“Because he negotiated with management and those are the terms they both agreed to. Why are you so arrogant that you think it is your place to judge others? Who the hell do you think you are?”

That was not a negotiation. Getting what you want under threat of a strike is a form of extortion, not negotiation.

You vastly oversimplify the worker/manager relationship. Using hyperbole does nothing to advance your point. Unions have long since grown too powerful in this country, and they are now just as guilty of extremes as the industrialists of the previous century.

What about those of us who are anti-union and anti-management? I mean, why pick a side when you can oppose everything? Both unions and traditional employment structures are top down mandatory systems organized around hierarchies. The fact that each can check the abuses of the other is pointless- both are inherently poor systems, built around the idea of production as a process and the assembly line mentality of labor. In other words: corporations and unions are a relics of 20th century industrialism.

Hear hear! (Just read The Future of Work.)

In computing terms, it’s the same false dichotomy as “client and server”, but on the Internet everyone is a peer. (Although some sites are just your computer on dynamic IP, while other sites are Google.com.)

“Capital” vs. “Labor” is also a false dichotomy. “Labor” is just the renting of your body (i.e. capital) — which includes your brain/mind for knowledge workers — in exchange for whatever capital the buyer also agrees to (usually money).

In other words, “labor” is just one kind of capital, among many. Everything you own to augment your ability to think and act is also capital, and that’s all that cars and computers to factories and mines are too. (Just as also some people are profoundly more genetically adept at music, or mathematics, or gymnastics.)

We’re cybernetic organisms, ever since our distant ancestors first picked up a jawbone and used it as a weapon.

p.s. Unions contribute to causing unemployment. Keep that in mind during these hard times.

“Y’r qbblng vr smntcs. Lk sd, th dffrnc s n th cntrct. Y cnvnntly sdstppd tht pnt.”

slv sgnng cntrct! RFLM!

Unions are no longer about being paid a “fair” wage and doint “fair” work. The modern union stands for doing the least amount of work possible for the most money.

This is your youth and naiveté showing. People can’t always just quit and move.

I’m curious to hear why you think why not. If the answer is “house and kids”, well, we’re back to my argument that most people can’t truly afford a house and kids.

Labor is just not as mobile as Capital is. That is just an unavoidable physical reality.

No, it’s a problem of political borders. More nations need to follow the lead of the Amsterdam Treaty and Shengen Agreement; free movement of people between the NAFTA members would be a good start. Anything less is tantamount to, “Papers, please!”

Paris Hilton has never worked a day in her life and there are many more like her.

She’s an entertainer; she does “work”, and I’m sure her capital “works” (e.g. her money not sitting in a mattress, but being loaned or invested into others to do real things).

Their lives are hidden from view for a reason.

Mostly to avoid the mob violence of those inciting “class warfare” like you’re hinting at. At least, that’s the lesson I learned from the Johnson family in Born Rich.

In a crisis where your family had the only bomb shelter in town, and it only has room for your family, what would you do?

c.f. Executive Order 6102

Perhaps in your field everything is fine right now but there are other engineering fields that have been decimated. Their wages undercut by cheap labor from India or elsewhere.

Yeah, providence forbid that the really poor people get those jobs instead of you.

Putting your self interest in with management is a big mistake.

Again, this is a false choice. This social division doesn’t exist any more than different “races” exist.

Thanks for the posts! Both books look very interesting and I’m looking for’d to them! I suspect that we’re not quite at the “future” of work yet, so we still need to safeguard our rights to organize, unionize and jazzercise. The world is still full of people willing and able to take advantage of workers in the olde-fashioned sense.

In all my working career I have treated my employer as my working partner with the understanding that both of us need to do our parts to be successful. If the company does not thrive I don’t either and if I don’t work well, the company does not thrive.

Unionized labour screams “I got mine, you can go to hell” – no company with employees with that attitude can expect to survive.

But there’s nothing about unions that say they must be that way. Why not a decentralized, directly democratic union? Why not a union made of peers, who substitute networked decision-making and organizational software for the bureaucracy and officers of the past? In the near future, I can see the “rank and file” gradually realizing that they don’t actually need the cruft of an old-style union in order to organize and collectively bargain with their employer.

“If an auto worker, who might have a high-school education at best, makes about the same amount as I do, who has a Master’s degree in engineering, something is slightly wrong.”

