4 ms·

A few items that popped up from quick searching: * On journalist wages - https://ajr.org/2014/05/05/reporter-pay-falls-u-s-average-wage/ https://ajr.org/2014/0

by Kalium 5y ago

A few items that popped up from quick searching: * On journalist wages - https://ajr.org/2014/05/05/reporter-pay-falls-u-s-average-wage/ https://ajr.org/2014/05/05/reporter-pay-falls-u-s-average-wa... - wages are not growing and the employment pool is shrinking. A comparison with BLS data shows a similarly slow wage growth pattern. * Unions, in some circumstances, can restrict labor supply. This is called exclusive unionism and historically it's been used for everything from keeping racial minorities out to keeping the secrets of bagel-making under wraps. Here's the latter - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagel_Bakers_Local_338 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagel_Bakers_Local_338

gen220 5y ago
The picture is a bit unclear, with the data we have available. For example, the NYT is paying journalists more than they ever have, historically (this is why so many big names are working for them in the last few years). They also are employing more people as journalists than they have historically. It appears that we're going through two trends in news. One is centralization at the news aggregation level (i.e. newspapers, whatever), which benefits the journalists who ride that centralization and harms the journalists who find themselves outside. The other trend is decentralization at the news production level (individual journalists), which benefits the small number of journalists who can capitalize upon a platform for themselves as individuals online and "harms" (scare quotes because it's hard to quantify) the companies who cannot collect rent on their talent, and consumers who depend on companies for news aggregation. There are a lot of people in this second category who would not classify themselves as "journalists", but are still "producing news". Their income is difficult to measure, since they are usually not W-2 employees, and may not identify as journalists. Together, these trends may actually increase the size of the pool of people who can plausibly be called "journalist"s, and increase wages along with it. But it's a much more difficult universe to measure and segment, so the data might not agree with reality for a while.
bjourne 5y ago
I can believe journalist wages are not growing though your source in eight years old. The thing about bagel recipes seem to be about trade secrets not labor supply restrictions. How to make bagels is not a secret. I checked the sources the Wikipedia article cites and none of them mentions anything about secret recipes.
- Kalium 5y ago
  At the time, how to make bagels was not widely available information. The union tightly controlled their trade secrets and shut down any shop that didn't work with them. Membership was limited to family members of early members. Sounds like controlling the labor supply to me, though I understand that this is an opinion and others may disagree. All of this is material you can find fairly readily documented. Should that prove insufficient, I refer you to a 1913 essay by Booker T Washington: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1913/06/the-negro-and-the-labor-unions/529524/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1913/06/the-neg... Choice quotes include: > One does not have to go far to discover the reason for this. In several instances Negroes are expressly excluded from membership in the unions. In other cases individual Negroes have been refused admittance to unions where no such restrictions existed, and have been in consequence shut out from employment at their trades. The essay details several specific instances. My point is not that unions are inherently exclusionary. My point is that they can be and occasionally have been put to that use, effectively limiting labor supply. Much like pre-unionism guilds often were.
  - bjourne 5y ago
    I don't know the history of bagel baking. Though it seems odd to me that bagel bakers would be allowed to keep bagel recipes away from bakeries they work at. My suspicion is that the group we're discussing did not act as a labor union at all, but rather as a trade association trying to control the bagel market on behalf of bakery owners.

by Kalium 5y ago

gen220 5y ago

The picture is a bit unclear, with the data we have available. For example, the NYT is paying journalists more than they ever have, historically (this is why so many big names are working for them in the last few years). They also are employing more people as journalists than they have historically. It appears that we're going through two trends in news. One is centralization at the news aggregation level (i.e. newspapers, whatever), which benefits the journalists who ride that centralization and harms the journalists who find themselves outside. The other trend is decentralization at the news production level (individual journalists), which benefits the small number of journalists who can capitalize upon a platform for themselves as individuals online and "harms" (scare quotes because it's hard to quantify) the companies who cannot collect rent on their talent, and consumers who depend on companies for news aggregation. There are a lot of people in this second category who would not classify themselves as "journalists", but are still "producing news". Their income is difficult to measure, since they are usually not W-2 employees, and may not identify as journalists. Together, these trends may actually increase the size of the pool of people who can plausibly be called "journalist"s, and increase wages along with it. But it's a much more difficult universe to measure and segment, so the data might not agree with reality for a while.

bjourne 5y ago

I can believe journalist wages are not growing though your source in eight years old. The thing about bagel recipes seem to be about trade secrets not labor supply restrictions. How to make bagels is not a secret. I checked the sources the Wikipedia article cites and none of them mentions anything about secret recipes.

Kalium 5y ago
At the time, how to make bagels was not widely available information. The union tightly controlled their trade secrets and shut down any shop that didn't work with them. Membership was limited to family members of early members. Sounds like controlling the labor supply to me, though I understand that this is an opinion and others may disagree. All of this is material you can find fairly readily documented. Should that prove insufficient, I refer you to a 1913 essay by Booker T Washington: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1913/06/the-negro-and-the-labor-unions/529524/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1913/06/the-neg... Choice quotes include: > One does not have to go far to discover the reason for this. In several instances Negroes are expressly excluded from membership in the unions. In other cases individual Negroes have been refused admittance to unions where no such restrictions existed, and have been in consequence shut out from employment at their trades. The essay details several specific instances. My point is not that unions are inherently exclusionary. My point is that they can be and occasionally have been put to that use, effectively limiting labor supply. Much like pre-unionism guilds often were.
- bjourne 5y ago
  I don't know the history of bagel baking. Though it seems odd to me that bagel bakers would be allowed to keep bagel recipes away from bakeries they work at. My suspicion is that the group we're discussing did not act as a labor union at all, but rather as a trade association trying to control the bagel market on behalf of bakery owners.