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Posted by youcould 10/26/2024

California is torn between clashing Anglo traditions?(unherd.com)
73 points | 98 commentspage 3
addicted 10/27/2024|
[flagged]
pfannkuchen 10/27/2024|
On unions, I don’t think anyone opposes the practice in its basic free market form, i.e. a group of employees banding together to negotiate as a collective entity instead of as separate individuals.

In a free market, the company can freely negotiate with this entity, including terminating it its members masse if desired.

Absent illegal collusion between companies, in theory the companies who work with unions should end up being more productive since they will be able to attract better employees based on the better employment conditions secured by the union activity.

What many people are against is the particular regulatory structure that is present today. They have seen what happened to American manufacturing over the past decades, and unions as they are currently implemented in America seem to have played a large role.

galleywest200 10/27/2024||
>I don’t think anyone opposes the practice in its basic free market form

The people who run these companies oppose this practice. Minimum wage exists because these suits would pay you less than that if they could.

pfannkuchen 10/31/2024||
I think the root problem with the union/corporation adversarial dynamic is that it takes time for a company who negotiates with reasonable unions to realize that advantage and have that be established as the dominant dynamic. Like it could take generations of workers to reach equilibrium, and if there are other disruptions along the way (e.g. technology changes) then it could take even longer.

People understandably got impatient waiting for the fairly straightforward game theory to play out and so they started changing the rules.

In a simpler world where companies are free to fire union workers en masse, you’d have to be pretty evil to oppose the right to unionize just to eke out the relatively tiny benefit it would bring in the short to medium term.

It’s a much simpler explanation for almost everyone who looks like they might be that evil to actually just oppose things as they currently stand. Sort of the Occam’s razor of morality.

ZeroGravitas 10/27/2024|
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