Indeed, perhaps there is. Maybe if you formed a union you could get fairly compensated instead of whining about how those you deem inferior to you are not living in squalor.

Zuzu
“In computing terms…”
“We’re not computers, Sebastian, we’re physical.”

“”Labor” is just the renting of your body (i.e. capital)”

Which is no different than slavery. The only difference being the terms of the contract. A union is a means of collective bargaining or negotiating for a better contract. There really IS no other means by which those who provide labor capital (as you describe) can effectively bargain for a better deal.

Anarcho syndicalism claims to offer a better alternative than the Labor-Capital dichotomy but I’m unsure that would actually work in real life. It certainly ain’t gonna happen in the US. Not in this century.

The pendulum has swung too far to the right. About time that changed.

I am not against people taking a lunch break. However, sometimes, you have to roll up your sleeves and get the job done, even if it means taking a 10-minute lunch break every month or two. But not a union man. Heaven forbid that he takes less than his assigned lunch break, even once.

It also annoyed me that I could not even touch this card while I was at the customer’s site. I helped design it, I debugged it, I touched every part of the card for months. Yet when I get to the customer’s site, a union rule hampered our productivity.

Unions are no longer about being paid a “fair” wage and doint “fair” work. The modern union stands for doing the least amount of work possible for the most money.

You are making the mistake of generalizing about all unions based on your limited exposure. Try your sentence above on a Teachers’, Healthcare Workers’ or Garment Workers’ union, to name just some obvious examples.

It’s not black and white, as Corey’s post clearly states. Everyone seems to think the UAW and Teamsters (for better or worse) are representative of the “modern” union and it’s just not true.

In many ways America represents freedom. It’s protection of individual rights for example. But that is under constant threat by the dominant elite. Socialism is not the threat to America’s freedoms. The interests of the powerful always have been a threat to the interests of the people. World history shows us that.

http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=20090304204058584

“”Labor” is just the renting of your body (i.e. capital)” Which is no different than slavery.

No, it’s very different. Slavery would be if someone else “owned” your body instead of you. (Meanwhile your consciousness is trapped inside “someone else’s” body.) Hence the principle of self-ownership. I said rent, not a transfer of ownership.

There really IS no other means by which those who provide labor capital (as you describe) can effectively bargain for a better deal.

Of course there is: If you don’t like it, quit and work somewhere else. Just as if I don’t like a Ford car I buy a Toyota car instead. Or if I don’t like the price that one retailer sells coffee for, I buy it from other.

It’s called competition, and it’s always in the best interest of the consumer. Yes, selling your services of labor can be hard business, but when you do earn that money, be assured that everyone else trying to sell you something is working just as hard to please you.

You are making the mistake of generalizing about all unions based on your limited exposure. Try your sentence above on a Teachers’ … union

Teachers unions are just as bad; particularly the aforementioned emphasis on seniority over ability.

Recognizing a difference in capabilities among people is neither arrogant nor judgmental.

Compensation should be directly related to contribution. Different people contribute more or less value to an organization based on their skill sets. Heck, the engineers who are more experienced and skilled than me should be paid more!

To expect a level of compensation that is not in keeping with your contribution is wrong.

You should expand on this, because at face value it seems psychopathic, so I’m sure the explanation will be very interesting. If you’re arguing – as it seems you are – that the reason people can afford to raise families is because society hasn’t sufficiently embraced the free market…well, I guess I’d have to agree :)

I’d love to get to the origins of this sense of entitlement people have to “house and kids”.

How about I be entitled to a pony and a rocket car?

(Clearly, denying me my pony and rocket car is “psychopathic”.)

Zuzu, that’s an analogy, not real-world identity. Capital and labor are two different things.

Management does exist as a separate class.

“Doesn’t have a genetic basis” doesn’t mean “not real.” Race is most assuredly real.

Social constructions do not make things real, any more than popular belief in God, or angels, or ghosts, or bigfoot make them real.

This applies to all forms of “social identity”.

(Ok, technically, this gets into Charles Sanders Peirce territory on semantics, such as “The Fixation of Belief“, and being precise about “real” vs. “actual” — IIRC, or whatever terms he used.)

It is unseemly to make remarks like that when in all other instances you’ve taken a callous attitude toward the poor.

