Likewise, a few problems with companies:
-They are monopolies–they can force you to follow ridiculous rules (if you want to work there)
-They are immune from certain lawsuits
-They are able to force employees to accept below-market wage rates (one reason why workers strike)
-Company management people are often corrupt–like ADM
Anyone who thinks unions are run by philosopher kings is delusional; of course they’re not. But the problems you listed are hardly unique to unions; rather, they’re endemic to any organization dealing in managing people’s livelihoods.
Could you please think before shooting your mouth off? A company does not possess monopolistic power in the demand for a particular resource (your labour) unless that company and its collaborators control every business that has demand for your particular skillset. It is a felony for a business to collaborate with its competitors like this.
On the other hand, the goal of a union is to obtain monopolistic power in the supply of a particular resource (labour backed up by a particular skillset), by creating a cartel where the hundreds or thousands of suppliers (individual workers) collaborate to control the supply of that resource.
Right, which is why the Department of Motor Vehicles is such a model of courteous efficiency.
Similarly, when management demands that workers pay a higher percentage of their health care, and accept layoffs and pay cuts, they are actually equipping themselves to better serve their customers, who pay all their bills. It has nothing to do with the desire for more money - they are being completely altruistic. Just like unions.
Don’t you see that your parenthetical shows the rest of the sentence to be wrong. A worker could just go work for some other company.
Huh? The workers and employers are the two ends of the tug-of-war rope that define what the fair market wage is. You need entities on both ends of that rope.
I don’t. Read what Sam Stone says (generally a good idea) -
Unions of the first type represent the interests of their workers (within the bounds of human frailty), management does the same for the rest, and things tend to work out. When once union membership and activity becomes coerced and non-voluntary, special problems arise. The big labor bosses eye the goose that lays the golden eggs thoughtfully whilst feeling the edge of a butcher knife. And you wind up like GM.
Union greed and short-sightedness is not the only problem GM had, but it sure didn’t help to have their retired workers pushing labor costs thru the roof.
Right. But the incentives for politicians are very different than for business owners. A politician’s main incentive is to be re-elected. A businessman’s main incentive is to be profitable. So a business man has a strong incentive to bargain hard with a union, and a politician doesn’t. If the union can make more electoral trouble for him if he refuses a wage increase request than will an increase in the deficit resulting from the wage increase, he’ll just cave in and allow the wage increase.
This is why public unions like the SEIU and NEA are so activist. This is not theoretical - look at the electoral power the unions gathered to oppose California’s attempt to cut the budget. They put so much heat on the politicians that they completely caved. And when Arnie actually got budget cuts put on a proposition, the unions spent huge money and organized rallies and protests in opposition.
No, because in a well functioning free market there are checks and balances. Getting back to the public/private union difference, a private union is ultimately checked in its demands by the profitability of the company. If it demands too much, it can kill the goose laying the golden eggs. Why do you think the UAW finally went to the bargaining table? Because they had no alternative. It was either cut a deal or watch the company go under, taking all the union jobs with it.
No such constraint exists for public unions.
Again, the difference is that taxpayer money comes from a near-bottomless well. That’s the whole point I was making. You can charge more in union dues if you make up for it by providing more goodies. There is more leeway for public unions to do that than there is for private unions.
Oh, they have lots of ways of influencing politics. 13 of the top 20 biggest donors in Washington are trade unions. But that just scratches the surface of their influence. The SEIU has been astroturfing counter-protests. Union sign-makers provide free signs to protesters. Union leaders organize rallies, protests, and other political activities. During the Democratic convention in 2008, commentators noted that a large percentage of delegates were representatives from teacher’s unions and other unions.
This is an interesting article which shows the kind of political influence unions have:
When that kind of political muscle gets combined with a union that gets its funding from taxpayers, you have a system where union power is out of control. in California, the public unions have hijacked the political process and are bankrupting the state. California government services are now worse than they are in Texas, yet Californians pay twice as much for their government per capita. The extra money is going into the pockets of the public unions. They’ve become rent-seekers profiting from the people they are supposed to serve.
There are MANY things wrong with that. For one, a worker may not believe in the political goals of the union, but is forced to pay dues used to campaign for ideas he does not believe in. For another, unions can put a lot of pressure on workers to toe the union line. A ‘pledge to get out the vote’ from a union leader can easily translate into subtle coercion of union workers to participate in political activities they would not otherwise participate in.
