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Getting rid of unions will increase income inequality. Just compare for profit higher education with public higher education. The wages/benefits for workers

Getting rid of unions will increase income inequality. Just compare for profit higher education with public higher education. The wages/benefits for workers former very much lag those of the latter. Private prisons pay way less too. But the people at the top get outsized pay. The cost savings to taxpayers are not sufficient to justify this inequity.

pizzetta 9y ago
Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? The impact on progress should not be discounted as an externality. Imagine if taxicabs or any livery service of any kind had to have a union member associated with it. Would autonomous cars make the same progress (for example, we can have autonomous subways/trains but they have to be "personned" due to pressure from unions). Or, imagine if we had them in research (drugs discovery) --the added bureaucracy researchers would have to manage and devote valuable time to. I am not saying unionization is absolutely bad --they have brought good things about to workplace improvement, but they also have externalities we need to acknowledge.
- rainbowmverse 9y ago
  >> Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? We are a long way off from being able to say high technology has truly caused progress. Right now, it seems to do more harm than good. People in the tech industry are slowly coming to terms with their impact on the world outside their sphere of awareness, but that newfound conscientiousness hasn't translated into much change.
  - pizzetta 9y ago
    I imagine the progress in microprocessors, photolithography, search, education, power generation, drugs discovery, communications, etc., etc., do have a measurable impact on progress of the species. Imagine if tech were stuck where it was in even 1999. So many things possible today would not be possible (due to cost or unavailability).
    - rainbowmverse 9y ago
      These things are good, but have so far been applied carelessly and unevenly. This is where my comment about conscientiousness comes in. We need to start asking "For what purpose?" and "Who could this hurt?" more often. Packing more transistors into a CPU and working magic with algorithms to squeeze more out of them is not so good if it goes into a machine intended for surveillance and violating privacy, or to wipe out a million jobs because it can all be done by a few people now. We can keep packing the transistors and working the magic, but it's going to keep doing a lot of damage if the people responsible don't think about the human impact.
      - pizzetta 9y ago
        I wholeheartedly agree we spend much of our technology on both frivolous stuff and dangerous stuff (things that are detrimental to the wellbeing of people in general) -but the good offsets the negatives, I think.
      - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
        Anything can be used for good or evil. Its the wrong place to attack the problem - we can't live in the stone age because "somebody might misuse fire".
        rainbowmverse 9y ago
        Someone did invent the fire extinguisher and come up with Stop, Drop, and Roll, though. I'm not saying don't do new things. For example, Bandcamp giving me a way to download a list of people who've bought my music is like a fire extinguisher. If Bandcamp burns, I don't lose everything with it. That's conscientious of them. Most places that sell music don't offer that.
      - stale2002 9y ago
        What are you talking about. Wiping out millions of jobs is a GOOD thing, not a bad thing. I'd argue that it literally the entire point of technology. "Destroying jobs" means that those people are freed up to do some else that is valuable and aren't wasting their time doing stuff that isn't worth anything to anybody. Creating "jobs" is easy. Just implement a tax, and pay a bunch of people to dig holes and fill them up again. Or do the modern equivalent of that and pay people to mess around with spreadsheets in an office and then throw away the spreadsheet. At least that method of "job creation" is being honest.
- InTempWeTrust 9y ago
  IT unionized? The Union of Loners.
  - sctb 9y ago
    Continuing to comment like this will get your account banned. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- yequalsx 9y ago
  I think most groundbreaking research is government sponsored. A lot of it at universities which are unionized. Instead of unions substitute the phrase "sane worker protections, pay, and rights". The U.S. is badly in need of better labor laws and much greater enforcement of those laws.
  - pizzetta 9y ago
    >I think most groundbreaking research is government sponsored And I think many of the researchers are the oft exploited grad students and the like who are not typically bound by union agreements --some staff and contractors may be unionized, but not most of the people doing the drudgery work that goes into research, at least in the US.
- csydas 9y ago
