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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28064 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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The United Auto Workers have gone on strike: https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/us-auto-union-strike-three-detroit-three-factories-2023-09-15/

What happens if Ford and GM simply say: "okay, you're fired"? This seems to have quite a few benefits, mostly that they can get rid of union workers and remove the threat of another strike.

I'll admit that unions sortof confuse me. I didn't grow up around them and have always wondered the mechanism by which everybody gets to quit their job but then demand extra money to come back. Are the people running factory machines inside of Ford and GM (or starbucks, or a hollywood writers room) really that highly skilled?

It should be noted that Tesla is not unionized, and will not be a part of this strike. Do you guys think there is a chance that the government tries to force Tesla to stop making cars during the strike to make things more fair?

I'll be honest about my feelings towards unions: I don't get it at all, and I think I'm missing something. I do think that workers should have an adversarial relationship with their employer, but it seems to me like unions have all but destroyed the american auto industry. I think you'd be insane to not just fire anybody who joins a union on the spot. I don't get how places can "vote to unionize". Why does the employer not simply fire the people doing the organizing? Sure you can all vote to make a starbucks union, but...I just won't hire anybody in your union.

I think you'd be insane to not just fire anybody who joins a union on the spot.

This is explicitly illegal in the US and would land you in deep shit.

Why does the employer not simply fire the people doing the organizing?

That is illegal.

Sure you can all vote to make a starbucks union, but...I just won't hire anybody in your union.

I suspect this is also illegal in Michigan.

This is explicitly illegal in the US and would land you in deep shit.

This also happens all the time and companies usually get away with it.

And people are murdered every day.

How does that affect the legality of murder?

It doesn’t. But the fact that it happens so often changes the calculus. Legality is a factor in corporate behavior, but evidently not the dominant one.

Union jobs offer stability and benefits for no upside. It's not like you can go from warehouse to CEO with union , like you can with a start-up. no stock options either. It's not like you can get a raise for exceptional work, it's all collective. So it tends to benefit the median or mean instead of the outliers who really excel. So there are downsides to joining a union. But I agree that overall they seem overpaid relative to the value they create.

The questions is whether the two-standard-deivation-above-average worker is better off with their effort-recognized package in a non-union shop, or with the standard package in a union shop.

I would guess the latter, most of the time.

Only one guy can work his way up to CEO, there are fewer opportunities for promotion than you think, and employers won't pay you that much more than the other people in the same job description just for doing good work. Most competent people seek advancement by leaving their firm for a better job title at a new company, rather than wait around for advancement opportunities at their current one.

At least, that's my impression for large megacorps where the owners are in a different sate/country from the average worker and treat them as numbers on a spreadsheet rather than individuals. There's definitely more room for recognition and advancement at smaller and locally-owned places where the owner actually sees and knows almost every employee. But those small shops aren't teh ones we're ussually talking about when we talk about union issues.

This is only true because these places don't even try to reward above-average productivity. I think it's difficult to measure, pay incentives wouldn't increase performance much, you're already selecting for low-skill employees by paying little, and differences in pay per employee would cause drama and workplace-politics problems. But it's my impression that there are, even in many low-skill occupations, often >1.5x differences in productivity per employee.

Not all humans have 135 IQ (supposedly the average here). The people joining the union just want good wages and benefits to have a family. They don’t think like us here who want routes to be rich.

(And I hate unions but I think this is a good understanding of what their people want)

Yes. In the US there's a sense that you don't have the freedom to escape the pressure to try to be rich. It's up or out, striver for everyone. (Unless you want to join the ranks of the homeless, dropping out of any semblance of a normal middle class existence.)

I've been doing contracting jobs for years in tech and anyone not already looking over their shoulder at the next job when they're only a week in to their current one is kind of a sucker. An endless hustle.

The reason capitalism is the most productive economic system is Darwinian creative destruction as new ideas outcompete old ones, often in the form of churning enterprises. People hate this. Even the winners typically hate this. Schumpeter predicted that social democracy, even if it didn't seccumb to Marxism, would inevitably destroy capitalism by turning to a quasi-socialist mush as voters replaced a culture of dynamic entrepreneurship with "laborism" -- i.e. the philosophy that the point of the economy is to make life as cushy as possible for workers rather than products as good as possible for consumers.

America's greatest achievement is keeping the entrepreneurial spirit relatively healthy. In much of the rest of the advanced world its essentially dead. In Canada, we live in a corporatist state and the best research on the subject shows regulation and corporate cronyism is the reason our GDP per capita has slid from 85% of the U.S. level a generation ago to 70% today.

So the role in unions in fostering “laborism” is clearly bad in my opinion as it robs us of economic growth, but I do sympathize with the desire of people to get out of the economic rat race. Many people want to get their credential, get a secure job with a pension and then put their career and livelihood on autopilot until age 65 so they can raise their kids, pursue hobbies, etc. Some people just have extreme risk aversion or grew up in precarious financial circumstances and seek out these jobs.

I just think those jobs should be paid less than market wages, not more.

It’s not even that great then. Unions are a huge reason why America is no longer manufacturing things to the same scale it was. It’s orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to simply build the plant in Mexico or Southeast Asia than deal with the overinflated wages and poor work ethic of union employees.

There's a 25% import tax on light trucks, which are 69% of the market and consist of basically anything bigger than a Toyota Camry. So as long as the unions steal 24% or less, it's not actually cheaper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax

https://www.autoweek.com/news/a1714156/light-trucks-take-record-69-us-market/

This is primarily caused by Obama era fuel efficiency rules, which hold big cars to unrealistic fuel efficiency standards but allow trucks to escape fuel efficiency standards by becoming larger. For obvious reasons unions have opposed attempts to fix these rules.

https://www.thedrive.com/news/small-cars-are-getting-huge-are-fuel-economy-regulations-to-blame

https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/kdkdx3/normal_truck_vs_american_truck/

I would be enormously unsurprised if workers in the US were paid double that of workers in Mexico, and that's before we even start getting into non-pay related union inefficiencies.

America is at record production from manufacturing. Workers are down but it’s because productivity improved.

Productivity improves mostly by eliminating the overpriced workers.

overinflated wages

Do you even hear yourself? How long has real wage growth been stagnant in the United States? Workers need to get paid more, even if it affects the shareholders or C-suite compensation packages.

How long has real wage growth been stagnant in the United States?

Median weekly earnings hit a nadir of 345 "1982-1984" dollars in Q4 2017, and increased to 362 such dollars in Q4 2019, their highest value to date by far (previous peak was 354 in Q2 2017). The pandemic made everything go screwy and it hit 393 in Q2 2020, it's now 365.

It's not stagnant; there was a stagnant period from 1999 to 2014, though I note these numbers do not take into account total compensation, so likely what was happening is health care was eating it all.

Thats all heavily dependent on which inflation rate you use to do the calcs.

It's the consumer price index. Pulling out some other shadow inflation figure is special pleading.

No it’s standard practice and the whole Index itself is difficult to measure. We don’t buy the same goods one year to the next.

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When automakers can literally cross the border into Mexico and get the same quality work for less than a third of the cost, the auto worker is overpaid.

Or the other auto-worker is underpaid....

Compensation in the US has more or less steadily grown since it started being measured in the 50s.

In pessimist/doomer spaces that want to make the economy seem worse than it is, e.g. Reddit, you frequently see charts that show otherwise. This is pretty much always due to dishonest stats, e.g:

  • Using "household income" instead of per-capita, which is confounded with shrinking household sizes.

  • Using inflators like CPI that doesn't take substitution effects into account (instead of e.g. PCE) and thus overstate inflation a lot if compared over a long period of time.

  • Not counting transfer payments.

  • Counting the decline in hours worked as lowered wages, and not as people choosing to work less when they don't need to.

  • Just completely making shit up, like this tweet that made the rounds a few days ago where real household income is compared to nominal rent prices.

That figure doesn’t account for the four year degree requirement, the grad school requirement for a lot positions, the debt of these two, or the requirement to have a smart phone and laptop, right?

Does the cost of laptops and smart phone really factor in to these figures meaningfully?

Maybe, why not? The average price of a mobile plan is 144 monthly, so 1.7k yearly, so 3% of the median salary.

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"Real Hourly Compensation for All Workers" does not attempt to capture every possible thing in society that affects peoples finances, no.

(Though increases in cost of education will be reflected in the inflation, and as such adjusted for. Also the cost of the minimum viable laptop and smartphone required for getting a job is comparatively very low, and people get them anyway even if they weren't required – even the homeless have phones!)

A mandatory four year period of large debt and fewer working hours is a serious cost on the median citizen and I’m skeptical this is actually conveyed in the inflation metric. Because you can’t just take “tuition increased by this amount”, you also have to measure the fact that it’s required for more workers who may otherwise have forgone it completely

The people joining the union just want good wages and benefits to have a family. They don’t think like us here who want routes to be rich.

It's a long story that involves the Great Migration and George C. Wallace, but my maternal grandfather was a GM retiree, a rarity in the south. It's not an overstatement to say that getting that GM job was the best thing to happen to my grandfather and by extension my family. My grandparents (who grew up as farmers and were fortunate for their time to have received eighth grade educations) went from a working life fit for the Book of Job to being comfortably lower-middle class with a secure retirement.

Where things get interesting is that my father (high school educated) also went from broke to "making it" thanks to the auto industry, only this time it came courtesy of working for a non-union automaker (Nissan; he presently works for Tesla). The free market worked well enough for him. Would it have for 20th century autoworkers? I suspect so. Ford was late to unionization and I'm not aware of their workers having been poorly paid prior to it.

