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Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea of blue-collar workers getting well-paid is very upsetting to some white-collar workers. They feel their social status threatened by people they deem beneath them.
Lots of people don't like that engineers are well compensated in the tech industry also. Look at all the company shuttle protests in San Francisco.
TIL the average salary for port workers is $147k.
That's the kind of quality of life a strong union will get you as a worker. No wonder the biggest business interests have undergone a decades-long propaganda campaign against them.
The flip side of the coin is that the quality of air you will breathe every single day is guaranteed to be abysmal, and air quality has a very strong inverse correlation with life span.
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Let me just ask you: why, in a market system, shouldn't people get as wages whatever they can demand , using personal negotiating skills, collective negotiating skills, law, whatever? Management won't leave money on the table, why should the workers?
You had me up to "law". From the econ perspective, the "free market" does not include lobbying for particular laws. To define it as such is mockery of the term. Assuming completely free property rights and contracts, unions would probably have almost no power. The power of unions stems from the fact that they are protected (e.g. you can't fire someone for joining a union) and the fact that the state ignores violent c…
It is absolutely absurd for you to say this, when unions and workers attempting to unionize have and still continue to be slaughtered for their attempts to gain basic human rights at their workplace.
I would say such a misstatement is laughable but it would be poor taste to make comedy of the deaths of so many.
TIL the average salary for port workers is $147k.
One worker making $1,000,000 and 9 making $10,000 gives you an average of $109,000 while only a single worker is above the mean.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The idea of blue-collar workers getting well-paid is very upsetting to some white-collar workers. They feel their social status threatened by people they deem beneath them.
I don't think that's the primary issue people have with high wage union labor, and your comment shows an unwillingness to engage constructively with political opponents. Unions are a monopoly, and when prices (in this case, of labor) are high due to a monopoly, we must ask whether the government should allow, forbid, or encourage this monopoly. When wages are very low, I think most people are not opposed to unions fo…
Non-elite flyover whites making good money seems to really upset a certain segment of the population. How dare they make a better living them me doing physical labor!
Most people have been taught to look down on blue-collar manual labor. Seeing them makes good money upsets them. Even the OP expressed his distaste for the oil-field workers.
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I don't think that's the primary issue people have with high wage union labor, and your comment shows an unwillingness to engage constructively with political opponents. Unions are a monopoly, and when prices (in this case, of labor) are high due to a monopoly, we must ask whether the government should allow, forbid, or encourage this monopoly. When wages are very low, I think most people are not opposed to unions fo…
Unions aside, there was the same butt-hurt regarding blue-collar oil field workers making 100k+. The New York Times ran endless articles complaining about the shale oil boom. Non-elite flyover whites making good money seems to really upset a certain segment of the population. How dare they make a better living them me doing physical labor! Most people have been taught to look down on blue-collar manual labor. Seeing…
In fact, before I saw the rest of the thread I was going to ask for clarification about the original oil-field worker point.
I agree that manual work can have a high market rate even without unions, e.g. if it physically requires a very fit man to do the job, in addition to the right personality, dexterity, intelligence and reliability.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You had me up to "law". From the econ perspective, the "free market" does not include lobbying for particular laws. To define it as such is mockery of the term. Assuming completely free property rights and contracts, unions would probably have almost no power. The power of unions stems from the fact that they are protected (e.g. you can't fire someone for joining a union) and the fact that the state ignores violent c…
>and the fact that the state ignores violent crime when unions commit it It is absolutely absurd for you to say this, when unions and workers attempting to unionize have and still continue to be slaughtered for their attempts to gain basic human rights at their workplace. I would say such a misstatement is laughable but it would be poor taste to make comedy of the deaths of so many.
Can you give any similar examples of violence against unions, say within the last 20 years and in the US?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Unions aside, there was the same butt-hurt regarding blue-collar oil field workers making 100k+. The New York Times ran endless articles complaining about the shale oil boom. Non-elite flyover whites making good money seems to really upset a certain segment of the population. How dare they make a better living them me doing physical labor! Most people have been taught to look down on blue-collar manual labor. Seeing…
Fair point, I thought you were saying before that critiques of union workers earning too much were really driven by this white vs blue collar issue, while now I see that what you were really saying is that the OP wasn't necessarily even talking about unions, just complaining about rich blue collar workers. In fact, before I saw the rest of the thread I was going to ask for clarification about the original oil-field w…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>and the fact that the state ignores violent crime when unions commit it It is absolutely absurd for you to say this, when unions and workers attempting to unionize have and still continue to be slaughtered for their attempts to gain basic human rights at their workplace. I would say such a misstatement is laughable but it would be poor taste to make comedy of the deaths of so many.
This is what I was referring to: http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2011/08/22/why_do_w... Can you give any similar examples of violence against unions, say within the last 20 years and in the US?
I read that article, you're right, at first glance, it's pretty troubling. Seeing the source (one of the oft-propagandistic, oft-badly-sourced Real Clear sites) made me want to follow up on the claims inside.
The Ohio man who was shot, it isn't clear from any authoritative reporting what actually happened--the only people who explicitly link his attacker to a union are secondary sources. It also looks like the authorities were in fact working on it, though I couldn't find any sort of follow-up reporting.
The rest is all so vague that I can't really make a lot of sense of it.
That said, of course I don't condone violence, neither petty vandalism (like leaving debris in the Verizon driveways), nor the economic destruction left behind when multinationals bend laws in favor of offshoring, and then do so, and leave entire towns with no source of employ.
Neither of those is right, but I don't think we'll get to the right place by trying to come up with one "right" set of laws that every person and every business must abide by--I think we'll iterate closer and closer to "right" when people and groups work together to make their slice of the world better.
It's just that, the entire time I've been alive, the working folks and the poor have been under the bootheel of a variety of--excuse the language, I can't really think of another way to be succinct about it--oppressors both large and small, whether it's the people who ship factories overseas to save some bucks (and bend laws in their favor), or the managers who willingly accept just-in-time staffing solutions that leave their workers with unpredictable work schedules, or the managers who cheat workers out of overtime by classifying them as "salaried," or the managers who try to normalize 100-hour work weeks, or ... on and on and on. We work a lot harder for a lot less, and we're still on course to work even more, for even less.
If a union's a way to bend that downward slope a bit, I'm all for it. No historical evidence suggests that less regulation would do it.
Anyway, thanks again for keeping the discussion going in a courteous, engaging fashion.