a road is set to 25, but the dominant traffic is at 35, the presumption is that the proper limit is actually 35.
As a Californian, this interests me -- can you cite a source for me to follow? I found this page [0] from Caltrans, but it speaks to determining the posted speed limit, not overriding the posted speed limit.
> The most widely accepted method of determining the posted speed limit is to set the speed limit at what is called the “85th percentile speed”, which is the speed at or below which 85 percent of the traffic is moving.
The links in that page describe the process, including the part you referred to "overriding" the speed limit. I don't think they use that term, but look for what the code calls out for "speed traps".
Here's a concrete example: Embarcadero road in Palo Alto feeds from highway 101. It has a posted speed limit of 25, and there is a perennial complaint presented to the city council, letters to the editor etc: why won't the police come out and enforce the speed limit? The answer is that to do so they'd have to do a survey and then adjust the limit...up (I think traffic travels about 40-45 MPH on this road). If that is the reasonable and proper rate for that road, to enforce anything lower would be a speed trap. The city keeps the 25 signs up in the hope that they discourage even faster driving.
Likewise when they use radar they not only have to post a sign but do a survey, which has to be updated every few years -- you can't use radar to enforce something unfair. I'm not sure the radar signs on Embarcadero are even current (thus probably not even legal).
BTW as I learned in driving school years ago (got a ticket), apart from "reasonable and proper at all time" you can't go over 55 anywhere unless it's explicitly posted. Actually I got all this initially from driving school, and then when Jim Warren went to the effort of getting the entire CA legal code online in the 90s, I actually read a good chunk of the vehicle code in particular.
That seems a bit judgmental of a society that seems a fair bit more orderly than ours. It would probably not work in the US, or the rest of the Anglosphere, but we should not suppose ourselves better or more moral. The purpose of morals is to establish mores for societal function. Theirs works quite well for them.
I think you are forgetting that, at least in principle, the government is just some folks we decide should handle the laws & stuff in the country so that we can go about our lives. Your comment makes it sound like those pesky 'people' shouldn't interfere with the almighty government. OR ELSE!
Protesting is one of the few ways of disagreeing with the actions of the government, i.e. the people WE put in charge.
They have tools that neither side have. Like taxation policy. They might get sides to agree to lower wage increases if they promise to lower taxes. Thus increasing the overall competitiveness of nation.
I don't know why but literally every tax reduction proposal is basically, tax the rich less and burn a hole into the budget. Nobody is even thinking about the small guy when it comes to tax policy.
Why is a government more appropriate to handle this sort of situation than the parties directly involved in it?
These are the two groups that are directly impacted by decisions related to the wages and benefits. The only way you get closer to the source is by replacing "union" with "employee," but the reasons that unions exist in the first place is because of the sheer power that employers have over individual employees. As it is, the Danish government already granted people to form groups to exercise their collective rights.
Its when parties not directly involved are marshalled to coerce a party, that it gets sticky. Those strikes in related industries are simply extortion. We have mobs in the US that operate like that. "Do what we want, or somebody could get hurt"
Yes, and the vast majority of the time, they're called corporations.
"Do what we want or we'll fire you" is acceptable.
"Give us tax breaks or we'll leave you" is acceptable.
But somehow "Value your employees or we won't work with you" is a bad thing.
Why should collective groups have less power than corporations? We have grown accustomed in America to treating corporations as something between groups of people and actual governments.
They aren't. They're groups of people tied together by money and in that respect they're no different than a coalition of workers who have decided that there are requirements to be met in order to do business.
One-on-one seems reasonable, that's negotiating with an employer. But when you bring in 'vinny and his friends' to put pressure on one side, that gets iffy.
Escalating the negotiation to extortion through back doors, is probably not the optimal way to go.
When you stop pretending that employee vs. employer is a one-on-one negotiation, then we can begin having an adult conversation. Until then, I'm going to assume that you're being purposefully obtuse due to the hyperbolic nature of your posts in this thread.
A corporation is run by people. They're 'negotiating' with hundreds or thousands of people. I'm not sure where you're going with that.
The idea is, it's not really negotiation when you turn off their water or shut down their loading dock. That has nothing to do with negotiation. That seems very clear, and not hyperbolic at all.
I don't think I've been extreme, but I do know we disagree on what extremes should be 'cricket' and which are over the line. The strong signal I get from this thread is, labor should be allowed any and all tactics because 'labor is good'. That's just not true, fair or rational.
You wanna bring any more ethnic stereotypes in the conversation, or you good?
As it is, all you've proven in this entire thread is that you're willing to throw around racist innuendo and you have a serious inability to understand basic written English.
This is how I described corporations in this VERY thread, replying to you:
> "They're groups of people tied together by money and in that respect they're no different than a coalition of workers who have decided that there are requirements to be met in order to do business."
Corporations only negotiate with hundreds or thousands of people at a time when they're cutting sweetheart deals with the government or negotiating contracts with unions. They do NOT have that relationship with individual employees. I don't get to bring my entire department into the office with me whenever I'm negotiating a raise with my boss as an at-will employee. At-will employment is funny as hell in its own right, since it perfectly describes the relationships between corporations and non-union employees in the US. We are expected to give our employers at least 2 weeks notice to prepare for our departures, but then turn around and justify their actions for immediately terminating employees for any reason as "protecting the business."
You seem to be very upset that McDonald's couldn't just waltz into a foreign market, ignore the prevailing social contract between employees and employers, and do whatever the hell it wanted and damn their employees. The people in Denmark essentially said "we're not going to allow you to come in and start a race to the bottom. We have social business norms here that you need to respect. You will pay these people what others in this industry are already getting, or we will refuse to service you."
You would know this if you actually read the article instead of wasting your time dreaming up mafia quips.
It's not a double standard, it's one standard for a corporation and a different standard for a labor union, because those are different types of organizations.
Snopes is a poor fact checker and should never be relied upon by someone who can use google. Here is a more accurate article that consists of actual reporting:
"True, a Big Mac here costs more — $5.60, compared with $4.80 in the United States. But that is a price Danes are willing to pay. “We Danes accept that a burger is expensive, but we also know that working conditions and wages are decent when we eat that burger,” said Soren Kaj Andersen, a University of Copenhagen professor who specializes in labor issues.”
Bottom line, everything has a cost. Higher wages do need to be paid for with higher prices. Wise people understand that the world has trade offs and they make those trade offs with open eyes. Foolish people pretend there is no tradeoff.
The snopes article links directly to the Big Mac index [1] which is the authority on the real cost of a Big Mac.
It’s cheaper in Denmark than in the U.S. by any measure.
The Big Mac Index is a mediocre currency education toy, nothing more.
And they admit it:
> Burgernomics was never intended as a precise gauge of currency misalignment, merely a tool to make exchange-rate theory more digestible.
The Big Mac Index is also not accurate as it pertains to the US. Big Mac prices vary considerably by location in the US (ranging from $3.x to $6.x). It'd be like trying to pretend there's a Big Mac price in the EU. The index claims $5.65 for the US. That's their poor attempt at a national guess, they didn't actually figure out prices for every location, and they appear to have picked a high price as their foundation. Cities in Florida, Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio are commonly in the $4.x price area for example.
This article finds the national average is closer to $4.82 (in my state it's well below that) -
But the article you linked doesn't seem to refute that Big Macs don't cost particularly more in Denmark than the US. If you do go by the "Big Mac index" (with price relative to 1hr @ average wage) it is probably more affordable in Denmark than US
> it is probably more affordable in Denmark than US
It's not. You're not accounting for the higher US wages for one thing. Median take home pay is about 40% higher in the US vs Denmark.
The Big Mac Index also gets pricing wrong for the Big Mac in the US market. Their quoted $5.65 figure is higher than nearly every state's average, and far higher than most states. The average US state Big Mac price is comparable to or below Denmark.
US workers have far more disposable income than workers in Denmark. Tax rates are dramatically higher in Denmark than in the US (over 2x higher for someone earning $40,000 per year). The US has a far more progressive taxation system. Someone earning $38,000 in Denmark takes home about as much as someone earning $30,000 in the US; someone earning $61k in Denmark takes home about as much as someone earning $50k in the US.
US workers at the median and average earn higher wages than people in Denmark do.
"In Denmark, the average household net-adjusted disposable income per capita is USD 29,606 a year, lower than the OECD average of USD 33,604 a year."
vs
"In the United States, the average household net-adjusted disposable income per capita is USD 45,284 a year, much higher than the OECD average of USD 33,604 a year, and the highest figure in the OECD."
Since this has deflated the myth about higher wages in Denmark, the next response will be: yeah, but people in Denmark have healthcare. And so do people in the US as it turns out, commonly provided by their employer. So if we're going to back healthcare costs out of the high Denmark tax rates, we have to add the drastically more expensive US healthcare (about 90% more expensive in the US per capita) back in to employee wages to one extent or another to adjust correctly. The US worker would gain even more ground vs their peer in Denmark.
But does this tell the whole story? Well, no. Household finances are in horrific condition in Denmark compared to the US, which throws further question on affordability of the burger prices. The people of Denmark are approximately the most indebted people in the world vs their disposable incomes.
Big Mac pricing varies throughout Europe. Dutch McDonald's employees are paid way less than the $22 the Danes get, but our Big Macs are more expensive.
There is definitely a tradeoff to be made because nothing ever comes for free. However, that 4.73 billion dollar profit can give every one of their 210k employees each an extra 20k per year (regardless of the average income in their respective countries) before it would even turn a loss based on 2020 numbers. And that's not even taking into account the fact that 2020 profits were significantly down.
In a fair system, increases in price would pay for wage increases and vice versa. In practice, price increases flow towards the top.
And the employee doesn’t exist to make money for their employer’s shareholders, and this entire article shows how employees can capture some of that money if they work in solidarity.
This creates inverted incentives: to take as much from the pot as possible while putting in as little as possible.
Same reason as why such communal systems never work if they get much larger than one family.
Inverted by whose standards? You could just as convincingly argue that capitalist enterprises are the ones with inverted incentives: to extract as much value from workers as possible while paying them as little as possible.
That doesn't actually change in a traditional capitalist system. The only difference is that owners and upper classes have more power than the individual to make their interest of getting the whole pot for little work happen
In capitalist system owner can enforce cooperation so the pot itself grows.
The proportion that workers capture here is of course dependant on external factors, like labour market and laws.
that works great until you need to raise capital. You either need to do loans (unsuitable for early stage companies due to risk and capped upside for investor) or issue equity which brings us back to square one.
Does that standard of fairness go both ways? If a business is losing money should the employees then be required to work for free?
Most McDonald's restaurant workers worldwide are employees of local franchise companies which are far less profitable. The main McDonald's corporation is just a supplier for them.
Perhaps not for free, but it's not unheard of for labor unions to negotiate temporary lower wages in order to try to save the viability of a business that they want to keep working for.
What “work” does capital do? Like honest question, what do they do all day? Just scheme up ways to replace workers with robots? Chat on their Bloomberg terminals? For how much shit they talk on the worthlessness of labor, I don’t actually understand what work they do.
> However, that 4.73 billion dollar profit can give every one of their 210k employees each an extra 20k per year
There are two problems with this argument.
First, we do not believe in the labor theory of value. Time has a value. Risk has value, land has value, and there is also value in nature, so if you were to distribute all the profits solely to labor, you would have only labor and no capital.
That means no equipment, no burgers, no fries, no land, no buildings, no cash registers, no working capital, etc. Just a bunch of people standing around, not even being able to work because tools are required to work and the moment someone suggest paying for the tools necessary to do work, someone like you pops up and starts complaining that there must be no payments for capital, all payments must be only for labor, and so no tools are ever purchased.
No land is purchased. No money is borrowed to pay for any expenses, etc.
The second problem is opportunity cost. McDonald's market cap is 180 Billion dollars, and it earns about 5 Billion per year for a yield of ~2.7%. But this is a risky return. Alternately one can invest in 30 year treasuries that are guaranteed and earn 1.86%. So that corresponds to a risk premium of 1% and a real rate of ~1.8%. In real terms, the risk-free rate is actually negative and the McDonald's earnings yield is approximately zero. Thus the earnings accruing to McDonalds are basically just enough to make up for the loss of the value of the investment due to inflation, so you'd get your original money back, with a healthy dose of risk.
That is charity. You should be on your knees thanking investors for supplying the 200K workers of McDonalds with 180 Billion dollars of capital that allows them to have jobs while the investors are getting basically nothing back in exchange for taking on that risk.