Ford was late to unionization and I'm not aware of their workers having been poorly paid prior to it.

Then why did their workers vote to unionize? Why vote to pay union dues for no benefit? The data here indicates that wages at Ford in 1940 were quite a bit lower than the industry norm ($14.34/hr in 2021 dollars, versus $17.09 for the industry as a whole).

If you read your own link, you'll discover the reason Ford got lower priced workers is because they hired lower priced negros and minimized racial discrimination. As many right wing economists have noted, taste-based discrimination costs money and free markets penalize it.

One reason the (majority white) workers voted for unions was to reduce labor market competition by colored workers. This was a major motivator for many other pro-Union laws such as Davis Bacon and minimum wage.

https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/1997/summer/american-labor-movement.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis%E2%80%93Bacon_Act_of_1931

Of course, having on the market a rather large source of cheap labor depresses wages outside of that group, too–the wages of the white worker who has to compete. And when an employer can substitute a colored worker at a lower wage–and there are, as you pointed out, these hundreds of thousands looking for decent work–it affects the whole wage structure of an area, doesn’t it?

  • Senator John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, 1957, after many colored workers moved to MA and started competing economically with his constituents

My own link says that, while Ford paid black workers slightly more ($14.53 versus $13.55), they paid white workers substantially less ($14.14 versus $17.38).

Note also that black workers made up 38% of the workplace at Ford but only 6% elsewhere, so the higher salary for black workers at Ford probably reflects the fact that more were working at more highly skilled jobs. It sure seems tough to infer anything other than that, at any given job description, Ford paid less.

One reason the (majority white) workers voted for unions was to reduce labor market competition by colored workers

This is common knowledge. Just as it is common knowledge that employers sometimes brought in black workers as strike breakers. But how does any of that support the incorrect factual claim that pay at pre-unionized Ford was equal to that at its unionized competitors?

Why vote to pay union dues for no benefit?

I was responding to this. They voted for unionization due to benefits they hoped to achieve for white workers, at the expense of black ones.

As noted in the article, the higher pay for black workers also reflects that Ford was greedy where others were racist.

That's the whole point of unionization - letting some workers get a great gig at the expense of others.

Yes, I am agreeing with you. it was OP who opined that it was not true ("Ford was late to unionization and I'm not aware of their workers having been poorly paid prior to it")

Wait, so the claim is that ford paid it’s black workers better than it’s white workers in 1940? That doesn’t pass the smell test- either the blacks were getting paid extra to cross picket lines, or the numbers are simply wrong.

Edit: forget the below. You have misconstrued what I said. The linked data [edit: I meant what I said] does NOT show that Ford paid its black workers better than its white workers. It shows that Ford paid black workers more than its competitors paid black workers ($14.53 versus $13.55), and that they paid white workers substantially less than its competitors paid white workers ($14.14 versus $17.38).

It indeed passes the smell test because, as I noted, the obvious explanation is that black workers at Ford were employed in more highly skilled occupations than the black workers elsewhere. Again, it says that black workers made up 38% of the workplace at Ford but only 6% elsewhere, So, the black workers elsewhere were probably almost entirely janitors and the like.

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It is difficult to teach someone to know something, when his argument depends on him not knowing it.

Not all humans have 135 IQ (supposedly the average here)

Lolwut?

Not all humans have 135 IQ (supposedly the average here)

Lolwut?

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/pJJdcZgB6mPNWoSWr/2013-survey-results

Can we finally resolve this IQ controversy that comes up every year?

The story so far—our first survey in 2009 found an average IQ of 146. Everyone said this was stupid, no community could possibly have that high an average IQ, it was just people lying and/or reporting results from horrible Internet IQ tests. Although IQ fell somewhat the next few years—to 140 in 2011 and 139 in 2012 - people continued to complain. So in 2012 we started asking for SAT and ACT scores, which are known to correlate well with IQ and are much harder to get wrong. These scores confirmed the 139 IQ result on the 2012 test. But people still objected that something must be up.

This year our IQ has fallen further to 138 (no Flynn Effect for us!) but for the first time we asked people to describe the IQ test they used to get the number. So I took a subset of the people with the most unimpeachable IQ tests—ones taken after the age of 15 (when IQ is more stable), and from a seemingly reputable source. I counted a source as reputable either if it name-dropped a specific scientifically validated IQ test (like WAIS or Raven’s Progressive Matrices), if it was performed by a reputable institution (a school, a hospital, or a psychologist), or if it was a Mensa exam proctored by a Mensa official.

This subgroup of 101 people with very reputable IQ tests had an average IQ of 139 - exactly the same as the average among survey respondents as a whole.

I don’t know for sure that Mensa is on the level, so I tried again deleting everyone who took a Mensa test—leaving just the people who could name-drop a well-known test or who knew it was administered by a psychologist in an official setting. This caused a precipitous drop all the way down to 138.

The IQ numbers have time and time again answered every challenge raised against them and should be presumed accurate.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/03/17/ssc-survey-2017-results/#comment-476694

We have this argument every year. Points in favor include:

  1. Survey IQs mostly match survey SATs from IQ/SAT conversion tables.
  2. One year we asked ACT and that matched too.
  3. One time we made everybody describe which IQ test they took and in what circumstance, and the subset who took provably legit IQ tests given by provably legit psychologists weren’t any different from the rest.

I don’t doubt that a lot of the overly high numbers are people who took a test as kids which wasn’t properly normed for kids their age or something.

Interesting. I dont recall any of these polls or participating in any.

There are no good counterarguments to the standard objections that:

  1. People with impressive IQs highly disproportionately respond to "what's your IQ" questions, for the same reason that rich people disproportionately respond to salary threads, and extremely fit people to gym threads, and promiscuous people to threads about sexual histories etc etc etc. The infamous internet picture thread rule holds true - people who post in 'show us your face' threads on anonymous forums are either (a) delusional or (b) hotter than the average user of said forum.

  2. People Just Lie On The Internet. For an even moderately intelligent midwit, coming up with plausible context for a very high IQ score (where it happened, which test it was, how it correlates with ACT/SAT/GMAT/LSAT scores) takes 5 minutes of research via Google. Of course people lie most to themselves, misremember things, think "oh yeah, I'd definitely have gotten y instead of x score if I'd had a better day or had prepared a little more so I'll just say I got y".

  3. The Motte is now like 10 years out of SSC / LW and has a related-but-substantially-distinct audience. Rats are disproportionately high IQ silicon valley weirdos, the CW thread - /r/Motte - website progression and long lifespan of the community, plus big overlap with /r/drama, redscarepod, various other culture war conversation communities picked up a large number of people of more modest intelligence. Sure, likely still well above average, but not 99th percentile.

Despite 1 and 2, I believe old LW being 130-140 and remaining close if lower as it's grown. More than a few posts there are just college-level math, and many of the remaining posts are analytic philosophy tier in attention to detail, precision, and length (not that either are necessarily true as a result), and often come from people who were math/physics majors. 3 is correct though.

I kind of assume this community is 135 IQ. Scott Sumner once said that Iq level doesn’t read the nyt they go somewhere on the blogosphere. My scores would test around there. I’m curious if not here then where would 135 IQ people go?

I haven’t found an above.

Scott Sumner once said that Iq level doesn’t read the nyt they go somewhere on the blogosphere.

Bill Gates probably has an IQ of at least 155, maybe 160 or higher (Harvard Math 55, publishing something interesting on sorting in undergrad etc), and apparently reads the New York Times cover to cover every day. It's a weird thing to say that smart people don't read the news. But in general it's a fallacy to assume there have to be publications that have an average audience of IQ 135. There may be, but they'll be things like some kinds of math journals in niche subfields, not things that cover general interest topics, like this place.

There may be some similar academic discussion boards for math/physics, but a mainstream political discussion board like this one is never going to be predominantly 99th percentile. There are subreddits like some of the ask-X where the politics may be odious but the raw quality of the writing is on the same level as here. You don't need to be 99th percentile to write most posts or comments here. I'd say the 25th percentile bound of The Motte regular users (more than 200 comments per year) is maybe 90th percentile IQ, sure.

apparently reads the New York Times cover to cover every day.

This makes me think less of his intelligence rather than more given the NYT articles I've actually read. That paper has been incredibly suspect and dubious the entire time I've been paying attention to the media.

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Ya he might. Nyt definitely aims for more of the top 10%. But what’s north of there?

It’s the blogosphere or Reddit.

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There are a lot of really good answers in this thread, reasons why historically unions have been a good idea (even if some notable examples have gone too far), but I want to point out that they almost entirely apply to private-sector unions. In the US we also have truly massive PUBLIC-sector unions, which (as far as I know) there is almost no good justification for. Their power derives from the government, which means that when they "negotiate", the government is the one on both sides of the table (negotiating about money that, as always, isn't theirs). It's always seemed insane to me, but maybe somebody here has a good justification...?

Well, the justification is the normal one, that workers need collective bargaining power to get a fair deal form there employer. There's no reason that logic doesn't apply to public sector jobs the same way it applies to private sector.

As you point out, it's the argument against public sector unions that is different. Because the bosses don't lose money if they pay more (they just raise taxes), because the people in the union are also in positions of authority over the populace and can abuse that power (police unions negotiating for fewer penalties for excessive force), etc.

Insofar as part of the point of a union is to protect workers from abusive or unsafe work environments that would seem to apply just as well to government employees as private employees.

unsafe work environments

The actual history here is that unions didn't do squat about unsafe work environments. The workplace safety revolution was a top-down thing, imposed by management on a grudging and resentful labor force. Why did management do it? Because the shift to no-fault worker's compensation put a price on danger, and companies responded rationally by paying people to make the workplace safer. Often the safety rules were imposed by insurance companies in exchange for lower premiums.

