I have a friend who worked at a grocery store for a few months while waiting for his teacher's certification to get processed and sent to the state he'd moved to. It was a minimum-wage job, yet mandatory union membership at this grocery store chain meant that a cut of each of his minimum-wage paychecks was taken from him without anything he could do about it.
The idea that unions are inherently, universally good is just as silly as the idea that unions are inherently, universally bad.
> The idea that unions are inherently, universally good is just as silly as the idea that unions are inherently, universally bad.
This is something I think a lot of idealistically pro-union people don't understand, at least in the college/grad school circles I've discussed it with. The concept of a union is good, sure. But unions themselves are businesses, and it's their business to be needed and to convince people to join and pay dues.
Not sure about your area, but the grocery store strike circa 2003 in California is the only reason that the employees received health benefits from stores that were trying to compete with Walmart
I don't understand this hyperbolic sarcasm. Minimum wage exists, labor laws exist. Not paying mandatory union dues wouldn't result in your wages being reduced that low, or being forced to work that many hours a week. This doesn't make any sense or support the point you're presumably trying to make whatsoever.
>>The idea that unions are universally good is just as silly as the idea that unions are universally bad.
You are arguing against a strawman. No one is saying unions are "universally good". However, it is an irrefutable quality of capitalism that collective bargaining is superior to bargaining as an individual. If you truly understand how capitalism works, and the way it puts the interests of employers in conflict with those of employees (i.e. employers want to maximize profits, whereas employees want to maximize their pay and benefits, and this game is zero-sum), you will realize that, on average, having a union represent you will yield better results for you (and your fellow coworkers) than you representing just yourself.
Okay so how did the Kroger union help my friend at all? Once again, membership was mandatory for employment, and a cut of each of his minimum-wage paychecks went to it, with him seeing zero benefit in exchange. Is there some hidden benefit both he and I (being his roommate at the time) just weren't seeing? (Trust me, we looked.)
Just because your friend didn't see the benefits doesn't mean he didn't have them.
Kroger union members have health care benefits, dental and vision benefits, and other benefits that they wouldn't normally get with a minimum wage job. Protections against forced and unpaid overtime (while allowing for voluntary, paid overtime).
Hell, the fact he got paid minimum wage in the first place--since unions were, and still are, the big drivers behind minimum wage (and raises to minimum wage) in the US.
None of these things applied to him. He did not get medical or dental benefits because he was employed there for less time than their minimum to begin receiving benefits (or maybe he had just qualified when his teaching license finally got through? I can't remember now). Membership was mandatory for employment, so anyone who works there part-time for less than whatever the minimum amount of time to receive benefits is (six months or a year I think?) is literally paying money to a union that will do nothing for someone who shows up to work, does what he's paid to do, and goes home without incident. It's like a mandatory tax on temporary hires that benefits long-term hires that means temporary hires make less than minimum wage as a result! EDIT: Oh and I forgot, they also took a fat chunk of his first paycheck as an additional fee, too.
Previously my friend and I had both worked at various Walmart stores in our home state and not only were we paid above minimum wage starting salary, but there were no hidden mandatory fees of any kind. I know Walmart's famously anti-union to the point of absurdity (the propaganda in the training materials is outright laughable), but from the point of view of a couple of young guys looking to work part-time at a grocery store, Walmart treated us both far better than Kroger treated him, and without unions.
Union membership is optional for Kroger employees in Mid-South. All employees get the union-negotiated benefits but dues are optional. They won't work hard to defend non-union members, though.
What location was this Kroger where union membership was mandatory? I didnt even know that was legal.
Would be very interested in knowing what Walmart locations those were since Walmart's strictly-enforced corporate policy until about 2 years ago was that they would not pay above minimum wage. Shortly after the Trump tax bill, they announced fairly hefty pay wages nationwide, putting their front-line employees above minimum wage for the first time in company history. It was huge news since Trump tried to use it as an example of his tax bill working...
>since Walmart's strictly-enforced corporate policy until about 2 years ago was that they would not pay above minimum wage
We both worked for Walmart as cashiers on and off between about 2008 and 2013, in Rapid City, Pierre, and Aberdeen, South Dakota, and the starting wages were consistently above minimum wage. I've never heard of this policy before, especially since different positions always had different starting wages and all were minimum wage or slightly higher.