Of course these yields are temporary. Investors may not be getting anything back now, but long term, these types of yields are unsustainable and they will go up. Investors do need to get something back for their investment otherwise the investment wont be made.
And getting back just the original amount invested is generally insufficient to motivate investment and is characteristic of a dysfunctional economy that is unpleasant for workers. When yields are so low as to just match inflation, that's when you see things like housing bubbles as investors turn around to buy up real assets like land because there is no point in investing in risky ventures, and that is when more people who don't understand the world start moaning about how unfair all the expensive housing is, while with the other side of their mouth they advocate for zero interest rates because payments to capital are "bad". We would like to live in a world where ventures are funded, where investment in productive capital is funded. We like the idea of SpaceX and Tesla and mRNA vaccines and M1 chips. We like investment. But that means that the investment must be more profitable that merely buying land and holding it to get back your money in inflation adjusted terms. And the greater the reward for investment, the more investment that will occur.
This is excellent explanation. People, who consistently advocate for market regulation or removal, do not understand that our standard of living, historically highest ever, is literally on this level because of market forces, and removing them will end up badly. Everyone tends to forget Soviet Union or North Korea.
You can invest an infinite quantity of money into capital without making a single cent in profit or loss. Lack of profit does not mean a lack of investment.
>That means no equipment, no burgers, no fries, no land, no buildings, no cash registers, no working capital, etc.
As I mentioned above. You're wrong.
>That is charity. You should be on your knees thanking investors for supplying the 200K workers of McDonalds with 180 Billion dollars of capital that allows them to have jobs while the investors are getting basically nothing back in exchange for taking on that risk.
You can call it charity but when wealth inequality rises to the point where nothing provides sufficient yields then calling that spending charity misses the tree for the forest. There is nothing to spend the money on, except charity. When you personally only demand 30 hours of work but provide 40 hours of work, there will be someone providing 10 hours less than they demand. The excess hours worked can only be spent on "pointless" activities which inevitably end up in the hands of the person working 10 hours less. When people don't share work, they share incomes.
I don't need to thank them for anything. The investors should be on their knees thanking their workers that they are providing this investment opportunity even if yields are negative. It literally makes no sense to thank someone for sitting on their money. If investors are willing to take on that risk, then it's clearly because that investment is more profitable than other investments from their perspective.
Think about it this way. Someone having a billion potatoes rotting in storage wants to maintain their wealth. The only way that person can maintain their wealth is by giving the potatoes to people who want to work for you in exchange for potatoes. The fact that you get to maintain your wealth is something others provided to you. If it wasn't for them you would be sitting on rotting potatoes and end up with nothing in the end. You'd accept negative yields on investments if they are higher than the negative yield of having too many potatoes.
>And getting back just the original amount invested is generally insufficient to motivate investment and is characteristic of a dysfunctional economy that is unpleasant for workers.
The fact that the investor is accepting zero or negative yields clearly implies that he has no use for that money except to maintain his wealth. So rather than a lack of investment the problem is a lack of consumption or alternatively people producing more than they consume.
>When yields are so low as to just match inflation, that's when you see things like housing bubbles as investors turn around to buy up real assets like land because there is no point in investing in risky ventures,
Raising interest rates doesn't magically create investment opportunities. You always have the same investment opportunities at any interest rate. The interest rate merely restricts how much investment can be done at once. Housing bubbles are not a result of low interest rates. They are a property of land itself. Monopolies allow perfect price discrimination and charge you "everything you earn" which is higher than "everything you spend". The fact that non-monopoly industries can't compete with monopoly power isn't surprising and why so many people suggest land value taxes.
>while with the other side of their mouth they advocate for zero interest rates because payments to capital are "bad". We would like to live in a world where ventures are funded, where investment in productive capital is funded.
Is this some kind of joke? The availability of low interest rates makes it easier to fund productive investment.
>And the greater the reward for investment, the more investment that will occur.
Yeah how are you going to get that? Are you going to start a war, bomb cities, kill people so that there is an artificial shortage and therefore yields are high again? Are you go...
>"True, a Big Mac here costs more — $5.60, compared with $4.80 in the United States. But that is a price Danes are willing to pay. “We Danes accept that a burger is expensive, but we also know that working conditions and wages are decent when we eat that burger,” said Soren Kaj Andersen, a University of Copenhagen professor who specializes in labor issues.”
Is there a name for this kind of rationalization ?
Our lexicon definitely needs a term for this. If there isn’t a concise term for the concept I fear people will struggle to convey the meaning behind what they’re noticing.
It feels deceptive and underhanded. I can give all sorts of synonyms but without a term for it, I fear labeling it, and therefore trying to counter it, won’t be effective.
I’m seeing these kinds of rationalizations all the time these days. Especially in the news.
Price to purchase != cost to produce. You would need study more detailed financials than merely the number on the screen above the register to get this answer.
So 80 cents more for an individual item despite the fact that they're making almost 3x the US minimum wage and getting full benefits to boot... and probably aren't on public assistance to make up for their lack of wages... and beef is likely less expensive in general in the states.
Honest question, do people add tips to McD in the US? Because then comparing the price payed by the customer in the transaction becomes closer, even higher if you factor in 20% tip.
Denmark does not have a culture of tipping, it’s rarely done, primarily in very fancy restaurants and no one would ever tip or expect anyone to tip in a McD.
For comparison of a price of a big mac between different countries, try to look at the "Big Mac Index". The Big Mac Index basically says "How many minutes do you have to work in country X in order to be able to buy a Big Mac compared to Country Y."
Economics 101btells us that the price of the burger has nothing to do with the cost of it, and still this argument is brought up again and again. Interestingly typically from the people who are present themselves as very business savy.
Are you being sarcastic? The food industry is generally used as the textbook example for the market most resembling perfect competition which as defined straight from wikipedia: "Such markets are allocatively efficient, as output will always occur where marginal cost is equal to average revenue i.e. price (MC = AR). In perfect competition, any profit-maximizing producer faces a market price equal to its marginal cost (P = MC)".
The restaurant industry certainly is not a market resembling perfect competition, I mean we can just look at the vastly varying prices between restaurants, which certainly can't be attributed to cost. Even if we talk about the food industry more generally, I mean there's like 3 or 4 different brands of milk in my supermarket which vary in price by 100% I hardly doubt that their cost varies by that much.
It's hard to just take this union story by itself. It may be true that the unions managed to push McDonald's into this wage deal, but unions do other things as well.
This is just to balance the conversation a bit, because at the moment it reads like unions are always reasonable.
If you look at recent years in Denmark, there's also been cases where unions have employed strongarm tactics with firms that are already unionized. There was a case a few years back involving a restaurant where the staff were members of a smaller union, and another union came in and told the owner he needed to do a collective bargaining agreement with them instead. They blockaded the restaurant during the conflict.
Plus there's stories about scaffolding being torn town when the employer decides to go with un-unionized labor.
Also there's currently a conflict with the nurses, who want more pay. Now you'd think that maybe people would be grateful to them right after a year and a half of covid, but in fact the government passed a law forcing terms on them, which many of them are not too happy about.
It's not like it's simply a free market, nor is it entirely centrally decided, so you can ask yourself whether the system is really as positive as it sounds from this article. There's pros and cons for everyone.
And, I believe, FAA training is famously hard and unforgiving. I've heard if you fail one of the tests, you are out forever and cannot reapply (for air traffic controllers).
There are exceptions like this everywhere in Europe. Can't speak for Denmark specifically, but anecdotally most countries in Europe have similar rules - certain workers cannot legally strike the same way McDonald's workers can.
One recent example is in Poland - you can't strike if not working causes risk to health and life of people, so when EMTs went to strike they just quit their jobs en masse.
The Danish nurses' strike was not illegal. The Danish labor market is governed by special rules. On one side you have the workers organized in unions. On the other side the employers that are also organized. They negotiate the work conditions typically every year.
In this case it was the nurses' union vs. the public healthcare system. The nurses voted no to the proposed agreement and eventually went on strike. Because nurses are critical to healthcare it was very controlled which nurses were included in the strike.
The negotiations continued but it was impossible to reach an agreement and the number of nurses on strike increased over time.
Eventually the government decided to intervene and made the initial proposed agreement into law. This is part of the organization of the Danish labor market that if a conflict continues for too long there can be an intervention from the government.
Some nurses being angry about the outcome continued smaller strikes. These strikes are illegal within the framework of the labor laws. There's a special court ("Arbejdsretten" or "The labor court") that can decide that both the nurses as well as their union have to pay fines for illegal strikes. This is not a criminal court.
The main reason that the nurses went on strike is because they want greater pay. Historically nurses and many other public jobs were governed by special rules where they were not allowed to strike but could also not easily be fired ("tjenestemand"). This system was inflexible and was modernized in 1969. The nurses ended up with lower pay compared to similar jobs in terms of education (schoolteacher, policeman) most likely because being a nurse is typically a woman's job. This pay gap still exists today where the nurses now are allowed to strike within the framework of the labor laws in an attempt to increase their pay.
Since "the government" in this context includes the legislative, and not just the executive branch, of course it can create legislation that decides such things.
However, the question was if nurses are forbidden to strike, and the answer is: no, not in general. What is happening now is that the government forced a contract on them, and continued strikes break that contract.
Well, you also need to have reasonable demands if you want other people to support you.
>In February 1981, PATCO and the FAA began new contract negotiations. Citing safety concerns, PATCO called for a reduced 32-hour work week, a $10,000 pay increase for all air-traffic controllers and a better benefits package for retirement.[9] Negotiations quickly stalled. Then, in June, the FAA offered a new three-year contract with $105 million of up front conversions in raises to be paid in 11.4% increases over the next three years, a raise more than twice what was being given to other federal employees, “The average federal controller (at a GS_13 level, a common grade controller) earned $36,613, which was 18% less than private sector counterpart";[10] with the raise demanded, the average federal pay would have exceeded the private sector pay by 8%, along with better benefits and shorter working hours. However, because the offer did not include a shorter work week or earlier retirement, PATCO rejected the offer.[11]
If 12,000 of them were fired (all at once?), so they are not that critical to the economy and the safety of the country to the point that can't strike, right?
That makes no sense as a reason for firing someone.
If you are not showing up for work (striking) you are not getting paid anyway. This is why the unions build up huge war chests so that they can pay their striking members. For example the largest property investor in Finland is a company owned by the unions. So they got wealth in the billions to fight if need be.
Paying striking members is a losing battle once those members are fired: you’ll be paying them indefinitely in this case because there is only one employer for air traffic controller jobs in the USA, the federal government.
Reagan did not negotiate with terrorists, either. These people were knowingly and purposefully breaking federal law. What kind of example does it set to continue negotiations with them after that?
That's an obviously unjust law. Removing workers right to strike removes a major point of leverage they have in negotiating for better working conditions and compensation.
Additionally; laws follow humans, not the other way. If you're a person in a profession that is not allowed to argue for better conditions: then that's the best way to get the worst possible conditions.
Seems like a false economy to force people to accept the conditions that they get with no recompense. A bitter FTC employee is much worse than a strike. A bitter FTC employee can kill hundreds.
This logic sounds like an argument for chopping of you hand if it falls sleep.
There is an obvious and straightforward way of getting those 12000 people to work again. There is no argument for firing them just because they are striking outside of petty displays of power and pure stupidity.
Firing people in a high position of trust and responsibility who have just broken that trust isn't a petty display of power.
And how is it stupid to conclusively resolve an ongoing dispute that intentionally threatens national air travel? Just because one side loses doesn't make the decision 'stupid'.
Replacements were found and the world didn't end.
The notion that labor isn't replaceable when their demands exceed their replacement costs is absurd, no matter how skilled they are or how critical their work is.
Especially when the opponent is the government, the one entity that gives unions their power of monopoly, and the one opponent who doesn't need to act rationally when determining "replacement costs".
If they could be replaced then the notion of it being illegal because they were "absolutely required" should be called into question.
You can't make it illegal to strike on the grounds of it being dangerous; then fire everyone for it with little or no issue: it just tells us that the reasons for it being illegal were bullshit.
Why would you think you have the arbitrary power to walk out on your job, and not have them let you go?
You 100% have the right to 'not show up at the auto shop to protest wages at the coffee shop' ... but it's a little odd to think that they can't just let you go and find another worker who will actually show up.
