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" In other words, in the labor market, effectively a small number of employers are competing for their labor" This is not what a monopsony is. That's an oligops

" In other words, in the labor market, effectively a small number of employers are competing for their labor" This is not what a monopsony is. That's an oligopsony. "Because most people sink roots in their communities, they are reluctant to quit their job and move to a job that is far away." The effect of this is a wash because this is also a problem for employers too. The supply of good workers is smaller because few people are willing to move towns for one - which drives labor prices up. "Unions used to offset employer monopsony power" Ahh, okay, now im understanding the point of this article. Lets fight monopolies with more monopolies instead of solving the underlying issues! I agree with the points about non-competes though.

Caveman_Coder 9y ago
> "Ahh, okay, now im understanding the point of this article. Lets fight monopolies with more monopolies instead of solving the underlying issues!" So you don't think unions have a place in modern day society?
- randyrand 9y ago
  I think unions should be tried for anti-competitive practices, just as any monopoly should. What is the difference between a bunch of carpenters unionizing their wages versus a bunch of small and large companies all agreeing to price-fix their products? Nothing.
  - scribu 9y ago
    What are some of those “anti-competitive” practices that you disagree with?
  - mikeash 9y ago
    Unions are no more monopolies than any random company is, and union bargaining isn’t collusion any more than a hiring manager consulting with HR is. When employers band together to bargain collectively, we call it a “company” and it’s not only accepted, it’s so entrenched in our culture that we can barely conceive of any other way. When employees do the exact same thing, we attack them relentlessly.
    - randyrand 9y ago
      No. This is completely wrong. A company is not by default a monopoly - a union is. Imagine if there were 10 different smartphone suppliers but all the suppliers agreed that they were only going to let you buy from 1 of them - company X. Company X would just charge you whatever the hell they felt like because you would have no other options. It would fricken suck. It would feel the exact same as a monopoly. Now compare this to a union. Company Y's employees are all unionized and the union forbids company Y from buying labor from anyone but them. Even if it's not forbidden , new hires are typically glad to join the union too, and in some cases the law forbids otherwise. See how similar that is? It's still a monopoly - just a monopoly against a single buyer.
      - Caveman_Coder 9y ago
        > "...a modern day union is." This is also wrong. Your straw man union isn't true across the board.
        randyrand 9y ago
        I fixed it, as it actually does apply to all unions. Not just modern day ones.
      - mikeash 9y ago
        I don’t believe companies are forced into any exclusivity agreement like you describe. They choose it. It’s not much different from any other long term business deal. A union is by default an organization of employees to bargain together. Anything beyond that is extra.
        randyrand 9y ago
        Even if hiring from the union is not forced onto them, new hires are often glad to join in on the price-fixing.
        cannonedhamster 9y ago
  - Caveman_Coder 9y ago
    Interesting...maybe in an ideal world...but in the real world where business owners currently have the upper hand (and congressmen and congresswomen basically on payroll), I'm perfectly fine with unions acting as a counterweight to corporate power.
    - randyrand 9y ago
      A few points: 1. Unions are not often a counter balance. They are usually just additional monopolies[0] where there was none before. The airline industry is incredibly competitive but yet airline pilots still decided to unionize and price-fix. 2. Monopolies should be fought with regulations targeted at increasing competition and lowering barriers to entry - not with more monopolies. Fighting a monopoly with another monopoly just hurts the consumer and hurts our country in the global economy. 3. unions have congressmen "on payroll" too. In fact in some states some industries have state laws that forbid people from working outside of the union. Only 27 states have right to work laws. [0] Per-company unions are the easiest monopolies to create because the scale of them is much smaller than the scale of the whole industry. Its very easy to get all your coworkers at company X to unionize and forbid company X from hiring elsewhere - and often new hires are happy to join the union too. But its very difficult for your company X to achieve a monopoly itself because it has to dominate an often much larger global market. For an example, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16489013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16489013
