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Notes -
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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