This is a huge success story for well-designed incentives, the sort of thing that ought to be in every history textbook as a demonstration of how meaningful change actually happens, and yet people keep attributing it to unions for some reason.

In one memorable example, the Chicago Plumbers Union lobbied until the mid-1980s to continue requiring lead pipes until they were banned federally because only union plumbers could install lead lines. This probably had a negative safety impact for the plumbers themselves, has definitely impacted generations of Chicago residents in ways that less union-friendly jurisdictions avoided. But hey, job security!

New York City still requires lead shower pans, probably for similar reasons.

That isn't sufficient justification. Public sector union power does not result in avoiding abuse but in stacking the deck in favor of union members resulting in overpayment, lower standards and inefficiency.

Who is to protect the rest of society from the goverment and the union and union employees collectively using their influence to extract more resources for themselves? Or from running goverment services in a subpar manner. There is a very real agency problem here.

But generally making sure that power used for the ideal of avoiding abuse or mistreatment isn't used to stack the deck in favor of said group that supposedly needs to be protected is one of the most important problems in western societies. We genuinely should care a lot more about not stacking the deck in favor of said groups.

There is a lot of assumption here that the free market wouldn’t have done a lot of the things as we got richer anyway. Unions always claim they did that but realistically free markets would have done the same thing.

Google isn’t unionized. I hear they have some great working conditions.

Datapoint of 1, but Texas has both unionized and non-Union electricians whose pay is negotiated separately. Union electricians make more during their apprenticeships and have stricter safety on the jobsite, non-union have an easier time going out on their own. I’ve heard Union electricians are better paid than non-union in rural areas but only at the level of hearsay. Union rules make it harder to negotiate a better work life balance but also prevent the worst excesses(which can be pretty bad).

So unions probably deserve some credit, but mostly at the margins.

Sure, it's possible that working conditions would have gotten better anyway.

As to Google I think that's more to do with the nature of software engineering as a profession. There is not nearly as much potential for harm compared to someone working a mining job or with heavy machinery or similar.

Wasnt referring to harm. But all the other benefits those firms provide. When a country gets sufficiently rich employees get to expect things like fully stocked kitchens and fancy lunches as a part of their pay.

Isn't that significantly an artifact of tax structure? At 30% income+payroll tax, a dollar spent by your employer goes 43% farther than a dollar spent by you, and the strength of that effect increases with pay under a progressive income tax.

Something else that comes to mind is that there's a bunch of cultural baggage about home cooking, fast food, frozen dinners, frequency of eating out, etc., which employer-provided chefs could bypass. Hitting a drive-through every day after work likely feels declasse to upper-middle-class specialist employees unless they're autistic enough to unlock, "just the macros, ma'am" mindset, but they are not likely going home to a wife who learned how to shop and cook in home economics class. There are multiple companies built around literally catering to this neurosis.

There are multiple companies built around literally catering to this neurosis.

Have any of those companies ever made a profit? Nobody I’ve ever known to use them has kept them after the free trial period expired. ‘Being able to launder VC money’ is a pretty low bar to clear in terms of finding a marketable niche.

You say this is a country thing but I'm pretty sure Google is a pretty large outlier on this. I work for and we definitely don't have fully stocked kitchens and free fancy lunches.

The key is that when productivity goes up employers can asks for their productivity to be paid in better benefits. Google and firms like them having super productive employers can asks for all sorts of fancy work conditions. Similar when manual labor hit a productivity level they could asks for things like 8 hr work week or safer conditions.

It isn’t even just that (and enough) but effectively the union gets to vote (and fund) for who they negotiate with. And the person paying for the arrangement isn’t on either side of the table.

I'll be honest about my feelings towards unions: I don't get it at all, and I think I'm missing something.

There's a lot of history there and a lot of competing interests. It's probably worth reading this: http://www.paulgraham.com/unions.html

I think you'd be insane to not just fire anybody who joins a union on the spot. I don't get how places can "vote to unionize". Why does the employer not simply fire the people doing the organizing?

There are explicit laws against that. Unions in general have a lot of laws to protect them. Read up on Pinkerton strike breaking.

The owner of the "Giant Tiger" chain of stores in Canada likes to joke that "you don't get unions unless you deserve them". I don't think that's entirely true, but early unions were created in response to genuinely horrible treatment.

Are the people running factory machines inside of Ford and GM (or starbucks, or a hollywood writers room) really that highly skilled?

More or less yes. Starbucks isn't terribly high skilled, but a key part of the atmosphere is the preppy gayish vibes they curate in their employees. They needed to do a lot of careful hiring and firing to get that while staying within the bounds of the law.

Hollywood is actually a case of very functional unions. Each production is a new company, so everyone is fired afterwards. The union can't force anyone to employ low performing employees. So standards are enforced by constantly having to be rehired and treatment is enforced by the union. Writers getting royalties makes a lot of sense. Without them writers would save all of their best ideas for a time when they were co-producers and could share in the profits that way.

Skilled autoworkers do deserve decent pay and are difficult to replace. One issue is that the janitorial staff will often get better contract than they deserved, and the union representing them is stuck fighting for raises on top of an already overpriced salary.

Autoworkers and old industry are very interesting. Their golden age has passed, but a lot of unions still expect generous contracts.

Unions are often overly adversarial in the US. I have a controversial explanation for this -- the culture was strongly influenced by soviet spies who wanted to sabotage US industry. The KGB was certainly trying, and had a lot of connections on the left. I admit I can't prove they succeeded.

But countries closer to the iron curtain tended to have more reasonable unions. Germany has national unions based on job type instead of local unions for each company. That makes them more accepting of contracts that are in line with industry standards even if they don't offer big raises.

American unions will bankrupt a company then shrug and say they were just representing their workers, who are now all unemployed.

Unions in the US (and Canada) also like to start taking over management roles, which creates conflicts of interest. Controlling shifts and vacation dates. Sometimes people need a way to protect themselves from an abusive union rep. As far as I know no one has managed to organize a sub-union to curtail union abuses, but I think it could happen.

Seems to me unions are more useful when labor market is thin. Modern economy means its relatively easy to get info about and apply for jobs outside of your local region making the pool of employers much larger.

You don’t even need that many people willing to move. Just enough people to create an equilibrium.

And note that non union car workers generally get paid pretty well. It’s also probably better for the individual worker who can be a bit more entrepreneurial since unions protect more the LCD.

Seems to me unions are more useful when labor market is thin.

You're not wrong, but the purpose of union solidarity is to be able to make the market very thin at a moment's notice. Ideally dropping the available labor down to near zero.

It's also why crossing the picket line in union heavy areas tends to (or, more realistically, tended to) have such high social consequences.

I meant when the employee market is thin. The classic example is the company town where there is a single employer.

Fair enough, I interpreted it the other way. That's my bad.

You overstate Hollywood. Writers would sell their stories without unions and not hold out for producer positions.

Unions make a little sense as you said on careers that have short term projects being the majority of their work. But that’s nothing like most unions who try to hold an asset hostage.

In the case of short term projects they are mostly selling a worker quality thing which does have value. If you’re building a bridge that takes a year having an organization guarantee worker quality makes sense. That’s not most unions.

A quick follow up is where unions fail...

Unions have a negative effect when there's a fixed capital asset that the union can hold hostage that is unrelated to worker performance.

For instance LA port workers are crazy overpaid just because the port is so important for the US economy and there is no political will to fight the union or build a second big pacific port in Seattle.

Railways are always struggling because unions base their demands on the value of the entire rail system. The fix here is to split of the railway companies... pass a law that the company that owns the rail lines can't use them for shipping, they have to charge other companies for rail access who actually do the shipping.

To add even more spice, California just approved unemployment for striking workers. No matter how ridiculous I think we've gotten, there's always a new vanguard to subsidize people that refuse to work with funds from people that are working.

Oof. You know you've gone off the far-left deep end when governor Newsom, of all people, is lightly coughing and hinting that this is unaffordable. So now my California tax dollars will be going towards supporting a strike for WGA workers who, in 2020, were earning a bare minimum of $4,546 a week. (I know the numbers in the current contract under negotiation were leaked, but I'm having a hard time finding a good source...? I suspect most of the media is on the side of any union, anywhere, anytime and would very much not like the hoi polloi to find out just how rich these brave freedom fighters actually are.)

Newsom is positioning himself for a Presidential run in 2028 (or, who knows, 2024 if Biden keels over). He's started a meaningful statewide initiative targeting retail crime, and he's bashing SF leaders for failing to deal with the homeless issue and perpetually kicking the issue down the road (yes, ironic, I know). But I applaud unprincipled politicians who do things that people will benefit from purely for electoral reasons, because that's at least better than the status quo.

The fact that Gavin Newsome is even considering a presidential run and that there are people who think this is a good idea is a massive black pill for me.

California has got a practically divine set of advantages:

  • Some of the best geography in the world. Temperate climate, massive mountains which create plenty of fresh water for both the coastal cities as well as the extremely fertile central valley.

  • A massive coastline

  • The 20th century saw Entertainment and tech, some of the most lucrative industries in our country, base themselves in California.

  • Not much in the way of natural disasters. Some earthquakes and wildfires, but the wildfires are arguably California's fault, and the earthquakes dont' seem to be much of a problem for a 21st century city.