But some do it anyway. But they’ve gotten more sophisticated than that. Instead of striking, they can engage in work-to-rule, they can set up revolving protests, fund political action committees that propagandize against politicians standing in their way, influence bureaucrats sympathetic to their goals to throw wrenches in the works, you name it.
Of course they do. But in the case of those companies, they’re all still beholden to the iron rules of the market. Demand more than your value, and you’ll sink the company.
And sometimes unions still do that. They’ve helped push GM and Chrysler to the brink of bankruptcy. They destroyed the trade show business in New York and New Jersey, and are busy destroying it in Chicago.
What a ridiculous argument. Just how is the public benefited by having public union employees retire at 55 on 70% salaries? How does the public benefit by having a public union member make significantly more than the equivalent private sector job, while enjoying full job security and immunity from recessions?
In other words, they are special interests looking after themselves and using the power of government to their benefit. I fail to see how this makes it okay.
Actually, they’re not. There’s no evidence that smaller classes lead to better educational outcomes. However, they do lead to more teacher employment and lower per-class workloads. Funny how teachers are in favor of that.
No, they aren’t. There’s a surplus of teachers. If there were shortages, you could argue that they need higher pay. But since there are plenty of highly qualified people who can’t find teaching jobs, I’d say that the higher pay actually prevents the hiring of more teachers by making them more expensive.
In fact, I just linked to a story describing the New Jersey teacher’s union actively campaigning to have stimulus funds used to raise teacher salaries rather than hire back teachers who have been layed off. How does that fit your theory?
New York has ‘rubber rooms’ full of teachers who have been removed from classrooms because they are not fit to teach, but who cannot be fired because of union rules. How does that fit with your theory that teacher unions have the goal of improving teaching for kids?
CEOS get paid millions of dollars because companies are trying to attract the best people with the best training, to provide the best products for you. So you should be happy when a CEO gets a 50 million dollar bonus. It means you’re being served extra well!
Oh, please. As if ‘extra training’ was the problem we’re talking about.
My wife manages nursing units. Her single biggest management problem is dealing with the myriad rules and requirements around staffing that have been imposed by the unions. Seniority rules that prevent her from putting her best nurses in charge, shift rules that make it hard to avoid paying out big overtime and destroying the unit’s budget for equipment, lax ‘sick’ rules that results in above-average sick calls and subsequent short-staffing, and problem nurses who can’t be fired or disciplined without it turning into a giant union battle.
For example, a nurse who had a college specialization and experience in child psychiatry could not be moved to a child psych ward, because another nurse was senior to her and wanted the position. That particular nurse was trained as an operating room nurse and knew absolutely nothing about child psychiatry. But hey, union rules…
Do you think it helps troubled kids to be counseled by someone trained as an OR technician, while an actual child psych grad works in another area?
Actually, there’s good evidence that the trend in demanding ever-higher qualifications for nurses is actually an attempt to maintain high wages by limiting entry into the field. The AMA does the same thing for doctors. The result is that nurses get paid more, but more and more duties are being offloaded onto nurses’ aides and LPNs, meaning the average education of the nursing staff may be going down.
Funny then that these altruists never campaign for lower pay so that the government can hire more workers and serve the public better. They never campaign for longer working hours. How lucky for them that it turns out that every single thing that ‘helps the public’ turns out to be something that makes their jobs easier or pays them more.
Think that one through. If I pay a marginal rate of 30%, but I can lobby the government to give me an extra dollar, I’m still ahead by 70 cents. The fact that they are taxpayers then becomes irrelevant to their motivation, doesn’t it?
Right. It has nothing to do with pay, working conditions, or job security. You’re just a selfless servant of the public. And I’m sure you’d feel exactly the same way if you made 20% less than an equivalent private sector job, because your own personal considerations really have nothing to do with your decision to work for a public union.
The fact is, personal anecdotes are irrelevant. You could be a prince among men, and it changes the argument not one bit.
Right. Because it’s all about ‘Tea Baggers’ and ‘Libertarian utopia’. It couldn’t possibly be about exploding government budgets and a developing class of wealthy state employees who are expanding their power and standards of living while the private sector enjoys wage rollbacks and layoffs. Nope. Let’s just demonize the opposition and invent straw men instead.