Support/sympathy strike means the the workers from other companies stop providing services for to the target of the strike. Most common forms of this is something like the ground crews joining the cabin crew/pilot strikes (or the other way around) or truck drivers joining the port workers strike (or again the other way around)
edit: Or wait is just normal striking illegal too? So it is literally illegal for a group of people to get together and go "fuck it this sucks" and not show up to work the next day?
Per wikipedia[1] The Taft-Hartley Act banned "jurisdictional strikes, wildcat strikes, solidarity or political strikes, secondary boycotts, secondary and mass picketing, closed shops, and monetary donations by unions to federal political campaigns."
Most if not all of these actions are legal in Denmark, here's some quick definitions:
- A Jurisdictional Strike is a strike to dispute job assignments; e.g. that all brickwork be done by members of a brickworking union
- A wildcat strike is a strike without union organization (so to answer your question, yes it is literally illegal for a group of people to get together and go "fuck it this sucks" and not show up to work the next day.
- Solidarity strikes would be a strike when you don't work for the employer. Not to be confused with secondary boycotts (below)
- Political strikes are strikes intended to influence government policy
- Secondary boycotts are what TFA mentions; e.g. not loading/unloading cargo to/from a specific company.
- Secondary picketing would be picketing companies that do business with the company (e.g. picketing stores that sell products from the business, or companies that sell goods or services to the business)
- A closed shop is a deal that requires the employer to only hire union members[2]
- Donating funds to federal campaigns is perhaps obvious?
2: Note that it is still legal for a collective bargaining agreement to require those hired to pay dues, but this act also allowed states to ban even that. 27/50 states currently ban even this, though going by population it's less than half the population that live in such a state.
" yes it is literally illegal for a group of people to get together and go "fuck it this sucks" and not show up to work the next day."
No, it is not (!).
This thread is full of reality-bending statements.
It's 100% legal to say 'fck it' and not show up to your job (in most cases).
That was never illegal, and it still isn't either in the US or Denmark.
It is not, however, possibly not legal to do so and maintain Union protections and 'not be fired'.
The power to literally not do your job* and then to have the government force private companies to maintain your contract (possibly renegotiated) as opposed to just annulling it and hiring others ... is effectively a 'positive right' which is obviously going to be regulated.
'Blockading' businesses, is also a very different thing than a 'boycott' and under any reasonable circumstance would also be illegal.
Go walk in front of your local Starbucks and try to stop deliveries, customers and employees from entering, and you'll find out both what the law is, and what's reasonable.
'Political Strikes' wouldn't ever be considered a form of reasonable power as well. Can you imagine Tesla employees not showing up for work for several weeks/months because they want to support/oppose Gavin Newsom's recall? And that Tesla wouldn't be allowed to let them go for now doing their work? I don't think you're going to find a lot of reasonable sympathy there.
Providing for the ability for workers to shut down a company because they want to make a political statement, to damage other businesses or workers, or blockading other businesses or workers etc. shouldn't rationally be within the purview of normal Union activity.
> " yes it is literally illegal for a group of people to get together and go "fuck it this sucks" and not show up to work the next day."
> No, it is not (!).
You are correct. It is only illegal if you are a member of a union. If you never were a member of a union, or if you terminate your membership with the union, you may then strike (at which point you obviously do so without any union protections).
Here in the Nordics there is no law protecting you from not getting fired for not showing up for work during a strike. It is all in the collective agreement that both sides agreed upon. And again the collective agreement applies to everyone union member or not.
Basically if a company does so the company is fucked as support strikes will stop pretty much all basic services your company uses from happening (cleaning, trash collecting, security guards, trucking/package services, etc would just stop happening). Obviously this only works if there is relatively high level of unionization on all fields.
Getting all these support strikes slapped on top of the "normal" strike is what happens when the employer breaks (or refuses to sign/join) the collective agreement (this is exactly what happened to McDonalds in Denmark)
"Here in the Nordics there is no law protecting you from not getting fired for not showing up for work during a strike."
Though I can't speak to that fact specifically, I doubt that Nordics can be fired from not showing up due to striking - because 'striking' i.e. the threat of shutting down the factory and the company not being able to dismiss everyone is the basis for the collective bargaining power.
Without the 'power' there is no basis to bargain.
If the company can just punt unskilled workers and hire new ones, then striking has considerably less power in most scenarios.
That said it's worth pointing out the differences between Nordic Unions and traditional American Unions. The later is heavily working class (think Ford/GM plant) while the former is just as much 'White Collar' (think Teachers Union).
Also, it's worth pointing out that again, technically, it's 'legal' to 'not show up for work' even if you're a member of an N/A union, it just means you'll be let go and that's that. People are pushing the wording of that far to aggressively.
> Though I can't speak to that fact specifically, I doubt that Nordics can be fired from not showing up due to striking - because 'striking' i.e. the threat of shutting down the factory and the company not being able to dismiss everyone is the basis for the collective bargaining power.
> Without the 'power' there is no basis to bargain.
My understanding is that the Nordic unions have this power via secondary boycots. If you hire non-union unskilled labor for your factory, good luck getting unionized truck drivers to haul the finished product away.
> Also, it's worth pointing out that again, technically, it's 'legal' to 'not show up for work' even if you're a member of an N/A union, it just means you'll be let go and that's that. People are pushing the wording of that far to aggressively.
"Illegal" and "Unlawful" are terms that are widely used. Just participating in an illegal strike is not criminal and (unless you otherwise disrupt the company's business) the only civil repercussion is loss of job (including backwages).
The US system is just plain weird and is a result of massive corruption at the beginning of the labor movement. Both sides did highly illegal things and whichever side was better funded (almost always the companies at the beginning) would bribe the local law-enforcement to get away with it.
Eventually this led to the establishment of the NLRB and various laws that kept trying to patch any (real or perceived) current imbalance of power. It's like a sport where they make rule changes to emphasize offense, but then a few years later make other changes to fix unintended consequences of the first change, and eventually you have so many rules that the refs need extensive training. (Professional gridiron football in the US is this way; not sure if there's a Nordic equivalent)
Why would you think you have the arbitrary power to walk out on your job, and not have them let you go?
This is why you rarely hear about individual workers going on strike. An individual is expendable. It’s quite another thing when the entire workforce shuts down production by walking out. Sure, you could just fire them all, but your production is still shut down.
The question of legality is not a question of whether an individual worker has the right to walk out (of they do; they are not slaves), or whether employers have a right to fire them (they mostly do). It’s a question of whether workers have the right to organize and coordinate the walking out, or whether this constituted a criminal conspiracy.
"or whether employers have a right to fire them (they mostly do)"
No - they do not. Employers cannot fire workers that are striking 'properly' (i.e. within labour code protections) - that is the very essence of the power of Unions.
Workers can walkout or 'strike' any time they want, as groups or individuals.
They can all quit, and even threaten to all quit.
They can even 'conspire' to all quit.
None of that is illegal - but the company cannot fire people if the strike is per regulations. They can fire them if the strike is not per regulations.
The notion of 'illegal strike' is misappropriated here.
The term 'illegal' or 'unlawful strike' really should be described as 'illegitimate strike', in which case the (non-market) rights that the government has afforded labour to 'not be fired' when they strike, do not apply.
Under specific conditions, the government protects workers who strike from being fired.
If those conditions are not met, then the protections offered workers are absolved, and so the workers can be fired.
Sometimes, workers will do a 'strike' together, without the backing of their leadership - this is called a 'wildcat strike' i.e. 'coordinated strike, technically not under the premise of the labour regulations'. This is an 'illegal strike'.
Someone 'walking out' and doing a '1 person strike' would be doing a mini 'wildcat strike' i.e. 'illegal'. They will be fired.
As you mentioned, the threat of a labour union just 'stopping production' would be scary, yes, but in most scenarios, the company - if they could - would definitely take the pain to get rid of the union. In a heartbeat. With joy and elation.
If you have antagonist staff that are threatening your operations by shutting down production, harassing replacement temporary workers, all sorts of tactics ... you definitely want that situation gone.
The owners would more than likely just let everyone go, and open the doors to hire new staff, and probably allowing regular workers to come back but not allowing the 'bad apples' (their purview).
In short: Unions derive their ultimate power form the ability to 'walk out' whilst at the same time being protected from being fired. That's the power that Union power rests on. Without that power, they'd be whittled away very quickly.
Danish white collar unions, a little bit like government unions, are very different from most of the traditional labour unions i.e. factory workers, auto workers.
In the later, unions can wield incredible power. At Beoing plant in Canada, 'Management' does not decide who does what job, or who gets promoted/advanced. Boeing basically allocates the # or roles and the skill sets. The Union leadership decide who gets to do what job, and it's almost entirely based on 'time in'. 'Seniority' is the golden power for union members and it outranks almost all other things. At a Ford plant in S. Ontario, the #1 job for the guy with the most seniority is to do nothing. Literally he sits all day in a room, overlooking the plant, watching everyone work. I think it's a historical artifact of when there was literal oversight needed, but obviously not anymore. He's like the King of the factory and rules all. He earns well over six figures to do that. Really nice guy though.
"When I bring this up, people sometimes respond by saying that these kinds of strikes are illegal in the US. This is a true and worthwhile bit of information, but insofar as it is meant to imply that the different legal environment is what accounts for the labor radicalism, this obviously has things backwards. The laws aren’t driving the labor radicalism, but rather the labor radicalism is driving the laws."
So true.
Every kind of strikes was illegal before it became legal.
There are ways around US labor laws too. Unions often get away with stealthy "work slowdowns" and "everyone call in sick" actions. Typically without any repercussions for the union or employees because it's illegal, but hard to prove.
Yup, it's often a "Work To Rule" action [1], where everyone works exactly by the book. All shortcuts are eliminated, every break is taken to the exact second (instead of working through the breaks to get stuff done), etc. Everything slows down, and that is that.
And the point is that it is strictly legal - everything is being done exactly by the book. Even so, employers sometimes sue unions over "malicious compliance".
Another way that works in many fields is just everyone refusing any and all overtime. If everyone does that most companies (and police, fire departments, public hospitals, etc) can't cope.
The company can't really force anyone to take extra overtime. The only thing they can do is fire you (well not in the Nordics but in the US I think yes?) but that will only make their problem of not having enough workers around worse.
The reason why US unions are so antagonistic is that US corporations are antagonistic and destructive, any hint of collective action brings out the guns, historically literally.
This very essay talks about their approach to countries with constructive unions / labour, so does the behaviour of Amazon in Germany these days.
US unions have just been living in that environment with little support (quite the opposite) for 150 years, so anything they can get they will everything else be damned. They have no incentive to be cooperative and agreeable because corps will try to destroy them regardless.
I've only taken a recent interest in history (specifically labor), but if you look at the grand scale of either direct physical enslavement or designed econeomical indirect enslavement (surfs to their rulers), you find so much of history dating back to the Egyptian empire of kingdoms that relied their econemy in significant part with labor enforcement.
You could try to argue about the right of withdrawing label just in context to American history, but I think we'd still wind up with a compelling case that so much of history had periods of significant unjust-by-most-standards labor compulsion.
Strikes were prosecuted as illegal conspiracies before the labor rights movement. The law was generally strongly pro-employer, hence the labor rights movement.
"Every kind of strikes was illegal before it became legal. "
This is not true.
Striking was not 'illegal'. If you decided to not show up for work your company could let you go.
'Striking' with protections etc is a 'positive right', effectively a set of powers established by government, imbued on workers.
Think about it: what 'right' would someone normally have to 'not show up for work' and expect that the company couldn't let them go?
What 'right' would someone normally have to block a company from freely interacting with other groups of workers?
'Striking' is a power given to Unions by government that enables them to have some kind of leverage over their employers, and stop employers form participating in what would in any normal circumstance just be normal course of business.
Most of the things unions fought for during the era of labour uprising were enshrined into labour law and other regulatory concerns i.e. 'worker safety' whereas actual wages make up only one part of the equation.
>'Striking' with protections etc is a 'positive right', effectively a set of powers established by government, imbued on workers. Think about it: what 'right' would someone normally have to 'not show up for work' and expect that the company couldn't let them go?
The same right someone would have to fire somebody.
Rights are not god given. Nor is the ability of the employer to fire workers some physical law. It's the result of a balance of power - same as the right to strike without getting fired.
This is not true, and the rhetoric on this thread is descending into byzantine logic.
If you fail to do your duties, you can (or should) be fired, that's of course legal and reasonable by any measure.
Any arbitrary means that the government provides for beyond that is a 'positive right' (i.e. you can't be fired if the union goes on strike, even if you fail to do your duties).
