I’m interested in the metric, because many of the people opposing unions (for example, your contention that they raise the price of labor, Airman Doors and shodan attacking any obligation to share profits with anyone else, and shallora discussing process protection) seem to be focusing on the benefits/costs of collective bargaining on its own, rather than government support. Similarly, most of us people in favor have assumed that union workers can be fired/contracts can be refused.
I’d be plenty happy (and have tried, on my own account), if we focused on unions in general, rather than any issue of government sponsorship.
Back on the issue, I think we start from different points. I argue that workers have (at the start) effectively no bargaining power–and many of those opposing unions say that is as it should be. You say the price of labor is too high with unions, but what’s to stop employers driving it too low without them?
If we’re opposed to monopolies, we should be opposed to giving employers the sole power to control the terms of employment–removing any bargaining power of workers.
So long as they obey the law, what is wrong with that? This notion that capital has an innate right to do business which supersedes the rights of labor to organize and bargain is ludicrous. Many large manufacturers manage to stay in business without their employees seeking the representation of unions. All they have to do is provide a workplace that exceeds the standards required by government and their competition, in safety, salary and worker satisfaction. Is that too much to ask?
No. A simple example. I don’t believe there is one conservative who is against credit unions in our society. They may not choose to participate in a credit union, but they don’t oppose them.
I take it then that you’re opposed to the Employee Free Choice Act? Because what you’re describing is how it works today in ‘Right to Work’ states. The EFCA wants to abolish that.
This is essentially what the act does:
Prevents employers from acting in any way to prevent union organizing activities.
Eliminates the secret ballot in favor of ‘card check’. Which means if a union rep can collect signed cards from 51% of the employees, the union is certified, and ALL employees must join it.
Eliminates the right of the employer to hire non-union employees in union positions, and to hire non-union replacement workers in the case of a strike.
In case of a dispute between the business owner and the union, they will have 120 days to settle it, or the government will step in and issue a ruling of binding arbitration.
So… An employer can’t stop a union from forming in his business, and once formed, cannot make any decisions regarding his own labor practices that is not explicitly agreed to by the union. And the law would make unions ridiculously easy to form, and card-check rules open employees to union intimidation or social ostracization from fellow employees if they refuse to sign their cards.
The EFCA is destructive to American business, and morally repugnant. The end result will be an increase in unionization, and a resulting increase in job flight from the United States. The Democrats will likely respond to that by increased protectionism. In a globalized economy, this is a regulatory death spiral. America right now should be focused on making businesses MORE competitive. It should be lowering corporate taxes and capital gains taxes and improving the competitive environment of made-in-America products and services. Instead, it’s going in the opposite direction.
In the meantime, other countries ARE lowering business taxes and diminishing the roles of unions in the work force. Canada, for example, is lowering the corporate tax to 15% by 2012, lowering capital gains and dividend taxes, and easing regulations that give unions power.
Unions may have worked better in an era where goods were made and sold locally, and local workforces had no choices but to work for local employers. Today, in a global economy, you simply cannot legislate high pay for workers. You can either pay them exactly what they are worth in terms of the value they bring to the company, or you can be forced to pay them more and watch your market dry up and all those employees wind up out of work. If you don’t believe that, have a stroll through Detroit.
No, personally I DON’T think employers should be allowed to prevent unions from forming among their employees. I think employers who use scare tactics and outright lies or, even worse, threats of firing those who talk union, should be jailed. Employees have the right to organize, period. Employers who intimidate and lie in order to prevent that should be stopped.
And frankly, union supporters keep bringing up things like the 8-hour day and the 40-hour week and OSHA and unemployment compensation and a notable lack of children dying in factory accidents because they are thing that happened before the unions began. And the unions stopped them.
Do you think that’s a good thing? If so, then you should be supporting unions. If you think that employers wouldn’t go RIGHT back to doing things the way they were doing them in 1890 as far as employee treatment goes if unions were to disappear, you’re the most naive adult I think I’ve ever met. I don’t trust private corporations to actually PAY their employees if they could get away with not doing it, let alone to treat them like human beings. I read history. I know what the labor movement had to work against. It wasn’t pretty.
