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Ted Cruz

7 (6.5%)

Rick Santorum

16 (14.8%)

Michelle Bachmann

13 (12%)

Chris Christie

23 (21.3%)

Rand Paul

49 (45.4%)

Total Members Voted: 107

[Bauglir]

I certainly think you ought to be able to say, "Hey, no, union, I got this. Don't intervene on my behalf." Even if a single employee is all it takes to get the union involved, small numbers of well-treated employees would be less likely to get screwed because one guy had to rock the boat. And it should take a (regressive*) fraction of employees to get that process going, not just one. But, again, that's a different thing - you should also have the option of resorting to union intervention now that your employer is a money-grubbing corporation.

*Larger corporations, having more power over individual employees, should have lower percentage thresholds. Maybe a small company with a couple dozen employees takes 20%, down to a tiny fraction of a percent for, say, McDonald's.

[Lord Shonus]

That does change the situation, but only slightly. The previous owners probably paid based on average wage or similar rather than trying to work out what they could afford to pay that particular position. This is a standard practice that ensures both that you will be competitive against other local businesses without excessively reducing your ability to attract suitable candidates. That average wage for non-union labor was at the level it was at because the overwhelming majority of the non-union companies are, in fact, run by money-gouging corporations. That's why small, family-owned business don't usually last long anymore. There is too much wealth concentrated in the hands of the corporations for anyone to truly compete with them.


Just as an example, the much-repeated story of the "outrageous" pay rates that some McDonald's employees want? It would cost less each year to give that wage than they spend on a single ad campaign, or donate to PACs supporting one politician.

@Bauglir
IT ha sbeen proven again, and again, and again that if you have a single non-union employee in a business, within a year there will BE no union.

[mainiac]

... sheb, NOBODY gets pensions here anymore.

Do the unions need to stand up to the corporate overlords? Oh hell yes.

Do they need to not ask for all that and a box of chocolates, and instead focus on fair (not high payong) wages and extras? YES.

Should they be demanding a minimum baseline pay that is 20% above baseline pay in the surrounding region (like mine?) NO.

Should they be demanding a retirement package that basically works out to still getting paid 100k+ a year, in an area where the average yearly pay is closer to 50k? NO.

I can't speak definitavely for seattle, but here in the wichita production hub, what I just described above prfectly describes the machinist union negotiation points.

Why the hell shouldn't unions be asking for a good wage?  The problem here isn't that the unions are asking for too much, it's that you are judging the unions against the baseline of a middle class that's getting hammered by a creeping decline for decades.  The reason those retirement packages are so great looking is that they are compensation for work performed back in the 70s and 80s when those jobs were still paying well.  The retirement packages were part of that compensation.  And it's not like Seattle based aerospace companies are just barely squeaking by....

[Bauglir]

@Bauglir
IT ha sbeen proven again, and again, and again that if you have a single non-union employee in a business, within a year there will BE no union.

I'm not arguing for non-union employees, I'm talking about the number of employees required to get union intervention on a policy matter that affects all employees (which is the kind of thing I assume wierd is complaining about; I've seen one or two such things at my own workplace which have been mildly annoying). Conflict resolution between a particular employee and an employer (say, a firing in violation of a contract), obviously, should require no such minimum, and contract negotiations proper should also follow a different process, and once the union does get involved, every employee needs to be bound by the results. Given all those caveats, it's a very small part of what unions do that could use changing.

[wierd]

Mainiac:

"Good" =! "Lavish"

It seems you guys are having trouble understanding exactly why I am against unions demanding wages that exceed the median income for non-union shops.

I'll try to explain the position, as best I can.


To begin with, a market-- any market-- is an equilibrium.  If you adjust one part of that market, it will settle in new areas to remove the influence of the adjustment.

For an example of this, prior to the 1940s, it was very common place for only one spouse to work. After the second world war, women had gained work experience, and cultural acceptance as employees. This isn't really a bad thing. They should be allowed to do whatever just like anyone else.

The issue, as that this created a disturbance in the market equilibrium. Homes now had a certain percentage above 0, that both partners would be working.  For those families that did so, they could basically double their household spending money.  Hello roadtrip and vacation culture of the 50s.

