I'm sympathetic, but I think this essay wants for a distinction between private- and public-sector unions. The immoral behavior you cite (garbage piling up, schools closing) seems so bad precisely because in these cases unions are standing in the way of the delivery of public goods that, in lots of places though not all, it's government's responsibility to provide.
Public sector unions, of course, clash with the entire concept of a union, and a lot of fair-minded liberals and progressives seem to have been snowed into making a category error here. The government is not a capitalist enterprise expropriating surplus value provided by public-sector workers. In a democracy, organized labor in the public sector is organizing against.... their fellow citizens.
The private unions are also organizing against their fellow citizens. Their entire point is to prevent other people from entering into voluntary contracts and restrict other people's choices. They should all be treated as the moral equivalent of criminal gangs.
Like I said, I'm sympathetic — but workers for a private company are selling their labor for a wage as part of such a voluntary private contract. They obviously have a right to withhold that labor as individuals, on the understanding that they risk being fired if they do so. And they have a right to organize and make other voluntary contracts with their fellow workers ("hey guys, let's not work tomorrow").
Consumers of the goods produced by the capitalist enterprises in this scenario also have rights — they don't need to purchase from the unionized employer, and can simply switch their allegiance as consumers. There's no real coercion here.
It's true that unionized private labor might be extracting value from consumers without having improved productivity in any way. But this is bog-standard rent seeking, and it's not obviously more immoral to me than e.g. being a landlord.
They can say “let’s not work tomorrow,” and withhold their labor when they want, though employers should be allowed to fire them. But labor unions as we think of them only exist by coercing and restricting the freedom of others. See the debate over right-to-work laws.
Seems like we may not disagree here — it sounds like your argument that labor unions are fundamentally coercive hinges upon their ability to leverage (coercive) state power to enforce their desires. If governments did not privilege union contracts any more than any other contract between consenting parties, would your feelings change?
Now that divorce is largely legal, if they tried to prevent a divorce and remarriage with force (outside the threat of using the force of the state to ensure fair division of shared-assets) then that would be illegal.
It’s not “just life” for people to engage in “collective bargaining” to prevent other people from entering into contracts. That’s usually criminality. Unions have invented a lot of euphemisms to cover this up. I already addressed the asymmetric bargaining point, redistribute wealth directly if you have to, don’t restrict freedom and progress.
As for the kind of person who wouldn’t want to coordinate, it’s usually the better workers who have something unique to contribute to employers and don’t want to be forced into a seniority based system. The parasitic loves an arrangement where you can’t get fired and compensation depends on how long you’ve been there.
There are different styles of unions. Most suck for the reasons you describe. One style I find interesting is the IBEW style union. It depends on the state (in some states it operates as a classic union) but often it acts more as something between a union and trade-association. For electricians it can provide apprenticeships to start out, insurance, other administrative functions when you are acting as independent contractor, and leads to drive business. They also provide some "fraternal" type benefits like rotary club. As a consumer, it acts as a seal of trust to ensure basic competence, recourse in the case of a job falling below standards, and again insurance coverage. You can hire non-union for cheaper, but there is often a distinct quality trade-off. And provided that is a free choice anyone can make (both the join, or to hire) then I can see how this type of union could and perhaps should thrive. These types of a unions do set common rates, but usually are not engaged in collective bargaining. There are more professions that could benefit from similar arrangements.
Agreed. But I do think there is more room for non-coercive "union" activity and further that our current legal environment actively innovation and competition in this space. Coops are another adjacent area of different methods of arranging ownership and labor and are also unexplored. There are more possibilities out there than our limited, adversarial, coercive unions.
I grant that many employers are dicks. The question is whether rules based systems to keep them from being dicks are worth the transactional costs. Richard is correct that direct redistribution has the lowest transaction costs
It is a major flaw in the article to not draw the distinction between public sector and private sector unions. The entire point is that when a private sector union acts up, a consumer can go elsewhere, but when a public sector union colludes with politicians to begrudgingly under-deliver services, the consumer ne citizen has nowhere else to go.
You might be familiar with Glassdoor, a website that collects anonymous employee reviews about tech companies. If I'm a software engineer interviewing for a job, I can open Glassdoor and read about the working conditions in the company for which I'm interviewing.
Let's say that according to Glassdoor, managers at this company tend to yell at employees. Now I can try to assign a numeric cost to this working condition. Perhaps, the salary is $10k higher, and perhaps I'm not too sensitive to people yelling at me. So I take the job, and everyone benefits.
In fact, a system like this creates incentives that benefit all of society. Employers improve working conditions, because it allows them to pay less for talent. And employees can find higher-paying jobs if they are willing to accept certain "problematic" working conditions (e.g. peeing in a bottle).
But if you take away Glassdoor, this system just doesn't work - because it's very hard to tell the working conditions at a company without working there (unless you happen to have friends already there). If you join a company, later to discover bad working conditions, you're unlikely to switch immediately, because of the cost associated with switching jobs. Sadly, the job market is just not very efficient in this regard.
I say this because I think your entire article assumes the job market is efficient. But it is not. So employers lack incentives to improve working conditions. And employees don't have tools to translate worse working conditions to a numeric cost.
I worked a dozer or so low wage jobs when I was younger. I did not see any barriers to switching between them. The job market looked extremely efficient to me. Everything I’ve seen involving central planning, which is what labor unions are, has looked awful and stupid. So nothing in theory or personal experience makes me inclined to trust the idea that government or lazy thugs should take over the job market.
For what it's worth, I agree more than I disagree with the perspective that worker unions overall did (and are still doing) more bad than good to employee working condition worldwide.
That being said, a more efficient job market will result in stronger incentives for employers to improve working conditions, which is a good (and ethical) thing.
How do you know that Glassdoor isn't filled with fake or malicious reviews? Fake: by employers seeking to boost their favorability ratings. Malicious: by disgruntled employees who were fired for cause or had a beef with a manager or co-worker and is taking it out on the company.
This happens, but in my experience Glassdoor has a fairly robust verification process. So if you read enough reviews, you can get a general sense of working conditions.
Even if one accepts all your arguments, you are still arguing from a dishonest alternative. Just outlaw unions (so much for freedom of assembly) and instead pass a law forcing redistribution of income directly. Which you know is extremely unlikely, in the USA, at least in the magnitude of dollars that would be required to make any material difference. I am sure there is terminology for this, somewhere in the long list of rhetorical tricks and maneuvers: argue against A by holding up B as an alternative, while knowing B is not viable.
