In defence of Unions

[Dave_Chappell]

Unions are often accused (almost to the extent of it being a cliche) of ‘holding the public to ransom’. I would maintain that actually it is the corporate class that is being held to ransom - and justifiably so.

When a company holds us workers to ransom by threatening to relocate to china and utilise what is effectively slave labour, what other option is left? The conditions of employment in countries that are offshored to, are certainly not due to the genuine free-market as libertarians would have it - they are due to nasty dictatorships holding down working conditions.

So if employers are not willing to abide by the rules of the free-market and employ only those who have a chance to reject their appalling terms of condition, why should workers abide by the rules of the free-market?

In short, is not union activity a legitimate response to the agression of bosses who will jump in bed with any nasty regime that will give them a profit at the expense of the people they employ?

[Phaedros]

Ughh, so wrong..goodbye

Anyway, in my view unions actually work hand in hand with corporations to ensure that there is no competition with those corporations. They force smaller companies to pay higher wages up to the point that only bigger corporations can afford it.

[Smiling_Dave]

@Consumariat

Unions are often accused (almost to the extent of it being a cliche) of ‘holding the public to ransom’. I would maintain that actually it is the corporate class that is being held to ransom - and justifiably so.

Union workers in govt jobs are not holding a corporate class to ransom. No corporation pays their salaries. They are holding the public, who pays their salaries and pensions, to ransom.

BTW, what is the “corporate class”? Corporations are not people, for one thing. For another, stcokholders come from all walks of life, and from all over the world.

When a company holds us workers to ransom by threatening to relocate to china and utilise what is effectively slave labour, what other option is left?

No it is not slave labor. Slaves are never worth it. They don’t work well. So if they are working well, they are happy with what they are being paid, not slaves.

The other option that is left is to take a pay cut. People won’t starve, because if wages go down, demand for food goes down, so food prices will lower.

In any case, there is a moral question here. Your next paragraph implies violence is a bad thing. And yet here you want to use unions and laws, whach are violence, against the mythical corporate class.

The conditions of employment in countries that are offshored to, are certainly not due to the genuine free-market as libertarians would have it

Of course they are. Your evidence for your claim?

• they are due to nasty dictatorships holding down working conditions.

Strangely enough, the nasty dictatorships, like the Arab countires that are revolting, like Cuba, like North Korea, like Communist Russia all the years, and China under Mao, likeThailand, were NEVER economic powerhouses [to understate the case]. Have you ever heard some member of the mythical corporate class saying “I’m taking my talents to North Korea”?

BTW, I find it odd that when China was balatanlty Communist, like under Mao, one didn’t hear the Marxists here griping about what a dictator he is. Now that China is capitalist, now it’s suddenly a nasty dictatorship.

So if employers are not willing to abide by the rules of the free-market and employ only those who have a chance to reject their appalling terms of condition,

Of course they have a chance. Where di you get that ridiculous notion. Do you think the Chinese are sitting chained to thier tables? Is that how thye became an economic powerhouse, by use of the lash? How come Russia and Cuba and Communist China never succeeded with their lashes?

why should workers abide by the rules of the free-market?

We are not talking about rules oif the free market. We are talking about rules of human decency, meaning not using violence to take things that belong to others.

In short, is not union activity a legitimate response to the agression of bosses who will jump in bed with any nasty regime that will give them a profit at the expense of the people they employ?

Again, maybe in Bizzaro world dictators run thriving economies, but it doesn’t work here.

As Mises explained, when you treat a human like an animal, the labor you can expect from him is at the level you would get from an animal. And using real animals is a much cheaper way to get those animal level results.

[Dave_Chappell]

“Ughh, so wrong..goodbye”

That’s a real profound insight you have there. Well done!

“Anyway, in my view unions actually work hand in hand with corporations to ensure that there is no competition with those corporations. They force smaller companies to pay higher wages up to the point that only bigger corporations can afford it.”

Good. If the competition is threatening to relocate to china in order to get workers to accept pitifull wages then I agree with the motivations of the unions.