  >Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? I'm not sure this is really a compelling point. Tech companies have made some cool stuff, but technology is also heavily driven by FOSS, which is not really driven by the same factors business are. Union or no union isn't really a question with FOSS, as these projects, many of which drive modern technology, were developed without traditional business incentives. Yes they're are businesses built around supporting open technology, but techs huge advances aren't driven only by companies. I think unionization would have less of an impact on tech advances than is being suggested.
  - pizzetta 9y ago
    I could argue that if unions were strong and everyone had to belong to a union to participate in an economy the unions could see an advantage to controlling how you contribute to FOSS because your "free" contribution to FOSS impinges on the rights to another unionized worker's right to work. The FOSS developer would theoretically be undermining the union worker.
    - naravara 9y ago
      When unions are huge and cover large swathes of the workforce, they tend to be more focused on the long-term health of the industry/economy. It’s when they’re small and parochial that they get really zealous about incumbency protection at the expense of everything else because they don’t have to balance competing interests the way you do when you have a bigger picture to worry about.
    - csydas 9y ago
      Well, you certainly could, but that wasn't the argument presented or responded to. The argument you put forth was Technology's advancement was due to IT businesses, and what would the world be like if there were more Unions; but this is not really a sensible proposition because major technological advances, indeed the majority of which are driving the backbone of the world economy and technology as we know it, were developed without any of the incentives provided by a business structure. Union or not is irrelevant to such forces because they operate outside the realm of business. The idea that FOSS would be quashed under a mandatory unionized economy is not what was being discussed, and I'm not sure of the relevance of such a theoretical world in the context of what was said. It's tangential at best. What was being discussed, the advancement of technology as we've seen it, has happened independent of how employees are organized and employed. As long as there are inventive persons looking to try something new, there will be technological advancements.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- _jal 9y ago
  I think there's an ordering problem. IT jobs have never faced union pressure because, in part, of massive, ongoing change and high wages. Private prisons are not labs of innovation. "Innovation" in this context means maximining prison labor and cutting healthcare costs. Schools are similar - we don't know how to make them work better, but bullshit standardized testing and cutting wages isn't it. I absolutely agree - not every work force should be unionized. I just wish folks would acknowledge that the titan-CEO/interchangeable wage-slave model is also leads to terrible outcomes in a number of industries.
- piva00 9y ago
  I recommend looking up the union/labour movement model of Sweden. It's a three-way between unions, employers and government to get into agreements, doesn't seem to be hurting Swedish economy (nor its IT industry).
- crdoconnor 9y ago
  >Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? The following would likely happen: * Wages would be higher, tech behemoth profits would be lower. * Vastly more attention would be drawn to some of the worse outsourcing disasters (some of which are currently covered up). * Those egregious IP agreements would be less common. * Employee share options agreements would probably be fairer. Not like this: https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/26/skypes-worthless-employee-stock-option-plan-heres-why-they-did-it/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/26/skypes-worthless-employee-... * Wage fixing cartels like this would be busted quicker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... >they also have externalities we need to acknowledge. So acknowledge them?
  - stale2002 9y ago
    Oooh how about these ones: Your pay would be pegged to seniority, not ability to contribute. Better pay your dues, newbie. You don't deserve as much money as I do, solely because of your age. You wouldn't be allowed to do anything outside your extremely limited job description. That's someone else's job, don't take it away from them! No more wearing many hats. Unless you literally kill someone, you are immune from being fired. Irregardless if you suck and are holding the team back. Find a good way to make your job more efficient? Sorry, you can't use that. It is not in your contract. And for that matter, doing things more efficiently means that there is less work to go around! Got to save jobs, by creating useless work! Don't work too hard. You are making everyone else look bad! The contract says that we are only supposed to solve 1 bug a day. You'd have to get some sort of union sponsored certification/significant barriers to entry, Because the union does not care about NEW workers. They want to keep them out so that they don't compete on wages with them. No more being a self taught engineer! No more switching to a different part of tech. You need a certification for that. Collective bargaining means that you won't be able to negotiate on an individual basis. No matter how good at negotiating you are or if you could get 2-3X the pay, or if you think the union contract sucks. Don't like the union? Too bad! You are forced to join it. Fuck you, you free rider! It doesn't matter if you believe that the union provides significant negatives, is corrupt, is destroying your industry and you shouldn't exist. Free rider! Free rider! Free rider!
