[throwaway73838]

Problem is, unions are actually counter productive to any industry. They reduce available work and further incentivize off-shoring of jobs.

In the post WW2 period, the UK and German manufacturing industries lagged behind the US in both wages and productivity, largely due to the former being unionized and latter not.

[ActorNightly]

Not really true.

For industries where you need x human labor to do x amount of defined work, unions definitely help employees. Companies have an incentive to extract as much labor while keeping wages the same or lowering, leveraging peoples need for a job. Also for a lot of positions in those industries, the pay is low enough to put significant friction for employees into doing things like switching jobs, especially when employees start getting specialized and becoming limited to a certain industry, where all the companies are incentivized to do the same thing.

However, for industries where you want to select for the best and brightest to advance tech, unions are a bad thing, because they effectively remove the capability of the companies to do this.

You could make an argument that both of those cases should be governed by a common principle, and that technology development is generally better for society, so unions are generally a bad thing, but that is a pretty complex issue.

[throwaway73838]

I would like to respond to you in depth, but I think a better option would be to recommend a good book on the subject. “Economics in one lesson” by H Hazlitt. First published in 1945, it explains, in clear terms, economic fallacies which existed at that time, and I’m sorry to say are still prevalent to this day, and possibly even more so. He explains the concepts better than I ever could. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_in_One_Lesson

[scarface74]

Haven’t those same companies just picked up and moved to a none union shop?

[foepys]

You mean the good old times when the US military just shot at people trying to unionize?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Blair_Mountain

[google234123]

No, he said post ww2 which is after 1921.

[Animats]

Um.

[lmm]

So how's that working out for those manufacturing industries nowadays, hmm?

[throwaway73838]

Well, since they’ve been increasingly unionized, they moved places like Texas (Tesla, SpaceX etc) and China.

Take the medical industry, for example - they can’t exactly go on strike, yet they are the highest paying industry in most countries. Which goes to show that unions aren’t necessary to be paid a high wage (also Singapore, unions are illegal, yet they have higher average wages than most developed nations).

In my country of Australia, garbage collectors earn $120,000, which is around $80,000USD. Yet just recently, they went on strike, refusing to collect the garbage. This is despite earning far more than the average person. Or train drivers - they are paid even higher, yet they also go on strike. This is not fighting for basic health and safety rights of Cockney chimney sweeps - this is blackmailing their employer for more money for nothing, for already privilege and highly paid staff in a competitive industry. Which ultimately leads to higher costs for consumers, less competitive industry, and more general inefficiency.

[lmm]

> Well, since they’ve been increasingly unionized, they moved places like Texas (Tesla, SpaceX etc) and China.

And yet Germany with some of the strongest unions in the world is a manufacturing powerhouse, and plenty of ununionized countries have very weak manufacturing. So something else must be going on.

> Take the medical industry, for example - they can’t exactly go on strike, yet they are the highest paying industry in most countries. Which goes to show that unions aren’t necessary.

Friedman famously described the AMA as the strongest union in the country, so that's the opposite of showing unions aren't necessary.

[renewiltord]

The AMA is an incredibly successful union. It is exactly the sign of how bad unions can be for society while being good for some of their members.

Thousands of people have died because of the AMA. Perhaps even hundreds of thousands through the artificial medical professional shortage they began.

Fortunately, America is moving away from MDs to NPs to scale medicine. The nation will treat unions as damage and route around them.