Again though, even if our Walmart employments were minimum wage jobs:
This is a bit like being forced to buy health insurance and complaining when you don't get ill.
I'm not saying the deal was reasonable for your friend, I don't know the details or his life situation. But like security guards or insurers, unions aren't always in "active" mode.
> This is a bit like being forced to buy health insurance and complaining when you don't get ill.
You're right, it is a bit like that. And similarly, many people don't want to be forced to buy health insurance. Especially if they don't think they'll get sick.
So what do they do when they do get sick? Die peacefully without costing the rest of us anything? I somehow doubt it - although I’d be happy to see any evidence to the contrary.
EDIT: to be clear, my argument isn’t “we shouldn’t have to pay for healthcare for others”, it’s “if people refuse to pay into the healthcare system when they are able to but still demand treatment when they need it, that’s a broken system”.
I don't know what they do. I'm not one of those people and I'm not arguing for or against health insurance. All I was trying to do was point out that the health insurance - union comparison has other parallels than what OP brought up.
Do you feel the same way about car insurance? Should people not be required to have active insurance if they don't think they will get into an accident?
What about vaccination?
I'm just curious how far you can take your logic before you realize that it is erroneous.
Whoa. Calm down. I wasn't saying I felt that way. Please don't make such spurious assumptions about me just for making what seemed like a notable comparison.
But since you mentioned car insurance, did you know that two US states don't require car insurance? Have you ever wondered why that is? Are those entire states insane? How can anyone consider driving there ever? Surely the system can't work, can it? (Note: Once again I'm not arguing for or against it.)
"Okay so how did the Kroger union help my friend at all?"
Ive read their contract. The union negotiated great health/dental, paid vacations, time to sleep between shifts, no sit shifts for food workers, and most important: due process. At union companies like Kroger, they have to either prove you weren't doing what they said to fire you or laying you off cost something. The unions also act as private lawyer representing you during wrongful termination. Those two are all I need to hear to be pro-union in a capitalist system.
Now, lets consider Kroger. I boycotted the ones down here since their shelves stayed empty. Workers said they had no staff on purpose, cutting it aiming for bonuses. They also micro-manage a lot adding distractions further reducing profit. Did more cuts. Instead of increasing staff, they just blame workers threatening their jobs with some fired. Union and local workers told me all kinds of examples.
Currently, Kroger is trying to roll back some or all of health/dental and pension despite being more profitable than they were in tougher years. Union reps said they were fighting hard to keep them. On top of that, they intervened for a few management sacked as punishment for staffing-induced, performance problems. They still work there with some doing a lot better with newer set of managers they had no bad history with.
So, that's how unions help your friend at Kroger or other places if the union is good. If management did cuts and targeted them, the union would ensure they remained employed so long as they were doing whatever the company wanted them to do. They would also have benefits in a sector where many don't.
My friend was a temporary part time cheese monger at a QFC (Kroger). He had no prior cheese mongering experience and was trained over the course of a few months. He could have taken any part-time job but we lived close to a QFC and they had a cheese monger opening, which sounded interesting to him, as far as part time jobs go. If they spontaneously laid him off, he would have had little trouble finding another part-time job opening elsewhere, but within driving distance instead of walking distance. As I said elsewhere in the thread, he was not receiving benefits because he did not work there long enough to do so. When you put all of these things together, and factor in the costs of paycheckly union dues and the up front "union join" fee, the union did more for its own existence than it did for him by taking money from his minimum-wage paycheck.
I posted a link elsewhere in the thread but apparently the SCOTUS has ruled that mandatory union membership and/or fee paying is not constitutional, so perhaps the situation has improved for temporary, part-time employees of WA state QFCs, but at the time it was pretty shocking to see my friend lose hundreds of dollars to a union that did nothing for him at all.
So you'd rather your friend be worked harder for his minimum wage? You'd rather he be liable for the things people steal from the store? You'd rather him be fired and be without medical insurance if he slips and falls at work?
Unions are why your friend isn't worked to death while he waits for his teacher's certification.
