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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   28027 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.

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.

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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