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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32051 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Anyone have any examples of an employee union that improves business for both employees and employer?

The most salient feature of unions that I know about is that they prevent the employer from firing bad employees, or promoting good employees over ones with seniority. This makes sense to me because unions get their power/support from employees that need the union more than the employer needs them i.e. bad ones. A prototypical example of the leftist high-low alliance.

But there's no reason it has to be this way. It's technically possible for a union to say "fire bad employees, promote some faster than others, but pay us more". Is there any examples of this sort of thing working well?

Supposedly German unions use apprenticeship systems and generally produce a minimum level of quality.

That purported role is frequently filled by occupational licensing and unreasonable education requirements in the US (e.g. college degrees for daycare) which serve the same "protect our jobs from competition/give us more money" role that unions do.

In other countries doctors have done much worse at creating labor cartels; the UK is flooded with a continuous supply of doctors from Southern Europe, Africa, India and so on, which is why salaries for doctors are 1/4 or less of what they are in the US.

See also discussions about how medical costs in the US are unreasonably high, and we should reduce them to UK levels. That can only be done by reducing employee compensation to UK levels.

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