The problem is that this GREATLY disadvantaged families that DIDN'T want to have both partners working. The market adjusted to accommodate the change in currency availability, by increasing prices on everything.  Inflation!

The end result of this, is that now unless one partner is a flipping doctor, lawyer, rockstar, or other insanely compensated employee, both spouses have to work to have the same or lower standard of living that their grandparents had, with only one spouse working.

That is the danger of pumping money into an economy willy nilly. The market WILL react to the change, to negate the influence.

The same thing happens in union towns here in the US.  People who WERE doing just fine, now suddenly can't, as a direct result of the union's insistence that it always stay ahead of the jones'.

This has impacts on available employment opportunities too. When there are big demands on compensation, then only big corporations can play the employment game. The market effects of those unions in action prevents smaller employers who offer a nicer workplace from offering employment, because they simply cannot operate on the scales that the big money grubbing corporations do.

My dislike for demanding pay in excess of the inflation rate is a direct result of seeing and understanding this. It does not in any way help people live better lives. It instead puts more coal on the fire.

[Bauglir]

I'd prefer we drag the median pay upward and enforce a mandatory price cap (however soft it might need to be for sanity reasons) on essential goods and services (with a fairly liberal definition of "essential") based on the cost to manufacture and sell, so that profits are optimized by not raising the price unless you do it in one huge, customer-enraging jump, which could only be successful if significant collusion with your competitors allowed you all to do it simultaneously. But that's just one small part of a very large conception of how our economy needs to change in order to cope with the idea that work isn't a good thing, but an unfortunate necessity. Because, yeah, obviously what I just outlined is balls-tripping crazy in a vacuum.

[wierd]

sadly, historical data says that such a policy won't work.

[Lord Shonus]

Mainiac:

"Good" =! "Lavish"

It seems you guys are having trouble understanding exactly why I am against unions demanding wages that exceed the median income for non-union shops.

I'll try to explain the position, as best I can.


To begin with, a market-- any market-- is an equilibrium.  If you adjust one part of that market, it will settle in new areas to remove the influence of the adjustment.

For an example of this, prior to the 1940s, it was very common place for only one spouse to work. After the second world war, women had gained work experience, and cultural acceptance as employees. This isn't really a bad thing. They should be allowed to do whatever just like anyone else.

The issue, as that this created a disturbance in the market equilibrium. Homes now had a certain percentage above 0, that both partners would be working.  For those families that did so, they could basically double their household spending money.  Hello roadtrip and vacation culture of the 50s.

The problem is that this GREATLY disadvantaged families that DIDN'T want to have both partners working. The market adjusted to accommodate the change in currency availability, by increasing prices on everything.  Inflation!

The end result of this, is that now unless one partner is a flipping doctor, lawyer, rockstar, or other insanely compensated employee, both spouses have to work to have the same or lower standard of living that their grandparents had, with only one spouse working.

That is the danger of pumping money into an economy willy nilly. The market WILL react to the change, to negate the influence.

The same thing happens in union towns here in the US.  People who WERE doing just fine, now suddenly can't, as a direct result of the union's insistence that it always stay ahead of the jones'.

This has impacts on available employment opportunities too. When there are big demands on compensation, then only big corporations can play the employment game. The market effects of those unions in action prevents smaller employers who offer a nicer workplace from offering employment, because they simply cannot operate on the scales that the big money grubbing corporations do.

My dislike for demanding pay in excess of the inflation rate is a direct result of seeing and understanding this. It does not in any way help people live better lives. It instead puts more coal on the fire.

The unions are demanding that the company is paying them the same percentage of the company's profits that they always have. In other words, they want to have the same slice of the pie that they've helped make that they always have. They happen to be working for an immensely profitable company that was built with the fruit of their labor. It a very real sense, anything less is a pay cut.

The non-union companies, in contrast, are growing at similar rates. Since the workers don't have a powerful advocate, their relative slice of the pie gets smaller and smaller while the company's wallet's get fatter and fatter. Thus, the median isn't well below union rates because the union is being unreasonable, it is lower because everyone else has a boot on their neck and an overlord screaming "YOU'LL GET WHAT I DEIGN TO GIVE YOU AND YOU'LL LIKE IT."

Of course, this is coming from someone who's had to call in OSHA twice in the last year for potentially lethal safety concerns because the company views us as disposable.