A lot of the people who work hardest, horrible hours out int he cold doing hard labour before you wake up, only make a reasonable living because of unions.
People have literally fought and died for the right to unions, for unions to be taken seriously. A bunch privileged silicon valley tech workers (not me, I'm a privileged seattle based tech worker, totally different ;) ) write off unions as inefficient and useless.
The great lie is that the harder you work, the more money you make. Under a fully unregulated capitalism (no unions, no min wage) your wage is uncorrelated to the hardness of your work, it is correlated to your worth and scarcity on the market.
Sometimes harder workers are harder to find, so they get paid more. Sometimes they're not. If working harder simply led to more money, salary negotiation would not be a teachable skill.
Where did you get that idea? That is so very far from true about either Ford or the 40-hour-week.
Are you of the opinion that more than a century of labor fighting for reasonable working hours and conditions meant nothing, or are you just wanting to give Ford all the credit, despite him drawing on decades of increased movement toward an 8-hour workday before he ever decided to try it as a company policy?
Many American businesses no longer have weekends. I worked at a restaurant where most of the staff was expected to work 6 days a week. Nowhere has mandatory closing times anymore, and more and more nonsensical places are operating 24/7.
The truth is a bit more nuanced than that. Henry Ford did not institute a 40-hour workweek out of the goodness of his heart. In an interview to World's Work magazine in 1926, he said: "Leisure is an indispensable ingredient in a growing consumer market because working people need to have enough free time to find uses for consumer products, including automobiles."
In other words, he understood that a consumer-based economy needs consumers, and consumers need sufficient leisure time to be able to go shopping and buy things.
Louis Brandeis had similar beliefs. Leisure was important for workers and his battles against the monopolies of the day were often focused on this belief. Though his focus was on self-growth and learning in the leisure time provided.
Your understanding of this subject disagrees with history. Henry Ford did not create a 5-day work week. Unions had already been fighting for an 8-hour workday for 60 years in the US alone. Ford adopted this and a 6-day week to attract workers. One could almost be forgiven for concluding that Ford was won over by 60 years of arguments and political activity by unions that preceded him, and gave their ideas a try.
Henry Ford did not bring American workers a 5-day work week. Unions had been working for the 8-hour day for more than 60 years before Ford tried an 8-hour, 6-day work week to attract workers who were already demanding an 8-hour workday.
> For instance, Ford’s " ‘sociological department’ had to inspect a worker’s home to make sure they ‘deserved’ the $5 first," said Ileen A. DeVault, a professor of labor relations, law and history at Cornell University.
The goal of government is to create the most stable, safe, and happy environment as possible for as much of the population as possible. What about the startup community, who obsessively chase endless growth, "innovation" and "disruption", makes you think they would be good at achieving that goal?
He's not saying that the push to growth-by-disruption is a solution. He's saying it's a problem, and we have to deal with it quickly, because it moves quickly. He's not saying we should run the country like a Silicon Valley startup. He's also not saying innovation should be banned or punished (coughcoughWarrencough). He's saying that it's coming, and it's going to mess up a lot of people's lives, and if we don't do something big to deal with that, we're going to have a revolution on our hands.
We, the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect Union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
There you go. Stated purpose of our government. And I think several of those clauses apply to using UBI as a solution to our rapid economic dislocations.
Check out his podcast with Joe Rogan or Sam Harris, he definitely understands that government is not the same as business, but he also understands markets and incentives (and perverse incentives) a lot better than most politicians imo.
Unique donors across (I believe?) all 50 states. It's to allow presumably grassroots candidates to achieve access. You can also qualify the normal way of scoring above some small percentage in national polls.
The DNC doesn't require donors from all 50 states, but it does require a healthy diversity of states. I think it is 200 unique donors from 20 different states.
Ha! For the record I’m all for it. I find the entire election procrsss highly entertaining.
The funniest thing I heard on the subject was the suggestion to nominate Trump as a Democrat so he qualifies for their primary debates and can take on all of them at once.
We're going after that oil too. Venezuela is coming up next. The thirst for oil, and America's willingness to take it by force all over the globe, is limitless
This is false and shows a lack on education to say it .. It is well-documented that the pattern of 'taking oil by force' was so obvious and conflict-enhancing, that the American foreign policy, military policy, and dollar-based oil trading market participants, went to great lengths to create ways to use soft-power in international oil deals.
