I really want to break your argument down, so you can maybe see how it doesn't really argue in any sort of way for what you think it does, and doesn't really make sense. I'm not trying to be hateful, but I really think you might benefit from seeing this from an outside perspective.
Argument: I do not see a single [union] effective at "Stifling CEO's from becoming rich".
1st Proof: American Automakers produce low quality cars.
2nd Proof: The only thing keeping them in business is lobbying from American Lawmakers.
Your proof has nothing to do with your argument. At all. They're not related. They're also very subjective and impossible to actually prove. They're not proof; they're opinion.
A more effective argument would be:
Proof: The largest Union employers are x, y, z, and their CEO's make $x, $y, $z.
you are right, but the argument itself is flawed in the first place.
CEOs are not the rich class, they are elite but they are employees. Plenty of CEOs get fired for doing bad job, or get softly pushed out.
Argument that labor union keep CEOs from getting rich is absurd because CEOs are part of labor force.
it is shareholders who get rich by squeezing profit, so I dont get why bring up CEOs. A CEO maybe get paid $10 mln a year. But shareholders get dividends/buybacks in order of hundreds of mils/blns
My argument was that labor unions lead to piss poor quality due to mediocrity (example: US automakers).
the japanese automakers have factories in the US and produce much higher quality cars without labor unions. How come???
> CEOs are not the rich class, they are elite but they are employees.
While this is sometimes true, the executive status class overlaps significantly with the haut bourgeois economic class (and most of the rest of the executive status class is in the petit bourgeois economic class; there are probably working class “CEOs” somewhere, but they are very much not the norm), and very typically they are specifically significant holders of capital in the firm of which they are CEOs. CEOS are not just employees, and their relationship to either the firms they control or the economy more generally are not very much like those of regular employees.
huh?
if we talking about tech layoffs and tech employees needing union - pls explain how Satya Nadella or Sundar are elites? they became CEOs just from being immigrant students. Started as engineers, and slowly rose through ranks.
tech is more merit based, compared to traditional boomer's industries. I dont see how CEOs in tech are part of elite, while they are simply hired managers. You do your job well - you can become ceo one day
Employees typically depend on their salaries to pay for necessary living expenses. If they lose their job, they need to get another one, or they'll eventually go broke.
Any CEO making $10M/yr would only need to work for a year before they could retire and live comfortably the rest of their life without ever touching the principal.
Interestingly many engineers in the German car industry (often seen as high quality), e.g. at Audi or BMW and other large non-automotive enterprises like Siemens work under IG Metall union contracts and the companies do rather well.
I think that's because in those countries a loss of employment doesn't have the potential to cause gigantic disruptions to life through the loss of health insurance and often housing. There are much more robust systems in place to help an individual worker handle life while between jobs. So the union isn't as incentivized to try to prevent any and all layoffs even when the company needs to respond to changing economic factors that might require scaling back.
Mexico has some strong unions, one of them is the SINDICATO NACIONAL DE TRABAJADORES DE LA INDUSTRIA. AUTOMOTRIZ (auto maker/manufactring union). Still, there are lots of cars manufactured in Mexico which are of quite high quality[1]:
Audi Q5
BMW Serie 3
BMW Serie 2 coupé
Honda HR-V
Hyundai Accent
Infiniti QX50
Infiniti QX55
Jeep Compass
KIA Rio
KIA Forte
Mazda CX-30
Mazda2
Mazda3
Mercedes-Benz GLB
Nissan Kicks
Nissan Versa
Nissan NP300
Nissan Sentra
Nissan March
Nissan NV 200 Cargo
Toyota Tacoma
VW Tiguan
VW Taos
VW Jetta
There is indeed a stigma that American cars (Ford, GM, Chevrolet) are trash, but I think that has more to do with a company policy, more than with Unions and manufacturing employees.
with all due respect to Mexican workers - in Mexico most OEMs do mostly assembly of ready made parts.
Engines, tranny, suspension parts are manufactured in US/Europe/Japan and simply shipped to Mexico for assembly due to NAFTA favorable trade agreement and cheaper labor for simple assembly
> how exactly? looking at american unions I dont see a single effective at "stifling CEOs from becoming rich".
You removed a major conditional.
