[lambdapie]

I don't think that's the primary issue people have with high wage union labor, and your comment shows an unwillingness to engage constructively with political opponents.

Unions are a monopoly, and when prices (in this case, of labor) are high due to a monopoly, we must ask whether the government should allow, forbid, or encourage this monopoly. When wages are very low, I think most people are not opposed to unions forcing wages above market rates (I am, but that's another issue). But when wages are high, or driven far above what people think market wages would be, people question the moral basis for protecting workers from competition.

So the issue isn't that blue collar workers are "beneath" white collar workers, but that (at least to an industry outsider) it's not clear what special skills these workers have that would command high market wages.

[Frondo]

Let me just ask you: why, in a market system, shouldn't people get as wages whatever they can demand, using personal negotiating skills, collective negotiating skills, law, whatever?

Management won't leave money on the table, why should the workers?

[lambdapie]

You had me up to "law". From the econ perspective, the "free market" does not include lobbying for particular laws. To define it as such is mockery of the term.

Assuming completely free property rights and contracts, unions would probably have almost no power. The power of unions stems from the fact that they are protected (e.g. you can't fire someone for joining a union) and the fact that the state ignores violent crime when unions commit it (but as far as I know that's not the issue here, I'm just mentioning for completeness).

I think that a legal system that is skewed towards labor is ok, for various reasons. But when you see wages pushed far beyond market wages, it's fair to ask if the system is too skewed.

So to answer your question, a person should not get whatever they can command by influencing the political system. Yes, both sides will try to do it, but in both cases the response should be to argue against them, and instead argue for impartial laws.

EDIT: the delay before the "reply" link becomes active is there for a reason. I'll respond to any reply that I consider to be based on a thorough reading of my post, and not a knee jerk reaction (for reference, the reply I'm referring to was written 4 minutes after my post).

[Frondo]

Of course the free market includes the rules that govern it. If you don't have rules, you don't have a market, just a rule of anarchic might-makes-right force.

If you're going to say "well, only property laws then," that's still laws! That's still a set of "this is how it should be" encoded into rules that we all have to agree to to take part in it!

It's just been, for so long, assumed that "screw the workers and don't let them fight back" is somehow "more free" that we treat that like a built-in thing, when really, that's just one way of doing it.

As for state-sanctioned, union-committed violent crime, oh please.

EDIT: Since you edited your remarks to include the last paragraph, I'll address that, too.

Why shouldn't people work to influence the political system in their favor? We all live here, we all have a role to play in the design and operation of the laws of our city/state/country. If enough people like strong worker protection laws, well, that's democracy, why shouldn't that stuff get encoded into law?

SECOND EDIT: Yeah, it only takes a minute or two to read what you're saying and respond to it. I saw a "reply" link right away, so if there's some extra delay built in, it didn't apply to me.

[lambdapie]

First, I was out of line in my edit. It's not for me to say how you should post on HN, so I apologize. I'll stick to the addressing the content of what you wrote.

The difference in our viewpoints seems to be that you have an "adversarial" understanding of the political system, where different interest groups try to get the best for themselves. On the other hand, I think that politics is mostly driven by ideology, not self-interest. If I can state an ideal set of laws, that should be sufficient and I don't need to concern myself with how special interest groups might try to manipulate the set of laws.

I also think you conflate self-interest with what is right/wrong when you say " If enough people like strong worker protection laws, well, that's democracy, why shouldn't that stuff get encoded into law?". Do they like it because they think it's right, or because it's good for them? That's an important difference.

On the specifics, I mostly believe in the free market. I don't consider the free market to be anti-worker (redistribution through taxation/welfare handles that aspect) or arbitrary. Classical economics shows that the free market should be considered the default position. I also support limited rights for unions, e.g. I don't think an employer should be able to fire you for joining a union, because the employers control of how people communicate in the workplace could be considered an unfair advantage.

Re violence, do you disagree that union members do sometimes commit violence against so-called scabs, when they attempt to enter a worksite? And do you think that in general these acts are punished in the same way that other violent acts would be?

[tedks]

>and the fact that the state ignores violent crime when unions commit it

It is absolutely absurd for you to say this, when unions and workers attempting to unionize have and still continue to be slaughtered for their attempts to gain basic human rights at their workplace.

I would say such a misstatement is laughable but it would be poor taste to make comedy of the deaths of so many.

[lambdapie]

This is what I was referring to: http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2011/08/22/why_do_w...

Can you give any similar examples of violence against unions, say within the last 20 years and in the US?

[tedks]

Your constraints are inappropriate for a world where capitalism is global. If you drink Coke or wear Nike you're directly supporting the murder of workers attempting to unionize and their blood is on your hands.

But, even in the US union organizers are frequently suppressed, either violently or through indirect threats and intimidation. It takes little scholarship to discover this and the absence of such indicates that you're more personally interested in having an argument, where you fight for your side to be considered correct, than actually learning, where you observe evidence in a nonbiased way and integrate that evidence into your beliefs. So it would make little difference for me to give any "similar examples" of the (utterly biased and as other commenters have pointed out, incorrect) source you've provided.

As another aside, it takes a special sort of person to, in the struggle between the powerful and the powerless, side with the powerful as you have here. I hope you contemplate this as you decide what person you are in the future.

[Frondo]

Let me first say, I appreciate the spirit in which you're keeping this going; we're civil, we're responding to things, it's great! It's how online chats should be.

I read that article, you're right, at first glance, it's pretty troubling. Seeing the source (one of the oft-propagandistic, oft-badly-sourced Real Clear sites) made me want to follow up on the claims inside.