How have I been callous to impoverished people? (Other than, perhaps, to suggest that they cannot also afford to have offspring of their own, just as they cannot afford mansions and skydiving lessons.)

Second, how soon do you expect those legal changes to happen? Is there any certainty that they’ll ever happen? (Answer: no.)

The world is what we make of it. If this requires changing the agendas of public discourse, then so be it.

You can look at how much the gap widened between rich and poor over the past decade or so, and conclude that class warfare is something the working classes engage in?

Invoking “class” as a function of economics, rather than political power, to create and “us versus them” mentality, is typical of the historic (i.e. turn of the 20th century) definition of “class warfare”.

I’ve seen you make your “most people can’t afford houses and children” argument before. I’ve never seen you justify it. So tell us: what changed, and when did it happen?

The shift from a primarily agricultural socioeconomy to a primarily industrial one, and now again to a primarily knowledge-based one. ala Alvin Toffler’s The Third Wave. In an agrarian society, offspring were essentially slave labor, and reduced operating costs of farming. However, with the rise of industrialization (beginning with fertilizer for the farms, IIRC), children largely changed from economic benefits to economic burdens.

Today, the cost of raising a child to be well suited to the critical thinking, creativity, and scientific reasoning skills required of modern knowledge work is astoundingly high. (In part this is reflected by ever increasing requirements of “official” education… high school, undergraduate, and now graduate school if not full PhDs.)

Zuzu @23, there’s an economic principle called “friction” that you need to become better acquainted with.

Please elaborate on your context here. I’m familiar with transaction costs, but insofar as changes of employment go, if you’re wise enough to save rather than rely on credit, the economic frictions are rather minimal. (I also acknowledge some additional burdens if you’re tied to a 15-30 year mortgage, but again, owner-occupied housing has been so vastly subsidized since the end of WWII that this seems to be yet another unintended consequence of social planning.)

“Indeed, perhaps there is. Maybe if you formed a union you could get fairly compensated instead of whining about how those you deem inferior to you are not living in squalor.”

I don’t understand your outrage. Why should someone with a high-school education whose job is to move my computer from one end of my cubicle to the other even be on the same payscale as someone with an advanced education and vast professional knowledge? Noone is entitled to anything, we all have to work for what we can have.

Statements like that do absolutely nothing to dispel the notion of the union entitlement mentality.

I understand what Harrkev is trying to say. As an engineer myself I am more than satisfied with what I make – it’s not an obscene amount of money by any stretch of the imagination but it’s a very fair wage for the work I do.

So I am not undercompensated but I do feel that unions are overcompensated. And that hurts the business entity as a whole. And your suggestion that I should form a union and demand more pay is ridiculous. I get paid a fair wage. Why would I demand more simply because I feel like I deserve it? By what measure? On what grounds? And when the business cannot meet the labour demands and crumbles, I’m out of a job!

Why does the employer/employee relationship have to be adversarial? Neither one can do without the other and if both work together, great things can be achieved.

Strike! by Jeremy Brecher
Labor’s Untold Story by Boyer and Morais
Dynamite by Louis Adamic
We Shall Be All: A History of the IWW by Melvyn Dubofsky

Are all fascinating reads covering the early era of labor history when the state’s iron fist was fully out of the velvet glove. The level of violence and chicanery companies and the government were willing to stoop to in crushing worker’s organizations will astonish those who aren’t familiar with the history.

More recently Kim Moody’s stuff, Mike Davis’ “Prisoners of the American Dream” are top notch.

The bosses hate the workers.

They realise that under NAFTA they can sack all them f*ckers and move the plant to Mexico.

South of the Border the cars cost a lot less to make.

No one in the US can buy them because the bosses laid off their workers and their MARKET.

Oh and no one else in the world buys american cars.

My personal experience: there is only one thing worse than being a member of a union. That’s not being a member of a union. But let me tell you, being confined by union rules and attitudes is pretty terrible. On the other hand, being without certain union protections has been a sometimes terrifying onslaught of arbitrary, capricious, and unaccountably hostile behavior.

A big problem with unions is that they’re run by their members. Wow, I can’t believe the people elected to represent the unions I’ve been in. Still, the big problem with management is also the people running the show. No one should mistake for one minute that, for the majority, corporations are not benignly despotic, they are just despotic.

