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by lmm 1572 days ago
So how's that working out for those manufacturing industries nowadays, hmm?
1 comments

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.

> 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.

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.