I do not care if the CEOs become rich, the dream of getting rich via business success is why capitalism works, what I care about is if they do it by underpaying their employees because of a power differential.
Two examples you mentioned heavily gatekeep profession and limit supply of labor to the market.
Do you want Tech labor union to gatekeep profession?
IT is already merit based and is good because there is no gatekeeping, just spin up your own website and start making money if you are that good.
As an IT professional I simply dont understand why I need labor union to dictate rules to me, when I can negotiate on behalf of myself perfectly fine.
If company decodes to lay me off - well it is company’s loss and fault - I will simply go work elsewhere or freelance, while company will struggle retaining skilled engineers
That is a gross misunderstanding of how the SAG and NBA Players Union work.
They do not gatekeep. They provide contractual minimum pay and benefits for their members, and that's it. Members are free to negotiate for higher pay, and many do. (In the NBA, the cap is imposed by the owners, not the union. There is no cap in Hollywood.)
Hollywood productions and NBA teams are free to negotiate with and hire non-members, with the caveat that such individuals may become members of the appropriate union upon the signing of the contract and that contract must then adhere to the union minimums.
In both cases, union membership is automatic upon certain events. For SAG, this means appearing in one or more SAG-governed productions (depending on the level of the role, i.e., lead vs supporting vs background). For NBA players, this means getting signed to an NBA team.
you also don't have to set your union up exactly like SAG, either. My point is that the members of a union get to choose whether they are propping up mediocrity, gatekeeping or something else.
Maybe interviewing or freelancing lead generation is a hassle - your local IUP (International Union of Programmers) could help sling jobs your way like a pipefitter union.
Maybe you want something different? I bet we could find a model of some union doing that; the world is big
We live in times of reddit/blind/social media - IT workers can already pseudo-unionize ehile staying under the radar.
We dont need formal union, but informal one - through information dissemination over Internet and absolutely voluntary participation and knowledge sharing - this is fine for me.
This is how we get leetcode practice, interview prep, job hopping, quiet quitting, overemployed, and other “best practices” to get edge over employers
They don't get to choose. The only way to get above-market pay is to keep potential employees out who would otherwise be offering better price:performance. That's the goal of a union, but they'll represent it in different ways, sometimes less obvious than others.
A union is made out of its members, a union's goals generally match what the majority of dues paying members want. There is no platonic union waiting in the wings. There are just groups of employees that could all work together to get things the mutually want.
They can't really do anything without an exclusivity deal or some other way to force employees to be part of the union. If they don't have such a deal yet, they're probably going to pretend it's not their goal.
One additional benefit of unions is coordinating strikes for the purposes of change, which is why we have many of the benefits taken for granted today as well as showing the importance of undervalued roles in society. And protesting retirement age hikes in France.
I knew someone was going to say this. There are a lot of things wrong with this line of thinking, but the simplest rebuttal is that there is a lot of room between "workers should organize for greater market power to prevent abuse by employers" and "we have abolished the State and everyone gets exactly the same outcome in all situations, and also we have executed half the population". To deny that is to argue in bad faith and/or deep ignorance.
I am from Soviet Union (which had strong state) and witnessed labor unions - who did nothing of value absolutely. so no, not buying this argument at all.
"workers should organize for greater market power to prevent abuse by employers" - tech engineers dont need it - because if you dont like it - you can simply leave to another employer. market forces will find equilibrium, labor union is only an obstacle in reaching market equilibrium.
it is telling that people who escaped communist countries never want to see any sign of communism in their life. Because communism doesnt work, never worked, and will never work
> tech engineers dont need it - because if you dont like it you can simply leave to another employer.
This is my whole point. This is only true for some, and it's not distributed according to merit. People get mistreated all the time at both tech and non-tech companies, even in career fields that are traditionally high-paying and high-mobility. The only way to stop that in a way that also promotes a relatively free labor market is for workers to self-organize, and for the government to legally protect their right to do so.
I understand your concerns about communism. Nobody in their right mind is proposing that we bring communism to the USA. The fortunate workers who have market power uniting to support for their fellows who lack market power is not itself communism, nor does it lead to communism. American labor unions are not communism, and never will be.
The USA once developed a strong tradition and culture of organized labor that brought us out of the brutality of the 19th century Industrial Revolution. There were plenty of smaller socialist and even anarchist groups at the time, but in general most people were not that radical, and no group anything resembling the Bolsheviks ever gained popular support in the USA.
