Thousands of Google’s cafeteria workers have unionized • Hacker News Board

Re: Thousands of Google’s cafeteria workers have unionized

#201

Post by walshemj » Thu, Jan 02, 2020, 8:47 PM UTC

kmlx wrote: post #193

walshemj wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are all workers in the end

i think very few are the kind of workers that need unions. and the numbers are falling constantly. more workers than ever before are independent human beings, fully able to take care of their own interests. even more so in our field of software development, where the pay is monstrous, the hours very low, and everyone's a contractor. i'd rather have my freedom both from a worker's pov and from an employer's.

Would you like to cite any studies on why the 99.99% of tech employees /workers don't need unions.

An most tech workers pay is not "monstrous" compared to our peers in other professions - even more so out side of SV

The CTO of a telco was in my branch before he retired a few years back.

Re: Thousands of Google’s cafeteria workers have unionized

#202

Post by ajtulloch » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 9:11 AM UTC

quotemstr wrote: post #67

joshuamorton wrote: post #38

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 framing of this is so incredibly (almost humorously) ideological. Look at what you've implicitly set up:

* the State, contracts, corporations, right-to-work law, at-will employment law, etc - all good, natural parts of the market.

* employee unions - bad, unnatural, rent-seeking, deviations from the market.

It's untenable.

Re: Thousands of Google’s cafeteria workers have unionized

#203

Post by quotemstr » Tue, Jan 07, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

ajtulloch wrote: post #202

quotemstr wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 framing of this is so incredibly (almost humorously) ideological. Look at what you've implicitly set up: * the State, contracts, corporations, right-to-work law, at-will employment law, etc - all good, natural parts of the market. * employee unions - bad, unnatural, rent-seeking, deviations from the market. It's untenable.

Do you have an argument other than that I've called bad things bad? Rent seeking is discouraged in economic policy for a reason (a reason I mentioned above), not because economists dislike how the word "rent" sounds or some other arbitrary reason.

> It's untenable

It's quite tenable.