9 ms·

Unionisation and collective bargaining does achieve progress, as does regulation. Minimum wages are a great example of the latter. I'm not quite sure what is dr

Unionisation and collective bargaining does achieve progress, as does regulation. Minimum wages are a great example of the latter. I'm not quite sure what is driving your passivity here.

supernova87a 6y ago
Minimum wages are the very textbook definition of protecting some workers at the expense of other workers, are they not? They don't solve the underlying problem. And I don't know where you come up with the notion of passive, I'm just stating an observation.
- namdnay 6y ago
  > Minimum wages are the very textbook definition of protecting some workers at the expense of other workers, are they not I guess so, if you assume that the total salary envelope is fixed. In which case, minimum wages protect lower-paid workers at the expense of higher-paid workers. Which is fine in of itself. But on top of that I think we have to assume that the salary envelope has some elasticity. Maybe minimum wage increases the total salary cost, and decreases returns on capital - so helping lower-paid workers at the expense of investors. Again, why not
  - supernova87a 6y ago
    > In which case, minimum wages protect lower-paid workers at the expense of higher-paid workers. Which is fine in of itself. Um, no, actually the complete opposite. Minimum wage protects the workers who are able to get the job at the minimum wage, at the expense of those even lower-paid -- the ones who would've been employed if the wage had been less (and now are not employed).
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - EliRivers 6y ago
      That's certainly not considered absolute fact. There is a lot of data showing increases in minimum wage without associated increase in unemployment.
      - supernova87a 6y ago
        You mean those studies about Seattle airport employment zone and such small scale examples of raising the minimum wage? I don't think it applies in general, or it would be a big mistake to think that you could replicate that widely. But maybe I'm mistaken. Maybe we don't send work offshore to lower cost countries to take advantage of wages lower than ours.
        EliRivers 6y ago
        I do not mean those, no. But maybe I'm mistaken. Couldn't tell you. Never heard of that study. It sounds like one study among so many that all indicate the same. Maybe we don't send work offshore to lower cost countries to take advantage of wages lower than ours. People DO send work offshore for that reason, and you know it. Why so childish? Why such pointless passive aggression? Why come out with that kind of nonsense bullshit? Grow up and have an adult conversation.
        supernova87a 6y ago
        I am, and I guess I need to spell out the point more explicitly. The point was that raising the minimum wage demonstrably affects employment by the fact that we every day choose to send work overseas instead of using people here at home at higher wages. So the notion that raising minimum wages doesn't affect employment just doesn't hold water unless you study it in a very isolated environment, where the effects of it get washed out by the larger absorptive capacity of the broader labor market.
        jahaja 6y ago
        Northern Europe haven't had significantly more unemployment even though the labour costs and regulations are much better than in the US. How would you explain that?
    - toyg 6y ago
      That is hard to measure. However, it is fairly easy to measure another likely drawback of minimum wage: acting as an anchor (or even an opposite magnet) on salary growth.
    - namdnay 6y ago
      I think these are two separate discussions. Indeed the floor effect of a minimum wage can have a negative impact on very low-value jobs, that's one of the issues to be managed. One way is to try to orient your economy around more high-value jobs, with a generous safety net for those who can't reach it. It's a very difficult question
    - pydry 6y ago
      This would be true if there were a direct line correlation between employment levels and minimum wage. There isn't. See Dube, lester, Reich. Instead, profits take a hammering and some businesses get replaced by others with no overall reduction in employment. If you analyze who lobbies for minimum wage hikes (labor groups) and who protests them (business) it ought to be plain as day who really gets hurt and who benefits from the narrative of "wed only hurt workers by paying them more".
    - jason0597 6y ago
      > Minimum wage protects the workers who are able to get the job at the minimum wage, at the expense of those even lower-paid -- the ones who would've been employed if the wage had been less (and now are not employed). What's the point in working if you're going to be paid in breadcrumbs? Do we really want to race towards another Dickensian society?
      - meowster 6y ago
        > What's the point in working if you're going to be paid in breadcrumbs? Being able to eat. "Breadcrumbs" for you or me might not be worth it, but for someone else it could be the difference between buying food that the supermarket or stealing ketchup packets from a fast food store.
        jason0597 6y ago
        People on the federal minimum wage are already struggling very hard to make ends meet. What makes you think that they'll be able to afford food on an even lower wage?
        xyzzyz 6y ago
        People were able to afford food in 1950, when wages were lower and poverty was rampant. I recommend rereading “The Grapes of Wrath”, to get a taste of what poverty in this country had actually looked like, and what it actually was like to not be able to afford food. Then compare that with what currently passes as “poverty”: you get much more than that already on SNAP benefits. I am very sympathetic to people in poverty, having grown up in it. However, let’s not pretend that poverty in today’s America is about “affording food”: everyone, no matter how poor, is able to afford food, and poverty today is less about the hunger, and more about the lifestyle you can or are forced to carry out.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - sudosysgen 6y ago