- arximboldi 9y ago
  > Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? I imagine less bullshit businesses selling air castles built on top of an exploitative operation. I imagine better democratic processes inside companies. I imagine using collective power to protect underrepresented groups instead of fighting against each other. A net benefit to society.
- BoiledCabbage 9y ago
  > Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? Unions would've collectively bargained and agreed not to work for companies that abuse H1-B visa farms. And this whole issue would've been resolved ages ago.
  - pizzetta 9y ago
    I'll grant you that --but while that protects domestic workers it may hurt domestic industry in that some things would be cheaper to develop in locales with less unionization or simply lower labor costs.
- blahblab 9y ago
  I don't have to imagine, I'm a unionized programmer. I've worked in private industry too and switching out an individual vs collective contract hasn't degraded my skills one iota. I will say that Government is bureaucratic, but no more than any comparably sized corporation. Our only problem is that our shareholders are fucking morons.
Consultant32452 9y ago
It's important to apply context to this. A minimum wage, among other things, forces businesses to prejudice against lower skilled workers. If the minimum wage is negotiated by the union to $18/hr but you only produce $10/hr due to lack of experience, disability, below average IQ, or you went to a failing public school then you're simply unemployed. If we remove this contractual minimum wage, you're right, it would likely have some minimal impact for the people on the margins of having productivity sufficient to justify hiring them on the union's minimum wage. However, everyone below that level of productivity now has the potential for new jobs, and with those jobs comes skills training and economic mobility. Unions do marginally help their members, but they harm everyone below them on the economic ladder.
- pdeuchler 9y ago
  The incorrect assumption here is that people earn what value they produce. People actually earn (value_produced - profit + bargaining power). The reason for upping the minimum wage is all minimum wage worker unions have disappeared and an increase in the low skill labor market supply (mostly due to the loss of manufacturing in the US) have decimated bargaining power across the board. Plus, due to automation, a single say, McDonalds worker, "produces" much more value than his counterpart 20 years ago without commiserate increase in salary even accounting for a loss in bargaining power (i.e. the profit variable has shot up, meaning an unequal share in the benefits of the labor). Of course, that's just the high level theory... using just common sense those same workers are going to be automated away entirely, if the wage is 20 cents or 20 dollars it doesn't matter. So we might as well force companies to compensate them in the short term for their impending unemployment.
  - Consultant32452 9y ago
    Two key things occurred during the time period you're talking about where wages stagnated in spite of massive increases in productivity growth. The first is that we actually started letting women get jobs. We increased the labor supply by nearly 40%. It's amazing that wages are not even lower than they are. The second thing that happened is that millions upon millions of unskilled immigrants crossed the border. This also, obviously significantly increased the pool of labor at the bottom of the economic ladder further suppressing wages.
pravda 9y ago
>Just compare for profit higher education with public higher education. The wages/benefits for workers former very much lag those of the latter. And here appears the Broken Window Fallacy!
- TheCoelacanth 9y ago
  What exactly do you think is "broken" when a worker gets higher pay? In the Broken Window Fallacy story, the total wealth in the system is decreased when the window is destroyed. In this example, no wealth is destroyed, it is just distributed differently. If you believe that wealth has a decreasing marginal utility as you become more wealthy, the more even distribution where the worker is paid more has a higher overall utility even though the total wealth is exactly the same.
  - sharemywin 9y ago
    "decreasing marginal utility" I know I'm bastardizing the meaning but it got me thinking about Elon Musk versus "prototypical lotto winner that loses everything" you could certainly argue that he is using his wealth(as well as others) to benefit society, ie. mars, electrification of transportation, etc.
    - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
      But if you count that then you also have to count the billionaires spending money lobbying to be allowed to continue pumping carbon into the atmosphere or for more bombs to be built. If you start using that method of calculating utility, I wouldn't be surprised if the marginal utility is actually negative at some point.

