[bigstrat2003]

Perhaps. But that's cold comfort to someone who doesn't have a job because the company went out of business. You would have to be an enormous asshole to say "it'll result in a better equilibrium" to someone who just lost his job.

[overfeed]

> But that's cold comfort to someone who doesn't have a job because the company went out of business

I suppose only those who lose their jobs because of a merger, or the CEO making poor decisions ought to get the warm and fuzzies because someone on the Internet won't blame them for their own misfortune.

Somewhere on the spectrum between "egalitarian, flat organization Utopia" and "Slavery", one has to draw a line where entities below that line should not exist.

[appreciatorBus]

You forgot that collective ruin is also an option and we have seen this many times when societies attempted to do away with economic & market concepts.

[overfeed]

Why is union-related collective ruin anathema, but elite-driven ruin is seen as an acceptable price to pay? Enron, the Great Recession, etc.

[appreciatorBus]

> somewhere on the spectrum between "egalitarian, flat organization Utopia" and "Slavery"

I didn't say that collective ruin was a result of unionism, only that that you appeared to be trying illustrate a point by outlining a broad spectrum of outcomes, but IMO you forgot one common outcome of forced collectivization. Where it belongs on that spectrum can be debated but that it's a common outcome cannot be.

[overfeed]

I provided a range of leader:worker income/power ratios from 1:0 to 1:1 with no commentary whatsoever on outcomes, because my entire point is that the outcome doesn't matter: at some threshold value and below, the existence of the org itself is immoral. We don't have to agree on where that point is, but its existence shouldn't be up for debate, IMO.

I hope we can all agree that a slave plantation should not exist in 2025, regardless of whether it's making billions in quarterly profit, or hovering above insolvency. Paying workers at this plantation $0.01 per hour isn't okay, either, but if you keep adding $0.01/hr N times (and incrementally improve working conditions), you'll eventually arrive at the threshold I was describing.

[Izkata]

> I provided a range of leader:worker income/power ratios from 1:0 to 1:1 with no commentary whatsoever on outcomes

For a slight perspective change, the thing that leads to what they mentioned: They're saying you forgot about the range 1:1 to 0:1.

[FrustratedMonky]

The threshold does exist. Doesn't the poverty line take into account local conditions for median food/rent prices?

So minimum wage should be enough to be above poverty line.

This would solve cases like walmart employees being in poverty and needing government assistance to live.

[seneca]

>Why is union-related collective ruin anathema, but elite-driven ruin is seen as an acceptable price to pay? Enron, the Great Recession, etc.

What are you talking about? Multiple people were convicted over the Enron scandal, including some serious prison terms.

[cogman10]

Who got convicted over Sears, KMart, and Toy's R Us? How about the slap on the wrist for the Sacklers for supercharging to opioid epidemic? What happened the the CEOs of GE from Jack Welsh on who steered the company on into the ground primarily through layoffs and cut-throat business management?

There's plenty of examples of business owners driving a company into the ground to personally enrich themselves.

[AnthonyMouse]

Not all of those were instances of the management purposely screwing people, but let's suppose some of them were. Should the conclusion then be that we should find ways to prevent that from happening again, or should it be that two wrongs make a right?

[autoexec]

The longest time an enron CEO spent behind bars was 12 years. Richard DeLisi was sentenced to 90 years for a nonviolent marijuana charge and spent over 30 behind bars before being pardoned. Kind of puts "serious" prison terms in perspective.

[overfeed]

> What are you talking about?

I am pointing out that some commenters here are grading Unions and CEOs on different curves on the issue of negative outcomes, and the alleged union bogeyman is a frequent occurrence at ununionized organizations.

> Multiple people were convicted over the Enron scandal, including some serious prison terms.

That is great, and should have been a deterrent for more ruinous shenanigans. Which CEOs got arrested for the subprime mortgage heists that triggered the 2008 GFC? The GFC made Enron look like jaywalking, I'm sure dozens of executive received life sentences and entire banks shuttered for their malfeasance and lack of internal controls. Right?

