Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

As unions decline, inequality rises

epi.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 479 posts

Re: As unions decline, inequality rises

#261

Post by underbrush »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #241
underbrush wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is why I said make the appropriate changes. - I don't want free speech because it is unfair to award lazy thinking free riding off established publications. - I don't want free speech because it is often exploited by terrorists. - I think people should be free to say things but I don't think it should grant them special protection from the government. etc. It isn't an exact comparison but that also isn't the poi…

You're right, it's not a comparison at all.

It is it just isn't an exact comparison which is also what I said.

Re: As unions decline, inequality rises

#262

Post by black_13 »

themitigating wrote: post #227
Swizec wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"provide for their families" was also a much lower standard than it is now. Back then having a good life (for immigrants at least) didn't mean a large house in the suburbs and 3 cars, it meant an entire family of 5 sharing 1 bedroom and walking everywhere. A pair of jeans was a multi generational investment. If your family could afford one bicycle, you were living large. This was unimaginable wealth compared to what…

The quality of living a family in the suburbs has today is like what a rich person a hundred years ago would have. I see people with houses, multiple brand new cars, TVs in every room, and who take a vacation at least once a year complain about the economy their entire life.

No post body was provided.

Re: As unions decline, inequality rises

#263

Post by JasonFruit »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #260
JasonFruit wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, what they oppose isn't unions as such, but compulsory union membership. They consider that a union should arise from the expression of worker needs, and a union that they are forced to join and that exists whether they want it or not might lack incentives to represent their needs instead of the needs of the union. It's kind of like the saying about organizations in general: eventually they come to s…

That's been my experience as well. It's pure reactance psychology. From the first paragraph of the wiki page > Reactance is an unpleasant motivational reaction to offers, persons, rules, or regulations that threaten or eliminate specific behavioral freedoms. Reactance occurs when an individual feels that an agent is attempting to limit one's choice of response and/or range of alternatives. When I think about the peop…

You say "loves freedom" like it's a bad thing.

Re: As unions decline, inequality rises

#264

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

pjmlp wrote: post #141
AS37 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bunch of those started 150+ years ago, when European unions essentially didn't exist.

Ok, lets remove those from my list. Spotify, SAP, Skype, Unity, Sitecore, OutSystems, Vodafone, ...

Even though it was founded in Denmark, Unity is a US HQ company now, and Vodafone is basally a body shop now mostly (what's their latest successful product?).

Plus, naming 6 random European tech companies doesn't prove anything. Every country has tech companies. How many exactly doesn't really matter in this comparison, what matters is revenues and market cap.

Consider that the US tech sector is worth significantly more than the tech sectors of EU + UK + Switzerland + Norway combined. It blows the entire EEA out of the water. To put it simply, the US hosts most of the largest tech companies by market cap and revenues.

If you take the top 50 tech companies in the world by market cap[1], the only European companies on the list are ASML, Booking, SAP, Schneider Electric and Dassault Systemes. 6 out of 50 for Europe, while the US has about 40 out of 50, while also claiming the highest six spots at the top.

Ouch! That's not even a competition. It's why American tech workers get paid so much. Not because they don't get government mandated PTO and sick leave, or can get fired more easily, or don't pay more taxes for unemployment and socialized healthcare, as is the common myth, but because the companies they work for are so obscenely rich compared to European ones and a lot more numerous.

/QED

[1] https://companiesmarketcap.com/tech/largest-tech-companies-b...

Re: As unions decline, inequality rises

#265

Post by ben_w »

themitigating wrote: post #227
Swizec wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"provide for their families" was also a much lower standard than it is now. Back then having a good life (for immigrants at least) didn't mean a large house in the suburbs and 3 cars, it meant an entire family of 5 sharing 1 bedroom and walking everywhere. A pair of jeans was a multi generational investment. If your family could afford one bicycle, you were living large. This was unimaginable wealth compared to what…

The quality of living a family in the suburbs has today is like what a rich person a hundred years ago would have. I see people with houses, multiple brand new cars, TVs in every room, and who take a vacation at least once a year complain about the economy their entire life.