I just wanted to post and say that I do see Sam Stone’s point about the problems of public unions - it’s not a problem with the unions, it’s a problem with the politicians and their unwillingness to face disapprooval for putting their foot down. Which results them dropping the rope in the in the whole “union vs. employer” tug of war.
I disagree with Sam enough that I wanted to credit him when I didn’t.
ETA: This is not to say that simply disbanding all public unions and dropping worker wages, cutting benefits, raising hours, and installing manacles at the government desks is the best way to go. But there is a systemic problem here that could benefit from some kind of attention.
Sam, I don’t have the time or energy to debate you point by point. It’s a fruitless exercise anyway. You’re right, I’m right. No one’s gonna budge. You’ve got your ideas, I’ve got mine.
I do want to address this:
Not every teacher sitting in them is guilty of any sort of malfeasance. Sometimes they’re wrongfully accused by angry students. Firing them for a bullshit reason is wrong. Putting potentially harmful teachers into classrooms is wrong. But those “union rules” (which are actually negotiated safety measures) are there to make sure every teacher gets a fair hearing before just having their careers (and livelihoods, years of education, etc) thrown down the drain by one fucked up and pissed off 16 year old.
How can you define coercion in a way that could not be equally applicable to management? You guys act as if management doesn’t demand things of employees that they would otherwise not do.
Perhaps, but you failed to explain why that is the fault of the union. Even if we accept your explanation, how does a politician taking the path of least resistance imply that unions are a bad thing? Furthermore, do you not think the same thing applies to corporations? How many politicians are happy to get behind legislation that will hurt businesses in their district? You seem to be railing against legislative horsetrading rather than unions. Particularly since everyone with influence attempts to lobby for money, considerations, or laws that will help them.
What is wrong with this? In the absence of unions, do you not think teachers (or whomever) would be against their pay and benefits being cut? The only way to curtail the actions you criticize here would be to prevent PACs and other interest groups from speaking out on the issues that affect them. Is that what you are suggesting should be done?
But as you noted, several politicians have not “caved in” to union demands. Isn’t that a constraint? You act as though politicians have no choice but to agree with anything the union says. Why are you not more upset with politicians who are more interested in protecting their jobs, then doing them?
In what ways can unions affect legislative change that the RIAA, NAR, or the ABA cannot?
Can you point to a specific union that advocates for issues beyond the scope of what they are presumably charged to do by their members? Do you see teachers’ unions advocating for farm subsidies (for example). If the unions is arguing for a specific policy that they deem will collectively help the members, how is that problematic? You seem to be insinuating that backing a candidate that supports the union goals means that all the members should agree with everything the candidate proposes. That’s not a reasonable standard.
Do you think this doesn’t equally apply to management? For example, do you think an employee at Smith & Wesson can actively support tougher gun laws without seeing their career suffer?
But how can you argue that a union can demand more than their value? Seems like “value” is a moving target in any circumstance. If a company agrees to pay these union employees X amount, isn’t that their value. Even if you argue that their wages are inflated, shouldn’t you consider the added value of their political cooperation (under your last example), stability, etc.? Isn’t the “value” essentially what someone was willing to pay for it?
Do you have a cite for this?
First, most public union employees do not make more than people in equivalent private sector jobs. Read my last site about teacher in NJ. Despite your claims, they do not make more than similarly educated people in areas of the country where the costs of living are similar. Unless you have a cite that says otherwise, please stop saying this without any evidence.
Second, the retirement benefits you mention were presumably part of the compensation package initially offered to the employees. If it’s such a good deal, and if they are so overpaid, why are there shortagesinsomanyplaces? Logic would lead you to believe that the salary and benefits, even at their current rate, are insufficient to attracts enough people. Do you disagree with that? If teaching is so well paid, and economically attractive relative to most private sector jobs, why do nearly half of teachers leave within 5 years?
It doesn’t make it ok, but it does make it par for the course. Again, I don’t see how unions are acting in a way that corporations, trade groups, lobbyists, etc. aren’t. Can you please enlighten me?
Yes, thereis. I suppose you can argue that it’s not a given, but there have been studies that do back up that claim.
This is not true. Particularly in urban areas, and in Math and the sciences.
