Unions kill innovation, at least in US. And 10-20% of people do the actual work so 80-90% can have the time to complain nonstop while making 400k plus.
As an American I don’t really use that many cutting edge tools from Europe on a daily basis. Maybe my Miele vac.
On the other hand almost everyone in the world uses something made by American corporations.
So unions block innovation by insisting the government pays union-level wages to construction workers.
I can tell you what is the difference between unions in Europe and unions in the US. As far as I can tell, unions and paying fair wages are not blamed for lack of innovation in Europe. We do have a lot of news about the fight over wages, but for some reason this antagonist union bashing in the media and general population seems to still be an American phenomenon.
fair wages do not prevent innovation. on the contrary. because unhappy employees will also make innovation difficult. i do believe that unions in europe understand that european companies need to innovate more to compete globally.
but unlike some american unions they do not hold the companies hostage. union shops do not exist. they can not demand that every employee joins the union. they do not control what tasks individual employees are allowed to do. they negotiate contracts and work conditions. that's all.
Unions promote mediocricy. If thats fine - good. Europe can allow themselves to be mediocre, while most of inovation is done in United States of America. But what if USA would do the same, where we would get inovation? China?
Why don't you go and ask Germans, the Dutch, Swiss or Nordic countries, which have gigantic union presence, if you think unions have anything to do with productivity?
The problem with US isn't with the unions, it's with the corporations' complete vitriol against them.
I've also heard that Europeans really like their unions, while Americans tend not to. I'm of the impression that European unions are structured differently and they tend not to have the same sorts of problems. That said, European companies also don't strike me as particularly productive relative to American companies; though I'm sure that's not down to unions alone, productivity isn't everything, etc.
Unions are not why building things in America is expensive. Its orders of magnitude cheaper to build things in France, a country with extremely strong unions.
> externalizing their negative effects onto society
Those US products are in common use in Europe, too, with the same effects. It's not illegal to create the kind of products Google and Facebook sell from Europe.
The main difference is not the relationships between companies and consumers, but rather the relationship between the companies, workers and the government.
> gig workers
I remember reading a book about this when in high school (in the 80s, though the book was quite a bit older), written by and from the perspective of the unions, where they argued that the during phases of growth, unions DID hold salaries back, but (according to themselves) this was more than made up for during recessions.
In the 19th century, the factory workers had a "gig economy" too, where they would often have to work on a day-by-day basis, and would show up at the gates of the factory every morning hoping to have work that day. If there were not enough workers, they could ask for very good salaries, but if there was a surplus it led to collapsing wages AND a high risk of no income at all, ie even worse than the Uber model.
This is precisely why many companies are trying to make regular dev roles as interchangeable as possible. By minimizing the dependency on individuals, they make their own bargaining position much stronger.
And when you stop being an employee that is valued for your individual contributions, and become an easily replicable "resource", it may very well be in your best interest to unionize.
However, there are externalities connected to unions, as they DO tend to stifle innovation, lowering all boats.
If worker well-being is a high priority, but a country ALSO wants a dynamic economy, one may want to look to Denmark, where most of the "safety net" responsibilities are moved from the employers to the government.
That requires a taxation level a bit higher than in Germany, but may be part of the reason why wages are significantly higher, and only exceeded by special cases like the US, Switzerland and Norway.
It's weird how Americans seem to have this huge anti-union thing going, and yet the same problems seem to never arise here in Europe, even though we are far more unionized.
I disagree. What you describe is Western Europe with depressed wages and less innovation and dynamic economy. You can’t regulate/unionize into prosperity.
The OP said it was never in a union’s interest to harm a company. And I provided counter arguments where they did exactly that. Unions reward mediocrity and the self interest of the union leaders at the expense of society as a whole. You pay a union worker more, that means that everyone else pays for it through higher prices. They also diminish the agency of the individual. Everyone is average.
The US has a union membership of 13% and France is 9%. Does France have a higher quality of life? Many would say so. Does the US have a higher quality of life than Italy? By economic measures, definitely. Switzerland has a much lower union membership than Belgium and a much higher quality of life.