The Ohio man who was shot, it isn't clear from any authoritative reporting what actually happened--the only people who explicitly link his attacker to a union are secondary sources. It also looks like the authorities were in fact working on it, though I couldn't find any sort of follow-up reporting.

The rest is all so vague that I can't really make a lot of sense of it.

That said, of course I don't condone violence, neither petty vandalism (like leaving debris in the Verizon driveways), nor the economic destruction left behind when multinationals bend laws in favor of offshoring, and then do so, and leave entire towns with no source of employ.

Neither of those is right, but I don't think we'll get to the right place by trying to come up with one "right" set of laws that every person and every business must abide by--I think we'll iterate closer and closer to "right" when people and groups work together to make their slice of the world better.

It's just that, the entire time I've been alive, the working folks and the poor have been under the bootheel of a variety of--excuse the language, I can't really think of another way to be succinct about it--oppressors both large and small, whether it's the people who ship factories overseas to save some bucks (and bend laws in their favor), or the managers who willingly accept just-in-time staffing solutions that leave their workers with unpredictable work schedules, or the managers who cheat workers out of overtime by classifying them as "salaried," or the managers who try to normalize 100-hour work weeks, or ... on and on and on. We work a lot harder for a lot less, and we're still on course to work even more, for even less.

If a union's a way to bend that downward slope a bit, I'm all for it. No historical evidence suggests that less regulation would do it.

Anyway, thanks again for keeping the discussion going in a courteous, engaging fashion.

[lambdapie]

Unfortunately I don't have time to go into this more, but I also appreciate the tone of your reply.

A very brief summary of my position is that there is a set of "right" laws, and that is the free market with redistribution through taxation. This is not an arbitrary choice, but one justified by classical economics. Anything good for the poor that you would want to accomplish would be better done by redistribution than by unions. Except, of course, pleasing the members of a particular union, who might stand to benefit at the expense of other workers if they could increase their power.

Outsourcing a great example of this. It is actually good for people in the countries where work is outsourced to. They get more for their labor than they would otherwise, even if they get less than what a Western worker makes. If they showed "solidarity" and demanded Western wages, they would get nothing.

[D_Alex]

I think the problem is that in this case the "market system" is not a free market system, since the ILWU has a monopoly protected by regulations, which they somehow managed to get implemented.

Is that a good thing? Consider that the handling of each container costs $300, about double what it does in say Rotterdam. Who pays for the difference? The American consumers.

Or suppose all the fast food work was, by law, under the Fast Food Worker's Union. They demand that their members pay is equal to the ILWU, $227,000 inclusive of benefits per annum. Now a Big Mac meal cost you $15. Does your argument still hold?

And consider also this: such unions are often cesspits of nepotism and corruption, usually manifesting as union not admitting new members without some special considerations.

[ConroyBumpus]

My issue with union shops is that getting things done is unnecessarily difficult. Case in point: sitting around for half a day waiting for the unionized cable puller to sling a single cat5 connection between two racks on the same row in a data center. Then the guy doesn't show up until after 1600, so he forces overtime.

[lambdapie]

Funny you mention that. When I was a teenager I earned pocket money by running cat5 cable through buildings. In this case it was professional licensing, not unions, that made what I was doing illegal. I think professional licensing is even more pernicious than unions, since it operates entirely through manipulating the legal system.

[fraserharris]

This is especially true when unions are actively sabotaging the introduction of new technology in order to maintain their high wages or inflated numbers (introduction of containerization to Oakland).

[compostor42]

Unions aside, there was the same butt-hurt regarding blue-collar oil field workers making 100k+. The New York Times ran endless articles complaining about the shale oil boom.

Non-elite flyover whites making good money seems to really upset a certain segment of the population. How dare they make a better living them me doing physical labor!

Most people have been taught to look down on blue-collar manual labor. Seeing them makes good money upsets them. Even the OP expressed his distaste for the oil-field workers.

[lambdapie]

Fair point, I thought you were saying before that critiques of union workers earning too much were really driven by this white vs blue collar issue, while now I see that what you were really saying is that the OP wasn't necessarily even talking about unions, just complaining about rich blue collar workers.

In fact, before I saw the rest of the thread I was going to ask for clarification about the original oil-field worker point.

I agree that manual work can have a high market rate even without unions, e.g. if it physically requires a very fit man to do the job, in addition to the right personality, dexterity, intelligence and reliability.

[compostor42]

Indeed. I don't disagree with you about the Unions at all.

[knagra]

You do realize the sentiment behind the second clause of your last sentence contradicts the assertion of the first one?

[lambdapie]

Could you flesh that idea out? It's not clear to me what parts of the sentence you're referring to.

[mistersquid]

> So the issue isn't that blue collar workers are "beneath" white collar workers, but that (at least to an industry outsider) it's not clear what special skills these workers have that would command high market wages.

You say the issue is not one of considering blue collar workers to be inferior ("beneath"), but your second clause implies that if blue collar workers do not possess "special skills" "that would command high market wages" then something is "not clear", i.e. the blue collar workers would be "lower" without those "special skills".

This presumes blue collar work and workers are inferior to white collar work and workers because blue collar workers need "special skills" to be equivalently compensated/regarded.

EDIT: qualifying condition for last sentence.

[lambdapie]

Ok I get it now. I think a natural reading of my statement is that the original post was claiming some cognitive bias, in which white color workers felt themselves to be inherently better than blue collar workers, vs my own view that white color workers on average are actually worth more in the market.

My claim is that there is no cognitive bias, but that white collar workers in general are worth more (because they possess a rarer set of skills).