🇳🇱
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.
@freemo *Giggles* Self-checkout machines are starting to fall in disfavor around here because theft is hugely on the rise due to inflation. Those companies aren't saving anything, just as a funny aside.
There's a personnel shortage everywhere, too. I'd say minimum wage is actually helping out a lot right now. If there was too many workers and not enough jobs, you'd have a point. But right now, not really.
> *Giggles* Self-checkout machines are starting to fall in disfavor around here because theft is hugely on the rise due to inflation. Those companies aren't saving anything, just as a funny aside.
Thats the thing there are plenty of downsides to self-checkout... which is why many store owners might be resistant to it. But the more you price-fix the cost of labour with minimum wage the more those down-sides are worth it since there is a point where the costs balance out.
When there is a shortage of workers you dont need unions, thats the point, market pressures increase your pay as is since companies now need to compete to hire you aware... So there really is no good argument for needing unions in that scenario.
@freemo We had teacher strikes, cop strikes, etc, because of the government's decisions. Only possible with unions because how else will you organize this? Here the strikes are usually against government, not so much against companies. At least, not at that large scale. How do you figure this will fit here?
@trinsec You wont have strikes, strikes shouldnt be allowed, that is price-fixing and would be no different than companies organizing together and refusing to give their services at the market price...
Now you CAN have protests, and those get organized all the time. So nothing stopping people from protesting these issues still.
If you want to argue that way then fine, id be forced to oppose antitrust laws if I were to be convinced to support unions. Since as you say they should be free to collaborate
Because the system is specifically designed such that multiple owners cant collaborate in large numbers.
If you want to start a company that has more than a few owners then it would be a corperation since other types of companies have severly limited numbers of owners.
In a corporation the owners must be isolated fromt he board and the board somewhat isolated from day-to-day operations. One of the reasons to isolate the owners from what happens in their own company is specifically so they cant collaborate and manipulate prices within the company.
You’re missing the point: every firm with more than one owner represents an agreement by those owners to collude with each other, rather than compete, to extract higher prices from customers and set lower prices for labor. You can’t complain about labor unions behaving anti-competitively without also condemning capitalist firms.
And you are missing the point.. The legal structure is such that their collusion is severely limited by ensuring they dont have the information about the internal workings of the company to collude in any way that would result in price fixing.
People are allowed to work together, companies and employees... what they can do is collude to carry out price-fixing, and owners are prevented from doing just that.
Again, cooperation of any kind isnt the issue. Companies and people can cooperate all they want.. What they cant do is price-fix.
Labour can sell their services through staffing firms, and they even set their prices as a group when they do. This is fine because it doesnt target the entierty of a niche (all employees of a single company, or of a particular class of workers, or even of a geographic region). Much as company owners have some ability to collaborate and work together so long as they dont price fix (cooperate with other companies to fix the price within a certain niche such as a geographic location).
@trinsec @freemo
Workers—the owners of labor-selling firms—collude by agreeing to cooperate instead of competing. This is the mechanism by which they might be accused of “price-fixing,” since those prices are still set by bargaining with labor-purchasing firms.
*Entirely apart* from any explicit agreement by capital owners to set specific prices, capital owners collude via the same mechanism as workers in labor unions do, agreeing to cooperate instead of competing.