Unions can get currupt like any other public or private organization but the basic principle of unions are no different than a professional athlete's agent. We see in the past what things where like for workers, horrible working conditions and pay. The market does a lot of wonderful things but just doesn't regulate this properly on its own unfortunately. The American dream became a reality because unions helped to change all that. Ordinary people where then able to make a decent living and rise into the middle class and then able to retire comfortably even on jobs that we would not consider high skill jobs. That would be bascially impossible before the era of unions. Without well functioning unions the American dream becomes a nightmare for ordinary Americans but definitely becomes a dream for the owners of corporations lol
This is simply make believe. It is absolutely not true that wages have increased twenty to thirty fold over the past two centuries due to unions. It has increased due to marginal productivity. Unions were just one (and a minor one at that) way for employees to negotiate wages. In industries and places without unions, wages have routinely increased. Supply and demand for labor guarantees this as long as productivity increases and employers aren’t able to form a cartel on wages (something RH is not arguing for).
While I think you're correct that wages didn't increase due to unions, working conditions absolutely did. People used to work in horrible conditions for long hours, and unions had an enormous impact by protesting for more time off and safer employment. The benefits of those changes are harder to measure in dollars, but they provide tremendous benefits to workers.
Unions didn’t make much of a difference in either. Supply and demand with rising marginal productivity explains both wages and working conditions. This is true over the long range in non union industries and right to work states. Again, I never worked in a union industry, but my company was a perennial leader in "best companies to work at" lists. They offered good conditions and wages to attract and retain good employees in a competitive market.
In the early 20th century death rates, and more specifically injury rates, fell dramatically in a very short period of time. A lot of this is attributed to workman's compensation laws. Prior to these laws existing companies paid out very little to injured workers, and afterward it cost them thousands of dollars. This is believed to have been a major factor in creating safer workplaces, giving companies incentives to care about safety for the first time. Unions were a major player in getting these laws passed.
well since union power has been crushed wages have actually not gone up with the increase of productivity. The massive cost of living increases have more than countered the marginal gains on wages which means things have gotten worse for workers not better. With the crushing of unions we have now seen the death of the American dream. Although descent working conditions seem to have stuck for the most part wages have not since the market unfortunately doesn't properly regulate wages, exspecaly when corporations have the leverage in contract negotiations. Plus the elites now have so much wealth and power they're buying up everything so people will now own nothing (rent). The whole concept of the American dream was people could afford to live in their own home and raise a family and not be a serf but increasingly that's no longer the case.
1. Regarding the 80%/20% pee in a bottle scenario:
Is there any percentage at which you would say it's unacceptable? What if 100% of the people who worked there had to pee in a bottle because there were no bathroom breaks? They could always just get another job that pays slightly worse, and maybe Amazon would be forced to change their work model if they couldn't find anyone willing to do that, but if they offered high enough pay that might never happen, and should we as a society ever say "No, that's just not something we should allow people to require of their workers, even if they pay well"? There is something touching on human dignity here that makes me inherently oppose a business that works this way, and though "dignity" is a very fuzzy word that could be used to justify all sorts of stupid regulations, I still think we need to set some minimum standards that every business should have to meet.
2. Related to my point above:
Minimum standards allow people to make the choices you're claiming they would make if they could. In a time before breaks were mandated for many businesses, many workers didn't even have an option to get a job where they had breaks. A lot of jobs just didn't offer them a century ago. Now they're everywhere. So you can say "Well if unions didn't bargain for break times, people could just choose to go to a job where they had breaks but were paid less, or were paid more but didn't have breaks", but I feel like if organized labor had never bargained for them in the first place, they just wouldn't even be offered at many places of employment. In that case, nobody gets them, its just not an option, so you would choose your job entirely based on a pay and not the accompanying benefits, which don't exist. This applies to the 8 hour work day, weekends, job safety, paid time off, sick leave, etc. etc. If unions hadn't forced these things on companies I think they would be much scarcer than they are in the modern world, and workers would have less choice, not more. They might have more money, but in a world where they didn't think these benefits were even options they wouldn't even think to value them in the first place.
3. Regarding the morality aspect:
In a world where all other companies don't make enough money to offer more than $15 an hour, and Amazon does, then they are the only ones who could make the choice to better their workers lives. You should praise them for running a company that can offer better terms, that's a moral good, but if they choose not to offer better wages despite being able to do so, and offer only what is competitive with other company's wages and keep the rest for themselves, I find that morally objectionable. If you could make a choice which would dramatically improve other people's lives at little cost to yourself, and you choose not to, I don't think you should receive praise for that, regardless of what other people are doing. Now companies have limits on what they can do. Presumably Amazon could offer $100 an hour for a year and then go bankrupt, and I'm not advocating for that. But if they could offer $18 and continue to be a highly profitable and functional company, and instead offer $15 only because that's the market rate, I'm not going to call that a good thing. I'm sympathetic to the idea that it isn't a morally "bad" thing, but to act as if Jeff Bezos offering that same $15 an hour is praiseworthy doesn't seem right to me either.
4. The sandwich example:
This seems like not a good analogy. If you give someone a dollar, a good thing, you're not controlling what the buy or putting strings on it. But the employer is more "I give you a dollar, and in direct exchange, you give me this in its place", and what they have to give you in exchange is directly under your control. Sure, they have to give you something, but if that something is ruining their spine from repetitive movements all day at a frequency/weight that would be a burden on almost anyone's body and eventually ruins their back and gives them chronic pain, well, I would call that an unfair exchange. The employer controls the terms of the agreement, it's not just charity.
> What if 100% of the people who worked there had to pee in a bottle because there were no bathroom breaks?
That is perfectly fine. An even more extreme example: workplace sexual harassment should be allowed (i.e. not banned by the government). Let those women who don't want to be sexually harassed choose to work at firms that forbid sexual harassment, or negotiate anti-sexual-harassment clauses in their employment contracts. But for women who don't particularly mind being sexually harassed, they should be allowed to earn a premium by working for a harassing employer. Everybody wins.
> This applies to the 8 hour work day, weekends, job safety, paid time off, sick leave, etc. etc. If unions hadn't forced these things on companies I think they would be much scarcer than they are in the modern world, and workers would have less choice, not more.
Maybe, but I think economic growth and the resulting increased societal wealth is the main driver of improved working conditions. In the absence of unions, as people got richer they still would have begun to value improved working conditions over increased salary, and employers would have responded to those market forces by providing better working conditions.
The sexual harassment argument has always been unconvincing to me.
First, I don't see any reason they would get a premium for working in that space. I don't think it's likely there would be any increase in wages in exchange for being sexually harassed. Maybe there's some reason to think that would be the case, but it hasn't really been explained to me in a satisfactory way.
Second, what I imagine would happen is that some low wage workers who can't afford to quit their jobs would just be stuck working for employers who allow sexual harassment even though they really hate it. In prosperous economic times this might not be an issue, there'd be lots of jobs to jump between, but if there was a recession and there was high unemployment to the point where a low wage worker is going to take whatever they can get, it seems like a lot of people who would love to work somewhere they wouldn't get sexually harassed might not have a choice in the matter. The balance between employers and employees shifts with the times, and in times where the power is with the employers, good luck negotiating a contract to forbid about anything. They'll just give the job to someone else, and you'll be unemployed. Maybe that's fine with some people, but I don't think that's right, or something we should allow.