pizzetta 9y ago

Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? The impact on progress should not be discounted as an externality. Imagine if taxicabs or any livery service of any kind had to have a union member associated with it. Would autonomous cars make the same progress (for example, we can have autonomous subways/trains but they have to be "personned" due to pressure from unions). Or, imagine if we had them in research (drugs discovery) --the added bureaucracy researchers would have to manage and devote valuable time to. I am not saying unionization is absolutely bad --they have brought good things about to workplace improvement, but they also have externalities we need to acknowledge.

rainbowmverse 9y ago
>> Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? We are a long way off from being able to say high technology has truly caused progress. Right now, it seems to do more harm than good. People in the tech industry are slowly coming to terms with their impact on the world outside their sphere of awareness, but that newfound conscientiousness hasn't translated into much change.
- pizzetta 9y ago
  I imagine the progress in microprocessors, photolithography, search, education, power generation, drugs discovery, communications, etc., etc., do have a measurable impact on progress of the species. Imagine if tech were stuck where it was in even 1999. So many things possible today would not be possible (due to cost or unavailability).
  - rainbowmverse 9y ago
    These things are good, but have so far been applied carelessly and unevenly. This is where my comment about conscientiousness comes in. We need to start asking "For what purpose?" and "Who could this hurt?" more often. Packing more transistors into a CPU and working magic with algorithms to squeeze more out of them is not so good if it goes into a machine intended for surveillance and violating privacy, or to wipe out a million jobs because it can all be done by a few people now. We can keep packing the transistors and working the magic, but it's going to keep doing a lot of damage if the people responsible don't think about the human impact.
    - pizzetta 9y ago
      I wholeheartedly agree we spend much of our technology on both frivolous stuff and dangerous stuff (things that are detrimental to the wellbeing of people in general) -but the good offsets the negatives, I think.
    - JoeAltmaier 9y ago
      Anything can be used for good or evil. Its the wrong place to attack the problem - we can't live in the stone age because "somebody might misuse fire".
      - rainbowmverse 9y ago
        Someone did invent the fire extinguisher and come up with Stop, Drop, and Roll, though. I'm not saying don't do new things. For example, Bandcamp giving me a way to download a list of people who've bought my music is like a fire extinguisher. If Bandcamp burns, I don't lose everything with it. That's conscientious of them. Most places that sell music don't offer that.
    - stale2002 9y ago
      What are you talking about. Wiping out millions of jobs is a GOOD thing, not a bad thing. I'd argue that it literally the entire point of technology. "Destroying jobs" means that those people are freed up to do some else that is valuable and aren't wasting their time doing stuff that isn't worth anything to anybody. Creating "jobs" is easy. Just implement a tax, and pay a bunch of people to dig holes and fill them up again. Or do the modern equivalent of that and pay people to mess around with spreadsheets in an office and then throw away the spreadsheet. At least that method of "job creation" is being honest.
InTempWeTrust 9y ago
IT unionized? The Union of Loners.
- sctb 9y ago
  Continuing to comment like this will get your account banned. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
yequalsx 9y ago
I think most groundbreaking research is government sponsored. A lot of it at universities which are unionized. Instead of unions substitute the phrase "sane worker protections, pay, and rights". The U.S. is badly in need of better labor laws and much greater enforcement of those laws.
- pizzetta 9y ago
  >I think most groundbreaking research is government sponsored And I think many of the researchers are the oft exploited grad students and the like who are not typically bound by union agreements --some staff and contractors may be unionized, but not most of the people doing the drudgery work that goes into research, at least in the US.
csydas 9y ago
>Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? I'm not sure this is really a compelling point. Tech companies have made some cool stuff, but technology is also heavily driven by FOSS, which is not really driven by the same factors business are. Union or no union isn't really a question with FOSS, as these projects, many of which drive modern technology, were developed without traditional business incentives. Yes they're are businesses built around supporting open technology, but techs huge advances aren't driven only by companies. I think unionization would have less of an impact on tech advances than is being suggested.
- pizzetta 9y ago
  I could argue that if unions were strong and everyone had to belong to a union to participate in an economy the unions could see an advantage to controlling how you contribute to FOSS because your "free" contribution to FOSS impinges on the rights to another unionized worker's right to work. The FOSS developer would theoretically be undermining the union worker.
  - naravara 9y ago
    When unions are huge and cover large swathes of the workforce, they tend to be more focused on the long-term health of the industry/economy. It’s when they’re small and parochial that they get really zealous about incumbency protection at the expense of everything else because they don’t have to balance competing interests the way you do when you have a bigger picture to worry about.
