But those consumers are wealthier because they have union jobs that pay higher wages.
Can’t answer everything now, I pick this.
Technology is a mixed bag. It’s not true that tools and methods don’t require new skills to go with them. I’m more productive because of computers, but also because I learned how to use one.
In any event, you keep bringing up outsourcing. In the long run, the solution is for those foreign workers to get paid more too. Or do you think they are paid what they ought to be? Do you think American workers should be paid $1 hour too? You think that would be good for us, or for the economy?
Your own cite says that most do NOT want to join:
So 32% of non-represented people want to be in a union? That is not “most.”
I don’t have an opinion on unions one way or another, but did you happen to check out the name of this forum on your way in?
(bolding mine)
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Can’t answer everything now, I pick this.
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I understand…it can be a bit overwhelming when a bunch of posters are replying to you and you are trying to answer them all. When you get the chance. 
True, but if anyone can learn then you have no specific value add to demand more wages with an expectation of getting them. And I’m using the ‘you’ here to be categorical, not you specifically. That’s the thing…if a large number of people can be trained to run automated or expert systems, then individually you could have outstanding workers that could and do demand higher wages, but not across the board.
They are paid what the market demands in their situation. Ought to be is a silly concept…if everyone was paid what we ought to be paid we’d all be millionaires. In many low wage countries workers are paid low because, low as it seems to be to us, it’s a lot more than they could otherwise make in local labor, thus it’s an advantage to them to take those jobs. As their standard of living rises then there wages will invariably rise…this is already happening in both India and China. Eventually, they too will price themselves out of the low end labor market, just as we have. The answer to this won’t be for them to attempt to artificially maintain ever increasing wages just because, but to shift to some other value added niche market that they can use their own advantage towards to remain competitive.
As for us, I think we’ve basically priced ourselves out of the low end labor market. Even minimum wage, which seems ridiculously low to many on this board, is much much higher than comparable (or even grossly incomparable) labor in other countries. In some countries, 10 US dollars an hour would buy you a decent engineer or mid-level manager…here, that’s the wage a kid out of highschool working at 7-11 and basically scanning a bar code into a terminal and punching in a credit card, ATM card or maybe cash (after telling the machine exactly what the customer is giving and it telling the kid what the exact change is) would make.
Then what you are proposing is pretty much the definition of inflation.
Who loses during inflation are the consumers who don’t – or can’t – increase their income to keep pace.
There’s nothing wrong with higher wages, as long as higher productivity accompanies it.
My wife asked me why companies outsource.
I ask her this. If you can have a blouse made in China and pay $20, or have the exact one on the same table made in American by union workers for $25, which one do you buy?
The answer in that the worldwide consumer has made this choice.
This ends the conversation.
I like the results of unions (middle class, decent hours/wages, workplace safety), but not unions themselves or their methods.
Ideally, it should be easy to fire people and there shouldn’t be a minimum wage (among other things). But also, there should be a strong cash-based safety net, and high quality health care and education should be available to everyone for free. (Again, among other things.)
Freedom for the employer, freedom for the employee.
Obviously unions exist in order for workers to benefit more from their labor. This usually includes getting paid more because of union efforts, and I don’t see why you call this “artificial.” It’s simply a consequence of increased wages that they lead to more spending.
Yeah, big lot of good that does when the economy tanks and the unions refuse to recognize that taking a cut in salary is a hell of a lot better than getting a pink slip.
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I think it is more likely that high union wages were a product of the strong U.S. economy in the post-WW2 era rather than the force that drove that economy. Also, slight side-track, was Henry Ford’s famous “$5 a day” wage designed to create a middle class that would buy the Model T or was it mostly to attract the best talent in an industry with lots of turnover?
Henry Ford hated unions but he was the one who doubled wages to 5$ a day. Not to create people who could buy his cars but to keep workers around. The way he was able to do this was by making his assembly lines so productive. This is how wages go up, capital investments makes workers more productive and this allows employers to pay workers more.
Unions make firms and industries less competitive and have less money for capital investments. Everyone is aware how the UAW has bankrupted two of the big three automakers and cost the taxpayers 35 billion dollars. If you look at other industries you see the same things repeated. Look at the american steel industry, it was once the envy of the world now the places that relied on steel mills for employment are ghost towns. Those of us old enough to remember the film “Norma Rae” about the unionization of a textile factory in North Carolina should not be surprised to find out that the factory closed along with over 150 other textile factories. Those a little older may remember how the typesetters union turned New York from city with 7 daily newspapers into one with three daily newspapers. It was just in the news a few months ago how unions made Hostess go into bankruptcy. This is the reason for the decline of unions, simple Darwinian logic, firms and industries that have unions go out of business and firms and industries that don’t have unions grow. The decline of unions is good news for everyone who wants a job and everyone who wants to keep one.
Employers would have paid those wages anyway? They never said no to union demands?
No we’re not.
Prove it.
If unions were the “answer” to American Labor’s problems, Detroit would be jumping. (It ain’t). One big problem with unions-as they get larger and more powerful, they start to distate to management-and when they cause problems in production, employers move away…to non-union states. That and the corruption-read the history of the Teamsters.
According to this articlewritten before the bailouts union rules and payouts cost the domestic automakers 2,500 dollars per car sold. The reason GM and Chrysler had to go into bankruptcy was they lost 1,400 dollars per car sold. If they did not have the extra costs from their unions they would have been profitable.
Here is an article that states the loss from the GM bailout will be 25 billion dollars, and the loss from the Chrysler bailout was 1.3 billion dollars. This articlestates that GM got 16 billion dollars worth of tax write offs in the bailout.
Here is an articleabout how 28 billion dollars of the bailout could have been avoided by treating the UAW as it would have been treated in a normal bankruptcy.
I’m only posting because I though this thread was about unicorns, but I do agree unions play an important part in an economy and it is certainly not a good thing for them to become marginalized. However the US unions had serious problems, not least massive corruption and links to organised crime and partly what has happened is that they have failed to reform and modernize themselves, which has allowed anti-union forces to push them to the sidelines.
Other than that I think unicorns had their day a long time ago.
I might be willing to pay a $5 premium, under some circumstances. The problem is that the domestic, union-produced shirt is going to be more like $40-65, if the foreign-made one is $25. I’m not paying that much extra.
That’s not a union cost – it’s health care costs for the labor (which were negotiated through the unions, but do you really think that they wouldn’t need health benefits to hold workers?
Toyota doesn’t have health care costs in Jsapan because the companies don’t have to provide health benefits.
GM has to pay rretiree costs because that’s another required cost for years of labor – again, negotiated through unions, but do you think that GM would’ve been able to lure and hold workers without them? Toyota USA doesn’t have the costs because – as the article you cite says, they don’t have a lot of retirees. The company hasn’t been manufacturing in the US anywhere near as long as GM.
The comparison is apples and oranges. Trying to blame the failure on the “greed of the unions” with this kind of evidence is absurd.
False dilemma. We aren’t discussing a situation of “no benefits”; we are discussing one of “excessive expensive benefits benefits”, which, as you correctly point out, were demanded by the unions.
Non-union jobs also provide health care insurance, as I am sure you are aware.
Regards,
Shodan