[EmperorNero]

Anyway, in my view unions actually work hand in hand with corporations to ensure that there is no competition with those corporations. They force smaller companies to pay higher wages up to the point that only bigger corporations can afford it.

Yes. Unions drive marginal competitors out of business and thereby cartelize the market, which means they are very much in the interest of big business. Incidentally, a more cartelized market shifts bargaining power to the evil capitalists, reducing wages for workers. Work safety requirements have the same effect, big companies lobbied for them to drive smaller companies out of business (who have a harder time complying with the regulation) to monopolize the market. All state intervention in the economy is for big business. I think union people actually believe that they are hurting the evil capitalists, but economic ignorance turns all cause and effect on it’s head.

[Smiling_Dave]

Note: I didn’t realize English is not your native language, so made some assumptions about you that may not be warrented. Will edit my post accordingly.

[Dave_Chappell]

No it is not slave labor.

You are correct, it is not slave labour. A more accurate way of describing the situation is serfdom. The chinese are serfs to the same extent that we all are, because whilst Capital is given the freedom to move where it wants, Labour is tied to the soil of the nation it originates from.

Slaves are never worth it.

It has been worth it for civilisations going back to at least 8000BC, it was worth it for the USA for 200 odd years, it is worth it for the owners of the 20 million estimated people who are enslaved even today.

They don’t work well. So if they are working well, they are happy with what they are being paid, not slaves.

If your definition of ‘slave’ is that they ‘work well’ then this sentance makes complete sense. Otherwise your conclusion doesn’t follow from your premise.

The other option that is left is to take a pay cut. People won’t starve, because if wages go down, demand for food goes down, so food prices will lower.

In an idealised free-market maybe but we don’t live in that idealised society. By your own standards the free-market does not exist. That is, except when a reason to attack unions is required, and all of a sudden even China becomes a paradigm of libertarian perfection. Is it any surprise that Libertarians are seen as apologists for the powerful by most people?

In any case, there is a moral question here. Your next paragraph implies violence is a bad thing. And yet here you want to use unions and laws, whach are violence, against the mythical corporate class.

I think that violence is often justified as a defense against aggresion so long as the response in proportionate. You talk of a ‘mythical’ corporate class. It isn’t mythical, it is real - as are the working and capitalist classes. Arguing against the possibility of something based on the idea it violates free market theory only works as an argument if the free market exists.

The conditions of employment in countries that are offshored to, are certainly not due to the genuine free-market as libertarians would have it

Of course they are. Your evidence for your claim?

Austrian economics is my evidence. Are you seriously claiming that China is a free market? It is more akin to a mercantalist country than anything else. What would Rothbards analysis of China have been?

As an aside, what did you understand me to mean when I said ‘the conditions of employment’? What I meant was that the substandard living conditions in parts of China are not due to the free-market - i.e. it is the dictatorial nature of the system that causes these pitiful conditions. By your reply I assume you thought I meant something different.

Strangely enough, the nasty dictatorships, like the Arab countires that are revolting, like Cuba, like North Korea, like Communist Russia all the years, and China under Mao, likeThailand, were NEVER economic powerhouses [to understate the case].

I think maybe this sentance was in response to the misunderstanding above.

I find it odd that when China was balatanlty Communist, like under Mao, one didn’t hear the Marxists here griping about what a dictator he is. Now that China is capitalist, now it’s suddenly a nasty dictatorship.

I find it odd that when China was blatently communist libertarians considered it a nasty dicatorship, yet now it is a state-capitalist faux market, libertarians consider it a paradise of choice, freedom and self-determination. Of course, I’m neither a Marxist nor a Libertarian so I don’t have to worry about getting involved with bipartisan apologetics.

Of course they have a chance. Where did you get that ridiculous notion?

Hey, if you love china so much then why don’t you move there? I’m fairly sure you won’t find it as great as you’d hoped.

We are talking about rules of human decency, meaning not using violence to take things that belong to others.