My direct family member belonged to a large well known union that controlled all aspects of hiring, firing, promotion and job duties. Promotion and layoffs were based entirely on 'time in'.
>If you fail to do your duties, you can (or should) be fired, that's of course legal and reasonable by any measure.
It's legal because it was put into the legal code. It's not, again, some physical law.
For example, even if you "failed to do your duties", you still couldn't just be fired in many places, because there are extra protections and steps (and costs to the employeer).
>Any arbitrary means that the government provides for beyond that is a 'positive right'
Only if you have internalized that an automatic firing is the default.
An employment implies a contract between employer and worker.
The right to strike may or may not be allowed in the contract depending on the negotiating power of the employee, just like the conditions under which the employee can be fired is agreed upon.
What you consider "reasonable by any measure" is just the contract where the worker have no rights and the employer have all the rights.
Perhaps more relevant than the source of the rights is who will enforce them and how will they be enforced. Unfortunately, even if God is the source of these rights, They do not directly enforce them. It's governments that need to do that. If it were not so, it wouldn't have been necessary to write it into the declaration of independence in the first place.
So many people (even here on HN) think that unions have lost their way and should be abolished because instead of focusing on their duties, they sometimes get involved in politics, through supporting one candidate over another, donating to a campaign, or hiring lobbyists. This example shows how necessary political action is if a union wants to bring real improvement for its members.
After doing a (very) cursory search, average dues are under $500/year and unionized employees have total comp that's almost 50% higher than nonunionized employees [1]. Total comp that's largely not taxed.
This data comes to us from the BLS via an organization whose homepage lists services such as "Counter Union Campaigns", "Union Avoidance", and "THE UNION-FREE PRIVILEGE®".
The part about dues sounds about right. doitwithoutdues.com was Amazon's anti-union propaganda, so they had every incentive (and looking at the website the shamelessness) to exaggerate union dues. Yet, the number they came up with was only $500 per year.
So to break even, a union has to cause wages to be higher than the non-union situation by 1%? That seems simple enough to do. I would be very surprised if the vast majority of unions don't earn their keep tenfold.
I worked for a company with two plants, one unionized and the other one not. For the same job, the unionized plant paid approximately 20% more than the non-unionized one for the same jobs. A 1% due rate would have been a steal of a deal.
My union dues are less than $50 per month, and it's one of the bigger/more powerful unions in the US. I don't agree with everything they do, but the pay, benefits, and security (very hard to be fired) don't have a non-union comp (that I'm aware of, anyway).
In the UK much of the benefits of Union membership is more like legal insurance. Which in this complicated world is really quite sensible if a rather more boring image.
Are McDonalds in Denmark franchises, or corporate owned? In the US, they are francheses owned by individuals, so painting it as a Worker vs BigCorp issue is a little disingenuous.
How is it disingenuous? McDonald’s (the corporation) where the ones deciding not to follow union agreements, it wasn’t some individual franchise owner doing it.
McDonalds operates in the U.S. both in corporate-owned and franchise models. Internationally I am not so sure if there are franchise models, but I know that corporate owns many of the high profile restaurants internationally.
But even in franchises McDonalds keeps a tight leash on many aspects of the business (menus, processes, ingredients, and many labor standards), and so in many ways corporate McDonalds is responsible (practically, even if they argue not legally) for the operations at even the franchises.
You protect the right to make a decent living. While it is true that some workers have a bigger output, the company can always fire a worker with a very low output or assign better salaries to better workers.
> Firing anyone not worth minimum wage makes the true minimum wage $0 = unemployment.
Denmark is not communist. The state doesn’t mandate that you have to work for Mcdonalds and cannot work anywhere else. If a company doesn’t feel you are competent in a position then they can fire you, obviously. The minimum wage doesn’t mean they are obligated to pay anyone who wants to work for them, it simply means that anyone working in the position must have a wage at that point or above.
Which hurts low-value labor (including those without job experience or who are high risk or have negative history), by making them unemployable.
This notion that a "living wage" raises the floor for everyone is BS. The floor stays at zero and the height to the first step becomes unreachable for some.
...but it doesn't hurt low value labor. There are plenty of grocery stores, gas stations, restaurants, janitors, and the like in Nordic countries. They aren't as many fast food places as there were in the US (but there are so many more grocery stores peppered about) and the prices might be more expensive. But that's OK.
What do you mean, "High risk"? And a negative history - is that the same as being fired or working short term for a bunch of jobs? I'm gonna guess there is a limit to how much of that job history folks can hold against you - and additionally, I get the impression that folks don't change jobs as often as they do in the US. (I'm an immigrant, so I get stuff wrong sometimes).
I'm pretty sure the job stability is due to a combination between there being less wage gap between people, strong worker protection laws, and not having things like health insurance dependent on your employment status.
Few folks are unemployable: There are assistance programs to help folks find work, after all.
Employees require investment beyond their wage, especially on the front end. If they quit or have to be fired before that pays off, it's a loss for the employer.
You seem to have an idealistic view of what employing someone is like.
Why would you hire a person for minimum wage if they weren't worth that value?
Even worse, they might require supervision / handholding by you or someone else, costing that additional amount as well. Maybe they're clumsy and break things. Maybe they are rude and run off customers.
That all costs money, and it's the tip of the iceberg.
Or they just simply might not be productive enough to cover their cost.
Pretending everyone is worth whatever peg you set as minimum wage is delusional.
Most of the things you list for "high risk" are just things that you train for. After all, most low wage jobs reasonably expect to have to train folks.
Yes, you have to handhold sometimes. This is expected. If they aren't picking up on things in a reasonable time, places in the US will start disciplinary actions. The vast majority of people can do the stuff, though. Honestly, though, a lot of low wage jobs have some supervision built into the system, if anything to try to monitor theft or to keep folks from messing up.
Few people are so clumsy that they actually have issues. In the same vein, pretty much everyone is clumsy from time to time and very occasionally, someone will break something expensive. This is all rare. (I've worked many low wage jobs, and been in the middle management).
I don't know what sorts of jobs you think are low wage, but the vast majority simply don't have "productive enough". Some folks are slower than others, but realistically, there is only so much production you are going to do behind a cash register. Even things as arbitrary as how fast you help people isn't completely under your control.
I think people, just for being human and without having to prove worth, deserve a living wage and I think that should be more - at all times - than one would get from a safety net. If you work, you get x. If you think people are being overpaid at that rare, I would argue that's only because others that you deem "worth it" are underpaid.
In many union scenarios, the company would not be able to let go of workers even for productivity problems - nor would they be able to promote on the basis of ability or skill.
The union decides who gets promoted, demoted - which is usually on the basis of 'time in' - and sets the rates for which jobs (and I mean exactly which jobs, i.e. you don't pick up a tool or do a task unless it's on paper that this task is 'your job').
FYI I'm speaking from the experience of a family member who was a Union Member at a Boeing plant - so this would be a fairly traditional late-20th century style North American Union, similar to auto-sector style unions.
What? Why would I try to remove a union contract minimum wage that applies to myself and coworkers, simply because one individual is slow or inefficient?
But the burden of their unfinished work most likely falls to you and colleagues.
That’s fine for a while, but what if it intrudes in personal life? What if the work doesn’t get done, say a power outage, sanitation issues, it can impact many people?
The same thing that we did when we had the same work to do, but productivity was lower since methodologies and technology weren't quite there yet: hire more people.
If the company can't pay the staff enough to live and can't afford to staff the amount of people they need, the company isn't viable.
At which point you can let the company suffer for it, or let the staff suffer for it.
If the company has to rely on people living in subhuman conditions to survive, the company should die.
As a Dane, I find this notion completely alien. You know what unions are also good for? Ensuring healthy work/life balance, and ensuring that work outside regular working hours gets compensated appropriately. If I have to work sundays or evenings, I must be paid double my normal hourly pay.
And the union and company agree that two people doing this job should be enough. No more hiring
That’s not a thing in Denmark.
The person is not great at getting things done, but not horrible enough to be fired (especially by union standards).
That’s also not a thing. It’s surprisingly easy to fire workers in Denmark. It’s similar to at-will employment in the US. Only you’re not screwed if you do get fired, because we have generous unemployment benefits and universal healthcare.
Is it a thing in Denmark where a company doesn't have enough revenue to hire an additional workers? And you're stuck doing the surplus because of a low output co-worker?
I’m sure there are companies everywhere where management keeps an unproductive worker around for whatever reason. But in Denmark at least, they are not required to. All employment in Danmark is at will employment. As long as the reason is not explicitly illegal, employees can be fired for any reason or no reason. As I wrote in a different reply, this is considered uncontroversial because 1. there is usually a severance period of three months, and 2. most workers have unemployment insurance which is both generous and affordable, and 3. we have free, universal healthcare, which means losing one’s job is not catastrophic.
Workers that don't measure up aren't a good fit. Fire them. So that they can be set free, become stronger, at something they are good at.
Oh, but I agree! Fun fact: It’s surprisingly easy to fire workers in Denmark. This is relatively uncontroversial because 1. there is a severance period, which is usually at least three months, and 2. generous unemployment benefits. We call it Flexicurity[1].
Pure theoretical capitalism can't exist in the real world (zero transaction fees, perfect symmetric information, etc.).
Therefore, capitalist countries regulate their economies to make up for this: consumer protections (must have a license to perform surgery), measures to curtail the public good paradox (pollution regulation), etc.
In the US, we lean toward less regulation than many European countries and we reap different outcomes as a result.
Generally: if it's easier to hire/fire employees and pay them the price you choose, it's easier to take a risk with a new business.
Empowering unions discourages business risk. Empowering companies encourages monopolistic behavior. There are tradeoffs on both sides.
That being said, Denmark has 5.8 million people who are 86% Danish[0], which is roughly the population of the Atlanta metropolitan area [1]. It is difficult to draw confident conclusions from a comparison between the US and Denmark given the vast differences between them. The US path to "Nordic levels of equality" may look much different from the Nordic one.
> In the US, we lean toward less regulation than many European countries and we reap different outcomes as a result.
Yes, when laws are friendlier to wealthier people, wealthier people end up better of than poorer people, not sure why you think this is a very insightful comment.
> The US path to "Nordic levels of equality" may look much different from the Nordic one.
I am always amused to see supposedly economically literate techies making obviously false economic claims: Denmark having a smaller population would actually make it harder for them to achieve an effective welfare state, not easier, given economies of scale. This is econ 101 stuff. In the extreme end, a country with, say, 1000 people would have a much more difficult time implementing a welfare state than Denmark would. American economy is significantly more advanced than the Danish economy, so if they can pull this off, it should be much easier for the US.
>> In the US, we lean toward less regulation than many European countries and we reap different outcomes as a result.
> Yes, when laws are friendlier to wealthier people, wealthier people end up better of than poorer people, not sure why you think this is a very insightful comment.
I probably should have written my comments in a slightly different order. This: "Generally: if it's easier to hire/fire employees and pay them the price you choose, it's easier to take a risk with a new business." was meant to be one different result that could come about with less regulation.
>> The US path to "Nordic levels of equality" may look much different from the Nordic one.
> I am always amused to see supposedly economically literate techies making obviously false economic claims: Denmark having a smaller population would actually make it harder for them to achieve an effective welfare state, not easier, given economies of scale. This is econ 101 stuff. In the extreme end, a country with, say, 1000 people would have a much more difficult time implementing a welfare state than Denmark would. American economy is significantly more advanced than the Danish economy, so if they can pull this off, it should be much easier for the US.
What "obviously false" claim did I make? I made a case for why Denmark is significantly different economically and demographically from the US and tentatively stated that that implied that the US path to Nordic levels of equality MAY look much different from the Nordic one.
How is it that MAY is obviously false? The opposite of MAY is certainty - is it certain that the US path to equality will be exactly the same as the Nordic one?
GP originally said "across the Pacific Ocean," hence my comment. GP has since been corrected to "Atlantic Ocean," but I can no longer edit or delete this comment.
> McDonalds doesn’t pay Danes high wages because of a statutory wage floor or even because the state stepped in to enforce a collective bargaining agreement.
Are their wages even considered high by Denmark standards? I'd just say they have to follow local laws and wages if they wanna exist anywhere in EU, simple as that.
407 comments
[ 5.3 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadI like how the author snuck in the fact that McDonald's used to sell beer. I believe they still do in Germany - at least it used to be a fact that would regularly find its way onto reddits frontpage.
