Unions vs. Technology: Which Empowered Workers?
Did you think before this sentence came out or it was another Lush burp?
Isn't it obvious to you? If we all join unions everyone will be paid more, have less debt, take more vacations, retire earlier, sleep later, have better health care, and be able to afford the best homes in the best neighborhoods.
Who will do the work to provide all that you ask? Pink ponies.
Comments
Yes, life was much more difficult a century ago and beyond. I credit the technological revolution that brought use of electric motors, electric lights, telephone, affordable automobiles, refrigeration, etc.
Technological improvements raised productivity so that more wealth could be produced in fewer hours of work. This allowed the middle class to grow, because more people were needed in skilled positions to run the more advanced machinery and business systems.
Technological improvements allow the economy and consequently our standard of living to grow by very large amounts. Collective bargaining is at best a zero-sum game. In actual practice is negative because it removes incentives for individual workers to excel.
When productivity was much lower, it required 60 hours of work for each worker to product enough wealth to buy sufficient food, water, and other resources in order to live. Companies were competing for workers just as they are now. In fact the competition was more efficient than it is now, because there weren't the retirement and longevity benefits that companies and unions developed together in order to lock workers in to specific company/union organizations.
Given that competition, a new company would have easily hired away workers from a competitor if it could offer fewer hours of work and still provide enough income to live on. When productivity did increase enough to allow a shorter work week that's what happened, but of course the unions claimed credit for what would have happened faster without them. More flexible work rules would have allowed free market competition to operate faster.
Today in China, people work 60+ hours a week for peanuts. It's not because they don't have technology; they do. It's mostly because people are prevented from organizing to break the stranglehold that the gov't and the wealthy there have on them.
HAHAHAHAHA
You are talking about The People's Republic of China aren't you? The country is one giant union.
That's what unionism taken to its logical conclusion gets you. Fat union overloads.
In the US, we have right to work states. Washington is not one of them.
You can see where they are located here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right-to-work_law
Note that those are the states where people and jobs are moving to. That's because companies and workers can decide what is best for them. And when a union bungee jumps in to make a bargain that transparently serves their own interest only they can be booted out, like the event that started this thread.
Unions can reduce the amount of money that is available to a company for other purposes and so can appear to benefit its members in the short term. But eventually the host dies and the parasite has to move on, as we see in Detroit. If West Side Billy is correct that Boeing's costs have been bloated as much as he says, then that will happen here sooner than I would have expected.
Last year the Bellevue teachers struck to get higher wages. The world did not end, nor have they just sat around doing lousy work. If anything they are better teachers as a result.
Just because unions cause some problems doesn't mean they do more harm than good. Detroit assembly line workers didn't design those crappy cars. Had non-union workers made them they'd still be junk but the upper management would've taken home even more $millions.
Markor however union laborers that are so "skilled" did contribute to costs per hour being $10 higher then non-union companies like Honda and Toyota, thus making those crappy cars not economically viable. Thus by earning money in the now have ultimately contributed to their own demise in the future.
They are no longer crappy? Ahhh ok, there solved 10+ years of overpaying a workforce that is largely comprised of excellently progressive work force that could have been cut by 20%+ to streamline a company to produce better cars. Glad the issue is solved.
Thanks for the heads up.
I never understand anything you write. It comes completely from left feild, has no basis of any fact, and your main focus here seems to be taunting people.
Engineering is responsible for cost over runs. Line workers assemble what's put in front of them.
According to your theory the BMW is a better car because they pay the workers less.
Markor quoted an article where GM says they are not making CRAPPY cars anymore.
In that context my reply was to understandingly agree that since NOW the cars are not crappy anymore that washes away all the 10+ years of making total and utter waste of metal, that only people buy because it has to have high intensives in order to even sell. However does not wash away that in order to be competitive unions are still overpaid and are a burden on business domestically. Where is Honda, Toyota have the force that is getting paid $10 less, and producing a more desirable product. And that is USA.
Next time I will provide a short summary for you just to clarify any points you might misinterpret or understand, I know it is hard for professionals.
UAW workers cost Big 3 Auto companies $70 per hour. $38 of that is paid out in wages, the rest is benefits - mostly medical costs. Toyota's labor cost is $48 of which $30 is wages
So can Engineers be responsible for UAW labor costs that are 45% higher than the competition? The difference between the two is primarily embedded in benefits
Wow what a vote. People would much rather have a job then a union. Sounds like a real democracy.
This is a large part of the health care debate and why it came up with the Auto Industry bail outs.
It is an excellent point in fact.
And mukoh I have reread your comment and like i said it makes no sense.
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Still the point being is that costs are where it is at for the manufacturer, and labor unions have decimated any reasonable hiring costs, when you compare union vs. non-union. Its facts. Costs are higher in union PERIOD.
Good luck on the web.
Like I said BMW seems to be doing alright, or they were until they started the labor game. Now that they are finding cheaper labor the car quality, in my opinion, is questionable. I drive a Prius because of the leg room, but it is a cheaply built piece of junk. I do like the gas mileage, but that is an engineering feature.