So am I

Again, maybe in Bizzaro world dictators run thriving economies

Welcome to Bizzaro World**™**

[Dave_Chappell]

Unions drive marginal competitors out of business and thereby cartelize the market, which means they are very much in the interest of big business. Incidentally, a more cartelized market shifts bargaining power to the evil capitalists, reducing wages for workers.

This assumes that the current price level of wages is in equilibrium. Given all the government interventions that exist (most of which benefit Capital over Labour), I would maintain that the wage level is lower than it would be under a genuine free-market. Therefore union pressure to increase wages does not affect the economy in the way you describe.

[DrewBrando]

I`m at school and I have a french keyboard, so sorry for grammar.

“Ughh, so wrong..goodbye”

That’s a real profound insight you have there. Well done!

I personally thought it should be obvious`to the OP

“Anyway, in my view unions actually work hand in hand with corporations to ensure that there is no competition with those corporations. They force smaller companies to pay higher wages up to the point that only bigger corporations can afford it.”

Good. If the competition is threatening to relocate to china in order to get workers to accept pitifull wages then I agree with the motivations of the unions

Pitiful wages? what does that mean?
The company has no responsability to protect any workers job, the worker agreed to the circumstances in advance when they decided to trade in their labor for money. The company that deems it usefull to relocate to China does so because it is not satisfied with the value it is getting in America.
The workers either accept low wages, get a different job or start their own bussiness.

[Dave_Chappell]

Pitiful wages? what does that mean?

If you’ve never experienced it I doubt you will ever understand.

the worker agreed to the circumstances in advance when they decided to trade in their labor for money.

If the choice is between selling your labour-power to one underpaying boss or another underpaying boss… you’re going to be underpaid.

The company that deems it usefull to relocate to China does so because it is not satisfied with the value it is getting in America.

And what is better value than child labourers and recently evicted peasants?

The workers either accept low wages, get a different job or start their own bussiness

Hmmm.. do they now? I mean, how dare those uppity proles expect it to be otherwise?

I really think we might not even be reading the same book. Let alone the same page.

[Neodoxy]

If unions boost up wages and make them go even higher then wouldn’t this simply encourage employers to go overseas?

Most Americans do not belong to unions, yet there are still jobs and these jobs are not dirt cheap. Public unions do however threaten the public and their money.

Also, the movement of industries overseas will lead to increased wages over in the other nation, and increase demands for American goods, Americans on the other hand would then have to pay less money for things and could then specialize into things which they are more qualified for with their higher quality of education.

Your claim, however, still has a good deal of merit though because of the ever present fact that we do not live in a free market world. We should always strive for it, but when it is not possible other approaches may actually be more practical. This might be one of those cases.

[Paul]

Good. If the competition is threatening to relocate to china in order to get workers to accept pitifull wages then I agree with the motivations of the unions.

So you only care about some workers? What about the rest? What about the Chinese workers, whose wages are increased (in much higher proportion than your favored workers’ incomes are decreased, BTW) by the relocation?

[Neodoxy]

Finally, as for being “underpaid”, the first step to high wages are any wages, if these wages are “low” then the best thing that one can do to raise them is to promote competition in the region in order to promote higher wages in the long term through competition for labor. To prohibit this would mean lower wages for these individuals. If you care about helping the ACTUAL POOR, those in poorer regions who might actually have to worry about hunger in their lives then you would support the free movement of industry.

[MJGreen]

…How are unions (particularly public sector unions) a response to capitalists supposedly colluding with foreign governments to attain cheap labor? Wouldn’t unions provoke more businesses to relocate overseas (or within the country to a less union-friendly state), as they make working in the US more costly? And what do public sector unions, which are what most people are talking about when they say unions hold the taxpayer ransom, have to do with any of this?

And if acting so as to influence (but not coerce) the choice of others is considered holding the others ransom, aren’t we all guilty? Who hasn’t “threatened” their employees, bosses, colleagues or loved ones that they will do X if the others don’t do Y?

[EmperorNero]

@Consumariat

Unions drive marginal competitors out of business and thereby cartelize the market, which means they are very much in the interest of big business. Incidentally, a more cartelized market shifts bargaining power to the evil capitalists, reducing wages for workers.