Sexual harassment might not bother everyone, but it can be very upsetting to some people, and it seems like if you let it happen it will be just another burden put on low wage workers with low economic freedom, while high wage workers, who always have more choices, can escape it whenever they wish.
As women began to enter the workforce in the 1960s and 1970s, there was growing awareness that sexual harassment was a problem. The government responded by banning it. But if it hadn't, the strong social norm against sexual harassment would have continued to develop. By now, in our counterfactual scenario, most firms would have explicit policies against sexual harassment. The few remaining firms without such policies would be less competitive in the labor market and would have to offer higher wages or other perks to attract women employees.
As an investor (real or prospective) in Amazon, I strongly disagree with your framing of morality. I invest in a company voluntarily in order to make a possible positive return over time. There was always a strong possibility that my investment will be negative, even a total loss (exhibit A is my investment portfolio over the past 18 months). As such I aim my money at better managed firms that can create real value for billions of people and make money for me in the process. If that company takes my upside return and gives it instead to employees who have already agreed to do so for less, then I consider that theft. As a retiree, I depend upon my portfolio (meager though it is compared to others). I will not allow you to steal from me, so please do not do so. At a minimum, please understand the immorality of your argument.
I sympathize with this, and you're right, it's important to provide value to your investors.
I guess what I take issue with is this sentence, "To me, it’s morally outrageous to scapegoat individuals for things that aren’t their fault, and even worse to do so when the target not only isn’t blameworthy, but actually deserves praise for what they’ve done."
If your business is tremendously successful above all other businesses, and all you offer is the same market rate as your competition, I don't think that deserves praise. It may not be condemnable, but I wouldn't say it is praiseworthy either, especially if that wage is hardly livable for your employees.
Instead of using Amazon as an example, imagine just some unnamed retailer that is massively more successful than its competitors and earns a lot more profit. Furthermore, imagine their investors are all private, not pubic, so we can ignore the average worker who has their retirement savings invested in the company. Their workers are working for near minimum wage, and they have no incentive to offer raises to their workers because they're competing for the same labor.
Is it really more moral to offer higher returns to their investors than to raise their employees wages? Likely their investors are wealthy already, while their employees are not, and raising the standard of living for the largest number of people by the greatest amount is, in my moral universe, more praiseworthy than increasing investor returns.
I suppose the objection to this is generally that increasing investor returns lets them invest in other ventures which will provide new products more cheaply to consumers, and this should be a better net good for society, but I'm not convinced that's always the case.
Either way, morality differs from person to person and I'm not trying to say my system is right, only explaining my own feelings.
We are dealing with a network of mutual obligations and rights.
For one thing, every time you see a worker with a job, it helps to recognize there are competing potential employees who want that same job. Just as employers compete for employees by paying higher wages or better benefits/conditions, so too are prospective employees competing for jobs. In the cases of lower skilled, less experienced workers, the best thing they have to offer is to do the same job for less. These are the ones who get priced out of the competition.
If a company arbitrarily pays 50% over the market price for a job, then higher skilled employees will fill the position as they would be silly not to take this. A less experienced person would gladly love to take this job at less than a 50% mark up, but they are now priced out of the market. This is unfair to them and inefficient for society.
As for investors, the estimated returns to their investments are based upon risk adjusted expected rates of return. If the risk free rate of return is three percent, then any investment needs to be higher than this adjusted for risk. Most companies fail. Some succeed. A few succeed extremely well. If you take from investors whenever they beat the average, you effectively undermine the incentive to invest, which leads to the crumbling of the market mechanism and the deaths of the majority of the people on earth. IOW the utilitarian catastrophe.
Preferential treatment of employees over prospective employees and investors is not the utilitarian argument you suggest.
It is not such a black and white issue as you're proposing. There are thriving companies that pay their employees more than they need to based on their market. Trader Joes and Costco come to mind as two retailers who take care of their employees with above average wages and decent benefits. I don't think either company is suffering from doing this, and I don't think they need to do it to compete either. They could probably make more money for investors by cutting these things, but they don't, and their businesses are not failing.
Certainly there is a limit. You can't pay people an insanely inflated wage, and it wouldn't make sense to do so, but you can pay more than the minimum without ruining the economy.
They aren’t paying more than they need to. They are paying exactly what they want to pay to attract and retain the type of employee they want. Just like Ford chose to pay way above prevailing wage (with strong strings attached) to retain workers back in the twenties. The higher wage strategy is alive and well in business. So too is the low wage for low skill strategy. I suggest any employee who prefers to work at Trader Joe’s to quit Amazon and do so. When we work through why that doesn’t happen whole scale, it answers the question.
I don't think your model of how business works is always correct. I think there are genuine exceptions to your rule about people being paid exactly what they need to be in the market. You don't seem to believe that, but I do. You'd have to explain what Costco can really get out of cashier by paying them significantly more than Walmart, and I'm not sure that's anything. A better pipeline for managers maybe? But why not just raise your manager salary to attract better talent? They've had an employee first vision from the start, and I don't think that's just some cover-up for their business tactics to maximize talent in low paying positions where there is a low premium on higher skill.
Richard has once again written a piece that exposes the readers' unacknowledged priors and thereby enrages them. Excellent work. I'm personally too skeptical to believe that the only point being made here is the surface-level libertarian one, but Richard probably won't tell us.
As for the argument itself, it's airtight as long as one accepts contracts as a human right, which is of course downstream from accepting the concept of human rights. Nobody leading a labor strike or organizing to beat scabs with sticks believes that the common man is capable of negotiating meaningfully, or that he should have the right to pretend that he can. The whole point of using violence (the state's, if you can get control of it) to prevent people overgrazing the commons is that the sheep aren't smart enough to make the right decision.
“But instead of a progressive income tax used to fund cash payments to the unfortunate, the government decides FOR DECADES TO RIG THE TAX SYSTEM TO TRANSFER ENORMOUS WEALTH TO THE TOP 1%-5% OF THE POPULATION AND DEPLOYING TRADE POLICIES THAT DEPLETE THE AVAILABILITY OF DECENT JOBS FOR MILLIONS OF MIDDLE CLASS PEOPLE.
What’s more immoral: this formulation of this sentence or yours?
This applies for the productive rich who by the nature of their work or businesses report a traditional income. This does not apply for the rent-seeking, skimming, scamming financialized class of rich people who do not add value to society, do not earn "income", and do not pay income taxes. They are far richer overall than the productive rich.