The poster child of this approach is the Saudi Arabia oil trading partnership of decades, where the increasingly wealthy Saudi state oil company have a control and share of profits that increases over time. Read a few wikipedia articles or this :
It is true however, that Venezuala appears to be headed to breaking this pattern. It is related to the Hugo Chaves / Cuba / SAmerican Marxism fights and there are a lot of hard liners on both sides.
> In a statement, U.S. State Department deputy spokesman Robert Palladino faulted Venezuela for the latest incident.
>“The Venezuelan Navy aggressively stopped ExxonMobil contracted vessels operating under an oil exploration agreement with the Cooperative Republic of Guyana in its Exclusive Economic Zone,” he said, saying Guyana had the right to explore there and urging Venezuela to respect international law and its neighbors’ rights.[0]
Two months later Donald Trump is trying to oust Maduro for being 'undemocratically elected' while simultaneously praising communist Dictators in South East/East Asia.
Yeah, has nothing to do with American oil interests.
Because every industry needs to consistently grow, forever, under a capitalist system. "The future" will always be increased austerity and sacrifice for the proletariate, never the bourgeoisie.
Because people believe they are nobly resisting capitalism by preventing housing construction in cities, as the population continues to grow and urbanize, capitalism’s most important feedback loop (high demand -> high prices -> more profit —> more supply) is short circuited.
Because the vast majority of new housing projects in cities are luxury housing designed to further enrich property owners and would be unaffordable to most people in need anyway. If you're poor and starving and all I'm offering is $90 filet mignon, I'm not really helping you.
Even if what you're saying were true, it'd still drive housing prices down for the poor. I.e. the rich would slightly shift towards these new luxury units, leaving more supply for those in mediocre housing units.
A 600sqft box is a luxury because we have decided it should be rare.
We are massively overbuilding a housing type with offensive levels of resource consumption built in: single family detached.
Cap VW at 100 cars a year. Think they’re going to be Jettas or Porsche? Probably Porsche. Doing that, then getting mad that cars are unaffordable, and saying “clearly if we let the automakers make more cars they will just be more Porsches, that’s not helping” would be silly.
I agree that it's a political problem, but your solution is baffling to me. Instead of addressing the inequalities above ground, like millions of homes going unused while millions of people are homeless, you want to let a private company put poor people in mole-man colonies underground??
At least in the US, the millions of empty homes are mostly in places people don't want to live, for a variety of reasons (mostly related to limited opportunities).
Note that you will need to do substantial renovation, lead abatement, etc, and when you're done, the house will probably be worth around $50,000 at most, and not be in a safe neighborhood.
The political problem is mostly around providing enough homes in the places people want to live. The technologies to do this (multi-story apartment buildings, electric mass transit) are generally over 100 years old.
Well there is some sense to it: with the extreme weather we have to look forward to thanks to climate change, it'll make a lot of sense to burrow underground and live there. Underground colonies would be mostly immune to hurricanes, for instance, and probably a lot easier to keep warm when polar vortexes result in -50C temperatures outside in the winter, and easier to keep cool when it's 60C+ in the summer.
I guess the preferable option would be to create high-speed affordable transport so that location won't be an issue to people. I'm not sure which one is more feasible.
The former (high-speed affordable transport) will certainly be part of the solution in twenty years. If by no other means, then by lvl 5 autonomous cars.
During the shutdown, the administration was more than happy to compromise security by letting TSA employees go unpaid. Once workers started striking and airports started shutting down? Immediate response. There is power in a union.
I don't know why your comment's downvotes into gray, striking has gotten serious results several times already this year.
Taft-Hartley banned wildcat strikes, but I think if we saw more of those (despite their present-day illegality) we'd see a ton more actions favorable to workers taking place.
Of course, we should roll back the labor-hostile parts of Taft-Hartley (like the bans on wildcat strikes and the restrictions on speech surrounding union organizing), but that'll take more time.
The victims are the employees of Apple who receive a tiny percentage of the value they create, while a huge percentage of it goes to the corporate owners.