Ironically however, communism indirectly enabled big business to crush that tradition of organized labor, because the Red Scare of the early 20th century allowed them to label pro-labor policy as socialist or communist and therefore anti-American and anti-freedom.
If anything, the kinds of labor unions that people join the USA are a uniquely capitalist institution, being dedicated specifically to the purpose of balancing asymmetric market power.
How do you define if it is or not distributed to merit?
Arent market forces the ultimate invisible hand of merit?
I mean literally any worker can gove notice and change employers, it is at will employment on both sides.
You enjoyed it during great resignation, where IT workers would jump ship every year and get 50% raise.
You realize labor union will put a hard stop on job hopping? You will have to work for the same company for decades with 1.5% pay raise at best! Imagine working for sweatshop amazon for a decade lol
> How do you define if it is or not distributed to merit?
Work performance?
> Arent market forces the ultimate invisible hand of merit?
No. The price system is very efficient at certain kinds of allocation, but not in all or even most cases.
> I mean literally any worker can gove notice and change employers, it is at will employment on both sides.
Only if you have enough savings to survive without income and/or you can easily find a comparable job, which is not even true for many high-wage tech employees anymore.
> You enjoyed it during great resignation, where IT workers would jump ship every year and get 50% raise.
Yes, that was temporary.
> You realize labor union will put a hard stop on job hopping?
It won't, because it currently doesn't. This is not at all an established phenomenon.
> You will have to work for the same company for decades with 1.5% pay raise at best! Imagine working for sweatshop amazon for a decade lol
This simply isn't true. Even labor unions that struggle to negotiate with management are doing better than 1.5% over a decade. I'd be interested to see some data on this, but I'd bet that median union-negotiated wages are rising at about the same rate as median non-union-negotiated wages (read: slower than inflation). I say "median" and not "average" because there will be high earners who have seen huge pay increases recently that would skew the mean upwards.
You do know that those "executives" are almost always your coworkers, right? There are extremely few "labor union executives" because there are extremely few unions that have grown so large that they require managerial training to administer them. The vast majority of American unions are small and composed of your fellow coworkers. For all that talk radio likes to rant about the Teamsters and other giant unions, most unions are composed of people who know the job intimately.
one example: unionized truckers earn less than owner-operator truckers.
I am in camp of owner-operators, cause I see myself one day creating a startup and hiring engineers and I dont want to deal with unions in any capacity.
"Unionized truckers earn less than owner-operator truckers." I'd be very interested in how this is spun as by all measurements unionized truckers overwhelmingly have a much higher hourly wage than contractors. Are you talking take-home pay at the end of the year because the contractors work more hours? Or that there are more contractors so the expenditures of trucking companies go more towards contractors than unionized truckers?
This reminds me of the quote "John Steinbeck once said that socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."
the full quote from Steinbeck's article "A Primer on the '30s." Esquire (June 1960), p. 85-93 tells more about socialists/communists, than it tells about capitalists class:
"Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: 'After the revolution even we will have more, won't we, dear?' Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.
"I guess the trouble was that we didn't have any self-admitted proletarians. Everyone was a temporarily embarrassed capitalist. Maybe the Communists so closely questioned by the investigation committees were a danger to America, but the ones I knew — at least they claimed to be Communists — couldn't have disrupted a Sunday-school picnic. Besides they were too busy fighting among themselves."
Cool, it's a false attribution or at the very least a very mangled quote. The fact that the popular version of the quote has staying power isn't because of the authorship, it's because people recognize the truth in what the popular version of the quote is saying. It's kind of like the false attribution of "America is great because America is good. If America ever stops being good, it will stop being great," to Tocqueville. The quote continues to be shared not because most of those sharing it give two cents about Tocqueville, they share it because it speaks to them (well, that and in the case of the "good/great" quote you can fill in the blank for what "good" and "great" mean with whatever you want).
Unions gave you 40 hour workweek. Market forces worked children 12 hours a day including weekends in unsafe conditions. You are blinded by ideology.
I've seen it before with people from ex-soviet countries. They jump so far to the other side and believe unfettered capitalism is the answer that it's just sad to watch.