In the UK there are plenty of places where you can get food which is much more "real" but not necessarily healthy. There are lots of independent takeaways and cafes selling fish and chips or cooked breakfast around that price. There are plenty of places around markets where you can buy fresh food for that price, which is actually healthy. If you have access to a kitchen you can buy stuff and cook 2 meals for half that price.
Plenty of Indian and Chinese/Asian neighborhoods offer meals at incredible value too.
The only time I would consider something like McDonald's is in the motorway services where almost everything is run by big chains, the other time I go is because the kids get excited about the new happy meal toy.
In and Out burgers is reasonably priced, but not MD.
They got bought by Burger King and all Quick restaurant are slowing changing into Burger King.
* Pulp Fiction (Royale with cheese! Had to do it)
* I was kind of exhausted from trying to find something substantial to eat (lots of lightweight fare, not great for big ol Americans like myself) and the language hurdles involved in doing so. I mean, most people speak English to some degree but it's not the smoothest process
Here in Scotland the soft drink Irn Bru is served, as this is more popular than Coca Cola.
Chicken nuggets, mustard dip, and a large Estrella. Good times.
> In several countries that do not customarily use United States customary units as a unit of weight, the Quarter Pounder is sold under different names. In France, Belgium and Cyprus it is called the Royal Cheese and includes cheese. In German-speaking Europe it is known as a Hamburger Royal; in Germany it includes lettuce and tomato and is branded Hamburger Royal TS (TS standing for „Tomate und Salat“, tomato and lettuce). In Russia and Ukraine, it was known as Royal Cheeseburger, and since 2016 in Russia it is called Grand Cheeseburger.
Extra random trivia: in the south of Brazil, burgers are traditionally very large, so McDonald's Quarteirão (Quarter Pounder) is actually considered a small burger.
https://www.mcdonalds.com/dk/da-dk/product/quarter-pounder.h...
They call it "Royal with cheese".
;)
> This is where we need to get to.
A true champagne socialist.
The author, who does not seem to have come within a thousand miles of any other work than armchair pontification, is one for thinking it'd be great to have such labor unions everywhere.
A gallon of gasoline in Denmark $7.60. Sales tax in Denmark 25%.
I love Denmark but I am also familiar with what small business in Denmark have to put up with to survive.
In reality, gas prices are up all over the world because of pent up demand as things open up as we slowly come out of the pandemic.
- gas-loving American living in Norway
It's about 10¢/L cheaper in Germany or Belgium.
https://www.drive-alive.co.uk/fuel_prices_europe.html#Petrol...
the true cost, plus whatever taxes the local government have decided to levy
From my understanding, gas in the USA is not heavily subsidized. If it is, then everything is. It does not receive any special treatment.
https://www.google.com/search?q=us+gasoline+subsidies
https://www.brookings.edu/research/reforming-global-fossil-f...
"The Environmental and Energy Study Institute reported that direct subsidies to the fossil fuel industry totaled $20 billion per year, with 80% going toward oil and gas. In addition, from 2019 to 2023, tax subsidies are expected to reduce federal revenue by around $11.5 billion. Considering that production subsidies grew 28% between 2017 and 2019, the United States will be under a lot of scrutiny from other countries wanting to see evidence of reform before making their own commitments."
We are subsidizing the use of non-renewables in general by not taxing them enough (or even subsidizing them).
You get paid $22. That gets you about 2.9 gallons of gasoline in Denmark which converts to about $10 in the United States.
So, talking about how much the gross pay of Danish workers is without thinking at all about what they can afford to buy with that money is a true mark of economic ignorance.
The original point was that Matt Bruenig is a champagne socialist. "Denmark is great" is not a counter-argument to that.
I guess the next major costs to compare are rent and health insurance?
How so?
https://www.brookings.edu/research/reforming-global-fossil-f....
[0]: https://terrapass.com/product/personal-carbon-offset-grouped
[1]: https://www.bidnet.com/resources/business-insights/us-govern....
[2]: https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=23&t=10#:~:text=In...).
[3]: https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/diesel-fuel/use-of-diese....
> At 123 billion gallons of gas [0] and 44 billion gallons of diesel [3],
As a note, my personal tax rate in the US is not that much lower than my Danish tax, and in Denmark I get free health care, free education, free support if I'm struggling, and a unified, digital service for registering and running my company.
Thinking it's a good idea to have strong trades unions, if you don't happen to be in a union, does not mean you are a "champagne socialist".
Trade unionism and state socialism are not the same.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matt_Bruenig
Is that what you mean by contextualizing the domain and author?
I think the article stands pretty well on its own.
I'm not sure how hugely helpful this is without considering all of the knock on effects and what all of that means.
We could demand $50/h for them as well or otherwise demand that everyone in the country have the same pay.
It would be better if someone could make the case for some kind of net gain in having such prices fixed at any given place.
The reason that we don't want the government to set minimum wages and benefits is because that's too crude a tool. The best trade-offs, sacrifices and share of spoils varies, and having the unions of different sectors negotiate with the employers (themselves usually organized in unions) is that you can optimize a lot more so that everyone wins.
The main benefits of being part of an union here is stuff like union lawyer being made available to you if you have a dispute with your employer. And obviously more voice in who will represent you in the negotiations between the government, employers and employees.
Unions represent their members (sometimes not equally).
That's it.
They try to extract the most.
That's it.
They are not looking out for anyone's best interests but their own, they are not setting prices necessarily rationally, they are not acting for the benefit of the community at large.
There are 5 'factions' in a companies power dynamic:
1) Owners 2) Executives 3) Labour (i.e. Unions) 4) Customers 5) Suppliers
+ Arguably 'other financiers' (i.e.lenders) make up a 6th.
+ There are externalities, like 'the environment'
The surpluses will be divided among those parties given wherever the power equilibrium rests.
If a company is very weak compared to it's customer (like having Apple as a main customer), it won't make a lot of profit so not a ton of surpluses for the other groups. This is called a 'Monopsony' (i.e. Apple has power over it's supply chain).
If a company is very weak compared to it's supply chain (like a small retail store), they're not going to capture much surplus either.
If the investors have great leverage because capital is sparse, they get more surplus. If money is everywhere, they have less leverage.
Union power is an odd one because it's driven by non-market forces i.e. the regulatory limits of what unions can and cannot do given the local laws. In some regions, they are very powerful with (aka Germany, Denmark) with varying kinds of influence.
In the US, the auto-workers Unions are incredibly powerful, so much so that the standards that they establish fold-over into the non-unionized plants.
In a sense, the government roughly sets union wages by imparting the degree of power that unions have to strike etc...
So you don’t think they care that their members can keep their jobs long-term? Is that not in their interest?
To imply that all unions without fail will push for maximum possible compensation in the short-term, at the expense of any other concern, is simplified to such a degree that it no longer matches reality.
"So you don’t think they care that their members can keep their jobs long-term? Is that not in their interest?"
I don't care one way or the other. I'm saying that a Union is an organized body of power that protects it's own self-interest, and nobody else's.
"To imply that all unions without fail will push for maximum possible compensation in the short-term, at the expense of any other concern, "
I didn't write or imply that.
I'm wrote that Unions will use their power to maximize the returns above all else. Obviously, if they try to negotiate $200K salaries for their staff, they know they will be out of jobs.
However - every single dollar of profit to shareholders, added surplus to buyers/suppliers would be considered 'their money' in this equation, to the extent they can, they'll want to take all of those surpluses - exactly like other participants. Do you think their suppliers will sell for a dime less than they can? Will their customers pay a dollar more than they have to? Will management want to pay more than they have to?
A Union is not a benevolent thing, it's just a power centre acting in it's own interest and that's it.
Well, that’s how I interpreted it, in large part because you flat-out replied ”this is definitely not true” to the person who was making the point I pretty much reiterated in response to you.
> A Union is not a benevolent thing, it's just a power centre acting in it's own interest
Yes, the interest of its members, which is the whole point.
Yeah so what? The other side does the same thing and runs into the very same issues. If unions go to far they struggle with job retention. If employers go too far they struggle with employee retention. These forces balance closer to the middle than if you only had one of them.
Now, you know what's stupid? Letting the government become the union of last resort via the minimum wage. The government doesn't negotiate with anyone. It doesn't know what wages are justified. So it will get it wrong. Either it's too low or it's too high. No feedback from the actual economy. With no clue whether it makes things better, worse or simply does nothing (95% of the time).
I'll choose the unions rather than the government.
What this means is that using Unions, arbitrary employees can possibly take over companies and consume all of the surpluses, which is not good.
"Now, you know what's stupid? Letting the government become the union of last resort via the minimum wage. "
It seems odd because a 'min. wage' is a broad, crude measure, and a 'negotiation' feels more market oriented.
The problem is, those negotiations are not market oriented.
Union-Company negotiations are based on a very arbitrary power that we give to Unions to basically hold the operations of the company hostage unless certain demands are met.
It's not efficient at all.
Given that, I think it's just better if government sets a floor for work.
They could improve it by 1) using economic measures instead of making it political, and 2) possibly have different min wages for different sectors.
In reality - we don't need Unions. Where they are 'most needed' today is where pay is really how, and or there are some unfair practices, arguably at Wallmart and Amazon.
If we increased minimum wage to something reasonable, and got a bit more nuanced with regulation and enforcement ... then that would solve most of the problem.
Worker safety + regulations take care of most of the reasons unions needed to exist and min wage takes care of most of the rest.
Non-unionized auto workers make well above min-wage salary because market-driven salaries work well enough in those areas.
I didn't read that they'd strike until a specific pay number was reached from that page, just that McDonald's had to operate under the same conditions as their same industry peers
The Danish model allow for continuous adaptation of the compensation and benefits. The companies have just as much influence as the unions do. The model allows companies to avoid a minimum wage, which may not be beneficial to companies if a particular sector has a slowdown.
If you want the wages to be reasonable, then the government should take action to make it so. Not a private organization, by essentially extorting the public.
So what should the speed limit be? I don’t really know but they probably aren’t far off given the way the roads are built, people’s reaction times etc. Plus I know they have some people who have studied unexpected factors (e.g. too many stop signs cause speeding).
Such a system is hardly guaranteed to be “right” but is supposed to be alterable and easier to live with than people whipsawing the decision.
BTW in the case of speed limits: during a burst of sensible lawmaking, California set speed limits but also modulated them with the idea that people are sensible: if the speed limit on a road is set to 25, but the dominant traffic is at 35, the presumption is that the proper limit is actually 35.
As a Californian, this interests me -- can you cite a source for me to follow? I found this page [0] from Caltrans, but it speaks to determining the posted speed limit, not overriding the posted speed limit.
[0] https://dot.ca.gov/programs/safety-programs/setting-speed-li...
> The most widely accepted method of determining the posted speed limit is to set the speed limit at what is called the “85th percentile speed”, which is the speed at or below which 85 percent of the traffic is moving.
Here's a concrete example: Embarcadero road in Palo Alto feeds from highway 101. It has a posted speed limit of 25, and there is a perennial complaint presented to the city council, letters to the editor etc: why won't the police come out and enforce the speed limit? The answer is that to do so they'd have to do a survey and then adjust the limit...up (I think traffic travels about 40-45 MPH on this road). If that is the reasonable and proper rate for that road, to enforce anything lower would be a speed trap. The city keeps the 25 signs up in the hope that they discourage even faster driving.
Likewise when they use radar they not only have to post a sign but do a survey, which has to be updated every few years -- you can't use radar to enforce something unfair. I'm not sure the radar signs on Embarcadero are even current (thus probably not even legal).
BTW as I learned in driving school years ago (got a ticket), apart from "reasonable and proper at all time" you can't go over 55 anywhere unless it's explicitly posted. Actually I got all this initially from driving school, and then when Jim Warren went to the effort of getting the entire CA legal code online in the 90s, I actually read a good chunk of the vehicle code in particular.
Protesting is one of the few ways of disagreeing with the actions of the government, i.e. the people WE put in charge.
They’re not overriding the government, because it’s not an issue where the government has any say.
These are the two groups that are directly impacted by decisions related to the wages and benefits. The only way you get closer to the source is by replacing "union" with "employee," but the reasons that unions exist in the first place is because of the sheer power that employers have over individual employees. As it is, the Danish government already granted people to form groups to exercise their collective rights.
"Do what we want or we'll fire you" is acceptable.
"Give us tax breaks or we'll leave you" is acceptable.
But somehow "Value your employees or we won't work with you" is a bad thing.
