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I have always been a big supporter of #unions but lately I have been second-guessing that and debating with myself if I might actually change my views to be against unions....
My thinking is simple.. I am a huge supporter of anti-trust laws. Essentially I dont think companies should be allowed to create coalitions with the intention of price-fixing the market. This makes sense to me, companies **must** compete or else they can become too powerful.
If i believe in that logic then I should, by similar logic, be against unions. Unions are effectively large groups of people getting together to carry out price-fixing of their labour.
@freemo Unions is to give the workers a fair treatment, isn't it? To stop companies from acting like assholes to their workers.
Price-fixing labour sounds not as bad as price-fixing the market. After all, what is minimum wage if not price-fixing too? Or did you want to get rid of that as well?
@trinsec Everyone wants more, everyone thinks they arent treated fair. Companies think they pay too much for employees and may just as well view themselves as the one not getting fair treatment.
The anti-trust laws on companies is specifically there to ensure fair market value (no price fixing), so thats already how they get fair treatment.
I am also against minimum wage, it has caused enormous harm to the poor.
@freemo How does minimum wage cause harm to the poor?
@trinsec Because minimum wage is well known to cause unemployment shifts towards the poor... Higher minimum wage means hiring shifts so that fewer poor/low-educated people are hired and more higher-education people are hired. Minimum wage effectively increases unemployment amongst the group of people that you are trying to help (the poor) doing more harm than good.
@freemo Huh. That might be an American thing? Here, people are reluctant to hire well-educated people for low-skill jobs, because they tend to stay a short time because they'd get bored and move on to jobs that actually suit their level.
@trinsec No its pretty universal in the world... It isnt the result of high-education people getting hired for low skilled jobs. It is instead the fact that high-education positions that automate low-skilled jobs emerge. People are hired to build self-chekout machines and to maintain them, and the cashiers loose their job entierly. As minimum wage increases this accelerates.
The what now... They are paid less because minimum wage makes it impossible to hire them at the value they provide. Companies arent charities, they will only hire a person if they provide enough value to pay for themselves and then some. It isnt greed to want people to pull their own weight, nor is it greed to pay someone what their work is worth.
Now there is an issue that there are poor people being paid so low, that is no doubt. But that issue isnt the fault of companies, its the government's for not providing easy access to skill-development for those people. free education would be a nice start, but welfare and other support channels need to be engaged to ensure those people can invest the time into education at all.
@freemo
Wait, there'll always be a job needing cleaners and suchlike. A fulltime cleaner should be able to have a liveable wage. That's what minimum wage is for.
Companies arent charities.. if you dont provide the value of minimum wage no company should be obligated to donate charity to you so you can have a living wage...
For starters, no we wont "always be a job needing cleaners"... we are very quickly getting to a world where low-skill labour will not exist in a few decades
Two I have no issue with jobs existing that dont provide enough value to make a living wage. Those jobs should be stepping stone jobs.. they should be done as an extra job on the side, or by children who dont have skills yet, or to temporarily suppliment welfare while one goes to school... A no-skill job should **never** be a life long career, and the government should provide the means to make sure that is the case fairly by giving the means to obtain better skills.
@freemo @trinsec But if automation gets rid of the need for a lot of labor, as you said, why then should people be expected to have jobs at all? Seems like we should welcome the day when people can simply live and enjoy life without spending most of their waking hours laboring, especially laboring to put a few extra dollars in someone else's bank account.
It doesnt get rid of labour it shifts it to higher-skilled labour.
We have had automation for thousands of years as part of each step in technology.. Thousands of years ago plumbing was invented, for example, and that was automation very similar to todays.. It put an entire domain of work out of business and replaced it with more skilled people who made pipes, assembled them, fixed and cleaning them, etc. Yes one person can now do the work of 100 its true, but this increased productivity meant people were free to invent new things with new workers.. Its no surprise that despite that automation there was no utopia where no one worked, not then, not now... despite popular beleif it isnt going to eliminate jobs, it will just shift the type of jobs.
