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If there is one thing I've learned from two decades of reading about labor history, it's: Every gain labor has ever made has been taken. Every gain the working

• sageikosa 9y ago
  Towards?
  • sageikosa 9y ago
    Seriously, forward towards what? The "perfect society"?
    • crimsonalucard 9y ago
      Towards a more balanced distribution of corporate resources/wages/profits leading to a more healthy economy.
      • sageikosa 9y ago
        Balanced by what standard? Don't really need an answer, most of my posts are just to let other individuals know that at one time there were critical thinkers on HN. I've been downvoted so often for asking questions and answering questions (rather than rambling on through rhetorical platitudes and high-school level history lessons) that I actually take perverse pleasure in seeing how many downvotes I can get.
        • crimsonalucard 9y ago
          I'm not downvoting. By balanced I mean if everyone on earth had the same amount of money then the worlds' wealth would be perfectly balanced. I am not talking about fairness or whether or not the wealth was deserved. At two ends of the spectrum we have wealth inequality and communism. The ideal sweet spot is somewhere in between the two extremes, right now the United States is leaning towards wealth inequality.
• CapitalistCartr 9y ago
  Unfortunately, anyone willing to treat employees horribly, operates cheaper. If using trafficked chinese women were legal, the owner willing to be a psychopath will put his competition under. Capitalism is an inherently unstable system and only works with good regulation. I think a capitalist system only works as well as its regulation.
  • jwhitlark 9y ago
    Well, a truly unregulated market approximates a war. Just look at the early history of trader/pirates. This doesn't mean capitalism is unstable; it's lowest energy state is the state of nature. Unrestricted warfare is bad for profits, as well as general wellbeing. The trick is to add regulation without adding unnecessary friction, and finding an approximate solution to the free rider problem.
    • jules 9y ago
      An unregulated market doesn't mean that you can shoot people. Each transaction must be voluntary. Capitalism is not the same as anarchy.
      • perfmode 9y ago
        Anarchy is not the same as chaos.
      • thephyber 9y ago
        > An unregulated market has never existed in the history of modern civilization for more than 5 minutes. Ironically for your statement, the most unregulated markets are the most violent as they only occur after one government falls before institutions create themselves to deal with the chaotic state of unorganized and fearful humans. It will be interesting to see if the digital economy brings with it any self-created software companies (purely software companies created and administered by self-writing software) which tries to avoid any attempts to shut it down.
        • 9y ago
• tptacek 9y ago
  Since the capital and ownership sectors of our economy are all trained to operate businesses rationally and to not leave value on the table, it seems pretty clear that anything that labor doesn't take will be traded away. To me, in that light, neither the "depredations" of owners and investors nor the "coercion" of labor unions is really a problem; it's just the natural give and take of the market at work. The real problem is the late 20th century stigma labor organization has acquired. Without labor organization, the market system doesn't work.
  • minitel 9y ago
    Open borders and free trade (liberal policies championed in the EU and the USA) rob workers of power. It turns the whole world into a race to the bottom. Where companies with unionized employees will always lose to a company based in a jurisdiction where unions are impossible to form for one, um, reason or another. If you want unions to exist. Support protectionism and strong borders. Otherwise enjoy your cheap servants and goods and keep kvetching about socialism while you sip champagne and call people racist from time to time.
  • jbooth 9y ago
    It's not just the stigma that labor's gotten, it's the language that's infiltrated our thoughts. Giving a generous maternity leave is "leaving value on the table". Evading taxes via the double-irish or contractor/employee loopholes is "creating shareholder value". It's like Gordon Gekko and George Orwell collaborated.
    • aaronbrethorst 9y ago
      You might enjoy George Lakoff's writing on what he calls "reframing." This article is about the 2016 Presidential election, but it's equally applicable to this topic: http://www.salon.com/2017/01/15/dont-think-of-a-rampaging-elephant-linguist-george-lakoff-explains-how-the-democrats-helped-elect-trump/ http://www.salon.com/2017/01/15/dont-think-of-a-rampaging-el...
  • wyldfire 9y ago
    > The real problem is the late 20th century stigma labor organization has acquired. I think the stigma is well-deserved. Indeed they are rife with corruption and often create very odd incentives. Unfortunately unions suffer the same fate as other "invisible" benefits: everyone takes them for granted and doesn't recognize their value. People focus on the drawbacks and it's much easier to convince them that we're all better off without unions.
• pascalxus 9y ago
  Given how hard it is to find labor, due to the lack of housing, they might even have some degree of success. Tech giants need to learn this the hard way: the bay area is not a place for cheap labor: housing costs and taxes are way too astronomical for that. Also, as the article put it, in the short term, I think Google is putting themselves in a very weak position by making their expansion in San Jose. They could've picked a number of different tech hubs in the rest of the US, but instead chose San Jose. They'll be paying a much higher cost of labor for both engineering talent, plus the countless payoffs they'll need to make to local governments. But, I guess, it must all be worth it, otherwise they wouldn't have done.
  • aeorgnoieang 9y ago
    > Tech giants need to learn this the hard way: the bay area is not a place for cheap labor: housing costs and taxes are way too astronomical for that. If the tech giants paid even more than they do already, wouldn't that hurt everyone else even more than they already because of the competition over housing?
    • eru 9y ago
      Indeed, everyone but bay area landlords loses.
    • pascalxus 9y ago
      It sure would! Unfortunately, At this point, the only politically feasible option is to escape the bay area.
