111–120 of 203 posts
Imagine a gigantic apartment building in San Francisco. Let's say some 400-unit monster. Then picture a campus with four of those buildings. Then realize that such a campus could not house all the Google employees in the area. Then realize that such a campus could not house just the Google cafeteria workers in the area.
The consequence of this means rights for union organizers to be on the job sites and access to other workers. There is a thin edge of the wedge strategy at play here. It's not just the cafeteria workers. The opposition I have to unions at companies like Google is that the companies themselves are too politically powerful to have staff who in effect must to behave criminally to be terminated. When you look at the impa…
Unions are a way of balancing executive power. (I don't think they're a panacea though! All I hope for in this case is that it is able to improve the lives and working conditions of Google's cafeteria workers)
Does anyone have any good/neutral book recommendations on unionization?
There isn't anything really neutral to recommend. People are pretty adamant about "the right way". Start with ABCs of Socialism[0] and take a look at the texts they recommend. You'll have to come to your own conclusion about what you like and dislike about what it says. The problem with this stuff is that the left is extremely sectarian so I might have someone jumping down my throat for recommending something publish…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A union is just the free market at work. Much as a business is a collection of individuals working toward the common goal of supplying a product, a union is a collection of individuals working toward the common goal of supplying a product (labor). If you believe a union is a cartel that squeezes money from consumers, you must necessarily believe that a company is the same thing.
> A union is just the free market at work. That's not the case. A union is an organization for extracting rents above those the market would ordinarily bear. Rent-seeking activity --- no matter who does it --- makes society as a whole worse off. Bastiat showed that a long time ago. When corporations organize to extract rents, we call them cartels and apply strict penalties under the law. Why should employees have a r…
The operative word there is "normally", which makes your claim tautalogical. Unions do increase the cost of labor compared to a market without unions, but this is simply relative. You haven't (and I claim that you cannot) provide a reason that the cost of labor without unions is more natural, and isn't simply unnaturally suppressed by an imbalance in market power between job seekers and providers.
Does anyone have any good/neutral book recommendations on unionization?
Communist manifesto?
Start on page 14.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regardless, labor unions would be a feature of any conceptualization of free markets I’ve ever heard of. In what sense is cooperation and organization not compatible with a free market?
If an employer could negotiate with unions competing for a contract, the outcome might be a market-clearing price for labor. Enforce a monopoly for a single union, and the only possible responses are capitulate or leave, with outcomes that look like Detroit.
The consequence of this means rights for union organizers to be on the job sites and access to other workers. There is a thin edge of the wedge strategy at play here. It's not just the cafeteria workers. The opposition I have to unions at companies like Google is that the companies themselves are too politically powerful to have staff who in effect must to behave criminally to be terminated. When you look at the impa…
The consequence of this means rights for union organizers to be on the job sites and access to other workers. There is a thin edge of the wedge strategy at play here. It's not just the cafeteria workers. The opposition I have to unions at companies like Google is that the companies themselves are too politically powerful to have staff who in effect must to behave criminally to be terminated. When you look at the impa…
I'm much more concerned about executive accountability than I am about individual employee accountability at a company with as much political power as, say, Google. Unions are a way of balancing executive power. (I don't think they're a panacea though! All I hope for in this case is that it is able to improve the lives and working conditions of Google's cafeteria workers)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In a perfect world, unions would be unnecessary. I think that would be a less controversial opinion. Wanting them to be illegal is more a moralization of your economic ideology - it would not be compatible with a belief that “labor is entitled to all it creates”. And stating it as matter of fact rather than as an opinion is kind of lame
When corporations band together to extract higher profits we penalize them, same logic should apply to labor unions.
Your assessment of antitrust law is also pretty far removed from reality. By that logic, mergers and acquisitions would be illegal in every instance. Or, for that matter, standards bodies. Corporations band together to increase profits all the damn time, and the overwhelming majority of this activity is legal.