I can certainly understand individual exasperation when dealing with union members. One might want to consider though that the shitty attitudes of the union employees are almost always a learned reaction to equally duplicitous and shitty behavior by management teams.

One other thing to consider: labor power is truly hobbled compared to the mid-twentieth century. Small business is hobbled in the same way. There is absolutely no way for an American worker or small business to compete with other industrial economies with guaranteed health insurance or with “developing” economies that treat their citizens as throw-aways undeserving of even business subsidized health insurance. It suits trans-nationals just fine, but they’re not going to be the engine of economic growth or higher standards of living. That’s what the currently pooped on small businesses are for.

Both unions and traditional employment structures are top down mandatory systems organized around hierarchies. The fact that each can check the abuses of the other is pointless- both are inherently poor systems, built around the idea of production as a process and the assembly line mentality of labor.

In other words: corporations and unions are a relics of 20th century industrialism.

Number two: Unions operate at a serious disadvantage. Most union members and officers come from the labor force. Many are dedicated but not trained in dealing effectively with MBA’s and labor attorneys. They do their best, but can easily be swayed or corrupted by management, and it happens so often that it diminishes the effectiveness of unions. That is deliberate, and I have witnessed it myself as a union officer for many years.

I don’t know what the solution is except for labor laws that help level the playing field between highly skilled and financed management and moderately skilled and under-compensated union officials.

Unfortunately labor laws intended to do this have been weakened or done away with entirely, to a point that the Department of Labor is more of a corporate mouthpiece for keeping organized labor in its place.

Number three: Union officials are obligated to represent all union members in disputes with management, whether they are truly deserving or not. Kind of like being a public attorney – even the guilty get their day in court. It is terribly frustrating but unavoidable, and it distorts peoples image of what unions do. Management often takes advantage of this by overloading unions with frivolous actions that clog the grievance procedures and create further discontent with the unions. This doesn’t make unions bad, but it does affect peoples perceptions.

It is relatively easy for companies to create discontent and distort what unions are about, and they feel it is in their interest to do so. Again, it is the failure of labor laws to prevent this that has resulted in the decline of unions.

Labour is in opposition to capital because capital needs to reduce wages maximally to obtain profits. Only cooperation among workers can avoid attacks against wages.

Unions actually have a beneficial effect on the economy. They increase working wages which leads to greater aggregate demand.

The forms that unions take can be hierarchical and bureaucratic. However, this isn’t an argument against unions, it’s an argument for horizontalism.

As for capital, it isn’t actually that mobile. The reason that it currently moves is directly related to the fact that borders exist to keep labour captive. If labour wasn’t captive, then capital would move a lot less, as it wouldn’t be chasing labour in regions where state violence (to break unions) lack of regulation on labour and poor environmental conditions keep profits high.

I think the world needs a proper syndicalist movement. Corporations are international, and can move freely *AND* get a special dispensation from the state. Give labour the right to form unions which are protected in the same way that corporations are, and which are as international as corporations are and allow the free movement of labour and we’d be moving to a much freer society.

Freedom of movement would finally solve the problem of under-development as we’d have to ensure that places were nice to live in so that everyone doesn’t move to the imperial core. We’d stop screwing workers in third world countries with low wages.

Teacher unions are an excellent example. More pay for teachers is not a bad thing, but it isn’t a good thing in it of itself. I want my teachers better paid so that we get better teacher. When you see unions fighting for contracts that make it basically impossible to fire under performing teachers or prevent excelling teachers from receiving superior compensation, I get angry.

Unfortunately, unions are not for more efficient workers or supporting superior workers. They are for the majority of workers. The easiest way to make a majority happy is to simply give them more stuff the longer they stay in the game, rather than for being better. This results in some of the utterly fucked up contracts that unions some times impose. When an engineer literally can’t touch a tool or spin a knob because it violates a contact that says that only union technitions can, I am upset.

I don’t know what the answer is. I want unions that support and encourage excellence, not the dull drone of mediocrity. A union that fought for giving outstanding teachers truly superior pay would be something I support. A union that fights to make sure even the most dismal of teachers can’t be fired on the other hand is something I have little interest in. Instead, unions fight to shell out the most cash to whoever managers to keep sucking air the longest in some sort of screwed up pyramid scheme.