Despite having the money for it, the desire for it, and near total control of the government meaning free rein with the funding to pursue basically any policy they want, California feels like a failing civilization. Californians and the politicians they elect have squandered the biggest head start of anybody ever, and still instead of reflecting on their obvious failures of their ridiculous policies, they just keep doubling down.

Temperate climate, massive mountains which create plenty of fresh water for both the coastal cities as well as the extremely fertile central valley.

The Central Valley is more fruits, vegetables, and nuts. Corn and wheat are easier to harvest, so middle-class farmers can own the farm and buy a mechanical harvester or something. Fruits, vegetables, and nuts benefit from intensive manual picking, so farm owners hire outside labor.

The agricultural products that Central Valley and Mediterranean climates produce are very difficult to mechanize. Cereal crops are quite simple - while John Deere and Cargill are making it harder to eke out a freehold living as a farmer or dairy owner, it has been possible to save, invest, and eventually own your own farm through mechanization for decades.

Almonds, olives, strawberries, cherries, apples, oranges - all of these have been notorious for difficulty of mechanizing. Fruit trees, even monoculture and hybridized ones, will have fruit ripening at different times. By the time the fruit falls to the ground, it's not salvageable.

A dark, open secret on the West Coast is that our agricultural richness is only possible through subverting minimum wage laws. The only way we can have Fujis for $2/lb is because of shared common interests between the Democrats and Republicans in power. Democrats in Washington are heavily-union backed, and the unions have their roots in perpetuating marginalization of immigrants. They turn a blind eye to the poverty wages and intimidation tactics that enforce an underclass of Mexican and Central American laborers that destroy their bodies to give us cheap fruit.

  • quoted from the discussion on the original subreddit on Scott's article on the Central Valley

the earthquakes dont' seem to be much of a problem for a 21st century city.

Excuse me but...what?

And a massive coastline in itself means nothing. Indonesia also has one, Greenland as well.

I wonder if California is the biggest argument against open borders. My understanding (which is probably wrong) is that California until the early 90s was the beach boy California (hell Ronald Reagan was governor and easily won the state during elections) until a lot of migration changed it. That changed the voting dynamic leading to present day California.

Californians and the politicians they elect have squandered the biggest head start of anybody ever, and still instead of reflecting on their obvious failures of their ridiculous policies, they just keep doubling down.

In fairness that’s mostly pre-Gavin Newsome.

FYI they even have pirates now.

https://abc7news.com/oakland-estuary-marinas-pirates-us-coast-guard-boats-pirate-attacks-shipwrecks/13779792/

I've checked the article, and the other one linked in it. It's rather misleading to call these crimes 'piracy'.

On the other hand, media spin can do a lot with a slick looking fella.

Yeah. He speaks clearly and as far as politicians go looks great. The media would give him a great tail wind. Why shouldn't he take a chance at the presidency?

Why does the employer not simply fire the people doing the organizing? Sure you can all vote to make a starbucks union, but...I just won't hire anybody in your union.

The question there (setting aside laws and the like) is, what if there aren't enough people to hire otherwise? Remember that unemployment is pretty low in the US currently, so are there enough people you could actually attract, in the area you need them, for the lower wages you are refusing to hike? With the skillset you need, and all at the same time so you don't have to shut down anyway because you need at least a 100 or 300 or 3000 factory workers all at the same time? And then you need to train them, and who is going to train them with your experienced staff just been fired?

That's a gamble in and of itself. And the more people are in the union, or who won't work as scabs (because they are in an affiliated union or something) the harder it becomes. Now if truckers refuse to deliver to you because they are crossing a strike line and so on. A strike is a balancing act where labor does hold some cards, because replacing them will cost time and money, and a short term shock can kill a company. They leverage that in exchange for better conditions.

Recruiting large numbers of new workers is very expensive and it takes time your cash reserves may not be able to support.

Firing everyone who tries to unionize (again ignoring laws for the moment) would be a signal that you want to hamstring the power of labor. Which is entirely reasonable for an employer to do, but then it is also entirely reasonable for labor to move to an employer who doesn't if available. If you can manage it and keep your staff then you win, but if they have other better options you lose.

Then of course labor can elect politicians who put in place anti union busting laws which is also entirely reasonable for them to do, leveraging their numbers for advantage. And employers can leverage their advantage (wealth) to lobby politicians for anti-union laws. Whomever is more effective gets an advantage and so round we go. That's what it means to have the adversarial relationship you spoke of. Employees using the options they have available to try and better their conditions, with Companies doing the same.

And employers can leverage their advantage (wealth) to lobby politicians for anti-union laws. Whomever is more effective gets an advantage and so round we go. That's what it means to have the adversarial relationship you spoke of

If it's all hobbesian struggle between competing interests, why even have firms and contract law? Ofc, it's for general benefit - firms and contracts and the economy benefit all participants.

And we can ask the same question of unions - does the overall-best economic system have a large role for unions, or does it not? Even if the 'overall' hides a redistribution of surplus from one party to another, the govt can just redistribute it back.

And that leads into a proposed alternative to government protections for unions: a strong government-imposed social safety net. This prevents any local deadweight losses from unions, allowing the best firms to win, and then uses a uniform tax to efficiently redistribute that efficiently produced surplus to the workers. Or with less academic obfuscation: In your situation, with various political struggles the dockworkers' union prevents the port from automating, increasing dockworker pay but slowing cross-ocean trade of goods, making everyone slightly worse off. In my situation, the dockworkers are fired and the port is automated, and increased taxes takes part of the overall consumer surplus and sends it back to the dockworkers.

(note: I'm not saying this is a good policy, whether you want this much redistribution is separate, just that it's probably better than unions)

End of day unions steal from other workers. They only have market power if there is a bottleneck. Longer term you can just hirer other people. But in a constant cost business they just drive up prices for everyone else.

Or since this is the auto industry and exposed to free trade they end up bankrupting their firm and everyone just buys a cheaper Japanese car.

And when the bottleneck goes the other way companies can push down wages and so on. It's just swings and roundabouts. Each side can use the power they have when they have it. Why should it be any other way? There is no moral requirement for workers to make things easier for companies or indeed vice versa. The adversarial approach sometimes puts out of work a lot of people and sometimes causes companies to sink. and that is entirely ok. It's part of the emergent processes for finding the balance points between capital and labor. At a societal level it works. Each side has their own levers to pull, at different times. Expecting them not to do that is a fundamental error. Your employer is not your friend, and your employee is not your friend. You are engaged in a transactional agreement, nothing more.

And when the bottleneck goes the other way companies can push down wages and so on. It's just swings and roundabouts.

When a union refuses to work unless excess pay is provided, men with guns will harm the employer if they seek alternate arrangements with willing third parties.

When an employer refuses to pay enough to employees, nothing happens if the employee seeks alternative arrangements with willing third parties.

This is not an emergent process. It's explicit coercive action by the government to favor one side over the other.

As mentioned elsewhere though government is also an emergent process. Every human society develops it and its coercion. There is nothing unnatural about it. Its a fundamental part of human society.

Markets are protected by men with guns and also coerced by those men with guns. You must take the rough with the smooth.

My mistake, I thought you were attempting to make a statement more substantive than a purely descriptive "workers have lots of power due to threats of violence".

No one disputes that, so I'm not sure why you are devoting so much verbiage to repeating it.

Because people don't seem to realise that is the fundamental underpinning of civilization. If they recognize that then all talk of what markets deserve and unions being government coercion, is simply special pleading.

If the fundamentals of markets also rely on violence then that particular critique of unions specifically is not a good argument.

I'm confused. You seem to be trying to get from "union labor has allies willing to use violence" to "this is good" without advancing any argument why. Instead, you are just repeating truisms that no one disagrees with as if they make your case.

Your last sentence is an odd non-sequitur since free market types don't object to using violence against others who initiate violence.

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Whether or not such moral requirements exist, maintaining a high-trust society requires the shared fiction that they do. If you think everyone around you is a crook, crooking them back is the only way to get your due. If everyone thinks that way, they really are surrounded by crooks.

"Take what you can, give nothing back," is a code for pirates.

There are different levels of "high" in "high-trust society". There's the level where you can leave a stack of firewood, a cash box, and a "$5 per bundle" sign by a road, and trust that when you get back the accounting will all match up because nobody would steal. And then there's the second level, where you trust that if the accounting doesn't match up it's okay, because you know the person who took more than a mutually agreed transaction allowed really needed the excess that badly.

That first level of trust is the one where there are no crooks, the one you need enough of to keep civilization from falling apart, because society needs far more voluntary positive-sum transactions than it can afford to perfectly guard.

The second level might be a beautiful place to live, but I'm not convinced "anybody engaging in a transaction might be expected to become an unexpected charity donor" is even an improvement over a welfare state that spreads those costs around. The deadweight loss of an N% tax isn't as bad as the deadweight loss of an M% chance of a (100N/M)% tax with no greater benefits.

Or: you can leave a stack of firewood and a cash box and turn a profit. Some people will steal firewood, but they won't (usually) go as far as stealing the box or your entire supply of firewood.

I am increasingly coming to a conclusion that trust can only exist between those of equal power.

Who said anything about not giving anything back though? Sure when labor has more power, capital is paying more than it would like but it is still trading money for labor in a positive sum fashion overall. Because if all companies fail then labor also fails. Each side has constraints. Its more take what you can and give something back with the something and what you can varying within stable constraints at a societal level.

You make a good point. Strictly speaking an economic analysis of this stuff should be culture-free, with no implicit notion that the employers are conscientious, bright and noble and their employees are parasitic drag-em-downs. They are just two groups of actors engaged in contractual dispute/process. Whatever emerges from that just is the market. There's no reason why a victorious union should not be thought of as the clever, superior stock of human capital.

