You’ve already indicated that you don’t think the EFCA is a god way to remedy the problem. What is your suggestion for a remedy?
Because it’s become obvious that without prodding, many employers will simply never make a deal. Note that the reason a deal is not being arrived at is not due to what the employer sees as unfair terms for employment except for the fact that employees want to deal with him as a group instead of one at a time. You don’t see an imbalance of power in that situation? The mediation clause was an attempt to rectify that and bring both sides to an agreement.
Clearly they did not have a reasonable case, since they lost when they argued it before the NLRB and a judge.
Because constant and continual labor struggles and the drawing of lines and resultant animosity has been decided to be bad overall for society. The employer isn’t being asked to negotiate with some big scary entity of strangers; he’s being asked to negotiate with his employees as a group, instead of individually.
And yet this Michigan bio, which gets in the way of the employer and the worker is favorable to you.
Then you should support things which support a free market, and denouce that which does not. Yet you support laws that favor the employer which decrying laws that seek to help the worker.
FTR, I don’t have a problem with RTW laws as a rule. I’v elided in RTW states most of my life, and had no problems working as a union member.
Michigan’s RTW law, tho, is a piece of crap that seeks not to level and playing field in any way, shape or form; it is written mainly with the intent of disrupting unions.
The bolded part, IMO, shows that you really know less about unions and how they work (and why they exist) than I previously thought.
Actually the free market is absolutely dependent upon regulations for its well-being, the most fundamental of which is property rights. If I can get your goods by stealing them, why should I trade for them? Property rights are of course of much more value to those who have a lot of property than to those who have little, which is why they mostly became a class thing.
And unregulated free markets are parasites that inevitably destroy the economies that harbor them. A free market is just a filtering mechanism that sorts out people who are good and/or lucky at making money. The people who succeed use their money to bribe politicians to give them unfair advantages in the marketplace. If the people who succeed are not carefully regulated, they will eventually absorb most of the wealth in any economy (Hello one percent!).
And because the economic engines that are corporations care only about profits (as free market proponents repeatedly assure us the only purpose of corporations) they are sociopaths, and will tend to pay employees absolutely as little as the market will allow. And with the politicians in their back pocket, the market will allow very little indeed. Basically, we are in a race to the bottom, and people like Human Action with their worship of the Free Market are just greasing the skids … no matter what he THINKS he’s doing.
The problem being defined by you as “an employer has a captive and dependent audience who are subject to intimidation and other forms of coercion.” Your solution was to (seemingly) make coercion much easier through open voting, so that union intimidation would balance employer intimidation. Is that correct?
My solution would be to remove the NLRA certification process. Let any group of employees organize as they will, with no 30% minimum or one exclusive bargaining group per group of employees.
In a free market, transactions must be voluntary, which ensures that they are mutually beneficial. Yes, an employer (and employees) should be free to not make a deal.
Would you advocate your approach in any other area of life? Any time two parties are unable to reach a deal, force them into binding arbitration by government?
As I noted. I thought it germaine that their arguement wasn’t “The union can screw off!”, it was “This union doesn’t truly represent our employees.”
“Being asked” implies being able to refuse. Isn’t “being forced” more accurate?
If it was decided in 1935 that a free labor market was “bad overall for society”, thus legal coercion was needed, then we got the decision wrong, and it’s time to revisit it. Making unions illegal would have achieved the same result of labor peace, would it not? But that is equally wrong. The price we pay for freedom is that the other guy gets to make free choices too, even if you disagree with them.
Not sure what “bio” means here, but this law is marginally acceptable, because it seeks to counteract the stacking of the deck in favor of the unions. As I have maintained, broad labor reform should replace RTW laws.
Only in the broader context of labor law. RTW laws shouldn’t be considered in a vacuum.
Does Michigan’s law substantially differ from similar ones, like the Alabama statute I linked to?
Not sure how to take this…was I over-broad? I know that different unions in different industries have different practices. But the philosophy I mentioned is very much alive in many unions:
You are correct. A free market is only possible under the rule of law; it is impossible under a state of anarchy.
I think property rights are important to all, regardless of “class.”
Has anyone here advocated for unregulated markets? The dispute is over which regulations are beneficial to all, and which favor certain groups at the expense of others. A good rule of thumb: regulations that prevent or interfere with voluntary exchange should be avoided, regulations that prevent coercion should be embraced.
As to using politicians to gain unfair advantages in the market, that is exactly what I am against. It is wrong, whether it’s done on behalf of millionaires, or masses of laborers. Don’t fool yourself into thinking that only the wealthy have political influence in a democracy.
Sociopathy is defined as making rational economic decisions in a free market of voluntary transactions? That can’t be right. DSM-IV defines antisocial personality disorder as “…a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.” What disregard for and violation of the rights of others is taking place, exactly, in offering competitive wages?
Can you demonstrate that a “race to the bottom” is occuring? If so, how should we counteract the effect?
Stop busting unions? Look, I agree with you, generally, that voluntary agreements are better than coerced ones, or even managed ones. However, what other mechanism is there for rebalancing the vast gulf in negotiating power between an employer and an employee?
The imbalance is tempered by the employee’s ability to go work elsewhere. Beyond that, it’s simply a fact of life. In the same way, if I ask Megan Fox out on a date, what’s the mechanism for rebalancing the vast gulf in negotiating power between us? Answer: none. She’s a hot twenty-something actress and I’m a middle-aged paunchy middle-class professional. The situation is inherently unbalanced, and that’s just the way life is.
