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Wages are high if the supply of labour is low and the employer has money for wages. If supply is low and the employer does not have money, then the job won't ex
by mobiletelephone 9y ago
Wages are high if the supply of labour is low and the employer has money for wages. If supply is low and the employer does not have money, then the job won't exist. This is why tech workers wouldn't benefit from a union very much.
- zdkl 9y agoCan you elaborate on the relation of your second clause and your conclusion? I'm not seeing how this relates to the role and nature of unions.
- TeMPOraL 9y agoIt's not gonna last forever this way. Unions are not very useful for developers now, but you might want to have them already in-place by the time they become needed.
- eru 9y agoUnions are mostly there to keep out newcomers and non-union members. Eg strike breakers. I'm internationally mobile, so I'm often the newcomer. (And from a philosophical point of view, programmers are so well paid that even taking that down a nodge to the benefit of the general public would be fine. What we have to make sure is that forming new tech companies becomes easier and easier---so that any general cheapening of programmers benefits the customers and not the owners of companies. Traditionally, unions are the very opposite of lowering barriers to market entry.)
- TeMPOraL 9y ago> programmers are so well paid that even taking that down a nodge to the benefit of the general public would be fine The problem is, taking that down a nodge will not benefit the general public. All the surplus will be eaten up by the companies. I suppose there are two ways to view this - putting up barriers to entry vs. preventing wages from being driven down by encouraging everyone and their dog to become coders. At this point I sort of see it as both at the same time. The reasons unions could be useful in the future is both to preserve a reasonable standard of living for tech employees and to help oppose unethical demands from employers. Right now, tech employees have some leverage over their bosses. Without unions, this will eventually end.
- freeflight 9y ago> All the surplus will be eaten up by the companies. That can easily be fixed by plugging tax evasion loopholes and generally taxing higher. If there's a will then there's a way, the problem is pretty much finding the way everybody agrees on.
- eru 9y agoSee https://transformationdeal.org/2016/04/24/how-a-basic-income-combined-with-land-value-tax-could-work-in-the-us/ https://transformationdeal.org/2016/04/24/how-a-basic-income... for a very straight forward proposal.
- freeflight 9y agoNice to see something like this adapted to the US, I've seen comparable proposals in Germany [0], also build on a similar base of taxing land value/production facilities. Imho it seems like pretty valid approach considering land is one of the few resources we recognize as actually being finite, so it's a good place to start for building a "base". On the other hand it's quite frustrating how accepting we have become of creating "wealth" out of nothing by printing paper money but if we try to do the same thing based on something actually tangible, like land, people lose their shit going "you can't just make up money", sure we can, we do it all the time. [0] http://www.wissensmanufaktur.net/plan-b http://www.wissensmanufaktur.net/plan-b
- eru 9y agoI don't see the connection between paper money and land value tax. One of the reasons economists like taxing land is that the supply is perfectly inelastic---literally fixed to be precise. So a tax can't distort the market. If you can read German and like some historical musings in this direction (including about money), do read Silvio Gesell. https://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~roehrigw/gesell/nwo/nwo.pdf https://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~roehrigw/gesell/nwo/nwo.pdf
- eru 9y ago
- pdpi 9y agoYou're assuming that wages are the only thing worth arguing over. Work environment, tools, work/life balance are all things that you might want, and where you might need leverage to get them.
- emodendroket 9y agoAlso the stuff about age discrimination. It's weird to me that so many people here are unconcerned about that because, like... we're all going to be old someday (hopefully).
- emodendroket 9y agoHas everyone already forgotten that Google and Apple wage-fixing scandal? In the real world there are factors beyond the Econ 101 stuff.