At 02:09 PM 10/22/2001 -0700, David Honig wrote:

At 11:09 PM 10/22/01 +0300, Sampo Syreeni wrote:

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On Mon, 22 Oct 2001, Tim May wrote:

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"Sure, unions are good" is not at all obvious to me. Why do you claim this? When they're not given special privileges, they are a useful tool for market awareness and employee side organization.

Sure. But unions work to make membership *compulsory*. They have other legal privledges. .... UC grad students (TAs) are Teamsters, members of AFL-CIO. Seriously. Obligatorily. No choice.

My brother was a Teamster once, when he had a job in a warehouse. He decided that if he was going to have to pay union dues, he was going to work towards making the union local have some actual control over where the political-contribution part of the dues went instead of letting the Teamsters national bosses control it. (Do not taunt Happy Fun Teamster! He had a good time messing with them...) I'm strongly opposed to laws requiring companies to deal with unions, but also to right-to-work laws that forbid companies from doing exclusive deals with unions, except insofar as they're counteracting federal mandatory-union laws. After growing up watching Philadelphia TV, it took me a long time to be willing to view unions as anything other than the violent thugs who kept burning down construction sites and beating non-union workers and excluding incorrect racial groups and helping Mafiosi shake down businesses, though some of the businesses also helped Mafiosi shake down unions and hired their own goons (both blue-suited and free-market) to beat up union members as well - government and Pinkerton thugs have been just as violent and murderous, particularly in the coal mine strikes and northwestern lumber strikes, and the government has occasionally provided National Guard strikebreakers to do scab labor as well as to beat up strikers, which is inappropriate in a free market. Politics aside, though, I've dealt with construction unions and communications workers unions, and sometimes unions have been able to provide good service both for their members and for companies that hire them - you can go to the appropriate union hall and get well-trained workers to do the projects you need, and they provide workers with a certain amount of mutual insurance, often including medical and pension benefits. It's not that much different than what many of the Silicon Valley technical body-shops provide, except that the internal dispute-resolution methods are much more strictly seniority-based than competence-based, and it's more collectivist than individualist, but that's not as inappropriate as you'd think for industrial-age businesses that need large groups of workers for mass-production work rather than individual artisans. Business hiring is a process of negotiation in a market, in which all sides are trying to maximize their return, just as buying and selling are. Capitalists are out to make money, and so are workers, and if forming a union is an effective negotiating tool for the workers to get more of the pie than they'd get individually, then I wish them good luck, just as if forming partnerships or other kinds of business alliances are an effective business tool for business owners, I wish them good luck too - as long as they stick to moral methods, rather than threatening violence against strikebreakers or strikers or hiring politicians to give them an unfair advantage. Employee Stock Ownership Plans have also been an effective method of aligning the interests of unions and companies - they tend to encourage cooperation by leading both sides to recognize their mutual intersts. Of course, when you start giving workers stock, and telling them they're "empowered", you find they not only care about the company's success, they really lose patience for upper-management cluelessness, and in a unionized company, sometimes this is more visible to clueless upper managers than in a non-unionized company where the pointy-haired ones can ignore their "empowered" workers. Collectivist anti-management rhetoric, greedy union bosses, and various other cluelessness and abuses by unions sometimes cause employers to go broke or generally keep the pie smaller than if they were willing to share the wealth and do the win-win strategy of growing their market or at least their market share, and eventually Darwin will get those people; same holds true for greedy, stupid, and short-sighted business-owners or managers. Unfortunately, this often turns into a lose-lose situation, especially when organizational conflict causes a business to be too inflexible to adapt to changing market conditions. Back when part of the company I was in had some threat of becoming unionized, some of my co-workers joked about how we ought to respond by forming a Wobbly local, and run it against the CWA/IBEW/etc. The IWW may have a bunch of economically clueless class-warfare rhetoric about the worker class never having common interests with the boss class, but they can be pretty individualist and they certainly don't put up with greedy union bosses trying to push them around. (One guy from another union referred to them as the "I Won't Work" society.) They do have an unfortunate history of violence as well, but hey, if we've got to be part of One Big Union, might as well have it be One Big Highly Disorganized Union, and it seems to really torque off the Teamsters.

On Tue, 23 Oct 2001, Sampo Syreeni wrote:

On Mon, 22 Oct 2001, David Honig wrote:

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Sure. But unions work to make membership *compulsory*. They have other legal privledges.

What can you say? People rent-seek. That's an axiom which also goes by the name of "rationality". So the problem is not the union, but the legislators and their backers.

No, the problem is people. Don't confuse what is happening and why, with who is involved. -- ____________________________________________________________________ The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion. Edmund Burke (1784) The Armadillo Group ,::////;::-. James Choate Austin, Tx /:'///// ``::>/|/ ravage@ssz.com www.ssz.com .', |||| `/( e\ 512-451-7087 -====~~mm-'`-```-mm --'- --------------------------------------------------------------------