WiseOne wrote: ↑Sat Dec 14, 2019 2:02 pm
No, not that one :-) interesting demonstration of how inaccurate surveys can be, not to mention conclusions drawn from observational studies.
regarding unions: the problem is that they expanded their focus way beyond decent treatment, good pay & working conditions etc, to forcing regulations that put major barriers on construction projects. Maybe that doesn't happen as much in Europe, but I sure see it all the time here. It's the major reason why construction projects in NYC take forever and cost so much. Think of the Second Avenue subway, the Freedom Tower, and the Wolman ice rink that the city never did manage to finish until it got help from a certain person whose initials are Donald Trump - primarily because he didn't have to deal with unions.
And some of those regulations are batsh*t crazy. For example: students at my university medical center can't get summer and part time jobs in research labs, because the associated hospital's union forced that on us. Apparently they believed the students could represent competition for union jobs. Even though the hospital is private and is financially unrelated to the university. Students working part time has been a foundation of lab work not to mention student income for a LONG time, and it still is everywhere else. But now, thanks to the union, we can only "hire" them if they're willing to work for free or for course credit, or if they come under an NIH sponsored program.
Both of your examples are anecdotal and not really structural analysis of the power of unions, which leaves me asking a few questions. If we can temporarily separate (though of course they're related) the Cost of a project vs the Time it takes, and just look at cost... it seems to me that this would mostly be driven by labor costs, which, as previously mentioned, are relatively stagnant compared to past decades, so it's hard for me to believe that this is the source of the problem without some more information about the cost of labor in these contracts vs those during strong labor days like the 1940's and 1950's.
Now maybe some of the "time" element is due to some union-induced regulatory constraint, but to me this ultimately boils down to cost. Any time delays can usually be addressed by simply spending more money, and if labor isn't truly demanding that much more than, say, 1955, then I find it difficult to blame the time delays on "strong unions," though I'm open to deeper analysis.
To your last example, Unions have always been very active against "hiring scabs" to do union work. Obviously, there's probably some interpretation as to whether these part-time students are doing "Union Work," but I highly doubt that similar hiring would have been allowed by a trucker or miner's union back in the 1950's.
Just some thoughts... while I am fascinated by the history of the "labor movement" for lack of a better term, I feel like I walk away with little actual knowledge of how union political power works.