Why should collective groups have less power than corporations? We have grown accustomed in America to treating corporations as something between groups of people and actual governments.
They aren't. They're groups of people tied together by money and in that respect they're no different than a coalition of workers who have decided that there are requirements to be met in order to do business.
Escalating the negotiation to extortion through back doors, is probably not the optimal way to go.
The idea is, it's not really negotiation when you turn off their water or shut down their loading dock. That has nothing to do with negotiation. That seems very clear, and not hyperbolic at all.
I don't think I've been extreme, but I do know we disagree on what extremes should be 'cricket' and which are over the line. The strong signal I get from this thread is, labor should be allowed any and all tactics because 'labor is good'. That's just not true, fair or rational.
"We have mobs in the US that operate like that."
You wanna bring any more ethnic stereotypes in the conversation, or you good?
As it is, all you've proven in this entire thread is that you're willing to throw around racist innuendo and you have a serious inability to understand basic written English.
This is how I described corporations in this VERY thread, replying to you:
> "They're groups of people tied together by money and in that respect they're no different than a coalition of workers who have decided that there are requirements to be met in order to do business."
Corporations only negotiate with hundreds or thousands of people at a time when they're cutting sweetheart deals with the government or negotiating contracts with unions. They do NOT have that relationship with individual employees. I don't get to bring my entire department into the office with me whenever I'm negotiating a raise with my boss as an at-will employee. At-will employment is funny as hell in its own right, since it perfectly describes the relationships between corporations and non-union employees in the US. We are expected to give our employers at least 2 weeks notice to prepare for our departures, but then turn around and justify their actions for immediately terminating employees for any reason as "protecting the business."
You seem to be very upset that McDonald's couldn't just waltz into a foreign market, ignore the prevailing social contract between employees and employers, and do whatever the hell it wanted and damn their employees. The people in Denmark essentially said "we're not going to allow you to come in and start a race to the bottom. We have social business norms here that you need to respect. You will pay these people what others in this industry are already getting, or we will refuse to service you."
You would know this if you actually read the article instead of wasting your time dreaming up mafia quips.
When was the last time there were any actual consequences for the actions of a large corporation?
https://apnews.com/6d245065b3faaadc70e6eb77e3e5c20f
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/big-mac-cost-denmark/
"True, a Big Mac here costs more — $5.60, compared with $4.80 in the United States. But that is a price Danes are willing to pay. “We Danes accept that a burger is expensive, but we also know that working conditions and wages are decent when we eat that burger,” said Soren Kaj Andersen, a University of Copenhagen professor who specializes in labor issues.”
https://scm.ncsu.edu/scm-articles/article/the-price-of-a-big...
Bottom line, everything has a cost. Higher wages do need to be paid for with higher prices. Wise people understand that the world has trade offs and they make those trade offs with open eyes. Foolish people pretend there is no tradeoff.
1. https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index
And they admit it:
> Burgernomics was never intended as a precise gauge of currency misalignment, merely a tool to make exchange-rate theory more digestible.
The Big Mac Index is also not accurate as it pertains to the US. Big Mac prices vary considerably by location in the US (ranging from $3.x to $6.x). It'd be like trying to pretend there's a Big Mac price in the EU. The index claims $5.65 for the US. That's their poor attempt at a national guess, they didn't actually figure out prices for every location, and they appear to have picked a high price as their foundation. Cities in Florida, Texas, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Ohio are commonly in the $4.x price area for example.
This article finds the national average is closer to $4.82 (in my state it's well below that) -
https://www.restaurantbusinessonline.com/financing/why-big-m...
It's not. You're not accounting for the higher US wages for one thing. Median take home pay is about 40% higher in the US vs Denmark.
The Big Mac Index also gets pricing wrong for the Big Mac in the US market. Their quoted $5.65 figure is higher than nearly every state's average, and far higher than most states. The average US state Big Mac price is comparable to or below Denmark.
US workers have far more disposable income than workers in Denmark. Tax rates are dramatically higher in Denmark than in the US (over 2x higher for someone earning $40,000 per year). The US has a far more progressive taxation system. Someone earning $38,000 in Denmark takes home about as much as someone earning $30,000 in the US; someone earning $61k in Denmark takes home about as much as someone earning $50k in the US.
US workers at the median and average earn higher wages than people in Denmark do.
"In Denmark, the average household net-adjusted disposable income per capita is USD 29,606 a year, lower than the OECD average of USD 33,604 a year."
vs
"In the United States, the average household net-adjusted disposable income per capita is USD 45,284 a year, much higher than the OECD average of USD 33,604 a year, and the highest figure in the OECD."
https://www.oecdbetterlifeindex.org/countries/denmark/
Don't like average (since the high tier incomes in the US warp things so much)? Ok, how about the median:
$35,600 US (2017) vs $28,926 Denmark (2016)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_income
Since this has deflated the myth about higher wages in Denmark, the next response will be: yeah, but people in Denmark have healthcare. And so do people in the US as it turns out, commonly provided by their employer. So if we're going to back healthcare costs out of the high Denmark tax rates, we have to add the drastically more expensive US healthcare (about 90% more expensive in the US per capita) back in to employee wages to one extent or another to adjust correctly. The US worker would gain even more ground vs their peer in Denmark.
But does this tell the whole story? Well, no. Household finances are in horrific condition in Denmark compared to the US, which throws further question on affordability of the burger prices. The people of Denmark are approximately the most indebted people in the world vs their disposable incomes.
https://data.oecd.org/hha/household-debt.htm
There is definitely a tradeoff to be made because nothing ever comes for free. However, that 4.73 billion dollar profit can give every one of their 210k employees each an extra 20k per year (regardless of the average income in their respective countries) before it would even turn a loss based on 2020 numbers. And that's not even taking into account the fact that 2020 profits were significantly down.
In a fair system, increases in price would pay for wage increases and vice versa. In practice, price increases flow towards the top.
which is why the employer pays the employee for their service.
>this entire article shows how employees can capture some of that money if they work in solidarity.
creating a cartel is one way to strengthen your bargaining position.
Tragedy of the commons and all that.
Most McDonald's restaurant workers worldwide are employees of local franchise companies which are far less profitable. The main McDonald's corporation is just a supplier for them.
There are two problems with this argument.
First, we do not believe in the labor theory of value. Time has a value. Risk has value, land has value, and there is also value in nature, so if you were to distribute all the profits solely to labor, you would have only labor and no capital.
That means no equipment, no burgers, no fries, no land, no buildings, no cash registers, no working capital, etc. Just a bunch of people standing around, not even being able to work because tools are required to work and the moment someone suggest paying for the tools necessary to do work, someone like you pops up and starts complaining that there must be no payments for capital, all payments must be only for labor, and so no tools are ever purchased.
No land is purchased. No money is borrowed to pay for any expenses, etc.
The second problem is opportunity cost. McDonald's market cap is 180 Billion dollars, and it earns about 5 Billion per year for a yield of ~2.7%. But this is a risky return. Alternately one can invest in 30 year treasuries that are guaranteed and earn 1.86%. So that corresponds to a risk premium of 1% and a real rate of ~1.8%. In real terms, the risk-free rate is actually negative and the McDonald's earnings yield is approximately zero. Thus the earnings accruing to McDonalds are basically just enough to make up for the loss of the value of the investment due to inflation, so you'd get your original money back, with a healthy dose of risk.
That is charity. You should be on your knees thanking investors for supplying the 200K workers of McDonalds with 180 Billion dollars of capital that allows them to have jobs while the investors are getting basically nothing back in exchange for taking on that risk.
Of course these yields are temporary. Investors may not be getting anything back now, but long term, these types of yields are unsustainable and they will go up. Investors do need to get something back for their investment otherwise the investment wont be made.
And getting back just the original amount invested is generally insufficient to motivate investment and is characteristic of a dysfunctional economy that is unpleasant for workers. When yields are so low as to just match inflation, that's when you see things like housing bubbles as investors turn around to buy up real assets like land because there is no point in investing in risky ventures, and that is when more people who don't understand the world start moaning about how unfair all the expensive housing is, while with the other side of their mouth they advocate for zero interest rates because payments to capital are "bad". We would like to live in a world where ventures are funded, where investment in productive capital is funded. We like the idea of SpaceX and Tesla and mRNA vaccines and M1 chips. We like investment. But that means that the investment must be more profitable that merely buying land and holding it to get back your money in inflation adjusted terms. And the greater the reward for investment, the more investment that will occur.
You seem to be doing a pretty good job of this already
>That means no equipment, no burgers, no fries, no land, no buildings, no cash registers, no working capital, etc.
As I mentioned above. You're wrong.
>That is charity. You should be on your knees thanking investors for supplying the 200K workers of McDonalds with 180 Billion dollars of capital that allows them to have jobs while the investors are getting basically nothing back in exchange for taking on that risk.
You can call it charity but when wealth inequality rises to the point where nothing provides sufficient yields then calling that spending charity misses the tree for the forest. There is nothing to spend the money on, except charity. When you personally only demand 30 hours of work but provide 40 hours of work, there will be someone providing 10 hours less than they demand. The excess hours worked can only be spent on "pointless" activities which inevitably end up in the hands of the person working 10 hours less. When people don't share work, they share incomes.
I don't need to thank them for anything. The investors should be on their knees thanking their workers that they are providing this investment opportunity even if yields are negative. It literally makes no sense to thank someone for sitting on their money. If investors are willing to take on that risk, then it's clearly because that investment is more profitable than other investments from their perspective.
Think about it this way. Someone having a billion potatoes rotting in storage wants to maintain their wealth. The only way that person can maintain their wealth is by giving the potatoes to people who want to work for you in exchange for potatoes. The fact that you get to maintain your wealth is something others provided to you. If it wasn't for them you would be sitting on rotting potatoes and end up with nothing in the end. You'd accept negative yields on investments if they are higher than the negative yield of having too many potatoes.
>And getting back just the original amount invested is generally insufficient to motivate investment and is characteristic of a dysfunctional economy that is unpleasant for workers.
The fact that the investor is accepting zero or negative yields clearly implies that he has no use for that money except to maintain his wealth. So rather than a lack of investment the problem is a lack of consumption or alternatively people producing more than they consume.
>When yields are so low as to just match inflation, that's when you see things like housing bubbles as investors turn around to buy up real assets like land because there is no point in investing in risky ventures,
Raising interest rates doesn't magically create investment opportunities. You always have the same investment opportunities at any interest rate. The interest rate merely restricts how much investment can be done at once. Housing bubbles are not a result of low interest rates. They are a property of land itself. Monopolies allow perfect price discrimination and charge you "everything you earn" which is higher than "everything you spend". The fact that non-monopoly industries can't compete with monopoly power isn't surprising and why so many people suggest land value taxes.
>while with the other side of their mouth they advocate for zero interest rates because payments to capital are "bad". We would like to live in a world where ventures are funded, where investment in productive capital is funded.
Is this some kind of joke? The availability of low interest rates makes it easier to fund productive investment.
>And the greater the reward for investment, the more investment that will occur.
Yeah how are you going to get that? Are you going to start a war, bomb cities, kill people so that there is an artificial shortage and therefore yields are high again? Are you go...
Is there a name for this kind of rationalization ?
It feels deceptive and underhanded. I can give all sorts of synonyms but without a term for it, I fear labeling it, and therefore trying to counter it, won’t be effective.
I’m seeing these kinds of rationalizations all the time these days. Especially in the news.
I’m sure unions play a factor, but many others do as well.
Is there a single fact in the linked Snopes article that is incorrect?
Not a bad trade off.
Denmark does not have a culture of tipping, it’s rarely done, primarily in very fancy restaurants and no one would ever tip or expect anyone to tip in a McD.
https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Mac_Index
More evidence of Snopes incompetence and bias.
The Big Mac index is based on the presumption that Big Macs cost the same to produce in different countries.
Using that same currency index as a measure of Big Mac cost difference is, by definition, wrong, and a gross misinterpretation of circular logic.
If you don't consider a Big Mac to be an equivalent basket of goods (including labor price) then the whole concept falls apart and is meaningless.
What everyone ITT is comparing is actual purchasing power to exchange rate.
The whole discussion of Big Macs having different embedded costs per country is a discussion on why the Big Mac index is flawed.
https://www.economist.com/big-mac-index
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_competition
This is just to balance the conversation a bit, because at the moment it reads like unions are always reasonable.