What country has the highest disposable income? The US, followed by Canada, then Switzerland.
And unemployment rate? Before corona skewed everything, the US unemployment rate was below 4%. In Sweden? Close to 7%.
We get mad at businesses for monopolies, yet a union is a monopoly on labor. How is that right? The irony is that many people reading this are Silicon Valley software people making piles more money with far more disposable income than anyone working in a unionized country. If Silicon Valley were unionized, pay and benefits would decline dramatically. And productivity and innovation would decline. What’s the motivation to work hard if your pay is determined by collective bargaining and not your own merits?
Not sure about Europe. After having dealt with unions in the US for quite some time my general opinion of the average unionized worker is not very kind: lazy, non-productive, selfish, self-important, over-paid, unfairly protected, de-humanized, and more.
Of course, this is a gross over-simplification and a generalization that is not fair to a lot of people. There are good unionized workers.
I'll give you an example: Las Vegas Convention Center. Doing some work at night setting up computers, etc. The crew that installs the carpets comes in. Their job is, quite literally, to roll out the carpeting. I watched as this unfolded. Every hour or so a supervisor would roll around on a little electric cart and would tell people that they had to take a break. The workers would lay down on the carpet and go to sleep. This ballet continued for hours. The work that could have been done in three hours too six, if not more. I asked one of them how much they made. She, very proudly replied: $45 per hour plus benefits and a pension plan. My jaw dropped.
Then there are the stories of the security guards making $150K a year to sit on a chair by a door. And the stories of the union worker refusing to lend a hand because the task is not in their union contract.
Anyhow, the issue, as I see it, is that unions have resulted in hordes of people that are devoid of any real drive to succeed and move forward in life. In unions there are few incentives to be better at what you do. In a lot of union contracts you just can't be fired. I mean, take the examples of (unionized) teachers sexually assaulting students. They don't get fired, they are transfered and "hidden" in another job. There was a recent case of a (unionized) teacher who was feeding his students cookies with semen on on top. That's beyond sick. And, as I understand it, the guy was not fired and will enjoy his 80% pension for the rest of his life.
Anyhow, I don't want to go off on that tangent, but I've just seen too many examples where unions are just destroying drive, innovation and competitiveness in this country. It's a damn shame.
American unions, from my understanding, are less democratic and you lack the legal framework we have in parts of Europe which facilitates negotiations between unions and industry. Mind you, that framework didn’t come for free. It was fought for with blood sweat and tears.
European unions are very different from American unions though due to legal differences. In USA they tend to have much more power over workers and many workers don't like that.
American unions are quite different from European unions. European unions spend a lot of time running apprenticeship programs and doing things like advocating for more productivity. Like trying to figure out how to make the shop floor more efficient. American unions spend time preventing bad employees from being fired (like the NY teacher's rubber rooms and police unions fighting the firing of cops with 5 excessive force violations). Or spend time advocating for extra unneeded employees or forbidding employees from doing two different job roles. You can watch the longshoreman's season from the Wire for illustration. It's supposed to be a defense of unions, but accidentally illustrates why they are utterly broken in the US.
There is a use for unions that advocate for increased pay and clearer benefits. But as constructed and run in the US they are poison to the company. A whole layer of weird incentives the company (and workers!) have to deal with. A lot of the sinister sounding anti-union education the companies do points this out. And there's enough truth that it's very effective.
Pro union folks are always tweeting that companies spending $1 million to avoid an extra $100,000 a year in labor costs is evidence of a widespread conspiracy by the man to keep the working class down. Really the union is like adding a whole extra layer of horrible bureaucracy that costs way more than that $1 million. From that viewpoint shutting down a store or warehouse that unionizes make perfect sense.
Unions in the US are bad, in large part because of laws written to force things that way. Unions in Europe work different, but we legally cannot have that type of union so there is no point in discussing how unions don't have to be bad.
As an American I don’t really use that many cutting edge tools from Europe on a daily basis. Maybe my Miele vac.
On the other hand almost everyone in the world uses something made by American corporations.
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