But the US-style Daniel Plainview conservativism always leaks its way in.

Unions aren’t market forced and are protected by the government. Market forces would be the company paying the marginal wage to get to equilibrium for the workers they need which is often fairly high.

If unions can be influential enough to get government protection, then that is something the market must take into account.

The market only exists in this form itself because of government protection so complaining unions get it too is just special pleading.

In other words there are other factors than market forces to be accounted for. They are neither more nor less legitimate than the market itself.

Markets are natural. They come up organically. People who specialize in one thing want to trade with people who specialize elsewhere.

The only thing govs do for markers is prevent crime.

And give a resolution process for fraud,and theft and IP infractions. And ensure they abide by rules that the public want enforced, and build the roads the product moves on, and educate the workers the company employs and so on and so on.

A modern market is not the same as two farmers haggling over how many chickens per bushel of wheat. It is, like it or not reliant on the government.

A market can exist without government but it wouldn't be this market with all the advantages that entails. You must take the rough with the smooth.

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Unions are as much market forces as the entire edifice of corporations and business, which are also protected by government.

This idea that all the weird and specific permutations of business ownership is natural oh but unions are artificial and imposed by government is wrong.

So if it weren’t explicitly illegal to fire workers for trying to form a Union, retaliate against those who do or replace striking workers with no requirements on taking back strikers, would unions exist?

Companies existed well before governments mandated the form. There were businesses in every civilization that ever existed. They are perfectly natural and able to exist without a state to protect them.

The Union is weird in that they are fully created and defended by government laws with few versions of them existing in places that don’t have those carve outs. Guilds existed in the dark ages, but that’s really as close as you get.

The first recorded strike action was of construction workers on a pharaoh’s tomb, IIRC. Something tells me that Bronze Age god kings did not have laws against firing workers for organizing.

So if it weren’t explicitly illegal to fire workers for trying to form a Union, retaliate against those who do or replace striking workers with no requirements on taking back strikers, would unions exist?

Do you think unions simply spontaneously popped to being after it became illegal to fire workers?

If I've understood correctly, basic union protections became a thing in the United States with Wagner Act in 1935, and unions (AFL, IWW etc.) obviously existed before that already.

The Union is weird in that they are fully created and defended by government laws with few versions of them existing in places that don’t have those carve outs

Unions are not created by the government. Workers must vote to unionize a workplace. Unions existed back when unionizing was illegal, and laws simply protect the right to unionize.

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Anarchism has never worked, what are you speaking about when you say "able to exist without a state to protect them"?

Anyway that is not really relevant. The fact is that companies get some advantages from modern states. They are more prosperous when the state protects them. So they have to accept the downsides that come with this prosperity.

One could imagine in certain circumstances a non government backed union. But it would be very different.

I think some states have unions in the trades where you can hire a union electrician or a non union electrician. Since there is still free trade the union can’t withhold service to boost wages.

But in that situation the union can provide things like training, quality checks, various insurance etc and to employers during maybe a few week project they can just asks the union for people and not have to have full time electricians on staff or deal with training, insurance, quality, etc.

Yep. Effectively guilds. There can be benefits. The problem arises when government puts a huge thumb on the scale.

What power for a bottleneck do automakers have?

I sort of agree apple and google etc control some bottlenecks but I also support antitrust pursuits against them.

There is always a bottleneck. This isn't the early 1800s; even unskilled labour isn't that unskilled, and a mass of people quitting means a shock in training, logistics, production, and many other things. This isn't 'stealing' from anyone, and people both are and should be free to do so.

I disagree, some industries have short term bottlenecks but medium term they can hire and train.

And yes I will stick with its stealing. It violates market principles.

This wont be true in many locations. Lost of autoworker jobs are located in mediocre areas and yet require decent intelligence to even perform the tasks. Getting average IQ people to relocate to work in a factory in the middle of nowhere at a workplace that just fired everyone for demanding a raise is a short and long term problem. The genius of the original locations of these places is they sopped up labor that was bleeding out of farms that were increasingly mechanized (fewer workers per acre) while also having high fertility. That's not nearly as true anymore, there aren't all sorts of white boys pouring out of farms that need semiskilled work.

Or you just build a new factory, hire people there, and then shut down the prior one…

That is a waste of capital, if you can avoid it you should. If an economy can avoid it, it should craft labor rules to.

Building factories anywhere near population centers is almost impossible in the US.

Depends on which population center, honestly. Dallas-Fort Worth has new factories opening semi-regularly.

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There are lots of things violating the market principles of spherical cow land that nobody would call stealing. It isn't helpful, and it makes stealing look better more than it makes unions look bad.

It is a government enforced quasi cartel. Cartels are the sine qua non of anti competitive behavior except for the labor carve out. It is really bad policy and we don’t need to resort to spherical cows.

That’s just like your opinion. If it costs the average consumer money it feels like stealing to me.

Your feelings are an extremely poor substitute for argument and thought. Lots of things we don't consider theft cost consumers money; blessedly, consumers' purses aren't the be-all and end-all of the world, and tend to be weighed against other pressing matters.

Ok so you don’t like my frame. It doesn’t change what unions do which is theft. They don’t abide by market forces. If you want to propose something similar I will agree it’s theft.

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Are the people running factory machines inside of Ford and GM (or starbucks, or a hollywood writers room) really that highly skilled?

A lot of them are, yes. It’s also illegal not to play ball with unions.

The best argument I've heard in favor of unions is that the equivalent bargaining power of "a company" isn't "an employee" it's "all the employees".

Suppose we remove the distinction of capital versus labor, and suppose that we have two groups of people with disproportionate level of bottleneck in a production process. That is, if we have X people from the first group, and Y people from the second group, then the level of production is something like

f(X,Y) = A sqrt(X)P(Y)

where A is some constant, and P is 0 if Y is 0 and 1 if Y >= 1

That is, you only need one Y (the employer), but can have as many X as you want, but the more X you have in the same job the more diminishing returns you get. For each production process people can gather together and organize and form mutually consensual agreements to find some equilibrium level of X that makes this efficient. BUT, Y has disproportionate bargaining power here. If any individual X threatens to quit, their quitting drops the profits of the process by some small amount. But less than their average. The other X essentially pick up the slack, and the production keeps on going. But X is now unemployed and has 0 income, which is catastrophically awful and wasteful, as all of their potential labor is essentially being wasted unused. X quitting hurts themselves more than it hurts Y. But if Y threatens to quit then everything stops and everyone is at 0, so it's a credible threat.

But if all of the X form a union and threaten to quit/strike together, then again production stops entirely, just as if Y threatened to quit. So now they have equal bargaining power.

I'm pretty sure whoever I read this sort of argument from explained it way better than I just did, but I don't remember who or where (it might have been on the motte, so if whoever it was recognizes this argument as their own and can find the post, feel free to repost it and claim credit).

It's from the Non-Libertarian FAQ, still a good read to this very day.

The issue is the market has a rate of return. Let’s say it’s 10%. If you invest 1000 you get 100 a year.

Now auto manufacturing seems like a scale business but realistically there is no moat. Spending $20 billion to enter the auto industry seems like a lot of money but globally it’s not and your end up having a very competitive business environment where every nation has its auto manufacturer. And there is not some big differentiating factor. Hyundai can make sedans or suvs for middle class Americans.

When America was more of a closed market union wages could be high and since they just compete with other unionized shops the big 3 could pay high wages and then hike the price of their car. And every consumer pays a higher price. In the global trade world whoever has the cheapest wage costs can sell the cheapest car and consumers will buy it. And then labor is priced in the market for moderately skilled labor.

I saw the other day chicago public schools costs $40k per child. That’s unions being able to close the market and fucking over all citizens and tax payers. I see elsewhere it’s 30k but that’s still stupid.

I saw the other day chicago public schools costs $40k per child. That’s unions being able to close the market and fucking over all citizens and tax payers. I see elsewhere it’s 30k but that’s still stupid.

In 2019-2020, the Chicago school budget was just shy of $ 6 billion. Enrollment was 355,000. That is per pupil spending of $16,900. LAUSD, which is also unionized, spent about the same that year. So, if per pupil spending now substantially higher, as it is in LAUSD, it obviously is not because the districts suddenly became unionized and the unions were able to "close the market."

The most obvious reason for the recent increase, in order of magnitude, is 1) the large COVID enrollment decrease, which obviously is going to push per-pupil spending up; 2) an increase in state and especially federal revenue (in LAUSD, it rose from 631M to 1.85B) ; 3) the expiration of the old collective bargaining agreement in LAUSD and the signing of a new one; and 3) inflation.

I think you're sort of making two points here:

  1. Union shops can't compete with non-union shops because their costs are higher, and

  2. If all shops for a given industry in a given market are unionized then the customer suffers higher prices.

My responses to those are:

  1. Agreed, we should really try to make sure all shops are unionized so it's a fair playing field.

  2. Agreed, we should really make sure that all industries across all markets are unionized, so that everyone has better wages and can afford those higher prices.

Trying to pit workers against consumers through the contrivance of higher prices is a common rhetorical tactic, but what it elides is that all workers are consumers and most consumers are (or are supported by) workers. Helping one helps the other.

It’s not just a “rhetorical” trick. Labor is one of the main inputs I ti goods so most of higher labor costs do flow to it prices.

Sounds like you want everyone unionized. That sounds like you would be fixing the price of labor in the economy which would mean no more market for labor. Personally markets appear quite successful so I wouldn’t want to go down that route. And prices themselves gives producers a ton of signals on how to produce things more efficiently.