[kristofferg]

Unions are part of a healthy market economy. The succesful suppression of unions is a market failure.

[AnthonyMouse]

Unions are basically useless in a healthy market economy because then companies have to compete for customers and employees instead of having a monopoly, which causes them to have thin margins and therefore leave nothing on the table for collective bargaining to extract that wasn't already being extracted through competitive pressure.

Meanwhile unions in a consolidated market have the perverse incentive to sustain the monopoly because then the union is extracting a portion of the monopoly rents the corporation is squeezing out of consumers at the expense of the 99% of workers who don't work for that specific company. Which is why consolidated markets need not unions but antitrust enforcement.

[ethbr1]

> Meanwhile unions in a consolidated market have the perverse incentive to sustain the monopoly because then the union is extracting a portion of the monopoly rents the corporation is squeezing out of consumers at the expense of the 99% of workers who don't work for that specific company.

This still sounds like an improvement over the American consolidated market status quo, where the companies and shareholders retain more of the monopoly rents.

Antitrust enforcement would be great, but absent an 1880s-1910s level push, isn't going to happen.

So why not improve things in the meantime?

[AnthonyMouse]

> Antitrust enforcement would be great, but absent an 1880s-1910s level push, isn't going to happen.

Let's do that then.

> This still sounds like an improvement over the American consolidated market status quo, where the companies and shareholders retain more of the monopoly rents.

Except that you then get the union lobbying to sustain the monopoly instead of eliminate it, which makes it even harder to do the thing that actually needs to be done.

[cogman10]

Unions are about building worker rights and protections into the business expenses. When they are industry wide, it prevents any company from gaining an advantage by exploiting their workers.

A strong market economy is orthogonal to the treatment of workers. For example, the economy of the early US was both very competitive and had slavery. Same for islands like Jamaica.

The ideal is government regulation ensuring worker rights. Barring that, unions fill the role. Unions exist to fill a void created by a low regulation market. They are the libertarian solution.

[AnthonyMouse]

> When they are industry wide, it prevents any company from gaining an advantage by exploiting their workers.

If one company is exploiting their workers in a competitive market, what prevents those workers from going to work for any of the other companies?

> For example, the economy of the early US was both very competitive and had slavery.

Slavery is a government regulation that says that if someone pays a stranger money then you have to do work you never agreed to do. Markets are the thing where you only have to do something if you agreed to do it.

> They are the libertarian solution.

They're an attempt to monopolize the labor market in an industry. When unsuccessful they're useless because they have no bargaining power, when successful they're an abusive monopolist extracting undue rents from that industry's customers.

[hellojesus]

Current US law forces companies to negotiate with a union if it's employees vote for it. That seems like the opposite of a healthy market; it is a market in severe regulatory capture.

A healthy market would allow voluntary decisions by both parties. It would allow management to choose whether they want to negotiate with a collective broker, and it would allow workers to choose whether they want to find employment congruent with their preferences to either self negotiate or hire a third party.

[piva00]

How isn't it a market solution for a collective of individuals to band together to determine what they think are fair conditions of wage and labour? If they are wrong then the whole thing fails just like a business mispricing and/or mistreating its customers would, if they are right they all get a better deal.

It's a freer market than allowing disproportionate power of employers in the labour market distort the price of labour.

[ozlikethewizard]

Unions are the reason we have a 40 hour week, minimum wage, equal (ish) pay, reasonably safe working conditions, overtime pay, holiday, etc. Anti-union think is a Reagan/Thatcherite psyop, don't drink the kool-aid. Notice that since the dismantling of the Unions both here (UK) and across the pond the average person's life has steady a steady economic decline? Not a coincidence.

[frmersdog]

Helped along by a little clandestine sabotage, of course.

[lucyjojo]

this is actually pretty rare.

most case of ruin come from hostile warfare and/or interventions/state terrorism.

[vkou]

We've also seen collective ruin many many times when societies have embraced economic and market concepts. Seen the rust belt anytime lately?