• CryptoPunk 9y ago
  Any wage gains that are derived by unionisation are zero sum. They are economic rent extracted by reducing the competitiveness of labour markets, and advantaging unionized workers working for big employers at the expense of those without such jobs. In the long run, the reduced profit margins caused by wages that are artificially high (above the rate that would be established by the free market) results in less investment (profits == compensation for investors), which means a slower rate of economic and wage growth. >>If there is one thing I've learned from two decades of reading about labor history, I encourage you to read a diverse set of perspectives. I'd argue that unions have more power than employers in being able to shape the historical narrative.
  • chimeracoder 9y ago
    > I'd argue that unions have more power than employers in being able to shape the historical narrative. I'm not going to compare their power to employers' power, but it is definitely true that unions have been able to write their preferred version of history with labor law. Notice how we never talk about the historical ties between labor unions and white supremacy. It's all right there in the public record - there's no denying that it happened - but it's always ignored in the public narrative.
  • jeremysalwen 9y ago
    Why do you assume that the current wages are the "natural" rate established by the "free market"? Don't we have evidence that employers are already abusing their market power to extract rents? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_Litigation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L... for an example close to home) In fact, corporate profits are record-high, and wages have been stagnant for decades, suggesting very strongly that the "unnatural" market power that is keeping wages at "artificial" levels is in fact that of employers.
    • CryptoPunk 9y ago
      >>Don't we have evidence that employers are already abusing their market power to extract rents? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L.... for an example close to home) Very few firms can engage in such behavior. A pact like this can only be maintained by a small number of very large firms, and only the firms party to the pact will abide by it, leaving the entire rest of the employer market in a competitive state. Even had the antitrust action not stopped this behavior, it's questionable how much of an impact this behavior had in restraining wage growth in Silicon Valley's tech sector, and how long the pact would have lasted given its informal nature, and the temptation to cheat due to the intense completion between those party to it. If wages being below the natural, market rate, due to collusion between large firms is your concern, then the right solution is antitrust action. Unionisation in the current legal environment (where unions can affectively hold their firm hostage, and thus reduce labour market freedom) creates numerous unintended consequences that adversely affect industries. >>In fact, corporate profits are record-high, and wages have been stagnant for decades, suggesting very strongly that the "unnatural" market power Corporate earning growth is at historically low rates. Wages have stagnated because economic output growth has stagnated. See this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15244901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15244901
• tim333 9y ago
  >Every gain the working class ... has achieved has come from organizing In the absence of organizing, wages and conditions can get bid up if there is a shortage of workers for the jobs available. Maybe not so much for the US working class recently but SV programmers, Chinese factory workers and the like have seen their wages go up a lot.
• logicallee 9y ago
  >Every gain labor has ever made has been taken. what about the part where a single person can now add enough utility to the world and capture the entirety of sales and ownership of it without needing to own anything? 1. Isn't that a gain? 2. Who has taken it? Or doesn't it count as "labor" anymore if you work for yourself? Isn't owning your own work in full, the ultimate triumph of the proletariat? Piketty has nothing to say on this subject but I'm curious if after "two decades of reading about labor history" and given your participation here on HN (a forum of YCombinator, which enables anyone to become an entrepreneur) you have anything to say about whether this is a genuine gain. I also see you're C-level at upsolve.org - which helps low-income Americans. Isn't the fact that in my estimation at least 80% of those Americans could theoretically learn to code within 6 months (for the remaining 20% it may be too difficult) and with minimal (or no) financial backing capture some part of some output on the Internet, a source of victory for labor? If any of those "low-income Americans" build a web startup without funding (through perseverance and learning) then are they now 'evil', and taking from someone else? Who are they taking from in that case? I am sure you agree that wealth is not a zero-sum gain, and I am sure you see it is difficult to apply theories of exploitation of the working class, to one-person startups. What do you think about the movement toward a knowledge economy, and a lowering of the barriers to creating value and startups? I am particularly interested in this because I did not receive satisfying answers from experts in this field. Thanks for any thoughts. (Genuinely interested.)
  • kevmo 9y ago
    > Isn't the fact that in my estimation at least 80% of those Americans could theoretically learn to code within 6 months (for the remaining 20% it may be too difficult) and with minimal (or no) financial backing capture some part of some output on the Internet, a source of victory for labor? I have strong opinions about this. I worked at Hack Reactor the first year it was open and started the subreddit reddit.com/r/LearnJavaScript, so I have a lot of experience with helping people go from 0 to employed software engineer. Your estimations and assumptions are pretty flawed here, IMHO. Here's why: 1) 80% of Americans can't learn to code, unless you start training them at a relatively young age. Older people are not good at learning (they _can_ be taught to learn better, but that is separate problem). 2) Even if 80% could, 6 months is not enough time without full-time investment therein. 3) How many Americans can spend 6 months coding full-time for no pay? The majority of Americans don't even have $1,000 in the bank. This is out of their reach. 4) Even if you had 6 months full-time, you'd need to be on a pretty directed schedule, probably set by some sort of mentor. This costs money. None of this is to say that we couldn't create conditions, via government policies, to foster conditions more suited for enabling the sort of labor mobility you describe. I actually think that is what these unionized workers are doing via higher wages and more structured time off. They have taken more for themselves and thus expanded their range of opportunities. > If any of those "low-income Americans" build a web startup without funding (through perseverance and learning) then are they now 'evil', and taking from someone else? Who are they taking from in that case? Not many people can build a company. Like, it is fun to act like everyone in America is a potential entrepreneur, but, in reality, the vast majority of people don't want to start a startup. Period. Let's not deny these people a full stake in society and the economy just because they don't want to go for the jugular.
• kobeya 9y ago
  Unions claim that every advance made is due to labor organization. They would claim that, wouldn't they.