@Bauglir
I've never seen anything of the sort that you've described. Generally, union action is limited to "this policy is a violation of our contract" or "this policy is illegal under local/state/Federal law." Often, this comes up several times a week.

[wierd]

Shonus:

I would rather see this happen with regulations applying to large corporations, than through unions. That would give small employers an advantage in the market, and improve euntreprenurialism.

The smaller companies are not growing as quickly, because money is being tied up in large corporations.

I can comprehend your argument; large payouts demanded by unions put that money into the economy that would otherwise be witheld by the corporations, putting it into circulation where it needs to be.

That would be fine and good, if small enterprise was booming. It isn't.

All demanding higher rates of pay, which are dependent upon a corporation that uses every dirty rick in the known universe, and some that defy all explanation, to shelter its profits in multinational domains, (tricks that smaller business could NEVER do) does is make it impossible to be a small business owner, and pay your employees a livable wage.  The livable wage will make your own profit margin be too small to grow.

That is exactly what is happening.


Instead, I would suggest legislation and enforcement of something like this:

Corporations that engage in international commerce must:

Track all income from the domestic national market, and keep those figures seperate from other national markets.

Must pay taxes on all income from that market

Must provide labor payouts appropriate to the market value of the goods and services rendered/sold in that market, as measured by their income reports:
   Total profits earned in the region must never exceed the costs of labor+ inflation, +10% of that combined sum.
Income reports and wage payouts will be audited.
Violators will be fined the difference, + 20%.

Wholly domestic corporations would have different rules, which instead place limits on total profit earned in relation to CEO max compensation in a ratio against average employee compensation figures.

[mainiac]

Okay, for starters, rising incomes aren't just a product of inflation.  If your economic model isn't accounting for rises in productivity due to technological improvement and rising capital then it isn't even worthy of a one handed economist.

Honestly I was so caught up on that I couldn't even stomach properly reading the rest of what you were writing but suffice to say that you really can't talk about inflation without some sort of equilibrium model, even a paleo-monetarist aggregate demand view (which is pretty dumb IMHO but at least offers an equilibrium perspective.)

Sorry if this comes across as condescending but I just dont know what else to say when you paint such an incomplete picture.

[wierd]

Mainiac-- a complete analysis would have been a wall of text.

The incomplete and niave version was already a wall of text.

Giving a wall of text would have resulted in an equally hostile reception.

I therefore, gave the simpler, niave version.

There are many other factors at work involved in the 1940s-1950s labor transition effects of effectively doubling the work pool, which basically have the same effect that improvements in manufacturing technology has now.

Namely, the "value" of man hours worked was diminished. This reduction is in equilibrium with the potential availability of human labor.

When there are millions of unemployed humans, and lots of robots that work for the costs of electricity and maintenance, the going rate for human labor will be abysmal.

It is "very easy" to get the work done, and as such, the costs of obtaining that work are low.

Such a service cannot command a high price.


In the terms of the 1940s to 1950s transition, the "effective" pool of skilled laborers increased by approximately 100%.  This reduced the scarcity by 50%. It took time for the market price to dip to match this change. During that time, it was "very profitable" for both spouses to work.

The flood of liquidity in the market altered prices, and the going pay rates for labor declined as the market relaxed.

The market assimilated the greater laborer pool, by reducing the "effective" compensation for that labor by half.

[mainiac]

I don't think you deserve hostility man, you just aren't considering a really big thing.  Please, dont think I'm looking down on you here.  I'm just saying there's this whole, really, really, really big thing that you don't seem to be considering.  So you can start considering it and learn.  Learning is a great process.

Productivity growth is a huge F*ing deal.  Like maybe the single most important concept in post-classical economics.  If you are really interested in economics you should open your eyes to this and spread your wings and sour like a motherfucking eagle.

[Lord Shonus]

The part of my point that you don't seem to be getting is that the problems are not the union's fault. They're simply powerful enough not to get shit on as much, while the rest of the workers aren't.


Your point about small business and entrepreneurship isn't invalid. The obstacles aren't the higher union pay, especially since you can use incentives such as profit-sharing bonuses, partial ownership, or simply a direct and discernable impact on the company's future to attract potential workers in return for a lower base pay. It's the fact that the competitors are so wealthy that they can buy your entire family a hundred times over out of pocket change. It's Ma Bell and Standard Oil all over again, with the workers as a scapegoat.