      In addition of assuming that minimum wage is directly correlated with unemployment, which it isn't, there's another hidden assumption here. The hidden assumption is that lower-paid positions are less important. They aren't. There are many minimum wage positions that are more important than higher wage positions. They're not lower paid because they're less important, they're lower paid because they're more replaceable. So, when you force the employer to choose between not having a janitor, or paying 3.5$ more per hour, they will certainly decide to pay 3.5$ more per hour. Assuming that there is profit, which is a good assumption as the average surplus value rate is of around 5-7%, then what will happen is that profit will decrease, and employment will stay more or less the same. It's very important to realize that the market values replaceability, not importance.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        The employer may have another choice: contract out that janitorial position to be shared across multiple companies or some other way to extract more efficiency from it. Maybe they end up with 60-80% of the janitorial coverage that they had before.
        sudosysgen 6y ago
        But the janitors will still have their pay increase. It's not as if getting a contractor to do it actually decreases the amount of janitorial jobs, it actually increases them for the same amount of work. What it supposedly does is increase administrative efficiency.
        8note 6y ago
        They already have that choice though. Raising the minimum wage doesn't change how clean your restaurant needs to be
  - EliRivers 6y ago
    But on top of that I think we have to assume that the salary envelope has some elasticity. I suspect but cannot prove; a lot of elasticity. Those graphs showing productivity and wages decoupling; all that wealth is going somewhere. It's going to rich people. As you suggest, we could "just" (ha!) change where it goes; instead of to rich people, to workers.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      You would change where some of it goes. You also force companies to either not employ some people or to employ them on a basis that loses the company money every week. Imagine someone today capable of creating $1 of variable gross profit for their employer every 5 minutes before they were paid. Under a free labor market or a $10/hour minimum wage, that employee has stable and good employment prospects. Make the minimum wage $15/hour and change nothing else and that employee is on shakier ground. Either they must hope that their employer doesn’t know their individual productivity (likely somewhat true), that there is so much money being generated elsewhere that the company doesn’t care if they lose some here, that their job is practically required structurally (no one will close their shop from 10-12 and 2-4 just because the foot traffic drops off and those hours lose some money), or that their employer feels charitable but wants to dress that charity up in work clothes. Total wages have some elasticity. I have to believe it’s not generally beyond what is advantageous to the employer and their customers (who are paying all the wages ultimately).
      - CJefferson 6y ago
        Apple is making $435,000 profit per employee. There is clearly some slack there. Under your arguments, shouldn't that profit per employee be significantly smaller?
        sokoloff 6y ago
        If Apple had a clear path to make even more money by expanding and employing more people, I think they would. As it stands, they’ve got expansion opportunities fairly risk-free by having millions of devs 30% working for them, so that might be their focus. I’m not saying companies will invest right up to break even, but that they will attempt to avoid going beyond that point.
- CPLX 6y ago
  A minimum wage as currently practiced redistributes money from capital owners to labor. If you assume that the market clearing price for non-minimum wage labor is set, as all market prices are set, by the interaction of a supply and demand curve, then it becomes clearer that there’s no mechanism by which the redistribution from one worker to another would happen.
- pydry 6y ago
  >Minimum wages are the very textbook definition of protecting some workers at the expense of other workers, are they not? No, because empirical studies demonstrate that u employment doesn't go up when the minimum wage is raised, profits instead get lowered. There is an enormous lobbying industry dedicated to telling us what is bad for them is bad for us though.
laurent92 6y ago
History disagrees. If you look at the paid leave in France in 1936, and look at the various direct and indirect advantages (salaries + paid leave +...) obtained between 1920 and 1940, you’ll notice that the huge strikes of 1936 to obtain paid leave played almost no role in obtaining this perk. And a lot of companies had started doing so 1 to 5 years earlier, and it was developing at the same time in other countries which didn’t have strikes. Salaries and indirect salaries are a direct consequence of the context.
- djrobstep 6y ago
  Puzzled by this. France is exactly the country most people would think of an an example of the effectiveness of collective bargaining and unionisation for shorter working hours and better working conditions (and maybe the Nordics too). Check out the hours worked per worker, for one. Working hours per year are a lot shorter and French people enjoy much greater leisure time and quality of life as a consequence.
  - laurent92 6y ago
    And are « poorer » than in US. It’s only recently that French people started enjoying frequent worldwide travels, whereas it has been affordable for Americans for several decades. We also have smaller houses (90sqm in average vs 140sqm in USA, but also our interiors are generally less renovated, and anyone with a kitchen that would be average in USA, looks like an aristocrat here). It is quasi-impossible to be paid 140k$ in France. We get less money for less work, it is entirely proportional, the difference is, it was collectively bargained. But we don’t have « more » than in USA.
    - jacobush 6y ago
      What about health care?
      - vladvasiliu 6y ago