That's fair, although he didn't specifically cite income tax. If I'm going to blame any policy for the plight of the working class today, it'd be antitrust and the loosening of sexual/drug use mores, with tariff policy following a few yards behind.
This post does a good job emphasizing you point about Bezos being the least blameworthy for the underpaid warehouse worker’s plight. It even gives it a cool name.
If I had to make a steelman case for labor unions it's that they are mass-based "accountable membership organization" seeking real benefits for their own members, which means they have the incentive to actually care about the value of those benefits more than donor-driven activist groups (staffed by the upper-middle class) acting on behalf of helpless others:
There is one type of market where labor unions make sense, though the only industry it realistically still applies to is professional sports.
Labor unions are helpful in labor monopsonies (markets with only one employer) because workers don’t have any choice but to work for the one employer meaning collective bargaining can “even the playing field” by effectively disallowing workers from negotiating on their own behalf and bidding down wages (and working conditions etc.) individually.
Historically, geographically isolated labor markets (e.g. mining towns) were essentially monopsonies, but those are mostly gone now. Amazon is certainly not a monopsony, as you point out by indicating that their employees have other options.
The sports leagues, on the other hand, are monopsonies, which is why each of them has a functioning union. If you’re a top tier basketball player, say, you either have the NBA or nothing (weird European leagues maybe?). Because there’s only one NBA, it makes sense to have a collective bargaining apparatus so LeBron James isn’t negotiating against Anthony Davis for the right to play for the Lakers. Notice, by the way, that the only reason that sports leagues are monopsonies is because they’re enforced by government policy, and that even in this case unions create problems in the form of intermittent strikes and lockouts.
The monopsonies aren't enforced directly, but through tacit acceptance of leagues' monopolies in violation of antitrust laws. Because the leagues are allowed to operate as (more-or-less) monopolies, they constitute the only market for, say, basketball talent, hence the (downstream) monopsony. Here's a paper talking about the leagues' antitrust exemptions (though I don't necessarily endorse this particular paper or its source): https://www.antitrustinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/USandEuropeExemption.pdf
Got it. My thought would be that you can make a good case that sports leagues are natural monopolies -- fans are better-served with one Super Bowl rather than two or more. But perhaps this means that their profits ought to be regulated like utilities?
But I would think that the main winner of such a regulation wouldn’t be consumers (you can force teams to lower ticket prices but you’ll just create a shortage of seats) but advertisers and media companies. As well as the players (but then, they have a union).
Meanwhile a regulation that seems fair and reasonable for football might be overly harsh for hockey or soccer. I suppose you’d still want an antitrust exemption in place for sports below a certain revenue level.
So having grown men playing with balls and making more than the important CEOs running major international companies is your best argument for unions? Personally I preferred pro sports when it cost $8 for seats at the stadium and I could take my family for a fun and affordable day at the ballpark.
Since 1980 the number of teams in MLB has increased by 18% while our population has increased by 54%. Add inflation to that and it seems like there's a lot more going on here than player pay.
You're not helping your argument by conflating the right of workers to collaborate on witholding their labor with their ability to get government to help them to deprive their employer of the ability to hire replacement labor.
The post assumes that the price system is an efficient and fair way to determine wages and working conditions. However, market failures, such as information asymmetry, can lead to undesirable outcomes, including the exploitation of workers. Unions can help correct these failures by providing collective bargaining power, ensuring that workers have a voice in negotiating wages, benefits, and working conditions. In addition, while labor unions contribute to income inequality by benefiting those who are already employed, unions have historically played a significant role in reducing income inequality by advocating for higher wages and better working conditions for all workers, not just union members. The post also downplays the role of power imbalances between employers and employees. Unions can help address these imbalances by giving workers a collective voice and the ability to negotiate for fair compensation and working conditions. Without unions, individual workers are at a disadvantage when negotiating with large corporations that have significantly more bargaining power. Finally, this post focuses on the potential inefficiencies created by unions, but there are positive externalities associated with unions, such as increased worker safety and improved community welfare. Strong unions can lead to better working conditions, reduced workplace accidents, and higher overall standards of living for workers and their families.
The wealth distribution is about bridging the gap between poor and rich classes but not in a way that you choose to trivialise. Taxes are used to fund the public services from health to education and from housing to social care. In this way, the living standards of the poor and middle classes are raised and that the whole society benefits from the raise in the living standards. People when they have more money in their pockets in this way, they do spend more to support the local and national economy. In this case who do you think should pay the taxes in benefit of the whole, but not a few on the top? In your opinion not the corporations, which are making trillions of dollars profit year in year out.
Secondly, demonising labour unions is indeed an act of folly and desperation. The real wages have not increased almost for 50 years. During the same periond labour unions get weaker and weaker. Even Financial Times advises workers on the benefits of the organised labour nowadays. Millennials on the other hand increasingly demanding a more equal society and supporting social reforms.
Whereas the corporations, look at what they are advocating when it comes to the child labour laws. The New York Times on 25th February found lots of kids in hazardous jobs, in clear violation of child labor laws. “This shadow work force extends across industries in every state…Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.” It seems that the golden age of all children learning in free public schools in the U.S. is over. If there are strong labour unions, as you know it well, this is not going to happen at all.
As we steadily march forward to increasing income disparity, I am not sure I can find many examples where the “moral“ capitalist voluntarily supported labor without a little pressure.
I am not familiar with this steady march. The income disparities which I am familiar with are best characterized as the market signaling and incentivizing higher skilled jobs and capital over lower skilled labor. This goes up and down over time, with the most recent trend being slightly up as a billion plus lower wage workers (the REAL global poor) entered the market after being forced out by their government. IOW the market is signaling people to develop skills and education and to invest in capital. This is how markets work, and are supposed to work. If you "fixed" this you would break the market and we would be much worse off.
Yes. Why not spend the time and effort on solutions like EITC, CTC and things to spur economic growth like lower deficits and higher skilled immigration.
But on empirical grounds the reduction in the strength of trade unions has not coincided with a flourishing of economic growth, at least in the US, so I don't think unions are just that big a problem.
I'm sympathetic, but I think this essay wants for a distinction between private- and public-sector unions. The immoral behavior you cite (garbage piling up, schools closing) seems so bad precisely because in these cases unions are standing in the way of the delivery of public goods that, in lots of places though not all, it's government's responsibility to provide.
Public sector unions, of course, clash with the entire concept of a union, and a lot of fair-minded liberals and progressives seem to have been snowed into making a category error here. The government is not a capitalist enterprise expropriating surplus value provided by public-sector workers. In a democracy, organized labor in the public sector is organizing against.... their fellow citizens.
The private unions are also organizing against their fellow citizens. Their entire point is to prevent other people from entering into voluntary contracts and restrict other people's choices. They should all be treated as the moral equivalent of criminal gangs.