Workers are ALWAYS the scapegoat. The company I work for is headed straight into the ground due to chronic understaffing (we keep buying product, and have the workforce to do the preliminary sort, but the bulk of the work of identifying, pricing, and shipping the books never gets done because we have maybe 25% of the workforce needed to handle the volume), the fact that the previous supervisor sent something like ten million unidentified, probably highly valuable books to recycle (as a rough estimate, this literally cost the company over thirty million dollars in inventory, based on past trends) in an attempt to keep anyone from noticing this fact (as he feared that it would make him look bad), and the fact that none of the equipment ever works properly due to nonexistent maintenance and the fact that they didn't enlarge the Internet connection when they tried to expand the preliminary sort capacity.

So far, their response has been mandatory overtime, a draconian attendance policy, and constant anti-theft measures because they found out employees were stealing their garbage (literally, as any product that the company doesn't sell such as shoes or VHS tapes goes into the trash bin). There's still a chance that they can turn it around, but not if they don't start focusing on the real issues. Still better than it was before the union came in, when they fired the bottom 25% of the workforce every week, not counting those that were fired for refusing sexual advances from the supervisors (which they could easily get away with due to at-will employment.)

[Bauglir]

wierd:

The paper doesn't address the manner of capping I'm thinking of, but that's understandable since I made no attempt to explain it, since attempting to explain my Grand Economic Vision is likely to be a waste of everyone's time. That said, I'd expect a mechanism put in place that dynamically adjusts profit based on pricing. For instance, a subsidy toward production that tapers off as a corporation raises prices, scaled such that the loss of the subsidy is greater than the generated revenue, and such that by point the subsidy has run out entirely and further price increases have made up the difference, a jump directly from the price we prefer to regulate and the higher price would be obvious to consumers (a significant fraction of the initial price, say 30%, to pick an arbitrary number with no empirical backup), and unacceptable as long as a competitor is available. The goal is to create a stable equilibrium at a "fair" price from a consumer perspective. This does assume the availability of a competitor however, and despite antimonopoly laws, there are a lot of captive markets these days (which need other solutions).

I agree that the stricter regulations discussed in that paper (which involve a regulatory agency imposing a maximum price) probably aren't the best way to go. I much prefer creating incentives for corporations to make the world a better place on their own initiative.

Shonus:

Perhaps my experience has been unusual. An example of what I've seen is the imposition of an electronic clocking system that replaced paper logs. The union required this to ensure that everyone is paid for the hours they actually work, which I can understand, but. Earlier, it was common practice to simply list the hours you were scheduled, unless you worked well past them (30 minutes or more), because as a hospital we basically understood that you left when your work was done. You were being paid for your labor, not your time. The upshot of this was that we left when our work was done, even if that was early, and nobody cared because the work still got done. The electronic system has resulted in complaints from literally everyone I've talked to - nobody wanted it. It keeps you there longer when your work is done, and it gives you an incentive to leave with your work unfinished otherwise, because supervisors do not like even tiny amounts of overtime.

[Lord Shonus]

Shonus:

Perhaps my experience has been unusual. An example of what I've seen is the imposition of an electronic clocking system that replaced paper logs. The union required this to ensure that everyone is paid for the hours they actually work, which I can understand, but. Earlier, it was common practice to simply list the hours you were scheduled, unless you worked well past them (30 minutes or more), because as a hospital we basically understood that you left when your work was done. You were being paid for your labor, not your time. The upshot of this was that we left when our work was done, even if that was early, and nobody cared because the work still got done. The electronic system has resulted in complaints from literally everyone I've talked to - nobody wanted it. It keeps you there longer when your work is done, and it gives you an incentive to leave with your work unfinished otherwise, because supervisors do not like even tiny amounts of overtime.

I find it difficult to understand why "making sure that you are paid what the company is legally obligated to pay you" would result in complaints, particularly since, if you're now pushed into leaving early because your supervisor doesn't want overtime, that strongly suggests that they were previously (and illegally) cheating you out of a great deal of pay, although you did mention being able to leave early as well. Indeed, in some states, it's illegal to use the non-time-clock system for hourly employees, and every single contract I've ever read mandates it.