Both are private relationships, entered into voluntarily between two people (legal or natural). Why are they so utterly different that no comparison is possible?
ETA: I think I know why you say this. Because we recognize that a person’s dating decision is not a matter of social welfare to the extent that we’d intrude on it by mandating any aspect of it. We all agree it’s private.
But employment seems to be different. You seem to view employers as filling some sort of social welfare role as well as (or perhaps instead of) a personal role. Employers have some social responsibility that you’re willing to mandate by law, and dating doesn’t.
I dispute that this gulf is so unmanageable that it requires government intervention. Employees compete with one another for jobs; employers compete with one another for employees. There is a tendency to view businesses as monolithic, self-perpetuating entities that dictate terms to the rest of us and accrue undue power.
The truth is that, in a free society, a business is a fragile thing, which exists only so long as its products and services are of value to its customers. Here are some five-year survival rates by sector, covering the period 2005-2010, using the Census Bureau’s Business Dynamics Statistics data. After five years, the survival rate for the best of the sectors (mining) stood at 51.3%. The worst, construction, stood at 36.4%.
What gulf there is in negotiating power is a result of the business assuming the bulk of the risk in the relationship. Only one party is spending money, after all. When a business fails, the employees are free to move on to another. The owners shoulder the burden of debt.
So, I posit that: a) the gulf isn’t vast; b) what gulf there is is reasonable to be expected; and c) no rebalancing mechanism is required.
I don’t speak for Really Not All That Bright, but I think the idea of employers as agents of social welfare is fairly widespread on the political left. Their ideas seem to assume that workers are interchangeable victims with no power over their lives, rather than voluntary partners in a mutually-beneficial relationship to which both parties contribute greatly. The fact that employers are competing for employees goes unnoticed, as well. The sum total of this outlook is that businesses really exist to provide jobs, rather than to make a profit on goods and services desired by the public, with jobs being a side-effect. Note Evil Captor’s characterization of businesses as sociopathic for seeking only profits. Once you’ve decided that businesses should serve the public, not their owners (who are facing the risks), then the idea of trying to manage them via government suddenly becomes not just palatable, but necessary.
“Right to Work” is a nauseating euphemism, originally coined by a racist Texas political huckster named Vance Muse. He wanted to bust unions because he saw them as a venue for integration. As he put it:
Muse’s “Christian American Association”, which was associated with the Texas KKK and the American Legion (who in those days were total red-baiting fascists), was formed to lobby for these “Right to Work” laws, and was an early example of Southern strategy-style politics. Fred Koch was one of the leaders of the Kansas “Right to Work” effort, after which he helped co-found the John Birch Society.
I really will never understand the motives of non-plutocrats who want to see organized labor crippled (well, crippled even more than it is). Do they think these sleazy, rich pricks are going to see their supportive internet posts and hook them up with a job or something?
As I pointed out in post 298, one of the goals of organized labor was to keep African-American and female labor from competing with them. By your logic, you should be fighting against minimum wage laws. Are you?
I don’t think we’re talking about the same thing. “Subject to market forces” is not crippled, it’s normal.
Also, as an aside, one’s personal values and ideals should transcend their temporal economic situation. If I could increase my income by stealing credit-card numbers, I still wouldn’t, because it’s wrong. If I could keep my wages artificially high by throwing bricks at strikebreakers until they stop showing up to work, I still wouldn’t, because it’s wrong.
Because something has been is not good enough reason to assume that it must be. It is Written? Will of God? Precisely what authority are you appealing to?
David E. Bernstein is a professor at well-established hack mill George Mason University, and wrote a book purporting to “rehabilitate” Lochner. I’ll view his claims regarding the positive civil rights value of “freedom of contract” with much skepticism, thank you.
Ah, so unfettered free markets are “normal.” Which makes organized labor abnormal.
Do you deny that a) African-Americans were explicitly denied memberships in labor unions, and b) minimum-wage laws were advocated as a means of protecting organized while labor from African-American labor? Because both assertions are easily proven, if you’d like.
Not so. I don’t know if you’ve read the entire thread, but this has been addressed. The issue isn’t the existence of unions, which can be beneficial, and are not contrary to a free market.
The issue is certain union practices and legal advantages, which restrain trade and prevent free negotiation.
If this is all so very high-minded and proper, why was it necessary to do this legislation in stealth? When, exactly, did the Republicans there campaign on a promise of curbing union power? When did they campaign on the necessity to undermine Democrat power? Why was it necessary to include an appropriations clause in order to short-circuit a referendum?
I invoke the principle of aquatic fowl taxonomy: if it walks like a duck, has feathers, quacks and swims, the highest probability is that it is, in fact, a duck.
Once more, I have no objections to “unions.” I object to certain union practices and legal advantages.
As an analogy, in post #252, I Made French Toast For You linked to a report about a seafood company locking its workers in its plant, and violated wage and hour laws. Can I condemn this company’s actions without objecting to businesses in general and as a concept?
Also, I am assuming you have no objection to my points a and b. While one RTW advocate may have had racist, discriminatory motivations, many labor unions did as well, so at worst it’s a wash.
Look, I agree with you, generally, that voluntary agreements are better than coerced ones, or even managed ones. However, what other mechanism is there for rebalancing the vast gulf in negotiating power between an employer and an employee?