Interestingly enough, of all the environmental hazards caused by large corporations, here's a rare example of one where this was primarily caused by a union, which while not opposed to the overall removal of lead, demanded the use of pipes which required specialized knowledge to install, which precluded non-brazed copper and plastic pipes used elsewhere in the nation, and effectively made lead pipes the only viable option.
On the surface, finally after a decade-long fight, the plumber's union, despite objections by its union spokespeople, said in 1986 it would defer to the city council after the matter was decided at the federal level, but in that decade, long after other cities had banned lead pipes, lead pipes were still a required part of Chicago building code.
As a former union leader I'd just like to say FUCK THOSE GUYS. Holy shit that is fucking infuriating. I did OHSA inspections to prevent shit like that from hurting our members AND THE COMMUNITY. I hope their leadership is burning in hell.
This is why the "right vs left" style of thinking drives me crazy.
Unions are constantly doing evil things, usually for the same greedy and power-hungry reasons as any corporate board, and to the same detriment of society at large, but because we think of unions as being on "our side" and latch onto this romanticized notion of the unions of the 1800s they get a pass.
The police and prison guard unions constantly do horrible things to increase incarceration rates, erode civil rights and remove accountability. Labor unions fight against improvements that would make their industries pollute less if it makes their jobs harder or would replace union-dues-paying members with technology or non-union jobs. And they constantly create artificial monopolies and cartels far worse than any of the corporate behavior, which create situations like the pilot unions where senior pilots get huge salaries and cushy routes while entry-level pilots are treated like slaves, or where you're not allowed to plug in your laptop charger to a wall outlet because only a union electrician can touch it.
I wish society was better at recognizing "this group is harming society for the benefit of themselves" can be applied everywhere- corporations, unions, branches of government, etc
It's not nearly as symmetric as you're making it out to be.
In terms of overall welfare, an additional dollar in the pocket of a typical union worker is going to be more welfare enhancing than that additional dollar in the pocket of the typical owner. This is from just basic diminishing marginal utility of the dollar.
Of course, unions can do awful, evil things - they are organizations of people and people are petty, self-centered, greedy, etc.
I'm in favor of workers' ability to elect someone to represent them at the negotiation table (because that is what a union is). I'm not unaware that sometimes those workers can elect bad people.
I'm also in favor of electoral democracy, even if I wouldn't personally defend every single person who has been elected president since the start of time.
Your second paragraph adds nothing except detailing your reasoning which only serves to exemplify the behavior the comment you are replying to is complaining about. The point of the comment you are replying to is that people have a bad tendency to ignore groups doing evil things for their own gains if they otherwise align with these groups.
Whether it's the moron on one side of the isle screeching about "mUh UnIoNs" or the moron on the other side of the isle screeching about "mUh SmAlL bUsInEsSeS" is irrelevant. People, you very much included, need to refrain from giving groups on "their side" a blank check to engage in evil self serving behavior at everyone else's expense.
Of course the evil to good ratio is not the same for any two groups or groups of groups. His entire point was that that liking one group more than another is a worthless excuse for turning a blind eye to that group's evil. Just because you are able to write a second (or 3rd or 4th) paragraph expanding about why you feel one group deserves a blind eye more than another only serves to illustrate his point.
Your behavior is exactly what he is complaining about.
Civil rhetoric really breaks down when it comes to politics, it seems.
Nobody in this thread was "screeching" about anything, and I don't appreciate being not-so-subtly called a moron. I have done nothing of the same to you.
I am perfectly capable of criticizing bad actions by unions, 2020 has had a number of them.
But I will not use those critiques as an excuse to argue that the right to elect someone to negotiate on your behalf should be curtailed, because I believe the right to worker self-determination comes prior to those consequences - just as I don't support banning "bad" speech even if that speech has consequences.
I'm not going to keep responding because, honestly, you seem to be shadow-boxing a conversational opponent who only exists in your own mind.
> In terms of overall welfare, an additional dollar in the pocket of a typical union worker is going to be more welfare enhancing than that additional dollar in the pocket of the typical owner. This is from just basic diminishing marginal utility of the dollar.
Remarkably few people seem to truly understand what "marginal propensity to consume" actually means.
Economically, money saved is money lost. Money invested is a promise of debt. Consumption is what drives the economy. That's why the poor and middle class are so important. Without them having enough money, the economics of scale... don't scale.
I'll admit while I'm inclined to believe that it's better to distribute money to workers rather than investors, I don't understand the economic mechanics that makes this true.
I do understand that the rich aren't gong to spend as much as the middle and lower classes, but I don't have a good answer for the predictable trickle-down rebuttal: the wealthy will invest rather than spend, and that investment funds jobs which put money in the pockets of the poor (but perhaps more so in the pockets of the rich?). You sort of touch on that: "consumption is what drives the economy", but I think the trickle-down economics folks would agree and argue that their job-creation-via-investment results in increased consumption? I have a headache.
> I'll admit while I'm inclined to believe that it's better to distribute money to workers rather than investors, I don't understand the economic mechanics that makes this true.
It's probably more true now than during most of history, but it's not always true.