  - csydas 9y ago
    Well, you certainly could, but that wasn't the argument presented or responded to. The argument you put forth was Technology's advancement was due to IT businesses, and what would the world be like if there were more Unions; but this is not really a sensible proposition because major technological advances, indeed the majority of which are driving the backbone of the world economy and technology as we know it, were developed without any of the incentives provided by a business structure. Union or not is irrelevant to such forces because they operate outside the realm of business. The idea that FOSS would be quashed under a mandatory unionized economy is not what was being discussed, and I'm not sure of the relevance of such a theoretical world in the context of what was said. It's tangential at best. What was being discussed, the advancement of technology as we've seen it, has happened independent of how employees are organized and employed. As long as there are inventive persons looking to try something new, there will be technological advancements.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
_jal 9y ago
I think there's an ordering problem. IT jobs have never faced union pressure because, in part, of massive, ongoing change and high wages. Private prisons are not labs of innovation. "Innovation" in this context means maximining prison labor and cutting healthcare costs. Schools are similar - we don't know how to make them work better, but bullshit standardized testing and cutting wages isn't it. I absolutely agree - not every work force should be unionized. I just wish folks would acknowledge that the titan-CEO/interchangeable wage-slave model is also leads to terrible outcomes in a number of industries.
piva00 9y ago
I recommend looking up the union/labour movement model of Sweden. It's a three-way between unions, employers and government to get into agreements, doesn't seem to be hurting Swedish economy (nor its IT industry).
crdoconnor 9y ago
>Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? The following would likely happen: * Wages would be higher, tech behemoth profits would be lower. * Vastly more attention would be drawn to some of the worse outsourcing disasters (some of which are currently covered up). * Those egregious IP agreements would be less common. * Employee share options agreements would probably be fairer. Not like this: https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/26/skypes-worthless-employee-stock-option-plan-heres-why-they-did-it/ https://techcrunch.com/2011/06/26/skypes-worthless-employee-... * Wage fixing cartels like this would be busted quicker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... >they also have externalities we need to acknowledge. So acknowledge them?
- stale2002 9y ago
  Oooh how about these ones: Your pay would be pegged to seniority, not ability to contribute. Better pay your dues, newbie. You don't deserve as much money as I do, solely because of your age. You wouldn't be allowed to do anything outside your extremely limited job description. That's someone else's job, don't take it away from them! No more wearing many hats. Unless you literally kill someone, you are immune from being fired. Irregardless if you suck and are holding the team back. Find a good way to make your job more efficient? Sorry, you can't use that. It is not in your contract. And for that matter, doing things more efficiently means that there is less work to go around! Got to save jobs, by creating useless work! Don't work too hard. You are making everyone else look bad! The contract says that we are only supposed to solve 1 bug a day. You'd have to get some sort of union sponsored certification/significant barriers to entry, Because the union does not care about NEW workers. They want to keep them out so that they don't compete on wages with them. No more being a self taught engineer! No more switching to a different part of tech. You need a certification for that. Collective bargaining means that you won't be able to negotiate on an individual basis. No matter how good at negotiating you are or if you could get 2-3X the pay, or if you think the union contract sucks. Don't like the union? Too bad! You are forced to join it. Fuck you, you free rider! It doesn't matter if you believe that the union provides significant negatives, is corrupt, is destroying your industry and you shouldn't exist. Free rider! Free rider! Free rider!
arximboldi 9y ago
> Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? I imagine less bullshit businesses selling air castles built on top of an exploitative operation. I imagine better democratic processes inside companies. I imagine using collective power to protect underrepresented groups instead of fighting against each other. A net benefit to society.
BoiledCabbage 9y ago
> Imagine if unions were strong and IT were unionized. How would you imagine the progress we've seen in information technology? Unions would've collectively bargained and agreed not to work for companies that abuse H1-B visa farms. And this whole issue would've been resolved ages ago.
- pizzetta 9y ago
  I'll grant you that --but while that protects domestic workers it may hurt domestic industry in that some things would be cheaper to develop in locales with less unionization or simply lower labor costs.
blahblab 9y ago
I don't have to imagine, I'm a unionized programmer. I've worked in private industry too and switching out an individual vs collective contract hasn't degraded my skills one iota. I will say that Government is bureaucratic, but no more than any comparably sized corporation. Our only problem is that our shareholders are fucking morons.