        I wonder if this isn't a question of who bears the responsibility. For example, in the US you make more money but are expected to save, and make sure you have something to fall on in case of difficult times. In France, you expect the state to take care of you in such a situation. Spoiler alert: depending on the state is not a good situation. Some people may therefore prefer to be able to spend all they've got without having to think of hard times. Because they may think "it won't happen to me" / "I'll save tomorrow". As such, I would be very curious to see some actual numbers to be able to do as objective a comparison as possible. Because indeed, if in the US the prices are overall higher relative to the wages, the deal might not be as good in a bad situation. From France, this doesn't seem to be the case, mostly because (outside of SF) pretty much everything looks cheaper. Housing, food, entertainment, cars / gas, electronics, etc. The only issue seems to be related to healthcare. So I'd like to have that actually quantified. The issue in France is that in addition to the fact that "having a 140k salary is impossible", taxation is very, very high. If an employer pays 100k in total for an employee, the actual, cash in hand, after income, social security and medical insurance (1) for the employee is around 55-60k. Once said employee has his 60k in hand, practically everything has a 20% VAT [2]. Oh, and since this is France, you also have taxes on taxes. For example, VAT is levied on some taxes related to electricity. So out of a 100k USD total paid by the company, how much would a US employee have in hand after tax? I've also noticed that for similar positions in the US (outside of SV) a software engineer can expect twice the salary compared to Paris. And mind, Paris is very expensive for the basics (food and housing). It would be interesting to see how this compares to professions other than IT. In France, you're mostly barely above minimum wage for blue collar jobs. And minimum wage is nation-wide, the same in Paris and in some village in the middle of nowhere. [1] Only "basic" health care is actually "free". If you need anything more "advanced", such as dental work or glasses, you better have a "mutuelle", which is basically private insurance. This is usually provided by the employer, but what is actually covered varies. [2] Food, "necessities" and some other items have a lower VAT, 5.5% I think. There's also a 10% VAT for restaurants in some cases.
raxxorrax 6y ago
With enough free trade agreements without statues for worker protections, you can forget unionization to a large degree. And the mechanism to break them are easily available. Just insert special interests for local conditions or identity politics like race or gender and the union is as good as busted, you don't need to do much. Unions need unity and that won't stand for 10 minutes in todays world. Current civil liberty movements were often driven apart by this. You still need to be competitive because someone needs to be able to pay the minimum wage. If there is a discrepancy in wealth between countries, you need either taxes or let the worker class fall down to some international level for cheapest labor.
- eigenket 6y ago
  This seems like baseless conjecture, unless you have an example of a union (literally any union in history) being busted by "identity politics". Where I am from (the UK) unions are relatively commonplace, I have even been in one in the past (the university and colleges union), they seem like very stable organisation to me. I've never even heard of a union closing in the UK, although I guess it happens occasionally.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Surely the unions for all the industries that were outsourced from the UK to cheaper countries have closed.
    - eigenket 6y ago
      What happens as industries reduce is that multiple unions which are becoming smaller merge together. This is very different to what the guy was writing above about unions fragmenting due to political differences.
  - toyg 6y ago
    > (the UK) unions are relatively commonplace They have been slowly dying. They resist in the public sector (like the one you joined), in manufacturing (a shrinking sector in itself), and in call-centres. Everywhere else, they don’t really have a meaningful presence anymore. Part of the reason is the atomization of work in smaller and smaller companies, and temp-agencies being normalized; traditional union practices and laws struggle to fit these conditions. This is absolutely on purpose and effectively government-encouraged since the Thatcher years. > I’ve never even heard of a union closing They don’t “close”, they merge when membership falls below sustainable levels. You can look at the statistics on union membership to see the actual story.
matthewmacleod 6y ago
I'm not quite sure what is driving your passivity here. The fear that other people might benefit in some way.
- croissants 6y ago
  That's a pretty malicious motivation to attribute to OP without (as far as I can tell) evidence.
bufferoverflow 6y ago
Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Germany, Switzerland have no minimum wages. They are doing pretty well.
- wesammikhail 6y ago
  This argument only makes sense if you are not ideological about minimum wage laws. Which most people are. This whole thing does not stem from the desire to help others but from the strict ideological position that any regulation that _seems_ to favor the worker must indeed favor the worker. There is a reason Europe moved past min-wage laws, but Americans seem to be hell bent on not listening. Like most children, they have to make the same mistake on their own in order to learn from the consequences. I have personally given up on trying to reason with people about this.
- pydry 6y ago
  They have strong labor unions who set effective minimum wages in collective wage agreements. Minimum wages set at national or state levels is more common in countries where labor unions don't exist to negotiate.
- bondant 6y ago
  Germany does have minimum wage since 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_Germany
- ytwySXpMbS 6y ago
  Norway effectively does as union collective agreements apply to everyone, Sweden again uses collective bargaining, Finland again covers effectively every employee with collective bargaining. Germany does have a minimum wage as of 2015 so that’s just wrong. I’m not going to fact check the others but I imagine it’s a similar situation. It’s not like these countries are lawless and allow rampant employee exploitation.
  - Leherenn 6y ago
    Several Swiss cantons have minimum wage (Geneva starting from this month for instance). Also collective bargaining is pretty common as well (e,g, in the watch industry).