Like I said, I'm sympathetic — but workers for a private company are selling their labor for a wage as part of such a voluntary private contract. They obviously have a right to withhold that labor as individuals, on the understanding that they risk being fired if they do so. And they have a right to organize and make other voluntary contracts with their fellow workers ("hey guys, let's not work tomorrow").
Consumers of the goods produced by the capitalist enterprises in this scenario also have rights — they don't need to purchase from the unionized employer, and can simply switch their allegiance as consumers. There's no real coercion here.
It's true that unionized private labor might be extracting value from consumers without having improved productivity in any way. But this is bog-standard rent seeking, and it's not obviously more immoral to me than e.g. being a landlord.
They can say “let’s not work tomorrow,” and withhold their labor when they want, though employers should be allowed to fire them. But labor unions as we think of them only exist by coercing and restricting the freedom of others. See the debate over right-to-work laws.
Seems like we may not disagree here — it sounds like your argument that labor unions are fundamentally coercive hinges upon their ability to leverage (coercive) state power to enforce their desires. If governments did not privilege union contracts any more than any other contract between consenting parties, would your feelings change?
Yes that’s right.
> They can say “let’s not work tomorrow,” and withhold their labor when they want, though employers should be allowed to fire them
See: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumangali_(child_labour)>
Your spouse is not a criminal if they try to prevent you from marrying someone else by insisting on monogamy.
Now that divorce is largely legal, if they tried to prevent a divorce and remarriage with force (outside the threat of using the force of the state to ensure fair division of shared-assets) then that would be illegal.
It’s not “just life” for people to engage in “collective bargaining” to prevent other people from entering into contracts. That’s usually criminality. Unions have invented a lot of euphemisms to cover this up. I already addressed the asymmetric bargaining point, redistribute wealth directly if you have to, don’t restrict freedom and progress.
As for the kind of person who wouldn’t want to coordinate, it’s usually the better workers who have something unique to contribute to employers and don’t want to be forced into a seniority based system. The parasitic loves an arrangement where you can’t get fired and compensation depends on how long you’ve been there.
There are different styles of unions. Most suck for the reasons you describe. One style I find interesting is the IBEW style union. It depends on the state (in some states it operates as a classic union) but often it acts more as something between a union and trade-association. For electricians it can provide apprenticeships to start out, insurance, other administrative functions when you are acting as independent contractor, and leads to drive business. They also provide some "fraternal" type benefits like rotary club. As a consumer, it acts as a seal of trust to ensure basic competence, recourse in the case of a job falling below standards, and again insurance coverage. You can hire non-union for cheaper, but there is often a distinct quality trade-off. And provided that is a free choice anyone can make (both the join, or to hire) then I can see how this type of union could and perhaps should thrive. These types of a unions do set common rates, but usually are not engaged in collective bargaining. There are more professions that could benefit from similar arrangements.
As long as there's no coercion it's moral. Most unions won't allow the employer to hire non-union, and the government for some reason enforces this.
Agreed. But I do think there is more room for non-coercive "union" activity and further that our current legal environment actively innovation and competition in this space. Coops are another adjacent area of different methods of arranging ownership and labor and are also unexplored. There are more possibilities out there than our limited, adversarial, coercive unions.
I grant that many employers are dicks. The question is whether rules based systems to keep them from being dicks are worth the transactional costs. Richard is correct that direct redistribution has the lowest transaction costs
It is a major flaw in the article to not draw the distinction between public sector and private sector unions. The entire point is that when a private sector union acts up, a consumer can go elsewhere, but when a public sector union colludes with politicians to begrudgingly under-deliver services, the consumer ne citizen has nowhere else to go.
"Direct redistribution does not seem to inspire this kind of entitlement among its beneficiaries"
Dude, you need to get out and meet some welfare recipients.
You might be familiar with Glassdoor, a website that collects anonymous employee reviews about tech companies. If I'm a software engineer interviewing for a job, I can open Glassdoor and read about the working conditions in the company for which I'm interviewing.
Let's say that according to Glassdoor, managers at this company tend to yell at employees. Now I can try to assign a numeric cost to this working condition. Perhaps, the salary is $10k higher, and perhaps I'm not too sensitive to people yelling at me. So I take the job, and everyone benefits.
In fact, a system like this creates incentives that benefit all of society. Employers improve working conditions, because it allows them to pay less for talent. And employees can find higher-paying jobs if they are willing to accept certain "problematic" working conditions (e.g. peeing in a bottle).
But if you take away Glassdoor, this system just doesn't work - because it's very hard to tell the working conditions at a company without working there (unless you happen to have friends already there). If you join a company, later to discover bad working conditions, you're unlikely to switch immediately, because of the cost associated with switching jobs. Sadly, the job market is just not very efficient in this regard.
I say this because I think your entire article assumes the job market is efficient. But it is not. So employers lack incentives to improve working conditions. And employees don't have tools to translate worse working conditions to a numeric cost.
I worked a dozer or so low wage jobs when I was younger. I did not see any barriers to switching between them. The job market looked extremely efficient to me. Everything I’ve seen involving central planning, which is what labor unions are, has looked awful and stupid. So nothing in theory or personal experience makes me inclined to trust the idea that government or lazy thugs should take over the job market.
For what it's worth, I agree more than I disagree with the perspective that worker unions overall did (and are still doing) more bad than good to employee working condition worldwide.
That being said, a more efficient job market will result in stronger incentives for employers to improve working conditions, which is a good (and ethical) thing.
How do you know that Glassdoor isn't filled with fake or malicious reviews? Fake: by employers seeking to boost their favorability ratings. Malicious: by disgruntled employees who were fired for cause or had a beef with a manager or co-worker and is taking it out on the company.
This happens, but in my experience Glassdoor has a fairly robust verification process. So if you read enough reviews, you can get a general sense of working conditions.
Even if one accepts all your arguments, you are still arguing from a dishonest alternative. Just outlaw unions (so much for freedom of assembly) and instead pass a law forcing redistribution of income directly. Which you know is extremely unlikely, in the USA, at least in the magnitude of dollars that would be required to make any material difference. I am sure there is terminology for this, somewhere in the long list of rhetorical tricks and maneuvers: argue against A by holding up B as an alternative, while knowing B is not viable.
Unions can get currupt like any other public or private organization but the basic principle of unions are no different than a professional athlete's agent. We see in the past what things where like for workers, horrible working conditions and pay. The market does a lot of wonderful things but just doesn't regulate this properly on its own unfortunately. The American dream became a reality because unions helped to change all that. Ordinary people where then able to make a decent living and rise into the middle class and then able to retire comfortably even on jobs that we would not consider high skill jobs. That would be bascially impossible before the era of unions. Without well functioning unions the American dream becomes a nightmare for ordinary Americans but definitely becomes a dream for the owners of corporations lol
This is simply make believe. It is absolutely not true that wages have increased twenty to thirty fold over the past two centuries due to unions. It has increased due to marginal productivity. Unions were just one (and a minor one at that) way for employees to negotiate wages. In industries and places without unions, wages have routinely increased. Supply and demand for labor guarantees this as long as productivity increases and employers aren’t able to form a cartel on wages (something RH is not arguing for).
