[antielectronite]

I found these tweets to be very informative: https://twitter.com/okhanSTR/status/1207059687041982464

He's a lawyer who moonlights as a writer for SactownRoyalty, a Sacramento Kings fan blog that is basically being shut down by SBNation.

One interesting point he makes is that it's unsurprising that the Vox Union hasn't said anything about these hundreds of people losing work in favor of a dozen or so full time workers. It's not in their best interest to let people do part-time as a hobby what they do for their careers full-time.

[dmix]

Unions always benefit the few lucky ones to get the work and the hiring process gets riddled with nepotism and friends/family of current union workers. It was an open secret in the small town I grew up in that you had to know people in the unions to get a job and multi-generational workers from families was the standard.

It does give workers plenty of power but the exclusionary nature of it is rarely talked about. I remember reading a history of unions about how they originally started by white working class groups who wanted to prevent new black migrant workers from taking their jobs and working at a lower rate than them. https://www.jstor.org/stable/30030646

It's too bad the focus couldn't have been giving freelance workers more rights and protections while still giving them flexibility work-wise. The fact freelance and part time workers are going to get burned by this shift isn't really surprising. People seem to want to force either/all in order to push more unions instead of a more mixed economic approach.

[reaperducer]

Unions work for the benefit of union members. Not even remotely surprising, and I'm not even a big union guy.

[AnthonyMouse]

It's not surprising, but the narrative they prefer is that they're working for the benefit of union members against capital, not against hardworking independent contractors who are already making less money than them.

[larrywright]

Not to mention that if a business has the audacity to hire non-union labor, the unions will picket them and make all kinds of accusations about the business. Unions, for all intents and purposes, do not believe in free markets.

[rchaud]

"Free markets" in the Economics 101 sense don't exist anywhere but in the poorest parts of the world. A minimum wage is anti-market. So is paid time off, parental leave, anti-discrimination protections, and a host other rules and regulations that rich countries enshrined into law decades ago.

[AnthonyMouse]

> A minimum wage is anti-market.

A minimum wage is essentially a subsidy for certain poor people which comes mostly at the expense of different poor people. It's a very silly and inefficient alternative to better policies to help the poor, like a UBI.

> So is paid time off

This is also basically useless (but not as actively harmful as a minimum wage), because not long after it's passed, the value of the benefit gets priced into wages. If people wanted lower wages in exchange for paid time off then there was nothing preventing them from negotiating it to begin with.

> parental leave

Almost the same as paid time off, except that it's a cross-subsidy in favor of new parents, so you couldn't negotiate it in exchange for the same wage reduction in a free market, since you get the benefit (and wouldn't negotiate for it unless you intend to use it), but the wage reduction is spread across everybody and not just you.

Notice that you could get the same cross-subsidy with less distortion by having the government pay your salary during parental leave rather than the employer, because then the cost wouldn't fall disproportionately on employers of parents. That would also require the government to do a more accurate accounting of the cost of the program rather than passing an unfunded mandate.

> anti-discrimination protections

This one's the weird one, because in theory it's a useless requirement since discrimination is irrational and money-losing so nobody should want to do it anyway. But that was a different story when you had white people refusing to patronize employers with black employees or then women, so the original reason this got passed was in the nature of antitrust, which is pro-market. It's debatable whether we still actually need it anymore but it probably doesn't do a lot of harm since (unlike e.g. minimum wage) it isn't prohibiting anything anybody has any good reason to do to begin with.

[dmix]

Of course we don't live in a free market, all western economies have a mixed social-capitalist market [1]. It is the constant tension between the two that must be balanced, because practically markets can't account for every externality.

But there are some extremists on both ends who pretend, both of which are quite rare but the "free market" ones are the most often mischaracterized as wanting zero government instead of a smaller one as they thousands of examples of an ever growing list of government interventions making people worst off or simply pilfering money that should be going to those who produce jobs/wealth into the hands of people whose only skill is having political connections, all wrapped in some social justice/equity nonsense that ultimately leaves the poor worse off and economies stagnating.

[1] In fact the US has the largest administrative state in the world in terms of things like licensing and economic intervention, despite is ridiculous perception as a champion of markets. The only one who may be worse is India. And for all of the talk of 'deregulation' in the US, it only happens rarely and almost exclusively for the top 1% businesses like the top 5 mega-banks, while squeezing out the smaller banks from competing. It is not a general trend in any way that is supported by data, western nation states have exploded in size and scale since WW2. Yet the deregulation myth persists.

[kjeetgill]

The reason is that this is mostly true for how many unions got started. Fighting for rights like restrooms, safer working conditions, reasonable breaks, etc.

That's not to say many haven't grown into something more contentious, but the narrative I isn't unearned.

[pergadad]

Worth stressing that this might be how unions work in the US (if that's really so generalisable). In western Europe unions are definitely not so exclusionary

[gamblor956]

This is false.

Also, blog writers and journalists don't have a union. If they did, this wouldn't have happened.

[bpt3]

Vox writers are unionized.

[sundaeofshock]

Hold up. How exactly are part-time employees harmed by this?

And the question is the answer to what to do about freelancers: make them part-time employees.

[morelisp]

If as he says "none of us wrote for StR for the money" then a change to how the money is allocated should not affect him in any way, right?

If you get paid regularly for small amounts of work that's not a hobby, it's a part-time job. They're not remotely the same thing.

[AnthonyMouse]

When someone says they don't do something for the money, what they mean is that some of the value of doing the work is that you enjoy the work. You might be able to get $15/hour doing something you hate, but doing something you love for $5/hour a few hours a week is worth the $10/hour difference. That doesn't inherently mean it's worth a $15/hour difference.

And even if it is, that doesn't mean you're happy about losing the $5/hour.

[kelnos]

"None of us wrote for StR for the money" is a colloquialism. It doesn't mean that they'd work for free, or for under some threshold where the money they get isn't financially responsible for them given the time they put into it.

[Kylekramer]

I have to imagine that Vox Media is not going to allow people to write for them for free for a number of reasons, and the community the website developed is probably a main reason why they wrote there.