Right, so not a train station attendant who can be trained in half a day, but a train driver doing a difficult and skilled job requiring a minimum of 6 months training with considerable safety responsibilities at unsociable hours, as part of the world-class public transport system that keeps the UKs capital city and economic engine humming…
For which they earn about the same as, say, consumer brand managers who work 9-5, are not responsible for anyone’s safety and whose failure to turn up to work wouldn’t bring much of anything to a halt.
Seems… fair enough?
To tie this more direclty into the thread - undoubtedly, the fact that this job pays so well is down to the actions of the relevant unions and their willingness to strike. But again - why shouldn’t this responsible and economically important job pay well? What is wrong or bad about this outcome?
There is one absolutely huge one - negotiated benefits. You don’t want to pay union dues, but you’re more than happy to receive the pay and benefit increases that the union negotiated? Unfortunately, that’s how unions lose negotiating power. Yeah, one person doesn’t make that much difference, but then someone else sees how they don’t have to pay dues; then a few more; now only half the employees are union, and the administration can weather a strike.
That being said, I don’t think that unions should be involved in politics. The money I’m paying to the union for negotiations, strike fund, legal representation, etc. shouldn’t be going to Candidate Doe. I understand the Chicago Police Union endorsing a candidate for mayor because they have the same (or similar) goals to the union; I don’t think they should be as a union donating to the candidate or otherwise aiding the campaign. You, as an individual, want to donate? Great! You, as an individual, want to pass out literature? Wonderful! Heck, it wouldn’t bother me if the union says “We endorse this candidate - this is where you can sign up to help.”
I used to work in the insurance industry, and one of the companies I worked for tried to strong-arm us into donating to their PAC. Nope. Not gonna do it. I disagree with many of the stances you are pushing. In general, I believe that having medical insurance is a good thing (hense working for an insurance company); I have no problem with that being a single-payer system, and I’m not paying into a PAC that I believe is overall causing harm. Now, if the company was deducting from my pay to add to the PAC, I’d have a serious problem. BTW - the donations were opt-out, and I opted out at the first available moment. That was even too slimy for me.
I don’t know how it works elsewhere, but for my union, every penny that’s used for political/campaign purposes must come from our Political Action Committee, which is entirely separate from our union dues. We can encourage members to sign up for PAC donations, but it must be clear that it’s entirely voluntary and that signing up has no effect on their membership. During campaign seasons, certain union employees will work solely for the PAC and can’t talk with us about anything unrelated to political campaigns, nor can they be part of the regular union meetings. (I think I have that part right–I know that they’re following legal advice, but I’m not 100% clear on what that entails).
Meanwhile, when I worked for IBM, I helped them produce profits that they could use for political donations. I couldn’t say, “Please don’t use any part of my labor to fund a campaign donation.” They just did it with my labor.
If we remove unions entirely from the political money game, I’d like to remove all for-profit entities at the same time.
Assuming you’re right (i.e., that the supply is artificially restricted), if it weren’t, do you understand that people would no longer jump at the chance to earn the wages, since they’d be much lower?
I’m hoping that you’re agreeing that’s an artificial constraint? We’re not talking about the engineers who build the locomotives. We’re talking, at best, about the people who drive the locomotives. And pretty much the people who are walking down the aisle selling cups of tea. Why should they have their wage protected because they can hold the public hostage?
MY EXPERIENCE is… you get hired by the company; part of the on-boarding is here’s the union ap.
FOR TRADE UNIONS (carpenters, etc.), it can be more of you join the union; the union works as an employment agency to find you union work.
OK, similar to my company’s PAC experience; hopefully it’s opt-in, not opt-out (man, that really pissed me off!). Certainly fits with the Corporate model.
Actually, I don’t. But I know that if I wanted to get a job as a station cleaner, a non-union job, I could get it pretty much immediately. Platform/station attendants have much easier jobs, but they’re protected and higher paid. I’m pretty sure they didn’t need several weeks’ training to tell people to stand behind the yellow line. Same thing with driving a train - it’s not very difficult. The reason train drivers are paid so much isn’t based on their skill level, it’s based on the fact they’re in a union. If there was a free market alternative, they’d lose their jobs in seconds.