Unionisation and collective bargaining does achieve progress, as does regulation. Minimum wages are a great example of the latter. I'm not quite sure what is driving your passivity here.

supernova87a 6y ago

Minimum wages are the very textbook definition of protecting some workers at the expense of other workers, are they not? They don't solve the underlying problem. And I don't know where you come up with the notion of passive, I'm just stating an observation.

namdnay 6y ago
> Minimum wages are the very textbook definition of protecting some workers at the expense of other workers, are they not I guess so, if you assume that the total salary envelope is fixed. In which case, minimum wages protect lower-paid workers at the expense of higher-paid workers. Which is fine in of itself. But on top of that I think we have to assume that the salary envelope has some elasticity. Maybe minimum wage increases the total salary cost, and decreases returns on capital - so helping lower-paid workers at the expense of investors. Again, why not
- supernova87a 6y ago
  > In which case, minimum wages protect lower-paid workers at the expense of higher-paid workers. Which is fine in of itself. Um, no, actually the complete opposite. Minimum wage protects the workers who are able to get the job at the minimum wage, at the expense of those even lower-paid -- the ones who would've been employed if the wage had been less (and now are not employed).
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - EliRivers 6y ago
    That's certainly not considered absolute fact. There is a lot of data showing increases in minimum wage without associated increase in unemployment.
    - supernova87a 6y ago
      You mean those studies about Seattle airport employment zone and such small scale examples of raising the minimum wage? I don't think it applies in general, or it would be a big mistake to think that you could replicate that widely. But maybe I'm mistaken. Maybe we don't send work offshore to lower cost countries to take advantage of wages lower than ours.
      - EliRivers 6y ago
        I do not mean those, no. But maybe I'm mistaken. Couldn't tell you. Never heard of that study. It sounds like one study among so many that all indicate the same. Maybe we don't send work offshore to lower cost countries to take advantage of wages lower than ours. People DO send work offshore for that reason, and you know it. Why so childish? Why such pointless passive aggression? Why come out with that kind of nonsense bullshit? Grow up and have an adult conversation.
        supernova87a 6y ago
        I am, and I guess I need to spell out the point more explicitly. The point was that raising the minimum wage demonstrably affects employment by the fact that we every day choose to send work overseas instead of using people here at home at higher wages. So the notion that raising minimum wages doesn't affect employment just doesn't hold water unless you study it in a very isolated environment, where the effects of it get washed out by the larger absorptive capacity of the broader labor market.
        jahaja 6y ago
        Northern Europe haven't had significantly more unemployment even though the labour costs and regulations are much better than in the US. How would you explain that?
  - toyg 6y ago
    That is hard to measure. However, it is fairly easy to measure another likely drawback of minimum wage: acting as an anchor (or even an opposite magnet) on salary growth.
  - namdnay 6y ago
    I think these are two separate discussions. Indeed the floor effect of a minimum wage can have a negative impact on very low-value jobs, that's one of the issues to be managed. One way is to try to orient your economy around more high-value jobs, with a generous safety net for those who can't reach it. It's a very difficult question
  - pydry 6y ago
    This would be true if there were a direct line correlation between employment levels and minimum wage. There isn't. See Dube, lester, Reich. Instead, profits take a hammering and some businesses get replaced by others with no overall reduction in employment. If you analyze who lobbies for minimum wage hikes (labor groups) and who protests them (business) it ought to be plain as day who really gets hurt and who benefits from the narrative of "wed only hurt workers by paying them more".
  - jason0597 6y ago
    > Minimum wage protects the workers who are able to get the job at the minimum wage, at the expense of those even lower-paid -- the ones who would've been employed if the wage had been less (and now are not employed). What's the point in working if you're going to be paid in breadcrumbs? Do we really want to race towards another Dickensian society?
    - meowster 6y ago
      > What's the point in working if you're going to be paid in breadcrumbs? Being able to eat. "Breadcrumbs" for you or me might not be worth it, but for someone else it could be the difference between buying food that the supermarket or stealing ketchup packets from a fast food store.
      - jason0597 6y ago
        People on the federal minimum wage are already struggling very hard to make ends meet. What makes you think that they'll be able to afford food on an even lower wage?
        xyzzyz 6y ago