The USSR did not have real labor unions. It had organizations that pretended to be unions while being part of the state apparatus. Actual unions would have been the worst kind of enemy for the Communist Party: independent organizations that hold the same ideological position as the party while representing the interests of labor against it. The party could not tolerate such challeges to its legitimacy.
In a market economy, successful unions are powerful interest groups. They tend to have more influence on political parties than the other way around. Much like big businesses, but on a different subset of politicians.
it is telling that people who escaped communist countries never want to see any sign of communism in their life. Because communism doesnt work, never worked, and will never work
Oddly enough, I don't see too many former communists movie to Somalia or Ethiopia or Afghanistan. Former communists seem to favor the EU and the US, where we have heavily socialized large aspects of our public life (health care, etc.)
Are you saying USA has socialized healthcare? Perhaps, but only if you are poor (medicaid) or very old (medicare), or risked your life for military service (VA), and even then the wuality and access is not very good (just like anything socialized)
Looks more like minimum safety net, rather than socialism
You are wrong, communism was never about equality of outcome, it was more about equality of opportunity. This is part of red scare propaganda.
Also US had a lot to do with Cuba and Pol Pot if you study history.
You obviously did not live under communist propaganda. Communism was 100% about the equality of outcome - everyone was equal and was supposed to get his/her equal share. I lived 15 years in Romania under communism, 8 of these years under daily propaganda at school so I know this first hand.
The question was whether communism meant equal outcome and the answer is No. I’m not gonna defend Romania, Soviet Russia or any other old regimes on how they implemented communism.
The context here is about unions. Democracy at work is important and unions are the best way to achieve it in a capitalist nation.
How come people who never lived under commie regime claim to know more about communism than the people who actually lived under commie regimes?
Did you obtain you theoretical knowledge of what actual communism is - purely from Lenin's books? Have you tried to reconcile communism theory to communism in practice?
As I recall Lenin didn't think actual communism was obtainable without a long period of enforced socialism .. so the regime under Lenin was never actual communism (at least according to Lenin) and not especially socialist other than in name by Lenin.
In any case it segued into Stalinism .. and all of these were oppressive authoritarian top down rule.
People that think of post revolution Russia as a good example of communism are the kind of people that think of the USofA as a good example of capitalism.
"people who never lived under commie regime" - I get to hear this so often. We live in under a capitalist regime where 1% of the people own the rest of the population. Basic human needs like healthcare and shelter are paywalled by big corporations. Do you sincerely think wasting your life to make those 1% even more richer is somehow better than communism?
Btw, I didn't even claim that communism is the best way forward, you just assumed it. I would rather advocate for socialism which has better chances to succeed in US. Still, the moment we wave off 10k from student loans people start shouting "communism". Those same people got millions of dollars in PPP loans, still fired their employees and saw nothing wrong with it.
The main context here was about unions and people still cry "communism" whenever they hear the word union. I have seen immense benefits of unions from past generation and feel sad that they are not as prevalent today. "United we bargain, divided we beg" is the whole point of unions and still people choose to beg because "big bad communism". This propaganda has been enforced on us so much by govt that we forget what's good for us and that makes me sad.
According to statistics - rich kids squander ALL of their wealth in ~ 2 generations, so dont worry about rich kids. Stupid ones (of which there are a majority) wont be rich for long.
"Approximately 70% of wealthy families lose their wealth by the next generation, with 90% losing it the generation after that." [1]
> According to statistics - rich kids squander ALL of their wealth in ~ 2 generations, so dont worry about rich kids. Stupid ones (of which there are a majority) wont be rich for long.
So it's not a meritocracy - it's an inter-generational relay race. A meritocracy involves a level playing field. A 100% inheritance tax would help.
In general, it's a tired decades-old anti-labor talking point.
However there are many cases where it's hard to fire underperfoming unionized employees. And there's always the possibility of the union playing a kind of long game with management where they are willing to trade away the possibility of rewarding standout individuals in order to preserve the baseline.
I've never seen a union contract that didn't have a clear path to firing someone. I've worked in a union and in HR labor relations. My experience is that 'hard to fire' stories usually boil down managers not understanding the union contract, not enforcing the union contract until its too late, or wanting to enforce the union contract differently based on the employee.