I've owned a lot of businesses and have the labor discussion all the time. I pay well from what people tell me. I prefer to pay well. Profit should be based on the quality of the product or service rather than cheap labor.
It's kind of like saying if we made airplanes completely out of plastic it would make planes more profitable. If your profit is based on how cheaply the product can be produced you're in trouble. More likely the consumer is in trouble.
Blaming Unions for the lack of profit, or saying Wal Mart needs to make excessive profits at the expense of workers is short sighted. We all pay. We pay too much for mismanagement of cheap labor, that doesn't pay enough bills, and keeps people just hungry enough to want a job. Eventually some one snaps and becomes a statistic.
Unions are good for America, and they do seem to work for Europe. How about Greece, Italy, France, Germany, and South America? Do those economies suffer from Union representation also?
This is not entirely correct. The primary difference between UAW labor and non-union (Toyota/Nissan/Honda) is really in the legacy costs. UAW workers make slightly more in hourly wages (i.e. $25 vs $22, give or take), slightly more in benefits (vacation, holidays), slightly more in health care... but each one carries a much higher legacy cost (think $20/hr vs $2/hr).
The foreign makers started opening plants in the mid 80s (NUMMI was the first, I think in '83 or '84). By that point, when GM, Navistar, GE, and other large corporations were supporting 3 or 4 retirees for every active employee, the disadvantages of pension plans was clear. So the Japanese and European makers didn't offer them, and they will never have the pension costs. In 10-20 years, when the immense numbers of UAW retirees start dying off, the cost advantage will start disappearing.
On the subject of Boeing, I don't know why they still offer pensions to new hires.
I don't know what Boeing's costs are. But I've been through the "get rid of the union, everyone benefits!" charade before. Decertifying IAM would have an immediate impact on two groups: Boeing's shareholders and IAM employees. The former would benefit, the latter would not. Current IAM employees would be replaced by contract employees who get no benefits and less pay, and can be fired indiscriminately.
Jon's history of pre-union labor seems to be based on a fairy tale. People worked 60, 70, 80 hours a week not because they needed to (due to low productivity) but because if they didn't, they were fired and replaced with someone who would. When the employees started to catch on, they'd be eliminated and replaced with a new immigrant group who were grateful for the work and would do whatever it took to keep the job. It's a vicious cycle that continues today. "Yankee" labor was replaced with southern labor, southern labor was replaced with Mexican, Mexican was replaced with Chinese, Chinese will be replaced with Vietnamese or African or somewhere else willing to work for even less.
People in skilled labor (programming, engineering, etc) frequently carry the illusion that an unskilled or semi-skilled worker can effectively bargain with their employer for a fair wage. Sorry, they can't. Unions are a bitch but they are a necessary evil for many workers to get a fair wage. Jon's comment on right to work states is a prime example. Plants in the south rarely unionize because the "right to work" laws all but guarantee that if they unionize, they will lose their job. Workers can not negotiate individual pay raises.
We all benefit from the laws that were enacted because of unions, including the lower paid workers in right to work states. Toyota can not force their workers to work 60 hour weeks with no compensation because of labor laws enacted to prevent that. Chinese companies can and do.
[/rambling rant]
"Estimates of hospital doctors' average annual earnings in 2002 ranged from $35,000 to $56,000 in Germany; $127,285 in Britain; and $165,000 to $268,000 in the US. Swedish hospital doctor salaries were estimated at only $56,000 a year - similar to the German figures."
(from http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0607/p07s02-woeu.html)
That means there were other people even more desperate for a job who need to work that many hours in order to live, which is exactly what I said.
This conservative thinking that the world is somehow a better place when the average person is destitute & powerless is boorish. I don't get it at all, but I'm glad that liberalism holds a slim majority now. Looking at websites where the youth hang out, it seems that 95% or more of the users are anti-conservative; that's a good sign for the future.
Re the Boeing union decert in the South, they can have their lower wages. It's a sign of ignorance; those workers are probably worth less. The Seattle area has thrived on higher average wages for a long time. It's obvious that our liberal methods work better.
Perhaps the green revolution played a small role as well. No? It used to be that most people were required to work in agriculture, and today it's closer to 1%. Factory efficiency really never had much to do with how much work actually needed getting done.
If Boeing workers in Washington State decertify the company can move on. What's the incentive to keep them here? Jobs?
Low paying jobs attract low pay workers.
We already have a wage problem in the United States. Wages stagnated while the cost of everything went up. If we do get more decertification and Unions lose to the Wal Mart mentality we will have fewer consumer dollars for the pricing we currently have in place.
How will workers pay for all this debt we are relying on?
They can still leave if workers don't decert. The argument is phrased; Boeing is more likely to remain in the Seattle area without a union, but workers might find their benefits (including pay) slashed. If you're in the Union, what do you do?
This is complicated because you can really make strong arguments on either side of the unionization debate. On the one hand, unions do an excellent job of transferring more profit from owners and executive to employees. On the other, if a union is too powerful it can destroy the company by taking too much wealth from the bottom line.
An interesting sideshow argument should be whether or not there is something unethical about right to state laws or whether there is something unethical about laws like Washington's that require workers covered by unions to contribute their paycheck to the union.