Consultant32452 9y ago

It's important to apply context to this. A minimum wage, among other things, forces businesses to prejudice against lower skilled workers. If the minimum wage is negotiated by the union to $18/hr but you only produce $10/hr due to lack of experience, disability, below average IQ, or you went to a failing public school then you're simply unemployed. If we remove this contractual minimum wage, you're right, it would likely have some minimal impact for the people on the margins of having productivity sufficient to justify hiring them on the union's minimum wage. However, everyone below that level of productivity now has the potential for new jobs, and with those jobs comes skills training and economic mobility. Unions do marginally help their members, but they harm everyone below them on the economic ladder.

pdeuchler 9y ago
The incorrect assumption here is that people earn what value they produce. People actually earn (value_produced - profit + bargaining power). The reason for upping the minimum wage is all minimum wage worker unions have disappeared and an increase in the low skill labor market supply (mostly due to the loss of manufacturing in the US) have decimated bargaining power across the board. Plus, due to automation, a single say, McDonalds worker, "produces" much more value than his counterpart 20 years ago without commiserate increase in salary even accounting for a loss in bargaining power (i.e. the profit variable has shot up, meaning an unequal share in the benefits of the labor). Of course, that's just the high level theory... using just common sense those same workers are going to be automated away entirely, if the wage is 20 cents or 20 dollars it doesn't matter. So we might as well force companies to compensate them in the short term for their impending unemployment.
- Consultant32452 9y ago
  Two key things occurred during the time period you're talking about where wages stagnated in spite of massive increases in productivity growth. The first is that we actually started letting women get jobs. We increased the labor supply by nearly 40%. It's amazing that wages are not even lower than they are. The second thing that happened is that millions upon millions of unskilled immigrants crossed the border. This also, obviously significantly increased the pool of labor at the bottom of the economic ladder further suppressing wages.

pravda 9y ago

>Just compare for profit higher education with public higher education. The wages/benefits for workers former very much lag those of the latter. And here appears the Broken Window Fallacy!

TheCoelacanth 9y ago
What exactly do you think is "broken" when a worker gets higher pay? In the Broken Window Fallacy story, the total wealth in the system is decreased when the window is destroyed. In this example, no wealth is destroyed, it is just distributed differently. If you believe that wealth has a decreasing marginal utility as you become more wealthy, the more even distribution where the worker is paid more has a higher overall utility even though the total wealth is exactly the same.
- sharemywin 9y ago
  "decreasing marginal utility" I know I'm bastardizing the meaning but it got me thinking about Elon Musk versus "prototypical lotto winner that loses everything" you could certainly argue that he is using his wealth(as well as others) to benefit society, ie. mars, electrification of transportation, etc.
  - TheCoelacanth 9y ago
    But if you count that then you also have to count the billionaires spending money lobbying to be allowed to continue pumping carbon into the atmosphere or for more bombs to be built. If you start using that method of calculating utility, I wouldn't be surprised if the marginal utility is actually negative at some point.