This assumes that the current price level of wages is in equilibrium. Given all the government interventions that exist (most of which benefit Capital over Labour), I would maintain that the wage level is lower than it would be under a genuine free-market. Therefore union pressure to increase wages does not affect the economy in the way you describe.

Both our arguments so far assumed that prosperity is a zero-sum game, the only issue being how to distribute the pie between workers and capitalists. But in reality it is not. The greatest opportunity cost (for workers) is not how much wealth they get relative to capitalists, but how big the overall pie is. The problem in Bangladesh isn’t that the workers have too little bargaining power, but that the whole country is unproductive. There isn’t enough pie to go around, shifting bargaining power does not fix that. Workers receive higher real wages today than a hundred years ago because society is more productive, not because they struggled to receive a larger share of the pie. What share of the current pie goes to workers is pretty much fixed, any more and the economic distortions cause the pie to shrink. But there are great differences in how much the overall pie can grow. So while it might be true that unions merely counteract some of the regulation which benefits capital, they make society poorer by making it less productive, and thereby harm real wages of workers. It is unlikely that the extra share of the pie which unions might get for workers outweighs the pie being smaller. Meaning that unions have negative marginal utility for workers no matter what, an they would be better off without unions even if there is regulation benefiting capital.

[Smiling_Dave]

@Consumariat

Before replying in detail, I want to say something. You either know or do not know what AE has to say on this topic. If you do know, then please tell me in brief what it says and why you think it is wrong. That is the way men of reason discuss a topic. If you don’t know, then you will profit from looking into it.

You are correct, it is not slave labour. A more accurate way of describing the situation is serfdom. The chinese are serfs to the same extent that we all are, because whilst Capital is given the freedom to move where it wants, Labour is tied to the soil of the nation it originates from.
Pejorative names do not change the situation. The get paid a salary, equal to what they are worth.

It has been worth it for civilisations going back to at least 8000BC,
No it hasn’t.

it was worth it for the USA for 200 odd years,
No it wasn’t.

it is worth it for the owners of the 20 million estimated people who are enslaved even today.
Where are these people? What evidence do you have that these supposed 20 million slaves are making profits for thier masters.
It would help if you provided some evidence for your assertions. Here is one of my many sources. http://mises.org/journals/lar/pdfs/3_2/3_2_1.pdf

If your definition of ‘slave’ is that they ‘work well’ then this sentance makes complete sense. Otherwise your conclusion doesn’t follow from your premise.
I will explain. A slave does not work well enough to create a profit for his owner [as is well known. see above link]. By the laws of logic, it follows that if you see a country making money hand over fist, you can deduce that their workers are not enslaved. [It’s called the contrapositive of the original statement].

In an idealised free-market maybe but we don’t live in that idealised society.
The laws of supply and demand do not depend on the existence of a free market. If you disagree, what is your argument.

By your own standards the free-market does not exist.
I agree there.

That is, except when a reason to attack unions is required, and all of a sudden even China becomes a paradigm of libertarian perfection.
The reason to attack unions has nothing to do with China or free markets existing or not existing. Unions are a parasite on the company they work for, driving it into bankruptcy. This is clear logically as well as historically. You claim to know AE, so you must know this is true.

I did not say or imply that China is a paradigm of libertarian perfection.

Is it any surprise that Libertarians are seen as apologists for the powerful by most people?
This is a bit off topic. But yes, it’s not a surprise that people are foolish. P.T. Barnum noted the phenomenon.

I think that violence is often justified as a defense against aggresion
No one is “aggressing” against a union worker. His employer does not owe him a job. He is not taking what is not his. The union worker, on the other hand, is using violence to force the employer to give up his money.

so long as the response in proportionate. You talk of a ‘mythical’ corporate class. It isn’t mythical, it is real -
You are restating something without addressing my proofs that it is false.

as are the working and capitalist classes.
Also false, for the reason I stated above.

Arguing against the possibility of something based on the idea it violates free market theory only works as an argument if the free market exists.
I was not arguing based on free market theory. My argument is based on simple economic principles that apply in all markets, free or otherwise.

