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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28065 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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But the second situation is not even possible, you cannot have a factory without any workers...

Robots make it more and more possible every day.

Then there will be no need of a skilled worker...

You seem to think that's an issue. Pray tell, if workers accomplish nothing of value, why should they have any bargaining power at all? At that point better to go with UBI or something than support unions.

I agree, it would not be an economical problem. However it seems to me it is a problem with your argument: the negociating power of the workers has not increased because there is no need for them.

I was talking about what negotiating power actually is, not what it should be. Generally (with plenty of exceptions, such as monopolies) I think we should leave negotiating power as it is, though, and regulate around it.

I'm not sure I understand. First message, you say that negociating power would be better for workers if there were less skilled workers and more factories and you give an example.

Then I proved the negociating power would not be better in this situation. Nothing about what it should or should not be there.

Then, you reply that it's true, but there are better things to do than to protect unions in this situation.

To that I reply that you might be right, but it has nothing to do with my concern that the first message I replied to was based on a false hypothesis.

Now you tell me that it's about the negociating power as it is, and I almost agree: it's about the negociating power as it would be, if we changed the situation. But you still did not answer my concern?

First message, you say that negociating power would be better for workers if there were less skilled workers and more factories and you give an example.

Then I proved the negociating power would not be better in this situation. Nothing about what it should or should not be there.

Well both of the examples I mentioned (1000 jobs competing for one worker, 1000 workers competing for one job) weren't actually meant to be literal; they're just examples for the thought experiment. It's not really a false hypothesis--I was using those numbers to make a point, and the point could just as easily have been made using 10 trillion in place of 1000 even though there aren't 10 trillion workers or factories in existence.

In reality both workers and jobs are fungible, so there is never such thing as 1000 workers competing for one job (or otherwise being unemployed) or 1000 jobs competing for one worker (or otherwise leaving that position open). Really they just take the next best option.

The point is that workers compete for jobs and jobs compete for workers, and under certain circumstances one or the other has an advantage, generally depending on which is in shorter supply. As two real-world examples, compare two types of programmers, backend programmers and videogame developers. The former is a much less glamorous and less fun job on its face, so workers there have much less competition and much more negotiating power. Jobs in that field compete for workers more than workers compete for jobs. Videogame developers on the other hand, that's a crowded field, so I think workers compete for jobs more than jobs compete for workers there.

Going back to our original discussion, because I see I didn't provide enough info there, the "skilled worker" I was referencing would be something akin to a machine maintainer, a highly qualified person who can oversee the entire factory by themselves. It's not a real position--you'd still probably need security, janitors, etc.--but I think were such a position to exist, and were robots relatively cheap, that person would have quite a lot of leverage over their employer.

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