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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28482 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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Lots I disagree with here. The correct way to analyze employee vs. employer negotiating power is by considering all potential employees and all potential employers, e.g. the free market as a whole. If there are 1000 people who could be widget workers, then the single employed widget worker obviously doesn't have nearly as much bargaining power as their employer. On the flip side, if there are 1000 widget factories and only 1 qualified worker, that worker obviously has much more bargaining power than any of their employers do.

Whoops. I skimmed grandparent comment and sort of of vaguely inferred it was making a good argument similar to one I've read in the past, but you (meriadoc) are right and it's just wrong.

A liquid, free market that has a thousand sellers of same good and a septillion buyers will still be a very efficient market (assuming the thousand sellers are legally prevented from coordinating with whatever singularity tech allows a septillion entities to communicate in the first place). Any buyer who's being stiffed can just switch to another of the 100k sellers.

So in an idealized economic labor market with 1000 big employers and a hundred million employees, the employer still doesn't have much bargaining power, because the employee's alternative to not working still isn't 'not being employed', it's getting a job at another employer - their BATNA is just a slightly lower wage than their current one.

What GP was probably vaguely reaching at is all of the non-basic-econ-model reasons that employers have market power over workers - real world issues like specialization in certain jobs, the reduction in income caused by the gap in labor where you apply for a new job, risk in unknown gap spent not working and income of the future job, the fact that companies appoint (relatively) specialized and (relatively) high IQ people to create a system for negotiating with workers while workers are lower IQ and less sophisticated in negotiation, your commute restricting you to workplaces in your geographic area, the sheer convenience and habit of your current workplace, the gap in income interrupting spending you had planned because you made the mistake of not saving money (whether the spending is discretionary, which people still care a lot about, or mandatory spending on necessities for you or a family you need to support), cutting off benefits like health insurance tied to your workplace... All of these create situations where (in the current set of social circumstances) negotiations between employers and workers look and feel like ones where the employee's BATNA is 'no income for a few months and begging for rent money'.

Also, the difference in pay between modern non-union and modern union jobs, for any specific occupation, is much lower than you'd expect from either OP or the (more accurate claims in the) non-libertarian FAQ.

Yes, exactly, you put it better than I could.

Yours didn't have 200 word, paragraph-long run on sentences, though, I should probably put more effort into composition...

But the second situation is not even possible, you cannot have a factory without any workers...

Robots make it more and more possible every day.

Then there will be no need of a skilled worker...

You seem to think that's an issue. Pray tell, if workers accomplish nothing of value, why should they have any bargaining power at all? At that point better to go with UBI or something than support unions.

I agree, it would not be an economical problem. However it seems to me it is a problem with your argument: the negociating power of the workers has not increased because there is no need for them.

I was talking about what negotiating power actually is, not what it should be. Generally (with plenty of exceptions, such as monopolies) I think we should leave negotiating power as it is, though, and regulate around it.

I'm not sure I understand. First message, you say that negociating power would be better for workers if there were less skilled workers and more factories and you give an example.

Then I proved the negociating power would not be better in this situation. Nothing about what it should or should not be there.

Then, you reply that it's true, but there are better things to do than to protect unions in this situation.

To that I reply that you might be right, but it has nothing to do with my concern that the first message I replied to was based on a false hypothesis.

Now you tell me that it's about the negociating power as it is, and I almost agree: it's about the negociating power as it would be, if we changed the situation. But you still did not answer my concern?

First message, you say that negociating power would be better for workers if there were less skilled workers and more factories and you give an example.

Then I proved the negociating power would not be better in this situation. Nothing about what it should or should not be there.

Well both of the examples I mentioned (1000 jobs competing for one worker, 1000 workers competing for one job) weren't actually meant to be literal; they're just examples for the thought experiment. It's not really a false hypothesis--I was using those numbers to make a point, and the point could just as easily have been made using 10 trillion in place of 1000 even though there aren't 10 trillion workers or factories in existence.

In reality both workers and jobs are fungible, so there is never such thing as 1000 workers competing for one job (or otherwise being unemployed) or 1000 jobs competing for one worker (or otherwise leaving that position open). Really they just take the next best option.

The point is that workers compete for jobs and jobs compete for workers, and under certain circumstances one or the other has an advantage, generally depending on which is in shorter supply. As two real-world examples, compare two types of programmers, backend programmers and videogame developers. The former is a much less glamorous and less fun job on its face, so workers there have much less competition and much more negotiating power. Jobs in that field compete for workers more than workers compete for jobs. Videogame developers on the other hand, that's a crowded field, so I think workers compete for jobs more than jobs compete for workers there.

Going back to our original discussion, because I see I didn't provide enough info there, the "skilled worker" I was referencing would be something akin to a machine maintainer, a highly qualified person who can oversee the entire factory by themselves. It's not a real position--you'd still probably need security, janitors, etc.--but I think were such a position to exist, and were robots relatively cheap, that person would have quite a lot of leverage over their employer.

If there are 1000 people who could be widget workers, then the single employed widget worker obviously doesn't have nearly as much bargaining power as their employer. On the flip side, if there are 1000 widget factories and only 1 qualified worker, that worker obviously has much more bargaining power than any of their employers do.

Right... but which of those is closer to reality, though?

In reality there are about as many jobs as workers, considering the entire market together, though the quality of each varies.

In reality I'd say high-quality jobs and high-quality employees have a big edge, with the latter slightly winning out overall. In other words there are far more potential jobs for skilled applicants than there are highly skilled applicants.

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