        People were able to afford food in 1950, when wages were lower and poverty was rampant. I recommend rereading “The Grapes of Wrath”, to get a taste of what poverty in this country had actually looked like, and what it actually was like to not be able to afford food. Then compare that with what currently passes as “poverty”: you get much more than that already on SNAP benefits. I am very sympathetic to people in poverty, having grown up in it. However, let’s not pretend that poverty in today’s America is about “affording food”: everyone, no matter how poor, is able to afford food, and poverty today is less about the hunger, and more about the lifestyle you can or are forced to carry out.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
  - sudosysgen 6y ago
    In addition of assuming that minimum wage is directly correlated with unemployment, which it isn't, there's another hidden assumption here. The hidden assumption is that lower-paid positions are less important. They aren't. There are many minimum wage positions that are more important than higher wage positions. They're not lower paid because they're less important, they're lower paid because they're more replaceable. So, when you force the employer to choose between not having a janitor, or paying 3.5$ more per hour, they will certainly decide to pay 3.5$ more per hour. Assuming that there is profit, which is a good assumption as the average surplus value rate is of around 5-7%, then what will happen is that profit will decrease, and employment will stay more or less the same. It's very important to realize that the market values replaceability, not importance.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      The employer may have another choice: contract out that janitorial position to be shared across multiple companies or some other way to extract more efficiency from it. Maybe they end up with 60-80% of the janitorial coverage that they had before.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        But the janitors will still have their pay increase. It's not as if getting a contractor to do it actually decreases the amount of janitorial jobs, it actually increases them for the same amount of work. What it supposedly does is increase administrative efficiency.
      - 8note 6y ago
        They already have that choice though. Raising the minimum wage doesn't change how clean your restaurant needs to be
- EliRivers 6y ago
  But on top of that I think we have to assume that the salary envelope has some elasticity. I suspect but cannot prove; a lot of elasticity. Those graphs showing productivity and wages decoupling; all that wealth is going somewhere. It's going to rich people. As you suggest, we could "just" (ha!) change where it goes; instead of to rich people, to workers.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    You would change where some of it goes. You also force companies to either not employ some people or to employ them on a basis that loses the company money every week. Imagine someone today capable of creating $1 of variable gross profit for their employer every 5 minutes before they were paid. Under a free labor market or a $10/hour minimum wage, that employee has stable and good employment prospects. Make the minimum wage $15/hour and change nothing else and that employee is on shakier ground. Either they must hope that their employer doesn’t know their individual productivity (likely somewhat true), that there is so much money being generated elsewhere that the company doesn’t care if they lose some here, that their job is practically required structurally (no one will close their shop from 10-12 and 2-4 just because the foot traffic drops off and those hours lose some money), or that their employer feels charitable but wants to dress that charity up in work clothes. Total wages have some elasticity. I have to believe it’s not generally beyond what is advantageous to the employer and their customers (who are paying all the wages ultimately).
    - CJefferson 6y ago
      Apple is making $435,000 profit per employee. There is clearly some slack there. Under your arguments, shouldn't that profit per employee be significantly smaller?
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        If Apple had a clear path to make even more money by expanding and employing more people, I think they would. As it stands, they’ve got expansion opportunities fairly risk-free by having millions of devs 30% working for them, so that might be their focus. I’m not saying companies will invest right up to break even, but that they will attempt to avoid going beyond that point.
CPLX 6y ago
A minimum wage as currently practiced redistributes money from capital owners to labor. If you assume that the market clearing price for non-minimum wage labor is set, as all market prices are set, by the interaction of a supply and demand curve, then it becomes clearer that there’s no mechanism by which the redistribution from one worker to another would happen.
pydry 6y ago
>Minimum wages are the very textbook definition of protecting some workers at the expense of other workers, are they not? No, because empirical studies demonstrate that u employment doesn't go up when the minimum wage is raised, profits instead get lowered. There is an enormous lobbying industry dedicated to telling us what is bad for them is bad for us though.

