P-Necromancer
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User ID: 3278
P-Necromancer
2mo ago
Really? No one's made the standard case against unions?
(I've been too lazy to actually make an account here for three years, though I participated occasionally in the old place. This, finally, has pushed me over the edge.)
Say you're an autoworker in a nation that doesn't participate in trade (or that the labor lobby has persuaded to engage in sufficient protectionism the rest of the world can't possibly compete). Would you rather the auto industry be unionized? In principle, yes. (In practice, unions are so dysfunctional the answer might well be no, but let's put that aside and assume for the moment the union will genuinely work towards your interests.)
It'll make the industry objectively less efficient:
- The union will torpedo labor-saving innovations
- Collective bargaining makes it much harder for employers to remove poor performers or reward high performers. At best they'll be permitted to act on irrelevant or gameable metrics, like seniority or overtime hours
- As a result, there's very little incentive for any employee to do more than the minimum
- Strikes obviously reduce productivity, and negotiations waste everyone's time and attention
- Someone's gotta pay the union organizers their six or seven figure salaries. Stapling a whole second bureaucracy onto a company isn't exactly cheap
These factors aren't transfers from the greedy capitalists to the deserving workers, they're just lighting money on fire to bully the capitalists into making those transfers. But so what? It's not coming out of your pocket. You'll make higher wages with much better job security. You can just slack off and collect a better wage than when you were working your ass off! Sure, cars are a lot more expensive, but you're only going to spend a small portion of your salary on cars, so you still come out ahead.
So far so good, right? In fact, it's so good that the factory workers want in on the action, and they unionize. Then the farmhands, and the janitors, and the retail workers, and the accountants, and... Soon enough every industry in your nation has unionized. And the funny thing about workers and consumers is they're actually the same people, depending on the good or service in question. It's easy to see that you're in fact worse off now than you were when there were no unions: all that money you lit on fire has to come from somewhere, and the only people putting money into this whole arrangement are the customers.
But at least the capitalists are mad too?
Unions are government-backed cartels. That's not, like, an insult, it's just factually what they are. (It's also an insult.) I'm baffled how people who are eager to point out the problems corporate monopolies pose (most often with a very generous definition of monopoly) don't see that unions are bad in exactly the same ways and much worse in others. (Monopolies actually don't have to burn that much money to maximize their profits.)
Uncharitably, it's tempting to say they just care more about hurting the capitalists than helping the workers, or that they're happy to defect in full knowledge they're taking advantage of our insane laws on the subject to rent seek. Charitably... I'm struggling to come up with a more charitable explanation than ignorance, which isn't very charitable. I suppose Democrats cynically supporting them as a source of partisan advantage might be more charitable, provided you allow they think their partisan advantage will be good for the country?
(As far as 'fairness' is concerned: things are worth what you can sell them for. This isn't some special standard invented to screw over workers, it's how literally everything else is valued. And note: that's the marginal value, not the average value of the whole class of the product. You can see this easily by observing that food is pretty cheap despite the value of food as a class being effectively infinite for everyone. Collective bargaining is no more 'fair' than Nestle buying up all the water rights and charging you every cent you have for privilege of not dying of dehydration.)
Now, I'm not saying unions should be banned. There are... vaguely union-shaped things that actually work pretty well in some circumstances, like worker co-ops or law firm partnerships. (After all, these are examples of workers organizing and bargaining as a collective, right?) Trying to draw up definitions that capture the necessary subtleties wouldn't be easy, and I have no faith in the legislature's ability to do so. They're currently protecting them, so I think that's plenty fair.
Fortunately, I don't think that's necessary. Just strip their ridiculous legal protections and businesses will make their own judgments, hiring law firms that provide genuine value while firing rent seekers. In this particular case more work might be necessary, but organized crime is a solved problem.
There's a strictly superior solution: repeal the Jones Act and use the resultant economic gains to fund shipbuilding directly. 3% of the US GDP, the top level estimates; $880 billion. This is 27 times the navy's current shipbuilding budget; 22 times the total US shipbuilding market. (Yes, the vast majority of it is already warships.) Oh, and it's 3.4 times the entire budget of the US Navy. Needless to say, this would completely eliminate any issue of decaying capacity. For that kind of money, we could build 60 new aircraft carriers each year (and then sink them all because it'd be impossible to man them) and have enough budget left over to nearly triple our normal construction.
Of course, if such a proposal were put to the public, I believe we'd rapidly find we do not value our shipbuilding capability at $880 billion. The Jones Act is a near-total failure in its stated aims, but even if it were a fantastic success, even if it only cost the US economy a tenth as much as it actually does, it still wouldn't be worth it, and it only survives by hiding its true costs.
(Not a fan of tariffs either, of course.)
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