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Problem is, unions are actually counter productive to any industry. They reduce available work and further incentivize off-shoring of jobs. In the post WW2 period, the UK and German manufacturing industries lagged behind the US in both wages and productivity, largely due to the former being unionized and latter not.
I'm surprised they weren't already in one. I worked at a competitor (the Wall St. Journal) years ago and all software engineers there had to be part of the union. Unions in the news industry are extremely common and powerful. My subjective experience with it was that union membership was mostly inconsequential for developers. The market for programmers is so strong that people would just leave if they weren't treated…
That's exactly the time to unionize! The employer has limited leverage to bust any union efforts. When the employment market is weak and you are scrounging for a job it's a lot easier to threaten/scare everyone into submission.
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You’re living in a happy time. Ask a former high flying IBM engineer from what Binghamton or Poughkeepsie, NY was like circa 1992 when IBM detonated the mainframe business. Or anyone from DEC or HP. If you don’t think that will happen to the current cohort of tech giants, you’re engaging in magical thinking.
I think a union forming at IBM in order to compel management to stay in the mainframe business would be a net bad for society.
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I'm pretty sure going from "we can terminate your employment without cause" to "okay these are the reasons we will terminate your employment" is a HUGE stress relief for people. Unions, even when they're not doing much, bring in stability.
Turning the decision to fire someone into a hyper-formalized procedure mostly seems to result in environments where terrible people never get fired, like the DMV.
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I understood the point. My counterpoint is that if a union doesn't use the leverage of collective bargaining to deliver when it's in a good position to do so, it rather weakens the argument that the same union will decide to use its leverage when individual leverage evaporates. Organizations run on precedent, policy, and consistency. Arguing for the potential for inconsistency seems to me to be a rather weak reed. Es…
As parent said, in good times (demand >> supply), the difference between individual optimal and union optimal is relatively small. Or negative! In bad times (demand Ergo, you're not going to see a lot of union benefits in good times.
A union is not a panacea. For many people, unions are just as much of a hassle as a bad job and without the benefit of self-representation. And when all breaks loose, the last thing most reasonable is trade their agency
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Turning the decision to fire someone into a hyper-formalized procedure mostly seems to result in environments where terrible people never get fired, like the DMV.
1. The DMV is actually an amazing quality of service. Ive lived in a couple of states. California was just on another whole level of bad. Anyway, DMV is actually really efficiently done. 2. What part of firing people do you think is going to fix the bureaucracy?
There was a guy next to me who hadn’t read about the required paperwork and tried to argue. His experience probably wasn’t great but that was his own fault.
Problem is, unions are actually counter productive to any industry. They reduce available work and further incentivize off-shoring of jobs. In the post WW2 period, the UK and German manufacturing industries lagged behind the US in both wages and productivity, largely due to the former being unionized and latter not.
So how's that working out for those manufacturing industries nowadays, hmm?
Take the medical industry, for example - they can’t exactly go on strike, yet they are the highest paying industry in most countries. Which goes to show that unions aren’t necessary to be paid a high wage (also Singapore, unions are illegal, yet they have higher average wages than most developed nations).
In my country of Australia, garbage collectors earn $120,000, which is around $80,000USD. Yet just recently, they went on strike, refusing to collect the garbage. This is despite earning far more than the average person. Or train drivers - they are paid even higher, yet they also go on strike. This is not fighting for basic health and safety rights of Cockney chimney sweeps - this is blackmailing their employer for more money for nothing, for already privilege and highly paid staff in a competitive industry. Which ultimately leads to higher costs for consumers, less competitive industry, and more general inefficiency.
Problem is, unions are actually counter productive to any industry. They reduce available work and further incentivize off-shoring of jobs. In the post WW2 period, the UK and German manufacturing industries lagged behind the US in both wages and productivity, largely due to the former being unionized and latter not.
You mean the good old times when the US military just shot at people trying to unionize? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain
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So how's that working out for those manufacturing industries nowadays, hmm?
Well, since they’ve been increasingly unionized, they moved places like Texas (Tesla, SpaceX etc) and China. Take the medical industry, for example - they can’t exactly go on strike, yet they are the highest paying industry in most countries. Which goes to show that unions aren’t necessary to be paid a high wage (also Singapore, unions are illegal, yet they have higher average wages than most developed nations). In m…
And yet Germany with some of the strongest unions in the world is a manufacturing powerhouse, and plenty of ununionized countries have very weak manufacturing. So something else must be going on.
> Take the medical industry, for example - they can’t exactly go on strike, yet they are the highest paying industry in most countries. Which goes to show that unions aren’t necessary.
Friedman famously described the AMA as the strongest union in the country, so that's the opposite of showing unions aren't necessary.