No you didn’t. You also didn’t respond when I called you on it. Gov. Christie gave districts 2 options: face layoffs, or take a pay cut. Some districts opted to take a pay cut. The article you linked to involved district administrators, who ostensibly accepted pay cuts in order to save jobs, asking to use new stimulus money to match the pay of districts that did not take pay cuts. They were asking to do this so that they would not be able at a hiring disadvantage based on having accepted the prior deal to save jobs. This is not what you claimed. I’m also not sure how you missed the entire point of the article given that the first paragraph:
Somehow you parsed that as:
Which is a particularly strange conclusion to draw given that the article also says the following:
So not only are you mischaracterizing the article and the union stance, you are criticizing district officials who made choices that I sure you would agree with. Is there something I am missing here?
We’ve done this dance before. Saying that those teachers are not fit to teach, or that they cannot be fired due to union rules is false.
Do you contend that CEO pay is strongly correlated with compensation? If so, do you have any evidence of that?
Can you name any people who campaign for lower pay or longer work hours in the name of altruism?
I live in teh DC area and the union isn’t the problem. The problem is structural.
The issue is that we do not want the bureaucracy to flip every time a new administration gets elected so we make it tought to fire them. The problem the unions present is that they protect the baby boomers (who particiapte a LOT in the unions), while giving short shrift to younger employees (who grew up thinking likie Sam Stone). That is why the unions focus so much on retirement benefits and not so much on maternity leave or student loan relief.
There are all sorts of problems with the union but its not what Sam thinks it is.
I certainly can–more than you can, apparently :). You and magellan apparently missed that the parenthetical comment I included was a comment in what I was quoting.
Yeah, and how’s that working out? They don’t have anything close to a monopolistic power in the supply of any particular resource. So the parenthetical comment in the bit I was quoting, and sort-of-parodying, was every bit as undermining as it was in what I wrote.
Sam, before the rubber rooms closed down, they were a mark of shame for school administrators. The rules for firing teachers were clear, and blaming the unions for opposing the firings is like blaming a defense attorney for mounting a defense: of COURSE that’s what they did, and there was nothing improper about their doing so. What was improper is an administration so incompetent that they let cases get horribly backlogged. (Edit: to be fair, the rules should probably be streamlined. Still, it’s unquestionably administration’s fault that there was such a backlog.)
But the modern Republican approach isn’t to blame management for managerial incompetence: it’s to pass the buck downward until it hits someone who votes Democratic, whether it’s blaming the Gulf oil spill on environmentalists or blaming deaths in Iraq on war protesters. Well played once again.
I don’t know how this became my nit to pick, but I will pick it nevertheless.
The Founders were not capitalists. There was no such thing as capitalists in America in the 1780s. The kind of accumulation of wealth and development of wage workers that is necessary to create what we know as capitalism and to create the kind of conditions and distinct classes Marx talked about did not occur until decades later.
Even if you use Marxist terminology metaphorically, and you mean to identify the founders as a distinct class of land-owners, you’re still missing the mark. For one, land was plentiful in colonial America. Too plentiful. It was not the same as wealth in the capitalist sense. Moreover, some founders owned land. Some did not. Most people owned the land they farmed, “founder” or not. The difference between the richest and the poorest was not even close to where it was by 1850. Nor, indeed, was the founding of the country primarily to protect landed interests. It was almost exactly the opposite, as it lifted restrictions on who could serve in the government, and who could vote.
I see this meme all the time. I guess I’m just lucky to live in a state where it’s called the Dept. of Revenue. Never had a problem with them.
Right, and the union is the entity on the workers’ side. Or do you think fair market wages should be determined by a negotiation between entities with highly disparate power?
This is as easily an argument for protectionism, or for funding all pensions through general taxes, as a case against unions. GM had higher pension obligations than Toyota of America because it was older, & had built up retirees.
There is no positive press for unions. Most newspapers broke unions long ago. Since the TV news is part of the media conglomerates, there is no way to get friendly union stories or news. Most young people have never heard a positive union story. That is why as a group, young people have a bias against them.
Siemens of Germany just announced a deal guaranteeing its workers jobs for life. Many European countries have guaranteed jobs for ten years. Of course they even have union representation of the boards. In America ,workers are too lowly to be considered in the decision making process.