I don’t think there’s any disagreement on these ideas:
The lower-paid a job is, the higher the ratio of positions available:applicants. So, a job that pays minimum wage might have 10 positions available for every 8 applicants, whereas a job that pays well might have 10 positions available for every 50 applicants.
Unionizing is a way for workers to get better pay.
Unionized jobs are often really good jobs, so there’s less turnover, and fewer openings.
Nonunionized jobs, because they’re less attractive, have more openings and more turnover.
Unionized jobs are better because unions advocate for better pay and other conditions.
Do we all agree on all these points?
It’s a little weird to resent a union for making a job so good that there’s not much turnover and therefore it’s more difficult for new people to enter the field. Fortunately, unions are democratic institutions. If you work a job that’s really good due to union efforts, and you think the job should be shittier so that there’s more turnover and more openings, vote for a different leadership team.
To the idea that these jobs are low-skilled or can be achieved without much in the way of training: things I have witnessed, or which have been well publicised, which station attendants on trains and tubes may have to deal with:
Dangerously overcrowded platforms
Belligerent drunks
Sleepy drunks
300 angry commuters wanting someone to scream at about a late train
A 70+ year old woman falling down an escalator and bleeding profusely from the scalp and fading in and out of consciousness while 300 commuters tried to get on a train
Overflowing toilets
Football crowds
Safely helping disabled passengers on to and off trains
Receiving sexual and racist harassment
Helping passengers on the receiving end of sexual and racist harassment
Dealing with non-payers
Finding the best fare for confused passengers from the legendarily complex and hard to navigate UK ticket system
Tracking down lost property
Bomb scares
Bombs
I wouldn’t do that job for any money. I don’t have the skills or mentality for it.
But the main point is this:
The fact that they can demonstrate the enormous public value of their job by simply not doing it for a couple of days is an excellent reason that they should earn a good wage - clearly their labour is worth a lot, so why should they not see a fair share of that?
Yes, of course, that’s the basis of supply/demand economics. The market may set a wage rate that government deems too low. That’s the basis for a minimum wage. If the argument was that workers should be paid the minimum wage, I’d agree 100%. However, the argument, at least how I’m reading it, is that workers should set their own minimum wage, I disagree with that idea. If they want to make more money, they should improve their skillset to a level that’s demanded by the market. Instead, they want their wages protected because they can deny services they’ve already agreed to provide.
If everyone hwo worked in my old field, commercial market research, unionised and went on strike: nothing would happen. Nobody would care. Business would lose no money. They would probably make money when they realised they didn’t need to pay for these services. No one would be inconvenienced. The strike would fail. Being in a union would not be a sufficient condition for getting paid well.
What? Of course workers should set their own minimum wage. It’s called “not working for someone that won’t pay you what you want.” Anything else would be slavery.
Your objection really seems to be workers organizing to set a minimum wage. If Joe won’t work for less than $20 an hour, and Freya won’t work for less than $20 an hour, that’s fine; but if Joe and Freya agree that neither of them will work for less than $20 an hour, suddenly it’s a problem.
I went through 5 strikes in my 40 years at Boeing. During the first strike, I had picket duty with a long time union steward. He explained to me why we went out on strike and what the outcome would be. In all 5 strikes, we went out because the company wanted the employees to pay more for benefits. The first strike was over health care costs, this ended up being the reason for 3 of the 5 strikes. The others were over mandatory overtime and wages. Also, the strikes happened at times the company was doing well, sales and deliveries were up.
He also told me how the strike would likely end and this was true in all cases. Before we went out, the company would offer a wage and benefit package, this was presented as cost per hour per employee. If this offer was rejected, out we went. In all cases, when the strike ended, we always got a package that was the same cost per hour per employee as the original offer, the money was just moved around. In 4 of the 5 strikes, the offer included a nice signing bonus that in reality cost us money during the life of the contract. The only strike that did not result in a bonus was the only strike strike that last beyond Christmas, we ended up with a pretty sweet health care package instead.
Fortunately for us, the community generally supported us. I got my mug on the evening news 3 different times and a picture of me sitting in a chair eating an ice cream bar while holding a picket sign on the front page of a major Seattle newspaper. Now that I am retired, I do believe going out on strike was the right choice, even if it was just to get some time off of job for a month or 2.