The conditions of employment in countries that are offshored to, are certainly not due to the genuine free-market as libertarians would have it
Austrian economics is my evidence.
AE does not tell us anything about what China is. You have to go to China to find out. Your claim is like saying that AE is evidence for what color your shirt is.

Are you seriously claiming that China is a free market?
I am saying that the workers are paid what they are worth. That they are not slaves, and that it doesn’t matter [for purposes of understanding about unions here] if they are serfs.

It is more akin to a mercantalist country than anything else.
One of us doesn’t know what mercantilism is.

What would Rothbards analysis of China have been?
I am not a psychic medium who can speak for those in the grave. But he would agree with my analysis of unions here, because he spoke of similar situations many times.

As an aside, what did you understand me to mean when I said ‘the conditions of employment’? What I meant was that the substandard living conditions in parts of China are not due to the free-market - i.e. it is the dictatorial nature of the system that causes these pitiful conditions.
A wealthy creditor nation cannot possibly have a dictator determining the wages and conditions a worker will have. When the dictator does that, the country’s economy looks like Cuba or Stalin’s Russia.

I find it odd that when China was blatently communist libertarians considered it a nasty dicatorship, yet now it is a state-capitalist faux market, libertarians consider it a paradise of choice, freedom and self-determination.
Straw man.

Hey, if you love china so much then why don’t you move there?
My atitude to China and my choice of residence are not relevant to the topic at hand.

I’m fairly sure you won’t find it as great as you’d hoped.
My hopes are not relevant to the topic at hand.

We are talking about rules of human decency, meaning not using violence to take things that belong to others.

So am I.
No. You are talking about using violence to take away money from the employer that is his.

Again, maybe in Bizzaro world dictators run thriving economies

Welcome to Bizzaro World**™**
This is the most amusing part of your post. Unfortunately a picture proves nothing.

[krazy_kaju]

@Consumariat

Unions are often accused (almost to the extent of it being a cliche) of ‘holding the public to ransom’. I would maintain that actually it is the corporate class that is being held to ransom - and justifiably so.

There’s no such thing as “the corporate class.” The people who own corporations or “capital” are, for the most part, workers themselves or small business owners.

When a company holds us workers to ransom by threatening to relocate to china and utilise what is effectively slave labour, what other option is left? The conditions of employment in countries that are offshored to, are certainly not due to the genuine free-market as libertarians would have it - they are due to nasty dictatorships holding down working conditions.

While it’s true that the places that companies decide to outsource aren’t free markets (e.g. China, Mexico), neither is the US. Furthermore, they don’t actually employ slave labor. The people who work for these companies do so voluntarily, and many leave the countryside and rural areas in order to get these “low” paying jobs, which to them are actually quite high-paying.

By moving to foreign countries, these companies not only create an immediate standard of living increase for their workers, but also in the long run, by investing in the “outsourced to” country and gradually accumulating more capital.

So if employers are not willing to abide by the rules of the free-market and employ only those who have a chance to reject their appalling terms of condition, why should workers abide by the rules of the free-market?

Again, the people in foreign countries where 1st world jobs are outsourced to do have a chance and right to reject their “appalling” working conditions. In fact, they prefer those working conditions to their alternative: living the way they lived before these foreign businesses offered them employment.

In short, is not union activity a legitimate response to the agression of bosses who will jump in bed with any nasty regime that will give them a profit at the expense of the people they employ?

Again, businesses that outsource do not actually engage in or initiate any aggression.

[Epicurus_Ibn_Kalhoun]

It seems pretty clear everyone here (but me and the OP) agree a company is more justified making a deal with a dictator than a union… “free” trade and all that.

Good to know where your loyalties lie

[Caley_McKibbin]

You mean, “In Defense of Oligopolies”.

[krazy_kaju]

LOL, “Epicurus,” way to twist things around. Setting up a factory and voluntarily employing workers there is not “making a deal with a dictator.” Furthermore, if anything, unions encourage companies to flee overseas by demanding artificially high levels of compensation.