I feel like what you want is basically just communism and it doesn’t work.

The 'trick' is not saying the second half of the sentence, which is 'and consumers can better afford those increased prices because of their increased wages.'

If wages go up 15% and prices go up 5%, consumers are better off. The trick is pretending that consumers and workers are different people, and only looking at how something affects one of them, instead of looking at both sides of the equation and asking whether it's a net gain or a net loss.

Unionization only eliminates market forces if everyone in the country is in the same union, which would indeed be weird. The point is to have enough unions that a boss firing everyone in one union to switch to another is as costly and disruptive for them as losing a job and trying to find a new one would be to an employee.

Rounding everything that advocates for any change at all to the current economic regime off to 'communism' is a thought-terminating cliche in discussions like this.

That’s sounds like make believe. It’s not a “trick”. It’s just let’s assume prices and wages go up different amounts.

The magic of markets is the price system and firms competing in prices forced them to become more efficient.

At best this sounds like pre-Reagan/Thatcher where growth was slower and people were poorer. You would need to invalidate the productivity gains from that era.

With history as a guide the more likely scenerio would be prices go up 30% and wages go up 15%.

Lots I disagree with here. The correct way to analyze employee vs. employer negotiating power is by considering all potential employees and all potential employers, e.g. the free market as a whole. If there are 1000 people who could be widget workers, then the single employed widget worker obviously doesn't have nearly as much bargaining power as their employer. On the flip side, if there are 1000 widget factories and only 1 qualified worker, that worker obviously has much more bargaining power than any of their employers do.

Whoops. I skimmed grandparent comment and sort of of vaguely inferred it was making a good argument similar to one I've read in the past, but you (meriadoc) are right and it's just wrong.

A liquid, free market that has a thousand sellers of same good and a septillion buyers will still be a very efficient market (assuming the thousand sellers are legally prevented from coordinating with whatever singularity tech allows a septillion entities to communicate in the first place). Any buyer who's being stiffed can just switch to another of the 100k sellers.

So in an idealized economic labor market with 1000 big employers and a hundred million employees, the employer still doesn't have much bargaining power, because the employee's alternative to not working still isn't 'not being employed', it's getting a job at another employer - their BATNA is just a slightly lower wage than their current one.

What GP was probably vaguely reaching at is all of the non-basic-econ-model reasons that employers have market power over workers - real world issues like specialization in certain jobs, the reduction in income caused by the gap in labor where you apply for a new job, risk in unknown gap spent not working and income of the future job, the fact that companies appoint (relatively) specialized and (relatively) high IQ people to create a system for negotiating with workers while workers are lower IQ and less sophisticated in negotiation, your commute restricting you to workplaces in your geographic area, the sheer convenience and habit of your current workplace, the gap in income interrupting spending you had planned because you made the mistake of not saving money (whether the spending is discretionary, which people still care a lot about, or mandatory spending on necessities for you or a family you need to support), cutting off benefits like health insurance tied to your workplace... All of these create situations where (in the current set of social circumstances) negotiations between employers and workers look and feel like ones where the employee's BATNA is 'no income for a few months and begging for rent money'.

Also, the difference in pay between modern non-union and modern union jobs, for any specific occupation, is much lower than you'd expect from either OP or the (more accurate claims in the) non-libertarian FAQ.

Yes, exactly, you put it better than I could.

Yours didn't have 200 word, paragraph-long run on sentences, though, I should probably put more effort into composition...

But the second situation is not even possible, you cannot have a factory without any workers...

Robots make it more and more possible every day.

Then there will be no need of a skilled worker...

You seem to think that's an issue. Pray tell, if workers accomplish nothing of value, why should they have any bargaining power at all? At that point better to go with UBI or something than support unions.

I agree, it would not be an economical problem. However it seems to me it is a problem with your argument: the negociating power of the workers has not increased because there is no need for them.

I was talking about what negotiating power actually is, not what it should be. Generally (with plenty of exceptions, such as monopolies) I think we should leave negotiating power as it is, though, and regulate around it.

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If there are 1000 people who could be widget workers, then the single employed widget worker obviously doesn't have nearly as much bargaining power as their employer. On the flip side, if there are 1000 widget factories and only 1 qualified worker, that worker obviously has much more bargaining power than any of their employers do.

Right... but which of those is closer to reality, though?

In reality there are about as many jobs as workers, considering the entire market together, though the quality of each varies.

In reality I'd say high-quality jobs and high-quality employees have a big edge, with the latter slightly winning out overall. In other words there are far more potential jobs for skilled applicants than there are highly skilled applicants.

The union argument rest on firms having market power over labor. Which I don’t believe is true in most situations.

Auto manufacturing is what one would call a constant costs business. You plug in x amount of inputs (labor, metal) and you get a car. And every other auto manufacture has about the same costs structure. So then you end up competing on price and thats why auto manufacturers don’t have high margins.

Auto manufacturer stocks don’t have great returns. There’s no real moat to make economic profits.

Back in the day the big three did have a moat before imports. You had to buy from one of the 3. So if the UAW strikes and shut down all 3 and gpt higher wages then the big 3 could pass on the high labor costs to higher car prices. Detroit labor got paid very well. The rest of America without high wages paid for expensive cars.

The union argument rest on firms having market power over labor. Which I don’t believe is true in most situations.

Yes. You are correct.

The time when unions would actually be useful is when unemployment is high. But union power grows when unemployment is low.

While it's true that there was a lot of union agitation in the 1930s, union membership really took off in the 1940s and continued to grow in the 1950s-1970s when low unemployment led to unprecedented power for employees. In many cases, the Federal government all but required vital industries to unionize during WWII (in exchange for a no-strike agreement).

The fact that we are seeing so much union talk right now is because workers have more power than they've had in decades.

I personally agree with Richard Hanania. I think unions are just another form of cartel that we tolerate because their average member is poorer than the average CEO. But much like rent control, allowing unions is a policy that has greater costs than benefits.

There have absolutely been times and places where unionization was necessary, unless one has basically zero consideration for human misery and abuse. Martyrmade has an excellent piece on the topic, "Whose America? (Part One)". But yes, like any other institution they can go rotten, and clearly have in many cases.

EDIT: Here's the link. https://martyrmade.com/22-whose-america-ep-1-rough-extraction/

I think I'm missing something

A union is a way to force the C-Suite and investors to share some of the massive amounts of wealth that they hoard (and ultimately waste on trifles). UAW has 145k employees, who are real people that have a greater quality of life because of union activity. I don’t know if you can say that unions destroyed the auto industry, as Japan has an auto union. It’s more likely that German and Japanese cars are popular because they make better cars irrespective of unions in the same way Japan historically makes better electronics (why is PlayStation competitive against Xbox?) and parts, and Germany pharmaceuticals (despite a high employee quality of life). East Asian phones and laptops are also pretty much superior to anything America’s non-unionized tech workers come up with, even though America wins out due to Apple’s marketing.

why is PlayStation competitive against Xbox?

The answer is in large part 'because Japanese people WILL NOT EVER buy foreign products, whereas westerners do not mind buying Japanese'. PlayStation has a couple dozen million guaranteed customers, something Xbox has no way to replicate.

I remember being astonished to learn that Vietnamese tourists will generally bring their own dried food to eat during their travels. Asia really is a foreign country.

Yep. Asian tourists in Western nations tend to do that or stay in hotels run by people of their own nationality, because they do not want to try foreign food. There are plenty of jokes about low-class Westerners sticking out like sore thumbs and refusing to adapt to where they are, but a random Brit or German can be convinced to eat half-baked fusion food that is just familiar enough to be 'exotic' far better than most Asian people abroad can be.

This is probably also another indication that Westerners - i.e. white people - appear to have higher openness to new experiences. I suspect it may be correlated with greater innovative capacities, which may explain why North-East Asia is not richer than the West despite having higher IQ on average. People who are less likely to try something new are also less likely to invent something new.

I think it's about food safety. Eating at a strange restaurant is inhernently a risk.

The US traditionally got around this by having diners for travellers serve a lot of mildly flavored food (eg maynaise & white bread) that won't hide the tast of spoiled meat. After food inspectors became common, spiced food became lower risk.

Asian tourists can safely eat at restaurants by the same nationality by checking for tells of high conscientiousness. Lazy restaurant owners who cut corners on food safety are generally lazy elsewhere. Looking to see if they follow all of the small rules their culture expects about decor is a strong signal. Also they can scan the other customers to see if they have appropriate standards.

Interesting, thanks. I didn't think about it that way but you're probably onto something.

There’s a pretty good case that America’s unions wrecked the auto industry with an overly adversarial relationship to management while Japan and Germany, because of a different culture and regulatory climate, had unions that didn’t.

We could well flip the script, and consider American management uniquely hostile to its employees in a way German and Japanese management is not. Both of these, or neither, may even be true.

I think the real answer might be America has the National Labor Relations Act forcing management-union interaction to be adversarial. None of this German style working together. That's illegal in America.

That'd be the 'both' I referred to, yeah. It is one more example of how Anglo and Germanic democracy do differ in the details.

A union is a way to force the C-Suite and investors to share some of the massive amounts of wealth

Isn't that supposed to work by developing a skill that the "C-Suite" wants? (The people making the most money on these companies, btw, are not the "c-suite", its' the investors who own the company)

that they hoard (and ultimately waste on trifles).

How does one "hoard" money?