Most, myself included, have a very limited understanding of the economy we are part of, so I'm not surprised by complaints. Every so often, someone making 2 or 3 times the national average income makes an ass of themselves on TV by claiming they're economically disadvantaged.

In some senses, you don't even have to go to the suburbs to be unimaginably better off now than it was possible to be a century ago, because a century it was not possible, at any price, to make a weekend trip between New York and London; to be immune to the common forms of seasonal flu; to have a video call with someone; to get penicillin; 3D printers, and indeed all CNC machines more complicated than a loom controlled by punched cards, would've been fantasy; and so much more besides.

TVs are cheap now. So are 3D printers, travel, and phones.

Re: As unions decline, inequality rises

#266

Post by nightski »

scarmig wrote: post #191
8f2ab37a-ed6c wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the memes that you frequently see in the upper middle class left-leaning tech worker circles is that anything less than a worker co-op is ultimately an organizational structure that is inequitable and exploitative to its labor force, leading to negative externalities for society at large. I'm 100% ignorant of the history of labor and of all philosophical dialectic around it, but I would love to form an opinion…

Argument for the meme: Labor unions don't challenge the core structure of capitalism; even when they're working, they mostly serve to give a slightly bigger piece of the pie to workers. And in practice, they are hijacked by a certain bureaucratic caste that mostly optimizes for stability and self perpetuation. They become integrated with state sponsorship, which will never allow for substantive change. For instance,…

Nothing is stopping anyone from forming a worker coop in the US. Yet few do. Have you ever considered this?

Re: As unions decline, inequality rises

#267

Post by [deleted] »

TaylorAlexander wrote: post #239
themitigating wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The quality of living a family in the suburbs has today is like what a rich person a hundred years ago would have. I see people with houses, multiple brand new cars, TVs in every room, and who take a vacation at least once a year complain about the economy their entire life.

The fact that some people don’t know how well they have it is not evidence that everything is fine. Watch a few news reports on poverty in America and you will see that a decent percentage of working adults live with their entire family in a small cramped apartment, can’t afford any vacation, and likely can’t afford emergency medical care if it comes up. And even those people in the suburbs with all those TVs could h…

[deleted]

Re: As unions decline, inequality rises

#268

Post by scruple »

mkmk3 wrote: post #254
michaelchisari wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

| Why did I deserve to make more money than a teacher or a nurse? My tech salary, adjusted for inflation, is almost exactly what my RN mother was making when she was my age. Maybe our salaries aren't that extraordinary, they're just the only ones that have kept up with inflation. Don't feel guilty about a tech salary, feel angry others been left behind.

Why is sibling black_'s comment dead when they just provided an anecdote backing the parent comment? Or is the 1% talk controversial here?

That user is shadow banned.

Re: As unions decline, inequality rises

#269

Post by pessimizer »

Closi wrote: post #196
throw0101c wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is that a problem with income inequality, or a problem with political campaign financing rules? In the US those are intertwined: > The court held 5-4 that the free speech clause of the First Amendment prohibits the government from restricting independent expenditures for political campaigns by corporations, including nonprofit corporations, labor unions, and other associations. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citiz…

What I mean is that they are only intertwined because of that campaign financing rule - they aren't inherently intertwined. And the more obvious and immediate solution (to me) is to change that rule and stop them from being intertwined rather than to somehow fix all wealth inequality. As an absurd example, let's say I made a law that said that people with brown eyes can slap people with blue eyes. In this world, slap…

There's no way to make a sane case that it is the fault of a single law, or an idiosyncrasy of US campaign financing, that the amount of money you have has an decisive effect on politics. It's not a question of blue eyes vs. brown eyes, it's a question of wolves vs. kittens.

edit: If you want to do something politically that would harm my business, I can just silence you, have you jailed, or kill you. No campaign finance necessary. I can sponsor debates about the degree to which you molest children in my newspapers and on my television channels every day.

Hell, the money that goes to campaigns that isn't wasted to party graft just goes back to media owners, anyway. It's like US foreign aid, denominated in store credit at US favored contractors.

Post reply on HN