MangoMan wrote: ↑Sun Sep 11, 2022 12:37 pm
D1984 wrote: ↑Sat Sep 10, 2022 10:58 pm
Oh, and as
for a place that is really "run by unions" Illinois doesn't hold an even barely flickering candle to Scandinavia. There was an instance back in 2019 where Finland's postal service tried to move just 700 workers into a new contract and new collective bargaining unit that effectively would've cut their compensation a bit; damn near every union in the country--starting with the postal, freight, transport ,and warehousing sectors and spreading from there--eventually went on sympathy strike--or was preparing to do so--and within two weeks the whole country was virtually shut down except for absolutely essential workers; the whole affair eventually resulted in the downfall of a prime minister and his government losing power in the next election...all over something that only directly effected 700 unionized workers!
And the striking is another reason to hate unions. Regular folks just get another job with a different employer if they don't like the pay or working conditions. As a small business owner, I have zero sympathy for organized labor.
All the ability to unionize and strike strike does is give employees additional bargaining power (although to be fair, one doesn't technically need to be in a union per se to "strike"; if all of an employer's employees are un-unionized but do have some grievance with said employer and they all come to him/her together as a united front and say "
fix this issue to our satisfaction and while you are at it we know you can afford to pay us more so do that or else we will all simply down tools and quit work until you agree to do so" then the employer certainly has the
option to fire them all on the spot....but it is far easier to replace one solitary employee at a time than to try to replace all of one's employees at once....especially in time of low unemployment and tight labor markets! That's the point of collective action. It is no different in this regard than say, a boycott...which if you think about it, is a collective action "strike" of sorts by consumers rather than by workers; if one lone guy stops buying company XYZ's product it won't even be discernible; if OTOH, say, 100,000 people as a group deliberately all together at once stop buying it then chances are the company will begin to see it hit their bottom line).
All unions (or any form of collective bargaining....even if as in the above example it doesn't actually involve an official union) do is even the odds somewhat between employer and employee. By acting collectively, the employees become like the bundle of sticks in the in the tale of the brothers and the three sticks; together they have power and are stronger and are far more difficult to break whereas they would easily have little/no strength in power if they had to negotiate alone. An employer (especially a mid-sized, large, or giant company....or for that matter, any decent-sized city or state) has far greater bargaining power than any one given worker. Adam Smith--the gentleman who both figuratively and literally "wrote the book" on capitalism--openly acknowledged as much in
The Wealth of Nations:
"In all such disputes the masters can hold out much longer. A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate"
Employees having the power and ability to bargain collectively evens the odds by "making the necessity more immediate" for the employer as well rather than just for the employee.
If a business owner is so worried about his employees having more bargaining power and the ability to threaten to strike to obtain higher pay (or more generous benefits, or better conditions, or shorter hours for the same pay, or more vacation, etc) then maybe they should look at what they are paying (by which I mean "paying" as covering both actual wage levels itself and things like fringe benefits, retirement benefits, working conditions, and the like) in the first place and ask themselves:
A. Is what I am paying competitive?
and
B. Does it fairly reflect the value the employee adds to the company? Am I truly paying this person as close as possible to as much as they are worth or am I paying them as little as I can get away with and then pocketing as much of the surplus value they create myself and counting on them having little/no bargaining power vis-a-vis my company so they end up having to put up with this without much recourse to do anything about it?
A. above is pretty self explanatory. B. Means that the if the employee is really adding, say, $30 an hour in economic value to the company should the employer really be only trying to get away with paying him, say $20 an hour in pay and benefits? If an employee is truly so useless that he's asking for more than he's worth then fire him and do his job yourself (and/or hire someone else to do it). If not, then paying him/her more commensurately with the value he/she produces--even though doing so would cut into the employer's profits--would seem to be the best and quickest course of action to ensure that one's employees felt no desire to unionize or otherwise collectively bargain.
That logic is like: I'm shot in the leg and bleeding, but I shouldn't complain bc the guy lying on the ground next to me is shot in the stomach and probably going to die a long painful death.
You make it sound by way of comparison like Scandinavia is some third-world hellhole LOL. What I was trying to demonstrate is that saying that "unions have too much power in America" is somewhat laughable. Union membership here is around 10.5 or 11% of the total workforce (and around 7.5% or 8% of the privets sector workforce), company union busting activities typically only get a slap on the wrist even if they violates the letter of labor law, companies can simply all but refuse to agree to a first contract and refuse to even attempt to bargain in good faith (all the while dragging out the process for years in an attempt to outlast the union financially; this is technically against the law but the penalties for doing so are pretty toothless and aren't even enforced all of the time), sympathy strikes (AKA "hot cargo strikes" ) are illegal--hell, even simple secondary
boycotts without even any actual secondary strikes are still not allowed, wildcat strikes are illegal, general strikes are (arguably) illegal; there is a required "cooling off" period before a union can even legally strike in almost all cases in the US, closed "union only" shops are illegal, unions here have no legally enforceable co-determination rights on any corporate board like they do in Scandinavia, Germany, and Austria whereas in those nations workers are
by law allotted seats--sometimes up to half the seats--on every large company's board even if they don't own a single share of that company's stock (and to add insult to injury, in the United States unions can't even legally get around this by trying to use their pension funds to attempt buy up a majority of a company's stock so as to be able to vote in/out the directors that way like ordinary large activist shareholders can; US labor law technically forbids workers' union trustees from having a majority of seats on their own pension fund trust boards......this was put in place because in 1946 and early 1947--when stock prices and PE ratios were a lot lower than they are now--a few of the more forward-thinking unions had began to use some of their pension fund money to start buying blocks of stock in several companies and even in a bank with the clear goal of eventually having bought enough to potentially have a controlling stake in these companies; the Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 put a stop to that by implementing the "50% or less control by union trustees" for union pension fund boards), etc.
I was just trying to show that American employers have no idea what having to deal with an environment where unions still do have
ACTUAL power is like or that by comparison American employers don't know how good they have things here, relatively speaking. The poster who called it "wailing about a mosquito bite" had about the right metaphor in mind. If unions are so intolerably powerful in the US, how come our middle class income share--and for that matter lower class income share--are lower than they were in the 1960s or early 1970s? Why has the median/average worker received on average about the same pay he/she got in the early 1970s in inflation-adjusted terms (again, see the AHETPI data posted by Kbg) despite decades of economic growth? In countries where unions still have real power and influence, things like that don't tend to happen (or at least don't happen to nearly the extent they have happened here).