That’s why I wrote “C-Suite and investors”, btw. Why do you think that a person should only get the lowest amount their employer is willing to pay? That’s not how it is supposed to work. It’s supposed to work like the Peasant’s Revolt of 1381, or the Secessio Plebis of 490 BC, or the Khmelnytsky Uprising in 1650. It’s supposed to work like that in the sense that this is how it has historically worked, with the modern fantasy of “just compensation = set by employers” being an historical anomaly limited in scope. This modern fantasy is not found in developed European countries, neither is it found among white collar professionals like doctors and lawyers who lobby to increase their pay.

How does one "hoard" money?

How does one hoard property?

You're basically asking that a low-skill worker at a company with high margins get paid more than a low-skill worker at a company with low margins, right?

It should be clear that this is inefficient. If I can choose to be a high-skill employee at a low-margin company or a low-skill employee at a high-margin company, it's clearly in society's best interest that I do the former. When wages are set by market rate this is, indeed, what happens. If we lived in your society then I'm going to squat on my high-paying low-skill job for as long as possible.

I don't relish the idea of economic inequality, but I put up with it because the alternative is Jeff Dean scrubbing pots. If you want to help poor people do it at the government level. Forcing successful companies to pay only their particular employees more is bonkers.

The efficiency that matters is if a larger portion of the population has a higher quality of life to produce more, healthier children, and if they have the resources to educate their children well. The efficiency that doesn’t matter is if we have rung out the lifeforce of 80% of the population so that 1% of people can waste resources lavishly. Surplus resources going to Bezos and wealthy stockholders is much more inefficient than if it were spread to his workers and increased their quality of life.

Automakers aren't even high-margin companies. 5% net margin is a pretty good year.

You're basically asking that a low-skill worker at a company with high margins get paid more than a low-skill worker at a company with low margins, right?

That's how things do work, yes, at a macro scale. American waiters are paid more than their Cambodian colleagues not because they are more skilled, but because their employers are richer and mostly can't afford to pay Cambodian wages.

IMO the right lens here is that American waiters have the valuable "capital" of living in America -- where there are high-earning consumers willing to pay for their labor.

In contrast, there's nothing more valuable about unionized workers compared to non-unionized workers (except their ability to rent seek).

How does one hoard property?

By not letting others use it. Do you imagine the investors in GM are somehow both investing in GM but also not allowing other people to use their wealth?

Do you think people invest without receiving appreciation or dividends? What do they do with that? Do they give it all away, or do they buy expensive unnecessary things for pure vanity, wasting the resources required to train its manufacturers, then manufacture it, then ship it, then store it, etc.

It is not possible to both hoard money and also give it to somebody else in exchange for goods and services.

I'm sorry for picking on this, but this particular thing is a pet peeve of mine. The idea that it is even possible to "hoard" money in any meaningful way is a fundamental misunderstanding of money. The only way I could think of accomplishing this would be to literally hold us paper currency in a vault. Nobody does that.

Okay, we can see if that way, but then they are doing something infinitely worse — abusing and destroying resources, value, and potential, which are what underlies the importance of money.

I'll admit that unions sortof confuse me. I didn't grow up around them and have always wondered the mechanism by which everybody gets to quit their job but then demand extra money to come back. Are the people running factory machines inside of Ford and GM (or starbucks, or a hollywood writers room) really that highly skilled?

Generally the point of unions is to try and rebalance the allocation of surplus generated by production more towards workers than it would otherwise be. The reason companies makes things (in an economic sense) is that things are more valuable post-production than the constituent parts were pre-production. There is often an imbalance of power between employees and employers (especially when the work force is large) that can enable employers to capture a very large (perhaps total) share of this surplus. Unions exist to try and ensure workers capture more of the surplus generated by production, generally by making it more difficult for employers to fire employees. This is more effective in higher-skilled industries because the costs to mass-replace employees are higher but it can work in low-skill professions as well thanks to legal protections.

Do you guys think there is a chance that the government tries to force Tesla to stop making cars during the strike to make things more fair?

No, definitely not.

The imbalance in power has no evidence. Workers in most industries especially ones that are no or semi-skilled (can retrain in a short time) have hundreds of thousands of potential employers fighting for their labor.

I think it depends on the ratio of employees to employers. Sure those employees have hundreds of thousands of potential employers, but those hundreds of thousands of employers have (tens of?) millions of potential employees.

Both are deep enough markets to have competition for their services. Ratio I don’t believe matters and can’t think of any model that would say it does.

I feel like professional sports is an obvious one. There's really only one employer per-sport (NHL, NFL, etc). There are individual teams within that but the org has a lot of control over how people are allowed to move between teams and so on. It's probably as close to a literal monopoly as one can get.

I don’t hate sports unions but as you implied the sports leagues themselves are basically protected monopolies. I think baseball even has specific legislation protected them from antitrust issues.

Why does the employer not simply fire the people doing the organizing?

Because it is illegal

Are the people running factory machines inside of Ford and GM (or starbucks, or a hollywood writers room) really that highly skilled?

Autoworkers and screenwriters? Yes. Baristas? Not so much. Which is why unions have historically been more successful in skilled trades than in nonskilled trades; it is difficult for employers to simply fire skilled workers because it is difficult to replace them. More importantly, if it is more expensive to replace them than to give them a raise, well, that answers your question about why employers do not simply fire them.

Which is why unions have historically been more successful in skilled trades than in nonskilled trades

Isn't this a strong argument against unions as a tool for economic redistribution, from a large-scale political strategy perspective, as they only benefit a fraction of low-wage workers, and one that'll already have higher wages than workers in unskilled trades?

No, it is an argument to make unionization easier, because the union wage premium has historically been higher for less skilled workers than for more skilled workers.

it’s illegal

To an outside this seems absolutely insane.

I remember a job I did in NYC once building a stage for a music festival. It was something custom we had built at home in Texas at our shop, then shipped to NYC to assemble. When we got on site, it was explained that the venue had a contract with a union and we were required to use their workers. This means every cable that was plugged in had to be plugged in by a union electrician, every piece of stage had to be assembled by a union carpenter, etc. It was madness. I cannot overstate the uselessness of these people. Absolutely the laziest, stupidest people I have ever met, and who seemed to be constantly on break.

If these are the same types of people working in auto factories, then it doesn’t seem like any of the automakers would be at any loss to simply fire them all.

How long can the strike go on before the company is allowed to just fire everybody?

At my work study job in college I once spilled some food on the ground. I went to clean it up and was stopped by my boss. Cleaning up messes was reserved for the union janitorial staff.

To an outside this seems absolutely insane.

It seems insane from the inside, too. I'm told you basically need a whole history course to figure out how we got to this weird place where "firing someone for refusing to do their job" and "employees agreeing to go on a 'wildcat' strike without The Union's approval" are both illegal.

I haven't taken that history course myself, so best I can do is quote from some old discussions I read online, without endorsing their accuracy:

Back in the day when labor struggles involved a lot more militancy, US unions very much did want workers to join, and sometimes their militant arms would clash as the organizations fought over members. And over other things, like some being (alleged) “company unions” that did not represent the interests of the workers.

So the US govt passed a ‘one union per industry; employers may only bargain with that one union’ union-unifying law to prevent [in?]fighting between the North Side Steelworkers Union and the South Side Steelworkers Union.

This had the side effect of massively empowering the resulting megacorporate-unions. So the US govt passed some laws limiting union bargaining power - in different ways, like making it illegal for the mega-unions to strike so much. Unsurprisingly, these laws had unintended consequences and overshot, so the government passed some more laws to empower unions in different ways again. Along the way, war rationing and wage controls and employer-provided healthcare-default happened, upsetting the bargaining positions some more, and guess what the US government did? That’s right, passed some federal regulations to fix it!

(This did not fix it.)

Or, with a handful of references:

Under the Wagner Act of 1935 (NLRA) ...

An employee cannot, for instance, join a competing union or negotiate separately from the union.

...

...striking employees are cannot legally be fired. Even if they are permanently replaced during the strike (which is greatly restricted and doesn’t get rid of the union), they must go to the top of the list to be taken back on when the strike is over.

...

  • Strikers/picketers are allowed to trespass on employer property, and employers are barred from seeking legal redress against this. Under the Norris-La Guardia Act of 1932 (Anti-Injunction Act).
  • In non-right-to-work states, unions can demand that all employees must join or pay “agency fees” to the union as a condition of employment. “Right-to-work” means they can’t do that, which was left to the states as a compromise, as part of the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947. Employers are barred under the Norris-La Guardia Act from requiring the reciprocal: not joining a union as a condition of employment.
  • Under U.S. v. Enmons (1973), union violence is exempt from the Hobbs Act of 1934 (Anti-Racketeering Act), prohibiting the obstruction of interstate commerce by robbery or extortion.

I like the comedy of the UC Santa Cruz graduate student union wildcat strike of 2019 and 2020. They illegally wildcat striked against their recently approved union contract that most of them voted against, but was forced onto them by union leadership getting other UCs to approve it. So a majority of union members at all UCs approved it and UCSC union members cannot negotiate a new contract just for them. The dean's office correctly stated that would be illegal and there will be no negotiation with the graduate students. The union approved of a contract against their will and that is what they shall get.

Yes, like all human endeavors, laws are regulations re unions are not perfect. They include some pitfalls, one of which you identify here. But why would you form a judgment that the entire system is "insane" without assessing all of the costs and benefits, rather than only one? By your logic, the Defund the Police folks are correct, because they can certainly point to an instance in which a police officer acted not only lazily and stupidly, but also maliciously. But, the Defund the Police folks are not correct, because, on net, having police is sound policy not "insane" policy.