Edit: by extension, all the consumers are likely in the same position. Employees are all exploited by their employers, who steal most of the value created which they had little to no hand in.
|Employees are all exploited by their employers, who steal most of the value created which they had little to no hand in.
I'm sorry, but this is bog-standard communist clap-trap. Even if you don't like the current arrangement, the use of the word steal is absurd. Individual wealth, regardless of which income quintile you're in, has risen exponentially since the industrial revolution. There's lots of room for criticism of the world as it stands (crony capitalism and printing a sea of money being favorites of mine), but words like exploit and steal are crazy. And to say that an employer had little hand in the value of the products created is just silly. Even if we ignore everything else, you can't just disregard the massive capital expenses that go into building the infrastructure to make an iPhone. Somebody had to come up with that money to even make the company possible, long before the profits started rolling in.
I've had the dubious pleasure of working for companies that were posting little or no profit vs others that were making lots of money. Personally, I'd be happy to be 'exploited' by the wages Apple pays.
Well I am a communist, so that makes sense. Crony capitalism is just capitalism, by the way. It's designed to work that way.
In Apple's case, the "massive capital expenses" have been paid for many times over in profit; when does the compensation shift back to the people creating the day-to-day value? Never, I guess?
And by the way, I'm not talking about the $300k engineers in Cupertino. I'm talking about the people who were throwing themselves of factory roofs until they set up nets to take even that measure of freedom away.
Wow, an actual communist. OK, I need to ask you a few questions.
Why should we risk it? You might say that previous attempts were "not real communism", but that is what we end up with when we try. We've killed 160 million people trying to implement communism, or at least following leaders who tell us they will implement communism. It doesn't seem wise to try again, does it? Why would things go down differently? It's awfully risky to take the gamble, don't you think?
What motivation would there be for start-up founders? If that just isn't needed because the state owns all business, how do we ensure that unproductive business doesn't uselessly stay funded while productive business is never initiated?
If there is no legitimate way to obtain great wealth, don't you think people might turn to methods that are not legitimate, such as the corruption? History shows that communism quickly turns the culture toward corruption, and that this dissipates very slowly once communism is removed.
Your complaints about capitalism can mostly be handled without giving up all the benefits. Poverty exists everywhere, especially under communism, but right now a good deal of the source is competition from immigrants and outsourcing, both of which can simply be restricted. The fact that corporate profits skyrocket isn't something for most people to directly care about (jealousy is a nasty emotion) but FWIW this goes away if anti-monopoly laws are enforced and if corporations are prohibited from becoming huge.
Before you blame climate change on capitalism, please note the coal mines in North Korea and in China.
Nothing could be more equitable than people keeping whatever share of the pie they have earned.
I also truly do not give a fuck about start up founders... but if they aren't well-rewarded then they won't bother. What replaces them? Do you think that instead the government would operate all businesses? Without the possibility of bankruptcy, bad businesses (operating as government agencies) will continue sucking up subsidies. New ones will not be created unless the dictator is convinced that they would be useful to him.
The corruption problem we now have with politicians is indeed bad, but clearly this hasn't become universal throughout our culture. In a communist society, one might pay the store clerk a bit of extra cash to have him hide a bit of meat in order to save it for you. It all becomes totally habitual with all of the ordinary people you interact with every day. It's not just a matter of politicians.
I agree that the situation in the Scandanavian countries is unsustainable. Freeloaders are an increasing problem. The workload (taxes) have reduced the birthrate, and the low birthrate means that fewer workers will be sharing the load of supporting the old, each problem leading to the other problem and thus these countries are in a death spiral.
|Employees are all exploited by their employers, who steal most of the value created which they had little to no hand in.
Didn't that turn out to be bullshit? Like, years ago. Pretty sure that guy made the story up. Also, those people weren't employees of Apple.
And I'll take crony capitalism and wealth inequality over gulags and the tens of millions of people who have been killed by their communist overlords (who were also hoarding all the wealth).
I'm sorry, this is bog-standard capitalist clap-trap. Capitalism has killed many more, and will continue to kill millions and millions as the effects of climate change worsen, than the concept of equitable distribution of wealth.
Something like 40% of Americans have zero savings and would be ruined by a medium health emergency or unexpected car repair. What are you talking about.
