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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.
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.
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)
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.
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
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.
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?
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")
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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.
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