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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.
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 not even that great then. Unions are a huge reason why America is no longer manufacturing things to the same scale it was. It’s orders of magnitude cheaper and easier to simply build the plant in Mexico or Southeast Asia than deal with the overinflated wages and poor work ethic of union employees.
There's a 25% import tax on light trucks, which are 69% of the market and consist of basically anything bigger than a Toyota Camry. So as long as the unions steal 24% or less, it's not actually cheaper.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicken_tax
https://www.autoweek.com/news/a1714156/light-trucks-take-record-69-us-market/
This is primarily caused by Obama era fuel efficiency rules, which hold big cars to unrealistic fuel efficiency standards but allow trucks to escape fuel efficiency standards by becoming larger. For obvious reasons unions have opposed attempts to fix these rules.
https://www.thedrive.com/news/small-cars-are-getting-huge-are-fuel-economy-regulations-to-blame
https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/kdkdx3/normal_truck_vs_american_truck/
I would be enormously unsurprised if workers in the US were paid double that of workers in Mexico, and that's before we even start getting into non-pay related union inefficiencies.
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America is at record production from manufacturing. Workers are down but it’s because productivity improved.
Productivity improves mostly by eliminating the overpriced workers.
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Do you even hear yourself? How long has real wage growth been stagnant in the United States? Workers need to get paid more, even if it affects the shareholders or C-suite compensation packages.
Median weekly earnings hit a nadir of 345 "1982-1984" dollars in Q4 2017, and increased to 362 such dollars in Q4 2019, their highest value to date by far (previous peak was 354 in Q2 2017). The pandemic made everything go screwy and it hit 393 in Q2 2020, it's now 365.
It's not stagnant; there was a stagnant period from 1999 to 2014, though I note these numbers do not take into account total compensation, so likely what was happening is health care was eating it all.
Thats all heavily dependent on which inflation rate you use to do the calcs.
It's the consumer price index. Pulling out some other shadow inflation figure is special pleading.
No it’s standard practice and the whole Index itself is difficult to measure. We don’t buy the same goods one year to the next.
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When automakers can literally cross the border into Mexico and get the same quality work for less than a third of the cost, the auto worker is overpaid.
Or the other auto-worker is underpaid....
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Compensation in the US has more or less steadily grown since it started being measured in the 50s.
In pessimist/doomer spaces that want to make the economy seem worse than it is, e.g. Reddit, you frequently see charts that show otherwise. This is pretty much always due to dishonest stats, e.g:
Using "household income" instead of per-capita, which is confounded with shrinking household sizes.
Using inflators like CPI that doesn't take substitution effects into account (instead of e.g. PCE) and thus overstate inflation a lot if compared over a long period of time.
Not counting transfer payments.
Counting the decline in hours worked as lowered wages, and not as people choosing to work less when they don't need to.
Just completely making shit up, like this tweet that made the rounds a few days ago where real household income is compared to nominal rent prices.
That figure doesn’t account for the four year degree requirement, the grad school requirement for a lot positions, the debt of these two, or the requirement to have a smart phone and laptop, right?
Does the cost of laptops and smart phone really factor in to these figures meaningfully?
Maybe, why not? The average price of a mobile plan is 144 monthly, so 1.7k yearly, so 3% of the median salary.
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"Real Hourly Compensation for All Workers" does not attempt to capture every possible thing in society that affects peoples finances, no.
(Though increases in cost of education will be reflected in the inflation, and as such adjusted for. Also the cost of the minimum viable laptop and smartphone required for getting a job is comparatively very low, and people get them anyway even if they weren't required – even the homeless have phones!)
A mandatory four year period of large debt and fewer working hours is a serious cost on the median citizen and I’m skeptical this is actually conveyed in the inflation metric. Because you can’t just take “tuition increased by this amount”, you also have to measure the fact that it’s required for more workers who may otherwise have forgone it completely
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