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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.
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.
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.
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