[TaylorAlexander]

I’m sure the point about labor unions is true in this case, but I did a quick search and it seems labor union participation is even higher in Japan. 17% in the Japan and 10% in the USA.

I think in many ways we do labor unions wrong in the US, and from my cursory knowledge it seems like the Taft-Hartley act has a lot to do with it. That concentrated union power in the leadership which created an opportunity for more corruption, and also weakened certain powers that would make labor struggles more useful. Of course in Japan, they would likely use Japanese workers due to strong nationalist sentiment so this particular issue wouldn’t occur.

I’m only saying this because some will read your comment and take away “labor unions bad”. I suspect that the truth is we aren’t doing labor unions properly here, and also the desire to use Taiwanese workers suggests there is something lacking about the US education system. It is of course reasonable for US workers to want a chance, but we need to make sure they are worthy of that chance. You can leave it up to the market to let people find higher education, but that’s going to leave smaller numbers in the end due to how wealth is distributed in this country. If you want higher numbers of educated workers, more provisions for affordable education are required.

[seanmcdirmid]

Labor unions in different countries are completely different. For example, China has almost 100% union participation but it isn’t very meaningful. In some countries, unions are merely fronts for organized crime, in Japan and Northern Europe they are more like active partners.

[TaylorAlexander]

Sure. This reinforces the point that labor unions are not inherently a problem, but the way we do labor unions certainly can be. Most rhetoric I hear in the US is if the former type. I only know bits and pieces but it sounds like perhaps we could learn from how Germany does labor unions (and higher education and healthcare for that matter).

[nebula8804]

I don't know man, from what I have read the unions were instrumental to getting the former CEO of VW (Herbert Diess) removed. He was dragging the company kicking and screaming into a full EV strategy and I guess he got overpowered because next thing you know he was gone.

Now VW has gone from become a promising EV innovator to a laggard in this race (given what we see in their car tear downs and the reliability of their software). Maybe they were going to end up in this situation but it really seemed like they had a shot because the man at the top was trying.

Do we really want that kind of union? I don't know how we can reconcile the notion that to transition to an emissions free future, we must convert cars to EVs but at the same time, EVs will guarantee a result in job losses.

[ETH_start]

The empirical evidence consistently shows labor unions reducing productivity. The real problem is that a significant fraction of the population benefits from the economic rent extraction that unions engage in, so they have a strong motivation to argue that have some redeeming quality.

[pchangr]

Do you have a link?

I.e. all the Nordic countries have a majority of the population of unionized labor

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1356735/labor-unions-mos...

[ETH_start]

If you search Google Scholar you can find numerous studies on the impact of unionization. Generally any non-market intervention is found to impede the efficiency of the economy.

As for the Nordic countries, they are a cautionary tale. Singapore now has a huge lead on Norway in per capita GDP, despite the latter having previously been far ahead of the former, and the latter having been one of the largest oil exporters in the world for several decades:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-worldbank?...

Sweden similarly has failed to maintain its world leading position in global rankings:

https://iea.org.uk/publications/research/scandinavian-unexce...

[pchangr]

That was an interesting read. Thanks for sharing.

Personally I don’t care about a country productivity as much as I care about quality of life but I think that’s an entirely different discussion and it’s much more subjective as quality of life means different things for different people :)

[TaylorAlexander]

Let’s say it were true that labor unions reduced productivity, but that they also increased quality of life for workers. I often think we need to stop focusing so much on productivity to the detriment of life and human well being. Or stated more directly, it is non obvious to me that reduced productivity is inherently bad.

[ETH_start]

Productivity growth is the overriding determinant of quality of life over any extended period of time.

Take two countries at the same starting level of per capita GDP, and give one a GDP growth rate of 2%, and the other a rate of 4%, and within 30 years the latter will have twice the per capita GDP of the former.

It's very hard for a country with half the per capita productivity of another country to match their quality of life.

[deprecative]

Productivity has gone up while quality of life has gone down over the last half century. Yeah, we can get groceries delivered now but we're never not working or preparing for work. We have worse economic realities and the cost of living is sky rocketing.

Sure doesn't seem like that's holding these days.

[TaylorAlexander]

It seems clear that if you achieve increased productivity by ensuring that 90% of the population worked, say, 60 hours a week, with no maternity leave or PTO, no large amount of time to spend outdoors or with loved ones, you could have a productive economy full of miserable people. You can have scenarios where the quality of life is very high for 10% of the people while it is very low for the vast majority.

> It's very hard for a country with half the per capita productivity of another country to match their quality of life.

A very easy thing to say, but unsupported by the facts. According to Wikipedia [1] the GDP per Capita for the USA is roughly double that of France ($80k vs $43k) but according to happiness index levels[2], France is at 97% the happiness of the USA.

Notably France’s culture focuses on time with people, which is free and makes people very happy.

Certainly productivity matters to a point. You can’t be happy if you can’t even eat. But beyond a certain point, grinding for additional productivity, especially when the gains are not going to those workers, does not increase happiness. And in fact it is clear that you can have half the GDP per capita and be just as happy.

I should note that “GDP Is Not a Measure of Human Well-Being” is such a well discussed topic that it is easy to find articles on this point [3] and Wikipedia has a section on this fact. [4]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nomi...

[2] https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/happiness/

[3] https://hbr.org/2019/10/gdp-is-not-a-measure-of-human-well-b...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_domestic_product?wprov=s...

[lxm]

To clarify, this wasn't even a spat over unionized labor at the factory, this was about who gets to build the factory.

TSMC wanted to bring some highly specialized labor from Taiwan (who presumably have experience with building this type of facilities) and Arizona Building and Construction Trades Council insisting their local dudes would do the job just fine.

[silent_cal]

You make a good point, but in the US I do think labor unions have become basically bad. They function more like organized crime than legal representation.

[TaylorAlexander]

To the extent that this is true, I think the legal structures we have forced them in to, in particular changes due to the Taft-Hartley act, have led to this. For example it is illegal to strike without leadership approval, so the act forced more power in to the hands of leadership, thus making it more like organized crime.

And this is the point. Unions are not inherently bad, but the way we do them is.

[coredog64]

One of the major problems with US unions is a hangover from racism. Can’t remember the USSC decision off the top of my head, but the TL;DR is that there was a railroad union that wasn’t defending African-American members. The USSC essentially said that unions have to defend everyone. The downside to this is that it created an adversarial relationship between unions and management. If Joe Bag O’Donuts is a chucklehead, the US union still has to defend him. This leads to rubber rooms and job banks. In a German union, everyone can agree that Joe needs to go and that’s it.

[deprecative]

Just an FYI, the acronym for the United States Supreme Court is SCOTUS. Supreme Court of the United States. POTUS is the president, as well.

[pfannkuchen]

Source? This sounds too insane to be true!

[replygirl]

georgia rail strike of 1909

if you think that's insane, i'd recommend reading "who built america?" vol 1 and "artisans into workers"