While I think you're correct that wages didn't increase due to unions, working conditions absolutely did. People used to work in horrible conditions for long hours, and unions had an enormous impact by protesting for more time off and safer employment. The benefits of those changes are harder to measure in dollars, but they provide tremendous benefits to workers.
Unions didn’t make much of a difference in either. Supply and demand with rising marginal productivity explains both wages and working conditions. This is true over the long range in non union industries and right to work states. Again, I never worked in a union industry, but my company was a perennial leader in "best companies to work at" lists. They offered good conditions and wages to attract and retain good employees in a competitive market.
In the early 20th century death rates, and more specifically injury rates, fell dramatically in a very short period of time. A lot of this is attributed to workman's compensation laws. Prior to these laws existing companies paid out very little to injured workers, and afterward it cost them thousands of dollars. This is believed to have been a major factor in creating safer workplaces, giving companies incentives to care about safety for the first time. Unions were a major player in getting these laws passed.
well since union power has been crushed wages have actually not gone up with the increase of productivity. The massive cost of living increases have more than countered the marginal gains on wages which means things have gotten worse for workers not better. With the crushing of unions we have now seen the death of the American dream. Although descent working conditions seem to have stuck for the most part wages have not since the market unfortunately doesn't properly regulate wages, exspecaly when corporations have the leverage in contract negotiations. Plus the elites now have so much wealth and power they're buying up everything so people will now own nothing (rent). The whole concept of the American dream was people could afford to live in their own home and raise a family and not be a serf but increasingly that's no longer the case.
A few objections:
1. Regarding the 80%/20% pee in a bottle scenario:
Is there any percentage at which you would say it's unacceptable? What if 100% of the people who worked there had to pee in a bottle because there were no bathroom breaks? They could always just get another job that pays slightly worse, and maybe Amazon would be forced to change their work model if they couldn't find anyone willing to do that, but if they offered high enough pay that might never happen, and should we as a society ever say "No, that's just not something we should allow people to require of their workers, even if they pay well"? There is something touching on human dignity here that makes me inherently oppose a business that works this way, and though "dignity" is a very fuzzy word that could be used to justify all sorts of stupid regulations, I still think we need to set some minimum standards that every business should have to meet.
2. Related to my point above:
Minimum standards allow people to make the choices you're claiming they would make if they could. In a time before breaks were mandated for many businesses, many workers didn't even have an option to get a job where they had breaks. A lot of jobs just didn't offer them a century ago. Now they're everywhere. So you can say "Well if unions didn't bargain for break times, people could just choose to go to a job where they had breaks but were paid less, or were paid more but didn't have breaks", but I feel like if organized labor had never bargained for them in the first place, they just wouldn't even be offered at many places of employment. In that case, nobody gets them, its just not an option, so you would choose your job entirely based on a pay and not the accompanying benefits, which don't exist. This applies to the 8 hour work day, weekends, job safety, paid time off, sick leave, etc. etc. If unions hadn't forced these things on companies I think they would be much scarcer than they are in the modern world, and workers would have less choice, not more. They might have more money, but in a world where they didn't think these benefits were even options they wouldn't even think to value them in the first place.
3. Regarding the morality aspect:
In a world where all other companies don't make enough money to offer more than $15 an hour, and Amazon does, then they are the only ones who could make the choice to better their workers lives. You should praise them for running a company that can offer better terms, that's a moral good, but if they choose not to offer better wages despite being able to do so, and offer only what is competitive with other company's wages and keep the rest for themselves, I find that morally objectionable. If you could make a choice which would dramatically improve other people's lives at little cost to yourself, and you choose not to, I don't think you should receive praise for that, regardless of what other people are doing. Now companies have limits on what they can do. Presumably Amazon could offer $100 an hour for a year and then go bankrupt, and I'm not advocating for that. But if they could offer $18 and continue to be a highly profitable and functional company, and instead offer $15 only because that's the market rate, I'm not going to call that a good thing. I'm sympathetic to the idea that it isn't a morally "bad" thing, but to act as if Jeff Bezos offering that same $15 an hour is praiseworthy doesn't seem right to me either.
4. The sandwich example:
This seems like not a good analogy. If you give someone a dollar, a good thing, you're not controlling what the buy or putting strings on it. But the employer is more "I give you a dollar, and in direct exchange, you give me this in its place", and what they have to give you in exchange is directly under your control. Sure, they have to give you something, but if that something is ruining their spine from repetitive movements all day at a frequency/weight that would be a burden on almost anyone's body and eventually ruins their back and gives them chronic pain, well, I would call that an unfair exchange. The employer controls the terms of the agreement, it's not just charity.
> What if 100% of the people who worked there had to pee in a bottle because there were no bathroom breaks?
That is perfectly fine. An even more extreme example: workplace sexual harassment should be allowed (i.e. not banned by the government). Let those women who don't want to be sexually harassed choose to work at firms that forbid sexual harassment, or negotiate anti-sexual-harassment clauses in their employment contracts. But for women who don't particularly mind being sexually harassed, they should be allowed to earn a premium by working for a harassing employer. Everybody wins.
> This applies to the 8 hour work day, weekends, job safety, paid time off, sick leave, etc. etc. If unions hadn't forced these things on companies I think they would be much scarcer than they are in the modern world, and workers would have less choice, not more.
Maybe, but I think economic growth and the resulting increased societal wealth is the main driver of improved working conditions. In the absence of unions, as people got richer they still would have begun to value improved working conditions over increased salary, and employers would have responded to those market forces by providing better working conditions.
The sexual harassment argument has always been unconvincing to me.
First, I don't see any reason they would get a premium for working in that space. I don't think it's likely there would be any increase in wages in exchange for being sexually harassed. Maybe there's some reason to think that would be the case, but it hasn't really been explained to me in a satisfactory way.
Second, what I imagine would happen is that some low wage workers who can't afford to quit their jobs would just be stuck working for employers who allow sexual harassment even though they really hate it. In prosperous economic times this might not be an issue, there'd be lots of jobs to jump between, but if there was a recession and there was high unemployment to the point where a low wage worker is going to take whatever they can get, it seems like a lot of people who would love to work somewhere they wouldn't get sexually harassed might not have a choice in the matter. The balance between employers and employees shifts with the times, and in times where the power is with the employers, good luck negotiating a contract to forbid about anything. They'll just give the job to someone else, and you'll be unemployed. Maybe that's fine with some people, but I don't think that's right, or something we should allow.