laurent92 6y ago

History disagrees. If you look at the paid leave in France in 1936, and look at the various direct and indirect advantages (salaries + paid leave +...) obtained between 1920 and 1940, you’ll notice that the huge strikes of 1936 to obtain paid leave played almost no role in obtaining this perk. And a lot of companies had started doing so 1 to 5 years earlier, and it was developing at the same time in other countries which didn’t have strikes. Salaries and indirect salaries are a direct consequence of the context.

djrobstep 6y ago
Puzzled by this. France is exactly the country most people would think of an an example of the effectiveness of collective bargaining and unionisation for shorter working hours and better working conditions (and maybe the Nordics too). Check out the hours worked per worker, for one. Working hours per year are a lot shorter and French people enjoy much greater leisure time and quality of life as a consequence.
- laurent92 6y ago
  And are « poorer » than in US. It’s only recently that French people started enjoying frequent worldwide travels, whereas it has been affordable for Americans for several decades. We also have smaller houses (90sqm in average vs 140sqm in USA, but also our interiors are generally less renovated, and anyone with a kitchen that would be average in USA, looks like an aristocrat here). It is quasi-impossible to be paid 140k$ in France. We get less money for less work, it is entirely proportional, the difference is, it was collectively bargained. But we don’t have « more » than in USA.
  - jacobush 6y ago
    What about health care?
    - vladvasiliu 6y ago
      I wonder if this isn't a question of who bears the responsibility. For example, in the US you make more money but are expected to save, and make sure you have something to fall on in case of difficult times. In France, you expect the state to take care of you in such a situation. Spoiler alert: depending on the state is not a good situation. Some people may therefore prefer to be able to spend all they've got without having to think of hard times. Because they may think "it won't happen to me" / "I'll save tomorrow". As such, I would be very curious to see some actual numbers to be able to do as objective a comparison as possible. Because indeed, if in the US the prices are overall higher relative to the wages, the deal might not be as good in a bad situation. From France, this doesn't seem to be the case, mostly because (outside of SF) pretty much everything looks cheaper. Housing, food, entertainment, cars / gas, electronics, etc. The only issue seems to be related to healthcare. So I'd like to have that actually quantified. The issue in France is that in addition to the fact that "having a 140k salary is impossible", taxation is very, very high. If an employer pays 100k in total for an employee, the actual, cash in hand, after income, social security and medical insurance (1) for the employee is around 55-60k. Once said employee has his 60k in hand, practically everything has a 20% VAT [2]. Oh, and since this is France, you also have taxes on taxes. For example, VAT is levied on some taxes related to electricity. So out of a 100k USD total paid by the company, how much would a US employee have in hand after tax? I've also noticed that for similar positions in the US (outside of SV) a software engineer can expect twice the salary compared to Paris. And mind, Paris is very expensive for the basics (food and housing). It would be interesting to see how this compares to professions other than IT. In France, you're mostly barely above minimum wage for blue collar jobs. And minimum wage is nation-wide, the same in Paris and in some village in the middle of nowhere. [1] Only "basic" health care is actually "free". If you need anything more "advanced", such as dental work or glasses, you better have a "mutuelle", which is basically private insurance. This is usually provided by the employer, but what is actually covered varies. [2] Food, "necessities" and some other items have a lower VAT, 5.5% I think. There's also a 10% VAT for restaurants in some cases.