If you look at recent years in Denmark, there's also been cases where unions have employed strongarm tactics with firms that are already unionized. There was a case a few years back involving a restaurant where the staff were members of a smaller union, and another union came in and told the owner he needed to do a collective bargaining agreement with them instead. They blockaded the restaurant during the conflict.
https://da.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vejleg%C3%A5rden-konflikten
Plus there's stories about scaffolding being torn town when the employer decides to go with un-unionized labor.
Also there's currently a conflict with the nurses, who want more pay. Now you'd think that maybe people would be grateful to them right after a year and a half of covid, but in fact the government passed a law forcing terms on them, which many of them are not too happy about.
It's not like it's simply a free market, nor is it entirely centrally decided, so you can ask yourself whether the system is really as positive as it sounds from this article. There's pros and cons for everyone.
On the bright side we don't really have mercs or the US military showing up to murder strikers anymore, so that's nice
Certain groups are just not legally allowed to strike in the US. Air traffic controllers are critical to the economy and safety of the country.
Another interesting point is that all of the fired air traffic controllers were banned for life from working that job again.
That helps explain why it took 10 years to recover: all the new employees were probably newly trained.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/danish-government-inter...
In this case it was the nurses' union vs. the public healthcare system. The nurses voted no to the proposed agreement and eventually went on strike. Because nurses are critical to healthcare it was very controlled which nurses were included in the strike.
The negotiations continued but it was impossible to reach an agreement and the number of nurses on strike increased over time.
Eventually the government decided to intervene and made the initial proposed agreement into law. This is part of the organization of the Danish labor market that if a conflict continues for too long there can be an intervention from the government.
Some nurses being angry about the outcome continued smaller strikes. These strikes are illegal within the framework of the labor laws. There's a special court ("Arbejdsretten" or "The labor court") that can decide that both the nurses as well as their union have to pay fines for illegal strikes. This is not a criminal court.
The main reason that the nurses went on strike is because they want greater pay. Historically nurses and many other public jobs were governed by special rules where they were not allowed to strike but could also not easily be fired ("tjenestemand"). This system was inflexible and was modernized in 1969. The nurses ended up with lower pay compared to similar jobs in terms of education (schoolteacher, policeman) most likely because being a nurse is typically a woman's job. This pay gap still exists today where the nurses now are allowed to strike within the framework of the labor laws in an attempt to increase their pay.
However, the question was if nurses are forbidden to strike, and the answer is: no, not in general. What is happening now is that the government forced a contract on them, and continued strikes break that contract.
>In February 1981, PATCO and the FAA began new contract negotiations. Citing safety concerns, PATCO called for a reduced 32-hour work week, a $10,000 pay increase for all air-traffic controllers and a better benefits package for retirement.[9] Negotiations quickly stalled. Then, in June, the FAA offered a new three-year contract with $105 million of up front conversions in raises to be paid in 11.4% increases over the next three years, a raise more than twice what was being given to other federal employees, “The average federal controller (at a GS_13 level, a common grade controller) earned $36,613, which was 18% less than private sector counterpart";[10] with the raise demanded, the average federal pay would have exceeded the private sector pay by 8%, along with better benefits and shorter working hours. However, because the offer did not include a shorter work week or earlier retirement, PATCO rejected the offer.[11]
Once that card (striking) has been played, you lose any leverage afforded by avoiding interruptions of "economy and safety".
If you are not showing up for work (striking) you are not getting paid anyway. This is why the unions build up huge war chests so that they can pay their striking members. For example the largest property investor in Finland is a company owned by the unions. So they got wealth in the billions to fight if need be.
Paying striking members is a losing battle once those members are fired: you’ll be paying them indefinitely in this case because there is only one employer for air traffic controller jobs in the USA, the federal government.
Reagan did not negotiate with terrorists, either. These people were knowingly and purposefully breaking federal law. What kind of example does it set to continue negotiations with them after that?
The Iran-Contra affair seems like a pretty clear case of negotiating with terrorists.
Additionally; laws follow humans, not the other way. If you're a person in a profession that is not allowed to argue for better conditions: then that's the best way to get the worst possible conditions.
Seems like a false economy to force people to accept the conditions that they get with no recompense. A bitter FTC employee is much worse than a strike. A bitter FTC employee can kill hundreds.
An ATC being fired doesn't ground flights any more than an ATC on strike grounds flights.
"Stop getting a paycheck" is just a euphemism for "the employee/union has already burned their leverage and gets fired".
There is an obvious and straightforward way of getting those 12000 people to work again. There is no argument for firing them just because they are striking outside of petty displays of power and pure stupidity.
And how is it stupid to conclusively resolve an ongoing dispute that intentionally threatens national air travel? Just because one side loses doesn't make the decision 'stupid'.
Replacements were found and the world didn't end.
The notion that labor isn't replaceable when their demands exceed their replacement costs is absurd, no matter how skilled they are or how critical their work is.
Especially when the opponent is the government, the one entity that gives unions their power of monopoly, and the one opponent who doesn't need to act rationally when determining "replacement costs".
You can't make it illegal to strike on the grounds of it being dangerous; then fire everyone for it with little or no issue: it just tells us that the reasons for it being illegal were bullshit.
Why would you think you have the arbitrary power to walk out on your job, and not have them let you go?
You 100% have the right to 'not show up at the auto shop to protest wages at the coffee shop' ... but it's a little odd to think that they can't just let you go and find another worker who will actually show up.
Support/sympathy strike means the the workers from other companies stop providing services for to the target of the strike. Most common forms of this is something like the ground crews joining the cabin crew/pilot strikes (or the other way around) or truck drivers joining the port workers strike (or again the other way around)
edit: Or wait is just normal striking illegal too? So it is literally illegal for a group of people to get together and go "fuck it this sucks" and not show up to work the next day?
Most if not all of these actions are legal in Denmark, here's some quick definitions:
- A Jurisdictional Strike is a strike to dispute job assignments; e.g. that all brickwork be done by members of a brickworking union
- A wildcat strike is a strike without union organization (so to answer your question, yes it is literally illegal for a group of people to get together and go "fuck it this sucks" and not show up to work the next day.
- Solidarity strikes would be a strike when you don't work for the employer. Not to be confused with secondary boycotts (below)
- Political strikes are strikes intended to influence government policy
- Secondary boycotts are what TFA mentions; e.g. not loading/unloading cargo to/from a specific company.
- Secondary picketing would be picketing companies that do business with the company (e.g. picketing stores that sell products from the business, or companies that sell goods or services to the business)
- A closed shop is a deal that requires the employer to only hire union members[2]
- Donating funds to federal campaigns is perhaps obvious?
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taft%E2%80%93Hartley_Act
2: Note that it is still legal for a collective bargaining agreement to require those hired to pay dues, but this act also allowed states to ban even that. 27/50 states currently ban even this, though going by population it's less than half the population that live in such a state.
No, it is not (!).
This thread is full of reality-bending statements.
It's 100% legal to say 'fck it' and not show up to your job (in most cases).
That was never illegal, and it still isn't either in the US or Denmark.
It is not, however, possibly not legal to do so and maintain Union protections and 'not be fired'.
The power to literally not do your job* and then to have the government force private companies to maintain your contract (possibly renegotiated) as opposed to just annulling it and hiring others ... is effectively a 'positive right' which is obviously going to be regulated.
'Blockading' businesses, is also a very different thing than a 'boycott' and under any reasonable circumstance would also be illegal.
Go walk in front of your local Starbucks and try to stop deliveries, customers and employees from entering, and you'll find out both what the law is, and what's reasonable.
'Political Strikes' wouldn't ever be considered a form of reasonable power as well. Can you imagine Tesla employees not showing up for work for several weeks/months because they want to support/oppose Gavin Newsom's recall? And that Tesla wouldn't be allowed to let them go for now doing their work? I don't think you're going to find a lot of reasonable sympathy there.
Providing for the ability for workers to shut down a company because they want to make a political statement, to damage other businesses or workers, or blockading other businesses or workers etc. shouldn't rationally be within the purview of normal Union activity.
> No, it is not (!).
You are correct. It is only illegal if you are a member of a union. If you never were a member of a union, or if you terminate your membership with the union, you may then strike (at which point you obviously do so without any union protections).
Here in the Nordics there is no law protecting you from not getting fired for not showing up for work during a strike. It is all in the collective agreement that both sides agreed upon. And again the collective agreement applies to everyone union member or not.
Basically if a company does so the company is fucked as support strikes will stop pretty much all basic services your company uses from happening (cleaning, trash collecting, security guards, trucking/package services, etc would just stop happening). Obviously this only works if there is relatively high level of unionization on all fields.
Getting all these support strikes slapped on top of the "normal" strike is what happens when the employer breaks (or refuses to sign/join) the collective agreement (this is exactly what happened to McDonalds in Denmark)
Though I can't speak to that fact specifically, I doubt that Nordics can be fired from not showing up due to striking - because 'striking' i.e. the threat of shutting down the factory and the company not being able to dismiss everyone is the basis for the collective bargaining power.
Without the 'power' there is no basis to bargain.
If the company can just punt unskilled workers and hire new ones, then striking has considerably less power in most scenarios.
That said it's worth pointing out the differences between Nordic Unions and traditional American Unions. The later is heavily working class (think Ford/GM plant) while the former is just as much 'White Collar' (think Teachers Union).
Also, it's worth pointing out that again, technically, it's 'legal' to 'not show up for work' even if you're a member of an N/A union, it just means you'll be let go and that's that. People are pushing the wording of that far to aggressively.
> Without the 'power' there is no basis to bargain.
My understanding is that the Nordic unions have this power via secondary boycots. If you hire non-union unskilled labor for your factory, good luck getting unionized truck drivers to haul the finished product away.
> Also, it's worth pointing out that again, technically, it's 'legal' to 'not show up for work' even if you're a member of an N/A union, it just means you'll be let go and that's that. People are pushing the wording of that far to aggressively.
"Illegal" and "Unlawful" are terms that are widely used. Just participating in an illegal strike is not criminal and (unless you otherwise disrupt the company's business) the only civil repercussion is loss of job (including backwages).
Eventually this led to the establishment of the NLRB and various laws that kept trying to patch any (real or perceived) current imbalance of power. It's like a sport where they make rule changes to emphasize offense, but then a few years later make other changes to fix unintended consequences of the first change, and eventually you have so many rules that the refs need extensive training. (Professional gridiron football in the US is this way; not sure if there's a Nordic equivalent)
This is why you rarely hear about individual workers going on strike. An individual is expendable. It’s quite another thing when the entire workforce shuts down production by walking out. Sure, you could just fire them all, but your production is still shut down.
The question of legality is not a question of whether an individual worker has the right to walk out (of they do; they are not slaves), or whether employers have a right to fire them (they mostly do). It’s a question of whether workers have the right to organize and coordinate the walking out, or whether this constituted a criminal conspiracy.
"or whether employers have a right to fire them (they mostly do)"
No - they do not. Employers cannot fire workers that are striking 'properly' (i.e. within labour code protections) - that is the very essence of the power of Unions.
Workers can walkout or 'strike' any time they want, as groups or individuals.
They can all quit, and even threaten to all quit.
They can even 'conspire' to all quit.
None of that is illegal - but the company cannot fire people if the strike is per regulations. They can fire them if the strike is not per regulations.
The notion of 'illegal strike' is misappropriated here.
The term 'illegal' or 'unlawful strike' really should be described as 'illegitimate strike', in which case the (non-market) rights that the government has afforded labour to 'not be fired' when they strike, do not apply.
Under specific conditions, the government protects workers who strike from being fired.
If those conditions are not met, then the protections offered workers are absolved, and so the workers can be fired.
Sometimes, workers will do a 'strike' together, without the backing of their leadership - this is called a 'wildcat strike' i.e. 'coordinated strike, technically not under the premise of the labour regulations'. This is an 'illegal strike'.
Someone 'walking out' and doing a '1 person strike' would be doing a mini 'wildcat strike' i.e. 'illegal'. They will be fired.
As you mentioned, the threat of a labour union just 'stopping production' would be scary, yes, but in most scenarios, the company - if they could - would definitely take the pain to get rid of the union. In a heartbeat. With joy and elation.
If you have antagonist staff that are threatening your operations by shutting down production, harassing replacement temporary workers, all sorts of tactics ... you definitely want that situation gone.
The owners would more than likely just let everyone go, and open the doors to hire new staff, and probably allowing regular workers to come back but not allowing the 'bad apples' (their purview).
In short: Unions derive their ultimate power form the ability to 'walk out' whilst at the same time being protected from being fired. That's the power that Union power rests on. Without that power, they'd be whittled away very quickly.