Sexual harassment might not bother everyone, but it can be very upsetting to some people, and it seems like if you let it happen it will be just another burden put on low wage workers with low economic freedom, while high wage workers, who always have more choices, can escape it whenever they wish.
As women began to enter the workforce in the 1960s and 1970s, there was growing awareness that sexual harassment was a problem. The government responded by banning it. But if it hadn't, the strong social norm against sexual harassment would have continued to develop. By now, in our counterfactual scenario, most firms would have explicit policies against sexual harassment. The few remaining firms without such policies would be less competitive in the labor market and would have to offer higher wages or other perks to attract women employees.
As an investor (real or prospective) in Amazon, I strongly disagree with your framing of morality. I invest in a company voluntarily in order to make a possible positive return over time. There was always a strong possibility that my investment will be negative, even a total loss (exhibit A is my investment portfolio over the past 18 months). As such I aim my money at better managed firms that can create real value for billions of people and make money for me in the process. If that company takes my upside return and gives it instead to employees who have already agreed to do so for less, then I consider that theft. As a retiree, I depend upon my portfolio (meager though it is compared to others). I will not allow you to steal from me, so please do not do so. At a minimum, please understand the immorality of your argument.
I sympathize with this, and you're right, it's important to provide value to your investors.
I guess what I take issue with is this sentence, "To me, it’s morally outrageous to scapegoat individuals for things that aren’t their fault, and even worse to do so when the target not only isn’t blameworthy, but actually deserves praise for what they’ve done."
If your business is tremendously successful above all other businesses, and all you offer is the same market rate as your competition, I don't think that deserves praise. It may not be condemnable, but I wouldn't say it is praiseworthy either, especially if that wage is hardly livable for your employees.
Instead of using Amazon as an example, imagine just some unnamed retailer that is massively more successful than its competitors and earns a lot more profit. Furthermore, imagine their investors are all private, not pubic, so we can ignore the average worker who has their retirement savings invested in the company. Their workers are working for near minimum wage, and they have no incentive to offer raises to their workers because they're competing for the same labor.
Is it really more moral to offer higher returns to their investors than to raise their employees wages? Likely their investors are wealthy already, while their employees are not, and raising the standard of living for the largest number of people by the greatest amount is, in my moral universe, more praiseworthy than increasing investor returns.
I suppose the objection to this is generally that increasing investor returns lets them invest in other ventures which will provide new products more cheaply to consumers, and this should be a better net good for society, but I'm not convinced that's always the case.
Either way, morality differs from person to person and I'm not trying to say my system is right, only explaining my own feelings.
We are dealing with a network of mutual obligations and rights.
For one thing, every time you see a worker with a job, it helps to recognize there are competing potential employees who want that same job. Just as employers compete for employees by paying higher wages or better benefits/conditions, so too are prospective employees competing for jobs. In the cases of lower skilled, less experienced workers, the best thing they have to offer is to do the same job for less. These are the ones who get priced out of the competition.
If a company arbitrarily pays 50% over the market price for a job, then higher skilled employees will fill the position as they would be silly not to take this. A less experienced person would gladly love to take this job at less than a 50% mark up, but they are now priced out of the market. This is unfair to them and inefficient for society.
As for investors, the estimated returns to their investments are based upon risk adjusted expected rates of return. If the risk free rate of return is three percent, then any investment needs to be higher than this adjusted for risk. Most companies fail. Some succeed. A few succeed extremely well. If you take from investors whenever they beat the average, you effectively undermine the incentive to invest, which leads to the crumbling of the market mechanism and the deaths of the majority of the people on earth. IOW the utilitarian catastrophe.
Preferential treatment of employees over prospective employees and investors is not the utilitarian argument you suggest.
It is not such a black and white issue as you're proposing. There are thriving companies that pay their employees more than they need to based on their market. Trader Joes and Costco come to mind as two retailers who take care of their employees with above average wages and decent benefits. I don't think either company is suffering from doing this, and I don't think they need to do it to compete either. They could probably make more money for investors by cutting these things, but they don't, and their businesses are not failing.
Certainly there is a limit. You can't pay people an insanely inflated wage, and it wouldn't make sense to do so, but you can pay more than the minimum without ruining the economy.
They aren’t paying more than they need to. They are paying exactly what they want to pay to attract and retain the type of employee they want. Just like Ford chose to pay way above prevailing wage (with strong strings attached) to retain workers back in the twenties. The higher wage strategy is alive and well in business. So too is the low wage for low skill strategy. I suggest any employee who prefers to work at Trader Joe’s to quit Amazon and do so. When we work through why that doesn’t happen whole scale, it answers the question.
I don't think your model of how business works is always correct. I think there are genuine exceptions to your rule about people being paid exactly what they need to be in the market. You don't seem to believe that, but I do. You'd have to explain what Costco can really get out of cashier by paying them significantly more than Walmart, and I'm not sure that's anything. A better pipeline for managers maybe? But why not just raise your manager salary to attract better talent? They've had an employee first vision from the start, and I don't think that's just some cover-up for their business tactics to maximize talent in low paying positions where there is a low premium on higher skill.
Richard has once again written a piece that exposes the readers' unacknowledged priors and thereby enrages them. Excellent work. I'm personally too skeptical to believe that the only point being made here is the surface-level libertarian one, but Richard probably won't tell us.
As for the argument itself, it's airtight as long as one accepts contracts as a human right, which is of course downstream from accepting the concept of human rights. Nobody leading a labor strike or organizing to beat scabs with sticks believes that the common man is capable of negotiating meaningfully, or that he should have the right to pretend that he can. The whole point of using violence (the state's, if you can get control of it) to prevent people overgrazing the commons is that the sheep aren't smart enough to make the right decision.
How much of a troll one is lies on a different axis than how serious one is and how pro social or anti social one is lies on a third.
“But instead of a progressive income tax used to fund cash payments to the unfortunate, the government decides FOR DECADES TO RIG THE TAX SYSTEM TO TRANSFER ENORMOUS WEALTH TO THE TOP 1%-5% OF THE POPULATION AND DEPLOYING TRADE POLICIES THAT DEPLETE THE AVAILABILITY OF DECENT JOBS FOR MILLIONS OF MIDDLE CLASS PEOPLE.
What’s more immoral: this formulation of this sentence or yours?
If only that were true. Take a look at any of the widely-available charts that show which income quintiles pay the most income tax.
This applies for the productive rich who by the nature of their work or businesses report a traditional income. This does not apply for the rent-seeking, skimming, scamming financialized class of rich people who do not add value to society, do not earn "income", and do not pay income taxes. They are far richer overall than the productive rich.
