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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)
Yes. In the US there's a sense that you don't have the freedom to escape the pressure to try to be rich. It's up or out, striver for everyone. (Unless you want to join the ranks of the homeless, dropping out of any semblance of a normal middle class existence.)
I've been doing contracting jobs for years in tech and anyone not already looking over their shoulder at the next job when they're only a week in to their current one is kind of a sucker. An endless hustle.
The reason capitalism is the most productive economic system is Darwinian creative destruction as new ideas outcompete old ones, often in the form of churning enterprises. People hate this. Even the winners typically hate this. Schumpeter predicted that social democracy, even if it didn't seccumb to Marxism, would inevitably destroy capitalism by turning to a quasi-socialist mush as voters replaced a culture of dynamic entrepreneurship with "laborism" -- i.e. the philosophy that the point of the economy is to make life as cushy as possible for workers rather than products as good as possible for consumers.
America's greatest achievement is keeping the entrepreneurial spirit relatively healthy. In much of the rest of the advanced world its essentially dead. In Canada, we live in a corporatist state and the best research on the subject shows regulation and corporate cronyism is the reason our GDP per capita has slid from 85% of the U.S. level a generation ago to 70% today.
So the role in unions in fostering “laborism” is clearly bad in my opinion as it robs us of economic growth, but I do sympathize with the desire of people to get out of the economic rat race. Many people want to get their credential, get a secure job with a pension and then put their career and livelihood on autopilot until age 65 so they can raise their kids, pursue hobbies, etc. Some people just have extreme risk aversion or grew up in precarious financial circumstances and seek out these jobs.
I just think those jobs should be paid less than market wages, not more.
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