Danish white collar unions, a little bit like government unions, are very different from most of the traditional labour unions i.e. factory workers, auto workers.
In the later, unions can wield incredible power. At Beoing plant in Canada, 'Management' does not decide who does what job, or who gets promoted/advanced. Boeing basically allocates the # or roles and the skill sets. The Union leadership decide who gets to do what job, and it's almost entirely based on 'time in'. 'Seniority' is the golden power for union members and it outranks almost all other things. At a Ford plant in S. Ontario, the #1 job for the guy with the most seniority is to do nothing. Literally he sits all day in a room, overlooking the plant, watching everyone work. I think it's a historical artifact of when there was literal oversight needed, but obviously not anymore. He's like the King of the factory and rules all. He earns well over six figures to do that. Really nice guy though.
So true. Every kind of strikes was illegal before it became legal.
And the point is that it is strictly legal - everything is being done exactly by the book. Even so, employers sometimes sue unions over "malicious compliance".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule
The company can't really force anyone to take extra overtime. The only thing they can do is fire you (well not in the Nordics but in the US I think yes?) but that will only make their problem of not having enough workers around worse.
I don't think withdrawing your labour was illegal before someone legalised it - the whole workforce was not enslaved.
The reason why US unions are so antagonistic is that US corporations are antagonistic and destructive, any hint of collective action brings out the guns, historically literally.
This very essay talks about their approach to countries with constructive unions / labour, so does the behaviour of Amazon in Germany these days.
US unions have just been living in that environment with little support (quite the opposite) for 150 years, so anything they can get they will everything else be damned. They have no incentive to be cooperative and agreeable because corps will try to destroy them regardless.
You could try to argue about the right of withdrawing label just in context to American history, but I think we'd still wind up with a compelling case that so much of history had periods of significant unjust-by-most-standards labor compulsion.
This is not true.
Striking was not 'illegal'. If you decided to not show up for work your company could let you go.
'Striking' with protections etc is a 'positive right', effectively a set of powers established by government, imbued on workers.
Think about it: what 'right' would someone normally have to 'not show up for work' and expect that the company couldn't let them go?
What 'right' would someone normally have to block a company from freely interacting with other groups of workers?
'Striking' is a power given to Unions by government that enables them to have some kind of leverage over their employers, and stop employers form participating in what would in any normal circumstance just be normal course of business.
Most of the things unions fought for during the era of labour uprising were enshrined into labour law and other regulatory concerns i.e. 'worker safety' whereas actual wages make up only one part of the equation.
The same right someone would have to fire somebody.
Rights are not god given. Nor is the ability of the employer to fire workers some physical law. It's the result of a balance of power - same as the right to strike without getting fired.
If you fail to do your duties, you can (or should) be fired, that's of course legal and reasonable by any measure.
Any arbitrary means that the government provides for beyond that is a 'positive right' (i.e. you can't be fired if the union goes on strike, even if you fail to do your duties).
My direct family member belonged to a large well known union that controlled all aspects of hiring, firing, promotion and job duties. Promotion and layoffs were based entirely on 'time in'.
It's legal because it was put into the legal code. It's not, again, some physical law.
For example, even if you "failed to do your duties", you still couldn't just be fired in many places, because there are extra protections and steps (and costs to the employeer).
>Any arbitrary means that the government provides for beyond that is a 'positive right'
Only if you have internalized that an automatic firing is the default.
What you consider "reasonable by any measure" is just the contract where the worker have no rights and the employer have all the rights.
We revolted and started a country over this, made it into a primary declaration in our independence.
Union political lobbying is persistent in every election, using ‘sometimes get involved’ is not an accurate description for how frequent it is.
You could also drive an hour to save 3¢/gallon on gas.
This data comes to us from the BLS via an organization whose homepage lists services such as "Counter Union Campaigns", "Union Avoidance", and "THE UNION-FREE PRIVILEGE®".
[1] https://anh.com/the-cost-of-unions/
https://web.archive.org/web/20210329213754/https://www.doitw...
I worked for a company with two plants, one unionized and the other one not. For the same job, the unionized plant paid approximately 20% more than the non-unionized one for the same jobs. A 1% due rate would have been a steal of a deal.
"A necessary and complete way to have nice things is to have the will to have nice things".
Mostly. A bit under 10% of all McDonalds locations in the US are corporate owned.
But even in franchises McDonalds keeps a tight leash on many aspects of the business (menus, processes, ingredients, and many labor standards), and so in many ways corporate McDonalds is responsible (practically, even if they argue not legally) for the operations at even the franchises.
Interestingly, in the U.S., McDonalds owns most of the land under the franchise restaurants, and actually earns more if its profits on rent than on franchise fees or selling ingredients: https://www.wallstreetsurvivor.com/mcdonalds-beyond-the-burg...
Being able to eat it with a good conscience helps.
Do Danes ever advocate for someone to be fired?
If workers naturally have different productivity points, why protect their right to earn $22/hour?
Not if some workers are being paid more than their productivity/value is worth.
>You protect the right to make a decent living.
>the company can always fire a worker
These statements are contradictory.
Firing anyone not worth minimum wage makes the true minimum wage $0 = unemployment.
Which essentially prohibits anyone who's value is less than minimum wage from making any living at all, much less make a decent living.
Denmark is not communist. The state doesn’t mandate that you have to work for Mcdonalds and cannot work anywhere else. If a company doesn’t feel you are competent in a position then they can fire you, obviously. The minimum wage doesn’t mean they are obligated to pay anyone who wants to work for them, it simply means that anyone working in the position must have a wage at that point or above.
This notion that a "living wage" raises the floor for everyone is BS. The floor stays at zero and the height to the first step becomes unreachable for some.
What do you mean, "High risk"? And a negative history - is that the same as being fired or working short term for a bunch of jobs? I'm gonna guess there is a limit to how much of that job history folks can hold against you - and additionally, I get the impression that folks don't change jobs as often as they do in the US. (I'm an immigrant, so I get stuff wrong sometimes).
I'm pretty sure the job stability is due to a combination between there being less wage gap between people, strong worker protection laws, and not having things like health insurance dependent on your employment status.
Few folks are unemployable: There are assistance programs to help folks find work, after all.
Employees require investment beyond their wage, especially on the front end. If they quit or have to be fired before that pays off, it's a loss for the employer.
You seem to have an idealistic view of what employing someone is like.
Why would you hire a person for minimum wage if they weren't worth that value?
Even worse, they might require supervision / handholding by you or someone else, costing that additional amount as well. Maybe they're clumsy and break things. Maybe they are rude and run off customers.
That all costs money, and it's the tip of the iceberg.
Or they just simply might not be productive enough to cover their cost.
Pretending everyone is worth whatever peg you set as minimum wage is delusional.
Yes, you have to handhold sometimes. This is expected. If they aren't picking up on things in a reasonable time, places in the US will start disciplinary actions. The vast majority of people can do the stuff, though. Honestly, though, a lot of low wage jobs have some supervision built into the system, if anything to try to monitor theft or to keep folks from messing up.
Few people are so clumsy that they actually have issues. In the same vein, pretty much everyone is clumsy from time to time and very occasionally, someone will break something expensive. This is all rare. (I've worked many low wage jobs, and been in the middle management).
I don't know what sorts of jobs you think are low wage, but the vast majority simply don't have "productive enough". Some folks are slower than others, but realistically, there is only so much production you are going to do behind a cash register. Even things as arbitrary as how fast you help people isn't completely under your control.
I think people, just for being human and without having to prove worth, deserve a living wage and I think that should be more - at all times - than one would get from a safety net. If you work, you get x. If you think people are being overpaid at that rare, I would argue that's only because others that you deem "worth it" are underpaid.
The union decides who gets promoted, demoted - which is usually on the basis of 'time in' - and sets the rates for which jobs (and I mean exactly which jobs, i.e. you don't pick up a tool or do a task unless it's on paper that this task is 'your job').
FYI I'm speaking from the experience of a family member who was a Union Member at a Boeing plant - so this would be a fairly traditional late-20th century style North American Union, similar to auto-sector style unions.
That makes no sense what so ever.
If you are not massively productive you don't deserve a living wage and should live in a cardboard box for being such a shameful existence.
That’s fine for a while, but what if it intrudes in personal life? What if the work doesn’t get done, say a power outage, sanitation issues, it can impact many people?
If that’s your colleague, what’s the recourse?
If the company can't pay the staff enough to live and can't afford to staff the amount of people they need, the company isn't viable.
At which point you can let the company suffer for it, or let the staff suffer for it.
If the company has to rely on people living in subhuman conditions to survive, the company should die.
But a more common scenario - what about a co-worker, that is 60% your capacity?
And the union and company agree that two people doing this job should be enough. No more hiring.
The person is not great at getting things done, but not horrible enough to be fired (especially by union standards).
They're stuck on your team.
While overtime pay is great, do you really want to be responsible every week for their work deficit?
What's the recourse in the Danish labor structure?
That’s not a thing in Denmark.
The person is not great at getting things done, but not horrible enough to be fired (especially by union standards).
That’s also not a thing. It’s surprisingly easy to fire workers in Denmark. It’s similar to at-will employment in the US. Only you’re not screwed if you do get fired, because we have generous unemployment benefits and universal healthcare.
Is it a thing in Denmark where a company doesn't have enough revenue to hire an additional workers? And you're stuck doing the surplus because of a low output co-worker?
To me, protection isn't love.
Workers that don't measure up aren't a good fit. Fire them. So that they can be set free, become stronger, at something they are good at.
A worker at McDonald's that does 60% the output of the rest of the team doesn't deserve $22/hr.
Oh, but I agree! Fun fact: It’s surprisingly easy to fire workers in Denmark. This is relatively uncontroversial because 1. there is a severance period, which is usually at least three months, and 2. generous unemployment benefits. We call it Flexicurity[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flexicurity
Therefore, capitalist countries regulate their economies to make up for this: consumer protections (must have a license to perform surgery), measures to curtail the public good paradox (pollution regulation), etc.
In the US, we lean toward less regulation than many European countries and we reap different outcomes as a result.
Generally: if it's easier to hire/fire employees and pay them the price you choose, it's easier to take a risk with a new business.
Empowering unions discourages business risk. Empowering companies encourages monopolistic behavior. There are tradeoffs on both sides.
That being said, Denmark has 5.8 million people who are 86% Danish[0], which is roughly the population of the Atlanta metropolitan area [1]. It is difficult to draw confident conclusions from a comparison between the US and Denmark given the vast differences between them. The US path to "Nordic levels of equality" may look much different from the Nordic one.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denmark
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta
Yes, when laws are friendlier to wealthier people, wealthier people end up better of than poorer people, not sure why you think this is a very insightful comment.
> The US path to "Nordic levels of equality" may look much different from the Nordic one.
I am always amused to see supposedly economically literate techies making obviously false economic claims: Denmark having a smaller population would actually make it harder for them to achieve an effective welfare state, not easier, given economies of scale. This is econ 101 stuff. In the extreme end, a country with, say, 1000 people would have a much more difficult time implementing a welfare state than Denmark would. American economy is significantly more advanced than the Danish economy, so if they can pull this off, it should be much easier for the US.
I probably should have written my comments in a slightly different order. This: "Generally: if it's easier to hire/fire employees and pay them the price you choose, it's easier to take a risk with a new business." was meant to be one different result that could come about with less regulation.
>> The US path to "Nordic levels of equality" may look much different from the Nordic one.
> I am always amused to see supposedly economically literate techies making obviously false economic claims: Denmark having a smaller population would actually make it harder for them to achieve an effective welfare state, not easier, given economies of scale. This is econ 101 stuff. In the extreme end, a country with, say, 1000 people would have a much more difficult time implementing a welfare state than Denmark would. American economy is significantly more advanced than the Danish economy, so if they can pull this off, it should be much easier for the US.
What "obviously false" claim did I make? I made a case for why Denmark is significantly different economically and demographically from the US and tentatively stated that that implied that the US path to Nordic levels of equality MAY look much different from the Nordic one.
How is it that MAY is obviously false? The opposite of MAY is certainty - is it certain that the US path to equality will be exactly the same as the Nordic one?
Come visit any Nordic country. You’ll see how the happy, rich and fulfilled society looks like.
https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/big-mac-cost-denmark/
Are their wages even considered high by Denmark standards? I'd just say they have to follow local laws and wages if they wanna exist anywhere in EU, simple as that.