Businesses do not have an obligation to share profits. They have the ability to offer profit sharing if they think it’s in their interest to do so.
It’s also not necessarily in the worker’s interest to get involved in profit-sharing, because that comes with risk-sharing (profit sharing without accepting the risk of losses is not even remotely fair). So sure, if you want a situation where you get a bonus at the end of the year based on a percentage of profits, are you also willing to take a cut in pay at the end of the year if the business shows a loss? I’m guessing not.
Working for a salary alone has many advantages - the primary one being income stability. Wealthy people can afford to live off profits because they can survive the years when there is no profit to be had. People who live paycheck-to-paycheck cannot have part of the their pay switched from flat salary to percentage of profit, because they can’t afford the lean times.
Most businesses in America fail. When businesses fail, the owners lose everything, but the employees walk away with the money they’ve earned for their labor to date. That’s not always such a bad deal.
Also, your notion that a business is obligated to share profits flies in the face of your next statement, that businesses are free to negotiate with labor. An obligation implies no freedom to act. Which is it? Can businesses choose not to negotiate with a union? Or are they obligated to meet their demands?
You need to ask yourself this: Why then are there non-union businesses that pay more than minimum wage?
The answer is that your premise is wrong - individual workers DO have bargaining power. Labor is a product, and has a value and a price. Businesses that do not pay prevailing wages will not find workers. Or they will find workers who are not as productive, because the best workers go to companies that offer the best salaries/work environments. So long as there is no monopoly in jobs, there is competition for labor between businesses, and it’s ultimately this competition that sets the market price for labor, just as competition sets the market price for goods and other services.
That would only be true if there were only one employer in the world. Otherwise, your statement makes no more sense than saying that Sony should have to accept the price I’m willing to offer for one of their TV’s, because I like Sony and Sony has a monopoly in Sony products.
So labor is the biggest cost, and that tempts companies to go overseas for a supply of cheaper labor so they can maximize profit, and that’s the fault of unions?
Why isn’t it that the global transportation and communications infrastructure (subsidized by relatively low energy prices) has finally made it feasible to produce things overseas and ship them over here?
I don’t recall anybody blaming overpaid programmers (with their repetitive bullshit jobs) for IT offshoring. It’s pretty much universally acknowledged that the expanding global telecommunications infrastructure finally started making in feasible to ship the relatively high-skill service-oriented jobs to places where there’s a lower cost (and standard) of living. If you could point me to the big dinosaur IT union that made it happen, I’d appreciate it.
If you read my posts, you’ll see quite clearly I don’t take such a view. I do identify people in the post you quote who find profit sharing so anathemic that they think it should never happen. But you are correct that I misconstrue their position-they’re not fighting any obligation for profit sharing-some of them are fighting the concept itself.
Well, it all depends on the worker-some do, and some don’t. I might argue that the early 20th century experience does demonstrate that, absent other things, a large group of workers don’t have much bargaining power.
Again, however, my fundamental point is that it only makes sense to take bargaining power away from workers if they have too much. The people contending that in this thread are also the people contending that all profits ought necessarily to go to the employer, which seems to me to not be all that convincing to support the argument that workers have too little power.
Again, if you’ll look at my posts, you’ll see I favor a market-based system. Collective agreements are a part of such a market-in the same way large employers (who have much more bargaining power) are.
Well, an oligopoly, fine. There will still be dominant employers (say, GM/Ford/Chevy in the state of MI), that will, absent some kind of collective bargaining, effectively control the terms of employment for a certain kind of workers.
And the point still remains-most of the people arguing hard to get rid of unions do so to give control of the bargaining process to management. They’re opposing one concentration of bargaining power simply to create a different one.
Sam Stone has said exactly what I came to say. It’s not that I oppose unions; they can be very good things. But the government does not have the right to step in and legislate extra power to the unions that owners are legally required to knuckle under to.