      - Caveman_Coder 9y ago
        > "People unionize even when their employer is not a monopoly." Nobody said that unions form only when the employer is a monopoly...I'm not sure what "point" you're trying to make here.
        randyrand 9y ago
        Companies don't always have the upper hand. Unions are not always fighting "unjust" monopolies. They are often the unjust monopoly themself.
  - sjg007 9y ago
    I think that's a false equivalence. The difference is that the union and the company come to a negotiated bargain. This is an internal dynamic where consumer prices are still subject to market forces. Large companies that price fix are screwing "non-participant companies" and ultimately the consumer to control the market.
  - jim-jim-jim 9y ago
    For a firm to profit, the commodity's sale price must obviously be more than the cost of its production. Market competition ideally shaves prices closer and closer to their original production costs as firms undersell one another. If a firm profits, it follows that it has paid its workers wages less than the value their labor has generated. Collective action through a union brings wages closer and closer to the true value of their labor. Both of these situations limit the extent to which an ownership class, engaged in no productive labor itself, can siphon off the value that real work produces. Captive markets and "right to work" shops likewise both afford this class the liberty of being as parasitic as it wishes.
    - randyrand 9y ago
      Cant it also mean that the firm is adding value to the product? five programmersworking well together together is more valuable than five programmers working independently. you're also forgetting that companies have a lot of capital investments as well such as buildings and manufacturing plants. there alot of reasons a company should profit while still paying their employees of the value of their work
pjmorris 9y ago
> Ahh, okay, now im understanding the point of this article. Lets fight monopolies with more monopolies instead of solving the underlying issues! If an opposing force of similar power is not the best strategy, what do you propose as an alternative?
- Eridrus 9y ago
  We can enact laws to prevent the practices we as a society decide are unacceptable. There are people here who are fatalistic and think that politics is unwinnable and politicians are in people's pockets, but laws can take away unions' power too, so I don't see politics as avoidable in any case. I think framing a union as a monopoly is odd, but they become institutions in their own right, and theirs interests diverge from the wider group's fairly quickly. The UPS union seems to want to force UPS to not invest in drones or self-driving trucks at the expense of everyone who would benefit from significantly cheaper delivery, and this isn't exactly an isolated incident. The construction unions in NYC have secured themselves a deal where the government must use union labor, and unions negotiate a contract with their employers, who have no incentives to keep costs down because they pass all these costs on, and we get subways that are 10 times more expensive than anywhere else in the world. We have a similar situation with construction unions & housing in NYC leading to increased costs and .: more expensive housing for everyone in NYC. And the list goes on forever.
  - pjmorris 9y ago
    > We can enact laws to prevent the practices we as a society decide are unacceptable. The trick about laws is that they are only as strong as their enforcement. The larger an organization is, relative to the enforcer, the easier the laws are to game.
  - cannonedhamster 9y ago
    We can't even pass a federal budget, but we can make sure corporate lobbying gets their giveaways. Laws in the United States as of late almost never benefit the citizen, unless of course you consider corporations people.
sjg007 9y ago
I guess the idea is that the "oligopsony" is acting like a monopsony because of collusion. Why do you say it's a wash? They may not need "good" workers and instead only need enough workers. The attraction to "good" workers is not sufficient to drive wages up.