Ditto. 100% of the times I’ve seen that happen, the problem was created by bad management and often perpetuated because then they don’t want to have to explain why it wasn’t dealt with earlier.
wait until you hear about how inefficient executives are killer.
there is a bell-curve for leadership, and it's pretty damn clear after centuries of mercantilism and capitalism that they're not smarter than you are. it's a cartel, and the bellcurve applies to them just as much as it applies to your SWE I's straight out of college.
Sadly, even companies like Google that are famous for doling out equity to employees, chose to segregate their stock classes and give employees non-voting shares.
if they have $$$money$$$$ they are welcome to purchase on open market, as many shares as they would like.
problem is most retail investors never even vote for annual shareholder meetings and never bother to read proxy statements and shareholders' meeting agenda.
I said collectively. Workers don't get paid enough individually to buy relevant ownership shares (or even any shares). This is literally the point of collective action.
> In industries where employees are critical part of business theybhave a vote and meaningful share.
Employees are critical in literally every industry, otherwise they wouldn't be employed.
> For example startups where early engineers have options/shares and management listens to them and wants to keep them happy.
You're confusing "importance to the business" with "market power". Tech employees generally tend to have market power in the current economy. And how many of those options (read: lottery tickets) and shares even grant the employee voting power?
> All critical code is written by early and now very senior engineers, current employees are tiny tiny cogs that are not critical to business.
This is absolutely not true at the companies where I've worked. Can't speak for FAANG.
> I mean look at twitter - musk fired everyone he could and twitter still works.
This is a really weird example to generalize from. Most businesses are absolutely not organized this way.
> Same with google - google could fire everyone outside Search&Ads and still run its cash cow machine.
This is speculation. Google does a lot of things that aren't directly "making money on ads", but if they didn't think those things were worth doing, they wouldn't do them.
> Sadly in most cases with big tech - there is no reason to give a vote to employee class because they are not critical.
Weirder still is the notion that businesses ought to give their employees voting shares based on some notion of criticality to the business. I am arguing that employees should be unified, in a union, and that the union should seek to obtain a nontrivial voting share of ownership in order to ensure that employees are well represented in business decisions. Some leftists argue that the union should be entitled to this share. I won't even go that far, although I think it's a good idea.
>> Employees are critical in literally every industry, otherwise they wouldn't be employed.
if we talking in a context of unions, then there is nuance. Employee class can be critical, but unionized employees - may not be critical to business. If unionized employee is replaceable cog that anyone with Associate degree/IT Bootcamp and 3 month training/offshore worker can do the job, then unionized employees lose their bargaining power, and the incentive to unionize disappears.
US airline pilots enjoy unionization because US laws require quite extensive training&experience to become pilot, so that only former US Air Force pilots can qualify. With these Government protections it is easy to enjoy labor union benefits.
Try to pull it off in tech? Unionized folks will be fired and their jobs will be offshored very quickly.
>> I am arguing that employees should be unified, in a union, and that the union should seek to obtain a nontrivial voting share of ownership in order to ensure that employees are well represented in business decisions.
This argument could work in 20th century, where the barrier to create business was huge. To become factory/steel mill owner you gotta have huge capital$$$, and most ordinary folks had to be laborers for life. So there was natural divide between owner class (capitalists) and labor class, so labor unions provided some sort of bargaining power and a seat at the big table.
Nowaday in tech - literally anyone can create a startup. Anyone with a pulse and a PowerPoint deck could have create a startup funding during zero interest rate era. Some FAANG engineers earn more in salary+stocks than some business owners make in profit (talking about traditional small-medium businesses like barbershop or corner shop owners)
That means there is no real divide between capitalists class and laborer class. In 21st century your brain is the capital, not money. Money is cheap and investors are willing to fund good brains with good ideas.
Because not everyone is gifted with good brains, this created a natural divide within modern laborer class. People with good brains don't want to share big pie with every other laborer (via labor union). They'd rather become capitalists and get the biggest slice of pie for themselves.
This is why capitalism and market forces always win, and archaic schemes like labor unions are unfit for 21st century where quite a bit of jobs can be offshored/Automated/ChatGPT'ed
I think you guys are trolling by pushing your delusional idea of labor union in tech, where people one the same team sometimes don't agree and argue about the tiniest of things like the choice of framework or programming language.