It probably was true in the Reagan era that trickle-down "worked", because there was a lot of opportunity for large scale capital investment to improve the economy and make things people wanted (and provide jobs in the process). That doesn't seem as true now. Investors already have an excess amount of capital they don't know what to do with (and so are just doing things like buying houses en masse).
Consumption also funds jobs which put money in the pockets of the poor.
It has the added benefit of bidding up the price of things poor people need, which yes is inflationary but also incentivizes more resources being provisioned to help provide the things that poor people need.
I think OP made a correct argument that that we quickly make this right vs left without dissecting the actual impacts of workers unions. Your comment kind of demonstrates that.
> In terms of overall welfare
What is overall welfare ? If you are talking about society then we already know that free market competition leads to the best outcomes. If you are talking about welfare of specific group of people (at the expense of others) then you are right.
> I'm in favor of workers' ability to elect someone to represent them at the negotiation table (because that is what a union is).
I do not think anyone is opposed to that idea. It is covered under our freedom to form association. But in many cases unions are exact opposite of this. There is only one union which will negotiate on your behalf whether you like it or not and will actively prevent you from selecting someone else to negotiate on your behalf. In such cases workers are less free than before and it is much easier for the employer to get their way by just bribing the union leaders. (This is what happens in every single society where unions have collective bargaining rights.)
Employment is one of the most obvious, salient examples of market failure I can think of. Exploitative employers engineer situations where employees can't even use the job market, because they need a job and job-shopping (e.g. taking time off-call to do interviews) will lose them their job. Example: Arise Virtual Solutions[0].
If that's not a good enough example? See the gig economy. Companies taking over a service sector “with an app”, at a loss (using investor money), then squeezing the money back out of employees (e.g. by misclassifying them, not telling them how much each gig pays, programming virtual micromanagers to work them to the point of health problems in the name of “efficiency”). To use your words:
> If you are talking about welfare of specific group of people (at the expense of others) then you are right.
> If you are talking about society then we already know that free market competition leads to the best outcomes.
It's easy to find lump sum transfers that would be welfare enhancing over the pareto optimal outcome decided by the market.
> There is only one union which will negotiate on your behalf whether you like it or not and will actively prevent you from selecting someone else to negotiate on your behalf.
Well yes, you are beholden to the results of the election - even if the side you voted for didn't win. That is what worker self-determination is all about.
> it is much easier for the employer to get their way by just bribing the union leaders
Then why don't employers bring in unions more often?
Doesn’t have to be one bad person… a union as you say is still self-centered. Since they are an effective monopoly on workers, they can get pretty powerful and thus one-sided in interest seeking.
> In terms of overall welfare, an additional dollar in the pocket of a typical union worker is going to be more welfare enhancing than that additional dollar in the pocket of the typical owner.
Maybe, but printing a dollar and giving it to a union worker causes worse inflation than printing a dollar and giving it to an owner.
Unions are simply businesses that make labor available to companies. Any notion that they are something different from a business is mistaken. Attempts by unions to use government to make themselves legal monopolies are just as bad as any other business using government to do that.
In an employee owned corporation, you would get some say in leadership. Although it's possible that in a large enough corporation, it would be an indirect democracy. You vote for board members who vote for the company leadership.
While various municipalities and nations might classify co-ops as corporations legal wise, I don’t think the average person jumps to thinking of a co-op when you say corporation
You're always free to invest directly in your parent company. Shareholders hold tremendous power over company management, and that power increases the more you invest in the company. This gives large or organized shareholders at least as much democratic power as union members have over their entrenched leaders. Your question made it seem as though you didn't understand that.
Right to association is a fundamental American value something that American conservatives must value and something that Libertarians have always valued.
There is no argument that employees should have the right to form an association. The problems arise when such associations get "special privileges" that an average worker does not. Both L and R talk a lot about "equality of law" but happily shred that principle when it comes to their own voter groups.
Nearly all the evil (as you describe it) caused by unions is eventually due to the collective bargaining rights and other privileges.
In the words of Milton Friedman, unions do not protect workers. The competition protects workers. Market competition is the biggest rival to unions and hence unions will go to extreme lengths to prevent this sort of competition to keep themselves relevant. This does immense harm to workers as well as society in the long term. Folks like me who have seen extreme violence unleashed by workers unions end up despising very notion of unions for the same reason.
Unions are distributional coalitions. They try to allocate more resources to their members than they would receive otherwise. The source for this surplus is the rest of society. In other words, they are cartels. It should not be surprising that some of them are managed by organised crime.
Be it through negotiating salaries or restricting the number of doctors or enforcing very difficult admission procedures for lawyers.
They tend to also effect other, non-zero-sum game advantages, or otherwise they would probably be outlawed, but this is the gist of it. You can still acknowledge that many were founded with good intentions, but people who do not see at least some downsides have a severe reasoning defect.
On the surface, finally after a decade-long fight, the plumber's union, despite objections by its union spokespeople, said in 1986 it would defer to the city council after the matter was decided at the federal level, but in that decade, long after other cities had banned lead pipes, lead pipes were still a required part of Chicago building code.
https://www.npr.org/local/309/2020/09/11/911903152/here-s-ma...