raxxorrax 6y ago

With enough free trade agreements without statues for worker protections, you can forget unionization to a large degree. And the mechanism to break them are easily available. Just insert special interests for local conditions or identity politics like race or gender and the union is as good as busted, you don't need to do much. Unions need unity and that won't stand for 10 minutes in todays world. Current civil liberty movements were often driven apart by this. You still need to be competitive because someone needs to be able to pay the minimum wage. If there is a discrepancy in wealth between countries, you need either taxes or let the worker class fall down to some international level for cheapest labor.

eigenket 6y ago
This seems like baseless conjecture, unless you have an example of a union (literally any union in history) being busted by "identity politics". Where I am from (the UK) unions are relatively commonplace, I have even been in one in the past (the university and colleges union), they seem like very stable organisation to me. I've never even heard of a union closing in the UK, although I guess it happens occasionally.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  Surely the unions for all the industries that were outsourced from the UK to cheaper countries have closed.
  - eigenket 6y ago
    What happens as industries reduce is that multiple unions which are becoming smaller merge together. This is very different to what the guy was writing above about unions fragmenting due to political differences.
- toyg 6y ago
  > (the UK) unions are relatively commonplace They have been slowly dying. They resist in the public sector (like the one you joined), in manufacturing (a shrinking sector in itself), and in call-centres. Everywhere else, they don’t really have a meaningful presence anymore. Part of the reason is the atomization of work in smaller and smaller companies, and temp-agencies being normalized; traditional union practices and laws struggle to fit these conditions. This is absolutely on purpose and effectively government-encouraged since the Thatcher years. > I’ve never even heard of a union closing They don’t “close”, they merge when membership falls below sustainable levels. You can look at the statistics on union membership to see the actual story.

matthewmacleod 6y ago

I'm not quite sure what is driving your passivity here. The fear that other people might benefit in some way.

croissants 6y ago
That's a pretty malicious motivation to attribute to OP without (as far as I can tell) evidence.

bufferoverflow 6y ago

Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Austria, Germany, Switzerland have no minimum wages. They are doing pretty well.

wesammikhail 6y ago
This argument only makes sense if you are not ideological about minimum wage laws. Which most people are. This whole thing does not stem from the desire to help others but from the strict ideological position that any regulation that _seems_ to favor the worker must indeed favor the worker. There is a reason Europe moved past min-wage laws, but Americans seem to be hell bent on not listening. Like most children, they have to make the same mistake on their own in order to learn from the consequences. I have personally given up on trying to reason with people about this.
pydry 6y ago
They have strong labor unions who set effective minimum wages in collective wage agreements. Minimum wages set at national or state levels is more common in countries where labor unions don't exist to negotiate.
bondant 6y ago
Germany does have minimum wage since 2015. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_Germany https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_Germany
ytwySXpMbS 6y ago
Norway effectively does as union collective agreements apply to everyone, Sweden again uses collective bargaining, Finland again covers effectively every employee with collective bargaining. Germany does have a minimum wage as of 2015 so that’s just wrong. I’m not going to fact check the others but I imagine it’s a similar situation. It’s not like these countries are lawless and allow rampant employee exploitation.
- Leherenn 6y ago
  Several Swiss cantons have minimum wage (Geneva starting from this month for instance). Also collective bargaining is pretty common as well (e,g, in the watch industry).