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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
There are plenty of people who will never have the intellectual capacity to grow beyond a cleaner's job. You're kinda telling them to fuck off here. A no-skill job will always be required somewhere. And I highly doubt they can all be automated. There'll still be plenty of those kind of jobs in a few decades. You're kinda out of touch there.
> There are plenty of people who will never have the intellectual capacity to grow beyond a cleaner's job. You're kinda telling them to fuck off here.
Nah, there is no one who is incapable of skills. Technical knowledge is only one very narrow type of skill. There are social skills, artistic skills, wood working skills, tons of skills. Anyone who is truly incapable of acquiring any skills of any kind would be too incapable to even do a cleaning job. I cant tell you how many people who were very low in IQ and do beautiful art.
This is a cop-out I just cant agree with, its out of touch with the reality of their abilities... As for those jobs in a few decades... I think you may be out of touch with just how far robotics has come, a decade will be MORE than enough for robots to have the dexterity and capabilty of humans enough to be able to fully automate cleaning tasks. Hell we are surprisingly close now.
@freemo
That's what they said about flying cars. :P
I don't think this is a cop-out, I highly doubt we have the drive to have everything automated like you envision. I highly doubt that humans are willing to accept that kind of large-scale automation. I highly doubt we even have the resources to begin with to automate everything in a few decades. All I see is prototypes, and not even always succesful or even affordable.
No, seriously, I think you're the one out of touch. :P
I more or less agree with freemo (with some big caveats), but I want to add some context and potential solutions:
Assume that each job has a set of requirements that we'll call {R}, and for each unique {R} there exists a real value produced when a person that meets those requirements is employed there, called V. Thus, for the set of all jobs {J} there exists the set of all requirements for all jobs {{R},{R},{R},...} and values produced {V}, and people are compensated for a portion of V they provide to the company by doing the work.
If we assume that requirements are correlated to someone's intelligence (again, *assume* is the key word), even if we also assume that jobs are distributed IDENTICALLY to the intelligence distribution, freemo has a point.
Namely, there may exist jobs with values of V that fall below the minimum wage, M. If this is the case, those jobs must be collected and extended such that their values V > M; however, this necessarily expands the set of requirements for these now hybridized jobs (or {R1}+{R2} => {R1+R2} for all jobs where V<M).
Thus, if the minimum wage is raised too high (or alternatively, there are too many applicants with insufficient requirements for the lower end of the requirements distribution), we risk creating a class of unemployable people as a vertical line moves left to right along the bell curve chopping the lower end off completely. A great example of this in the intelligence space was what the US discovered when they relaxed their IQ requirements when training soldiers for the Vietnam war, and why those IQ requirements were reinstated. Unfortunately, that means that 10%(not sure of the actual stat here, but I think it's close) of the populace in the US is "not fit for military duty", and in that case, there are vanishingly few jobs for which they will provide value and thus be employable.
Now, there are a lot of assumptions baked in here, and I don't think this outcome is the *right* one. There are a lot of screwy things going on right now with the asinine "'growth' at all costs" mentality (and the private equity firms that accompany it) currently plaguing our economy and as a result vulnerable people are marginalized. I am of the mind that "Welfare Capitalism" that was pioneered by early GE and other US companies can and should become the more popular method of economic growth and stability, as it was what provided the conditions of the 50s and 60s, and that everyone should be able to find work. With that being said, in our current economic environment, and without substantial changes to it, I have to reluctantly agree with freemo.
@freemo @trinsec There are some jobs that are incredibly hard to automate. Strawberry growers have been funding research into how to automate picking strawberries since the 1980's. It is hard labor intensive work and the first person who can do it successfully will be a billionaire by the end of the year. In spire of directed research and huge potential profits, "Pick the red fruit gently without damaging the plant or the green fruit." Is still not even close to reality.
@trinsec
The difference is we already have the tech, its already proven it can be done and its already out int he field doing what it does... so its not speculation, it is reality, and it is here. The only step left is mass production and refinement.
We already have robots that can walk around, open doors, manipulate objects.. they are a hair away from being as capable as humans.
Hell even in the netherlands you have 100% automated cleaning locations that dont need robots either. For example there are bathrooms that **never** need anyone to clean them because they fully automate their own cleaning.
@jimvernon