I'd add it from an employer rights or business rights angle - as opposed to worker rights - it also feels intuitively absolutely insane that you would be stopped from putting to use your own materials because of intellectual property, or unable to repair something on your own (ala Louis Rossman on YT).

There are a lot of insane things in this world. What one chooses to highlight gives away a bias.

There are laws against taking certain types of anti union action. It varies by state but these laws give unions a lot more power than they would have in a true free market.

Are the people running factory machines inside of Ford and GM (or starbucks, or a hollywood writers room) really that highly skilled?

Switching costs are high, unions will generally make attempts to increase the difficulty of procuring 'scab'/temporary replacement labor and historically there was less ability to just move a factory international or procure international workers.

Do agree that the Writers' strike seems pretty fangless when it's not only a job with a fairly arbitrary marker of skill/ability to function, but it's also one that's an actual desired, targeted role for a lot of people without a real credentialist barrier to entry. Writer compensation should, logistically, have a pretty severe pareto principle.

Screenwriting is much harder than it looks. As evidence, I present all the garbage shows people love to hate. In recent years alone we’ve had incredibly high-profile properties with massive budgets that fail to include a coherent plot.

Worse, reusing quality writing is a death sentence. Prior to recorded audio and especially video, it was much safer. Today, if you want to see Shakespeare, you can watch a filmed performance, read the original text, or attend a live showing. A producer who wants to leverage that writing and credibility has to have their own spin.

Say you want to make a new TV episode. You copy a classic formula, you’re a hack. You spin an existing one, still a hack. You go original, well, you’re probably not as original as you think. If you really are, though…you’re gambling. High profile projects don’t like gambling.

The thing is, if it's so hard to write good scripts that few people can do it now, we can make do with less new media. The same is not true for jobs that produce physical goods.

I don't think that's strictly true--we can make do with less of most things. But directionally, sure, it's easier to reuse existing media than existing...sheet steel, or plastic, or something. Entertainment is a luxury.

But that's tangential to the OP, which claims the supply of writers is being artificially restricted. I was arguing that it's not particularly artificial, since most of the crop of potential good writers aren't taking the commitment to enter the market.

There’s certainly skill involved in writing, but the barriers beyond skill are pathetically low and frankly there are millions of people trying to get in. Every 14 year old girl with a laptop is an “aspiring author” and there’s a lot of amateurs doing fan fiction (look up some fan-made Trek shows, but for acting and production values, they’re probably nearly on par with the pros at this point) it’s a skilled trade, but it’s not wizardry and not impossible to learn. What keeps people out of Hollywood is more the difficulty of getting your SAG card, not any real skills gap.

You could make this same argument about, I don’t know, carpentry. Most anyone can learn it, lots of amateurs try, and the work of the best craftsmen is quite impressive. It’s even got a bit of cultural cachet, at least among men over 30. So why aren’t those men breaking into the carpentry industry and depressing wages?

It’s not because they can’t get a carpentry guild card. It’s because the demand for artisanal carpenters is actually pretty small. Carving table legs as a hobby is fine. Quitting your day job to focus on it is stupid.

14yo fanfiction authors don’t usually end up with movie deals or even a steady job writing. Too much risk of ending up homeless in LA. Conversely, for a studio, hiring a total unknown is more risk than they’d like. What are the odds that you get something competent, vs. Empress Theresa?

People would probably risk homelessness for carpentry if there were highly paid star carpenters.

There totally should be highly paid star carpenters.

Technically the biggest celebrity in human history is a star carpenter!

Sure Harrison Ford is well known but I think you overstate it.

Yeah, I notice that it did kind of happen in the past – Thomas Chippendale was a household name. However that was at a time when furniture was a huge status symbol among a small number of people among whom wealth was highly concentrated (more than today).

More comments

What, do you think you can put a bunch of fanfic writers with the highest number of likes in a writers room and they will write Succession? It IS wizardry (at least in a similar way to other developable skills such as being a professional athlete or musician).

The vast majority of writers put in a room are producing quality a lot closer to 14 year old fanfic than they are to Succession.

I think ‘writing something usable as a script’ is not equal to ‘writing a good story’ and the former takes a lengthy apprenticeship to figure out the how to’s, and isn’t really transferable from other kinds of writing.

What, do you think you can put a bunch of highly credentialed, well-regarded writers in a writers room and they will write Succession? I'm not sure what the secret sauce is in well-written shows such as that and Better Call Saul, but it doesn't seem to be specific to the screenwriters themselves. There have just been too many bad TV shows to easily chalk it all up to conflicts between artistic quality and commercial success.

Touché, there are indeed a tonne of stars that need to align to produce a good show. But I think that without seasoned professional writers, it would take really quite a long time for a new breed to develop well enough to deliver even the patchy consistency of quality we currently see.

It’s a high level of skill sure, but I don’t think it’s nearly as unattainable as people assume. It takes years of practice, it takes a bit of talent, but it’s a craft like most others. It’s just that most people don’t put in the hours required or learn the proper techniques.

I can't tell if you are being sarcastic or not, but: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifty_Shades_of_Grey_(film)?useskin=vector

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifty_Shades_of_Grey?useskin=vector#Background_and_publication

50 Shades of gray was twilight fanfiction that become a very popular bookseries, followed by several financially successful movies.

While these things are in a different category than Succession or other prestige TV shows, I don't think the writers are striking to make the scripts better.

I am a sweet summer child but I actually do believe they partly are striking to make the shows better. If you end up with small teams having to write shows fast (the way it's been going), you lose the large writer's rooms and space for development that enable young writers to practice and get good. I don't believe long prestige TV seasons get made with the typical British model (in which one or two writers typically take on all writing duties for a series). Quality has already got worse in the streaming age, sometimes I think a lot worse.

Re the Twilight example, obvs there are some fanfic writers who became high grossing professionals, people have to start somewhere. I don't think that gives us many clues about how to actually use the talent of fanfic and other amateur writers appropriately though.

I am talking about how to engineer a replacement talent pool from amateur writers relatively quickly if, say, the strike didn't end.

Re the Twilight example, obvs there are some fanfic writers who became high grossing professionals, people have to start somewhere. I don't think that gives us many clues about how to actually use the talent of fanfic and other amateur writers appropriately though.

E. L. James doesn't just happen to have some old fanfic on her resume from way back when she started her writing career; Fifty Shades of Grey is LITERALLY a Twilight fanfic called Master of the Universe with the names changed.

Master of the Universe:

I scowl with frustration at myself in the mirror. Damn my hair, it just won't behave, and damn Rose for being ill and subjecting me to this ordeal. I have tried to brush my hair into submission but it's not toeing the line. I must learn not to sleep with it wet. I recite this five times as a mantra whilst I try, once more, with the brush. I give up. The only thing I can do is restrain it, tightly, in a ponytail and hope that I look reasonably presentable.

Rose is my roommate and she has chosen, okay, that's a bit unfair, because choice has had nothing to do with it, but she has the flu and as such cannot do the interview she's arranged with some mega industrialist for the student newspaper. So I have been volunteered. I have final exams to cram for, one essay to finish and I am supposed to be working this afternoon, but no - today - I have to head into downtown Seattle and meet the enigmatic CEO of Cullen Enterprise Holdings, Inc. Allegedly he‘s some exceptional tycoon who is a major benefactor of our University and his time is extraordinarily precious... much more precious than mine -and he‘s granted Rose an interview... a real coup she tells me... Damn her extra-curricular activities.

Fifty Shades of Grey:

I scowl with frustration at myself in the mirror. Damn my hair – it just won’t behave, and damn Katherine Kavanagh for being ill and subjecting me to this ordeal. I should be studying for my final exams, which are next week, yet here I am trying to brush my hair into submission. I must not sleep with it wet. I must not sleep with it wet. Reciting this mantra several times, I attempt, once more, to bring it under control with the brush. I roll my eyes in exasperation and gaze at the pale, brown-haired girl with blue eyes too big for her face staring back at me, and give up. My only option is to restrain my wayward hair in a ponytail and hope that I look semi presentable. Kate is my roommate, and she has chosen today of all days to succumb to the flu.

Therefore, she cannot attend the interview she’d arranged to do, with some mega-industrialist tycoon I’ve never heard of, for the student newspaper. So I have been volunteered. I have final exams to cram for, one essay to finish, and I’m supposed to be working this afternoon, but no – today I have to drive a hundred and sixty-five miles to downtown Seattle in order to meet the enigmatic CEO of Grey Enterprises Holdings Inc. As an exceptional entrepreneur and major benefactor of our University, his time is extraordinarily precious – much more precious than mine – but he has granted Kate an interview. A real coup, she tells me. Damn her extra-curricular activities.

I definitely notice the best-written fanfic regularly beat the pants off of the average professional TV show. In a sane world, they would be allowed to sell their products on the bookshelves directly with a mandatory royalty fee paid to the copyright holder. In our world, best bet is either to rewrite their existing work into original properties, if possible, or hire them to write something new, if not.

The fact there's no credentialist barrier to entry to writing for the screen means there are a million and seven aspiring writers for every job and the vast majority are awful. But you can't prove they're awful, it's kinda subjective. All you really have to go on is the respect/admiration of producers and other creative people, and their previous credits. These relationships and credits are very difficult to obtain and so they select strongly (whether for exactly the most talented people, I highly doubt, but they do select). Sidestepping that edifice of relationships and trust and trying to start again with writers who are willing to scab (i.e. those new writers who don't care about the very relationships that matter most, with other writers, show runners, actors etc) would be truly hard and expensive. You'd have to invest a lot without knowing who'd do a good job, building whole new systems of trust, and that would require a lot of failure along the way.

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