Caveman_Coder 9y ago

> "Ahh, okay, now im understanding the point of this article. Lets fight monopolies with more monopolies instead of solving the underlying issues!" So you don't think unions have a place in modern day society?

randyrand 9y ago
I think unions should be tried for anti-competitive practices, just as any monopoly should. What is the difference between a bunch of carpenters unionizing their wages versus a bunch of small and large companies all agreeing to price-fix their products? Nothing.
- scribu 9y ago
  What are some of those “anti-competitive” practices that you disagree with?
- mikeash 9y ago
  Unions are no more monopolies than any random company is, and union bargaining isn’t collusion any more than a hiring manager consulting with HR is. When employers band together to bargain collectively, we call it a “company” and it’s not only accepted, it’s so entrenched in our culture that we can barely conceive of any other way. When employees do the exact same thing, we attack them relentlessly.
  - randyrand 9y ago
    No. This is completely wrong. A company is not by default a monopoly - a union is. Imagine if there were 10 different smartphone suppliers but all the suppliers agreed that they were only going to let you buy from 1 of them - company X. Company X would just charge you whatever the hell they felt like because you would have no other options. It would fricken suck. It would feel the exact same as a monopoly. Now compare this to a union. Company Y's employees are all unionized and the union forbids company Y from buying labor from anyone but them. Even if it's not forbidden , new hires are typically glad to join the union too, and in some cases the law forbids otherwise. See how similar that is? It's still a monopoly - just a monopoly against a single buyer.
    - Caveman_Coder 9y ago
      > "...a modern day union is." This is also wrong. Your straw man union isn't true across the board.
      - randyrand 9y ago
        I fixed it, as it actually does apply to all unions. Not just modern day ones.
    - mikeash 9y ago
      I don’t believe companies are forced into any exclusivity agreement like you describe. They choose it. It’s not much different from any other long term business deal. A union is by default an organization of employees to bargain together. Anything beyond that is extra.
      - randyrand 9y ago
        Even if hiring from the union is not forced onto them, new hires are often glad to join in on the price-fixing.
        cannonedhamster 9y ago
- Caveman_Coder 9y ago
  Interesting...maybe in an ideal world...but in the real world where business owners currently have the upper hand (and congressmen and congresswomen basically on payroll), I'm perfectly fine with unions acting as a counterweight to corporate power.
  - randyrand 9y ago
    A few points: 1. Unions are not often a counter balance. They are usually just additional monopolies[0] where there was none before. The airline industry is incredibly competitive but yet airline pilots still decided to unionize and price-fix. 2. Monopolies should be fought with regulations targeted at increasing competition and lowering barriers to entry - not with more monopolies. Fighting a monopoly with another monopoly just hurts the consumer and hurts our country in the global economy. 3. unions have congressmen "on payroll" too. In fact in some states some industries have state laws that forbid people from working outside of the union. Only 27 states have right to work laws. [0] Per-company unions are the easiest monopolies to create because the scale of them is much smaller than the scale of the whole industry. Its very easy to get all your coworkers at company X to unionize and forbid company X from hiring elsewhere - and often new hires are happy to join the union too. But its very difficult for your company X to achieve a monopoly itself because it has to dominate an often much larger global market. For an example, see here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16489013 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16489013
    - Caveman_Coder 9y ago
      > "People unionize even when their employer is not a monopoly." Nobody said that unions form only when the employer is a monopoly...I'm not sure what "point" you're trying to make here.
      - randyrand 9y ago
        Companies don't always have the upper hand. Unions are not always fighting "unjust" monopolies. They are often the unjust monopoly themself.
- sjg007 9y ago
  I think that's a false equivalence. The difference is that the union and the company come to a negotiated bargain. This is an internal dynamic where consumer prices are still subject to market forces. Large companies that price fix are screwing "non-participant companies" and ultimately the consumer to control the market.
- jim-jim-jim 9y ago
  For a firm to profit, the commodity's sale price must obviously be more than the cost of its production. Market competition ideally shaves prices closer and closer to their original production costs as firms undersell one another. If a firm profits, it follows that it has paid its workers wages less than the value their labor has generated. Collective action through a union brings wages closer and closer to the true value of their labor. Both of these situations limit the extent to which an ownership class, engaged in no productive labor itself, can siphon off the value that real work produces. Captive markets and "right to work" shops likewise both afford this class the liberty of being as parasitic as it wishes.
  - randyrand 9y ago
    Cant it also mean that the firm is adding value to the product? five programmersworking well together together is more valuable than five programmers working independently. you're also forgetting that companies have a lot of capital investments as well such as buildings and manufacturing plants. there alot of reasons a company should profit while still paying their employees of the value of their work

pjmorris 9y ago

> Ahh, okay, now im understanding the point of this article. Lets fight monopolies with more monopolies instead of solving the underlying issues! If an opposing force of similar power is not the best strategy, what do you propose as an alternative?

Eridrus 9y ago
We can enact laws to prevent the practices we as a society decide are unacceptable. There are people here who are fatalistic and think that politics is unwinnable and politicians are in people's pockets, but laws can take away unions' power too, so I don't see politics as avoidable in any case. I think framing a union as a monopoly is odd, but they become institutions in their own right, and theirs interests diverge from the wider group's fairly quickly. The UPS union seems to want to force UPS to not invest in drones or self-driving trucks at the expense of everyone who would benefit from significantly cheaper delivery, and this isn't exactly an isolated incident. The construction unions in NYC have secured themselves a deal where the government must use union labor, and unions negotiate a contract with their employers, who have no incentives to keep costs down because they pass all these costs on, and we get subways that are 10 times more expensive than anywhere else in the world. We have a similar situation with construction unions & housing in NYC leading to increased costs and .: more expensive housing for everyone in NYC. And the list goes on forever.
- pjmorris 9y ago
  > We can enact laws to prevent the practices we as a society decide are unacceptable. The trick about laws is that they are only as strong as their enforcement. The larger an organization is, relative to the enforcer, the easier the laws are to game.
- cannonedhamster 9y ago
  We can't even pass a federal budget, but we can make sure corporate lobbying gets their giveaways. Laws in the United States as of late almost never benefit the citizen, unless of course you consider corporations people.

sjg007 9y ago

I guess the idea is that the "oligopsony" is acting like a monopsony because of collusion. Why do you say it's a wash? They may not need "good" workers and instead only need enough workers. The attraction to "good" workers is not sufficient to drive wages up.