[AnthonyMouse]

That's probably not a great example given that the rust belt was thick with unions.

And in general the US has a cost of living problem because the various levels of government keep getting captured by people who want regulations that make costs to go up because they're the ones getting the money. That makes US workers less competitive because of the corruption-induced regulatory costs, which is exactly the opposite of markets working as they should, except insofar as "industries move out of countries with high corruption and inefficient laws" is supposed to apply pressure to countries to get more efficient rules.

[overfeed]

> That's probably not a great example given that the rust belt was thick with unions.

Perhaps we need to complete the thought here: was it the unions or executives that decided to offshore manufacturing? If the counterargument that unions are to blame for offshoring by "artificially" increasing the cost of labor, and should have competed with Chinese labor on price and they got their just deserts: then why are executives now (successfully) lobbying for protectionism against Chinese manufacturers? Why can't capital handle the type of rugged capitalism they inflict on American workers? If chinese goods could be ported as easily and cheaply into America and American labor was ported to China, there'd be blood on the floor.

[AnthonyMouse]

> was it the unions or executives that decided to offshore manufacturing?

Neither. It was consumers, who prefer lower prices.

> why are executives now (successfully) lobbying for protectionism against Chinese manufacturers?

Because they were fools who thought they could offshore the factory work but not the management work.

> If chinese goods could be ported as easily and cheaply into America and American labor was ported to China

This is literally what has already happened.

The actual solution is for the US to do something about high domestic costs, especially housing and medicine, which are the things keeping US workers from being globally competitive.

[_DeadFred_]

Regulation is a requirement in actual capitalist/market thought. Only fairly recently have libertarian's retconned in their 'free market requires no oversight' nonsense.

I agree, we should return to Adam Smith style capitalism/markets, with his strong promotion of regulation against monopolies, corruption, and rent-seeking

[AnthonyMouse]

> Only fairly recently have libertarian's retconned in their 'free market requires no oversight' nonsense.

You have to realize that there are people who call themselves "libertarians" who are actually plutocrats, just like there are plutocrats who call themselves "progressives", because people wouldn't agree with them if they would plainly state their actual goals. Whereas pretending to be the people who want to take you down serves the dual purposes of stealing the support of their base for your corruption and then undermining the support for the people who actually want to fix it once other people see what you're doing under their banner.

[appreciatorBus]

It's almost as if there is no silver bullet to these problems and we have to better than rely on dogma like "unions always good"

[DANmode]

Wait, which are those again?

[FrustratedMonky]

Paying employees is part of the market. Why is the counter argument, that we should not pay employees even a thing these days?

Ask yourself: Why is a paycheck now consider socialist re-distribution of wealth.

Could it be because literally lives are cheap.

[_DeadFred_]

Reminder that up until recently, economic & market concepts included a requirement for strong government oversight. The originators/thought creators of capitalism talked about the need for such. Adam Smith argued relentlessly for regulation against monopolies, corruption, and rent-seeking. Libertarian ideologues retrofitted in the fantasy of self-regulating markets without oversight fairly recently and it is turning out to be a pretty disastrous retrofit. I agree, we must go back to true, pre idealog economic & market concepts, like Adam Smith argued for.

[skybrian]

In abstract discussions about hypothetical situations, you can imagine things turning out however you like.

[stubish]

Conversely, it might be great comfort to someone who has a job because their company didn't go out of business. The point of unions isn't to punish business. The point of unions is to empower workers. One of the things workers can do with that power is ensure their business stays afloat and jobs remain, for example policies promoting long term health and stability rather than short term stock price bumps and volatility or corporate strip mining, even if it means executives get smaller bonuses.

[Normal_gaussian]

The point is rather that the company would go under with our without the union. The union just means the staff aren't plundered along with the electric cables as the shop sinks.

[antonvs]

The entire capitalist economy is based on that principle.