What I want to know is this: why do liberals think owners must be forced to pay people they don’t want to pay for services they aren’t rendering?
I disagree with that line of reasoning. There is nothing unfair about an employee sacrificing only a small part of their fixed salary in exchange for the possibility of greater reward if the company does well, as long as both employer and employee agree to this arrangement. I do not think an employer should be required to offer such a deal, but if they think a salary of $50,000+X is more attractive to potential employees than a salary of $55,000, it’s their choice.
Employers should be jailed for lying to employees? What about if employees lie to their employers?
Do you have a cite for that?
But we have laws on the books preventing those things from happening, union or no union.
But just to be clear, I’m pro-union. Unions are as much a part of free enterprise as corporations are. I just don’t want the government coming down on the side of one or the other. If workers want to unionize, great. If employers don’t want to hire union employees, great. Let the market sort it out.
Airman has it right. If the owner has unsafe working conditions and dangerous chemicals around and you don’t like it you can just go right down the street. If he wants to hire illegals because they are cheaper ,that is his right. If you want a vacation after 50 weeks of work, he alone should determine whether you deserve it. Labor has no value. Only owners do. If your grandfather started a business .you are the man. You did a better job of being born and should be rewarded. If he wants to pay time and a half for overtime or not, it should be his decision. Labor is nothing and don’t you forget it. There is no reason a 8 year old should be sewing soccer balls in India when we can have our 8 year olds do it here. You should have no say in anything at work. You are nothing and the owner can do without you.
You idiot. There is a big difference between having basic health and safety regulations and having the unions unfairly dictate terms to the business owners. On the other hand, no one has the right to disband unions by force either, although they certainly do have the right to fire anyone who joins them because a business owner should have the right to fire anyone. Any other arrangement means the owner is being forced to give out money to people who are not providing a service he wants.
Again, why do liberals think owners should be forced to employ people that they don’t want to employ? This is the same argument that always comes up when we talk about labor, and I sincerely do not understand the opposite position here.
I am not aware of anyone, liberal, conservative or otherwise, who wants to force employers to pay people they don’t wish to employ. Unless you are talking about an owner having the “right” to decide that Joe Assemblyline looked at him wrong one morning, so Joe should pack his shit up and gtfo. When that happens, when someone is having a bad day and they decide to take it out on the first “victim” they can find, it’s a good thing that unions are there to speak up about the (im)propriety of the situation.
I am not aware of anyone who wants to work alongside a shiftless, talentless incompetent drunk any more than I am aware of anyone who wishes to employ same. Can you show us some examples of this happening, please? Or of anyone arguing for this policy?
Look dingbat. The rules have come from unions.Companies fought every one of these problems. Unions are the reason for safe working conditions. Unions have pushed for the benefits we all have. They would not exist if the organizers did not fight and die for them.
Who forces anyone to employ someone they do not want to? I was under the impression that there was an application and screening process involved. I guess not where you are. They actually choose the employees they want to hire around these parts.
Vox.I wish to apologize for the name calling. It was poor on my side and I should know better. I responded emotionally which is not what I wish to do. Sorry.
More often than it should, less often than most would prolly try and claim.
I’ve seen it happen and I’ve tried to intervene, sometimes with more success than others. I saw a good person get fired for asking if there was coffee on a gig (I was unsuccessful in that intervention, sadly). I’ve seen people nearly get fired for asking how long a day was going to go, or if we would be taking lunch at noon or 1pm. I personally have been fired from a job for being “too loud” in pointing out unsafe work practices, and once I was fired because the client, who was drunk or hungover most of the time he was on site, thought I was “too pushy and condescending”.
I know that the plural of “anecdote” is not “data” but the situation I’ve described does happen.
Of course unions have the right to protest an unreasonable firing or bad working conditions. And the owner should have the right to fire them all if he wants to (which would probably ruin his business, which is exactly why unions have bargaining power in the first place). Besides, basic healthy working conditions, while campaigned for by many of the same people who led unions, are enforced by law; giving unnatural (to the free market) power to unions is not necessary to maintain them.