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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28036 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 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.

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