In fact the crazy politics right now are largely a consequence of that: with all the factory jobs and similar jobs that were lost, the idea was that “the market” would somehow “correct” and all those people would get different, hopefully better jobs. But that didn’t happen, because it’s all an ideological fiction, right up there with the idea of trickle down economics.

But suddenly, when it’s about workers collectively standing up for their rights against the one-sided power of enormously powerful corporations, “you would have to be an enormous asshole”? There’s definitely an enormous asshole somewhere in this picture.

[HumblyTossed]

Do I want a job that exploits me, or do I want no job at all.

Wow, quite the decision.

[hobs]

And its cold comfort to us all to basically say "let's all agree to slavery so nobody loses their jobs".

[seneca]

> And its cold comfort to us all to basically say "let's all agree to slavery so nobody loses their jobs".

Comparing software development jobs in the modern United States to slavery is quite fanciful.

[free_bip]

Game development is a lot different than "normal" software development. Usually involves a lot more crunch/unpaid overtime. Though yes, the comparison is hyperbole.

[Manuel_D]

Except unlike slaves, these software developers are free to quit and take a competing job offer.

[frmersdog]

The logical conclusion of the scenario being floated here is that if enough workers resist their own exploitation, the "job creators" will take their capital and go... somewhere. And then there will be no jobs.

[frmersdog]

(Obviously I'm being facetious. There will, of course, be jobs. And also, a lot of capital owners sitting on the sidelines, debt payments incoming with no income stream.)

[_whiteCaps_]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-Tech_Employee_Antitrust_L...

Until the companies start colluding to suppress your wages.

[Manuel_D]

Still not even remotely comparable to owning human beings as property.

Regardless, the government cracked down on this behavior (which affected 8 companies) and it stopped in 20009 as per your link.

[kevinh]

It's still going on now - they just use a third party to help them collude.

[Manuel_D]

What third party is enforcing an anti-poaching agreement? Can you back up that claim with evidence?

[popalchemist]

Indeed. I'm not without sympathy for anyone who loses their job. But losing the job due to an anti-working class parasite going belly up is not entirely a tragedy. One less parasite in the world is a good thing.

[FrustratedMonky]

Cold comfort.

Like with full time employed Walmart employees that qualify as homeless. Are they happy because they have a job, since poor old Walmart might go under if they were forced to pay a real salary?

[echelon]

Also, this will result in more jobs being offshored.

Hollywood unions were a sticking point. In 2022 and 2023, following the lead of Netflix and Amazon, most of those jobs moved from the US to Europe and Asia.

Atlanta, which was booming for nearly two decades, which had built dozens of $500M class-A film production studios, is suddenly almost entirely vacant. We went from doing almost all of Marvel and Netflix to being a dead zone. We're at 20% of past volume, if that.

LA was evacuated of work even more precipitously.

It's all in Ireland, the UK, Eastern Europe, and Asia now.

Gaming is next. The Saudis and Chinese are chomping at the bit.

edit: fixed the idiom, thanks frmersdog

[Muromec]

I work in a bank with collective agreement and three trade unions. We are dropping offshore contracts before we lay off people covered by collective agreement.

The bank simply can't lay off people at all without drawing up the plan together with the unions.

[frmersdog]

*chomping at the bit.

Ironically, China has also proven that you can't easily import expertise. At best, you can "steal" it over a long period of being the current industrial center's gopher.

[quesera]

Not sure what the original was (now edited), but it's actually "champing at the bit", historically.

Chomping is also correct enough today, descriptivistically speaking.

[frmersdog]

You're correct. Iteration is grand!

[echelon]

The film case is kind of wild.

Amazon, Netflix, et al. flew domestic crews to Europe to train their crews how to work. This wasn't unusual, because a lot of movies filmed on-location overseas. Nobody questions that. Par for the course.

Except they trained local crews how to do everything - they trained their replacements in person. And now there are no US domestic crew flights to Europe and Asia.

[LadyCailin]

People in the game industry are pretty often out of work anyways, so I don’t know how much there is to lose there. But industry wide unions can help with this, by providing financial assistance to workers laid off from union organized strikes.