That's fair, although he didn't specifically cite income tax. If I'm going to blame any policy for the plight of the working class today, it'd be antitrust and the loosening of sexual/drug use mores, with tariff policy following a few yards behind.
This post does a good job emphasizing you point about Bezos being the least blameworthy for the underpaid warehouse worker’s plight. It even gives it a cool name.
https://blog.jaibot.com/the-copenhagen-interpretation-of-ethics/
I was going to bring this up if I hadn't come across your comment.
I read this ages ago and had completely forgotten about it. Thanks for the reminder
If I had to make a steelman case for labor unions it's that they are mass-based "accountable membership organization" seeking real benefits for their own members, which means they have the incentive to actually care about the value of those benefits more than donor-driven activist groups (staffed by the upper-middle class) acting on behalf of helpless others:
https://www.slowboring.com/p/climate-left
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/victims-and-sympathy/
https://truckandbarter.com/2006/05/intellectual-tr-1.html
There is one type of market where labor unions make sense, though the only industry it realistically still applies to is professional sports.
Labor unions are helpful in labor monopsonies (markets with only one employer) because workers don’t have any choice but to work for the one employer meaning collective bargaining can “even the playing field” by effectively disallowing workers from negotiating on their own behalf and bidding down wages (and working conditions etc.) individually.
Historically, geographically isolated labor markets (e.g. mining towns) were essentially monopsonies, but those are mostly gone now. Amazon is certainly not a monopsony, as you point out by indicating that their employees have other options.
The sports leagues, on the other hand, are monopsonies, which is why each of them has a functioning union. If you’re a top tier basketball player, say, you either have the NBA or nothing (weird European leagues maybe?). Because there’s only one NBA, it makes sense to have a collective bargaining apparatus so LeBron James isn’t negotiating against Anthony Davis for the right to play for the Lakers. Notice, by the way, that the only reason that sports leagues are monopsonies is because they’re enforced by government policy, and that even in this case unions create problems in the form of intermittent strikes and lockouts.
It would be very strange if we allowed the sports franchise owners to form cartels (as we do) and not the players.
I'm curious, what government policy enforces sports league monopsonies?
The monopsonies aren't enforced directly, but through tacit acceptance of leagues' monopolies in violation of antitrust laws. Because the leagues are allowed to operate as (more-or-less) monopolies, they constitute the only market for, say, basketball talent, hence the (downstream) monopsony. Here's a paper talking about the leagues' antitrust exemptions (though I don't necessarily endorse this particular paper or its source): https://www.antitrustinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/08/USandEuropeExemption.pdf
Got it. My thought would be that you can make a good case that sports leagues are natural monopolies -- fans are better-served with one Super Bowl rather than two or more. But perhaps this means that their profits ought to be regulated like utilities?
But I would think that the main winner of such a regulation wouldn’t be consumers (you can force teams to lower ticket prices but you’ll just create a shortage of seats) but advertisers and media companies. As well as the players (but then, they have a union).
Meanwhile a regulation that seems fair and reasonable for football might be overly harsh for hockey or soccer. I suppose you’d still want an antitrust exemption in place for sports below a certain revenue level.
So having grown men playing with balls and making more than the important CEOs running major international companies is your best argument for unions? Personally I preferred pro sports when it cost $8 for seats at the stadium and I could take my family for a fun and affordable day at the ballpark.
Since 1980 the number of teams in MLB has increased by 18% while our population has increased by 54%. Add inflation to that and it seems like there's a lot more going on here than player pay.
You're not helping your argument by conflating the right of workers to collaborate on witholding their labor with their ability to get government to help them to deprive their employer of the ability to hire replacement labor.
I think this was a reply to a since-deleted comment as Hanina does not make that mistake.
The post assumes that the price system is an efficient and fair way to determine wages and working conditions. However, market failures, such as information asymmetry, can lead to undesirable outcomes, including the exploitation of workers. Unions can help correct these failures by providing collective bargaining power, ensuring that workers have a voice in negotiating wages, benefits, and working conditions. In addition, while labor unions contribute to income inequality by benefiting those who are already employed, unions have historically played a significant role in reducing income inequality by advocating for higher wages and better working conditions for all workers, not just union members. The post also downplays the role of power imbalances between employers and employees. Unions can help address these imbalances by giving workers a collective voice and the ability to negotiate for fair compensation and working conditions. Without unions, individual workers are at a disadvantage when negotiating with large corporations that have significantly more bargaining power. Finally, this post focuses on the potential inefficiencies created by unions, but there are positive externalities associated with unions, such as increased worker safety and improved community welfare. Strong unions can lead to better working conditions, reduced workplace accidents, and higher overall standards of living for workers and their families.
The wealth distribution is about bridging the gap between poor and rich classes but not in a way that you choose to trivialise. Taxes are used to fund the public services from health to education and from housing to social care. In this way, the living standards of the poor and middle classes are raised and that the whole society benefits from the raise in the living standards. People when they have more money in their pockets in this way, they do spend more to support the local and national economy. In this case who do you think should pay the taxes in benefit of the whole, but not a few on the top? In your opinion not the corporations, which are making trillions of dollars profit year in year out.
Secondly, demonising labour unions is indeed an act of folly and desperation. The real wages have not increased almost for 50 years. During the same periond labour unions get weaker and weaker. Even Financial Times advises workers on the benefits of the organised labour nowadays. Millennials on the other hand increasingly demanding a more equal society and supporting social reforms.
Whereas the corporations, look at what they are advocating when it comes to the child labour laws. The New York Times on 25th February found lots of kids in hazardous jobs, in clear violation of child labor laws. “This shadow work force extends across industries in every state…Twelve-year-old roofers in Florida and Tennessee. Underage slaughterhouse workers in Delaware, Mississippi and North Carolina. Children sawing planks of wood on overnight shifts in South Dakota.” It seems that the golden age of all children learning in free public schools in the U.S. is over. If there are strong labour unions, as you know it well, this is not going to happen at all.
As we steadily march forward to increasing income disparity, I am not sure I can find many examples where the “moral“ capitalist voluntarily supported labor without a little pressure.
I am not familiar with this steady march. The income disparities which I am familiar with are best characterized as the market signaling and incentivizing higher skilled jobs and capital over lower skilled labor. This goes up and down over time, with the most recent trend being slightly up as a billion plus lower wage workers (the REAL global poor) entered the market after being forced out by their government. IOW the market is signaling people to develop skills and education and to invest in capital. This is how markets work, and are supposed to work. If you "fixed" this you would break the market and we would be much worse off.
Yes. Why not spend the time and effort on solutions like EITC, CTC and things to spur economic growth like lower deficits and higher skilled immigration.
But on empirical grounds the reduction in the strength of trade unions has not coincided with a flourishing of economic growth, at least in the US, so I don't think unions are just that big a problem.