Why not assume they're genuinely curious to learn rather than attack them? It gives better conversation.
Like pbhjpbhj, I doubt that randomdata was as incredibly naive as he sounded. I took it as a rhetorical device. But using that device here amounts to either denying the malfeasance that can occur when people with wildly differing power levels negotiate or saying that the exploitation of workers is fine because market outcomes are always right.
The former is not a credible position; history provides too many counterexamples. The latter is a sort of reptilian free-market fundamentalism that often hides behind rhetorical devices because "might makes right" it not a moral standard most people will openly subscribe to.
I have to wonder if anyone actually read my comment, or just saw the word union and started replying with their stock responses.
I absolutely agree with you on this one but it just isn't practical. As we have seen time and again, this is not what happens in real life. Everyone wants to "add value" to the economy. Whether you own real estate in San Francisco or you own the only Internet cables to the home, history shows that you WILL use your position to demand a "fair price" for your "contribution" towards the society. In other words, everyone engages in rent-seeking even as we continue to say how it is horrible. We want perfect competition in the market for our suppliers and we want to be the sole provider with 100% discretion in pricing when it comes to our consumers. That is how the world works.
Is the management of labor unions a little inefficient? Absolutely but so is management of corporations. If management was efficient, we'd see close to 100% of economic gains of a corporation go to its investors. However, we see time and again that the "entrepreneurs" and the "hard working" and "risk-taking" executives will demand a very high price for their "work". It may not formally be a union but it sure feels like it when it comes to executive pay!
My comment emphasized the need for unions, so if you disagree with my points, are you saying that unions aren't necessary?
I will say, though, that I don't see it as necessary to reply to somebody who ignores the substance of a comment, picks out one sentence, and misinterprets it.
You don't find it necessary, but you felt compelled to anyway? Weird. The problem here is that you haven't even addressed the topic at hand. You went on some tangent that was irrelevant. All I could do was grasp at one small part of your comment that seems like it may have been somewhat relevant to try and salvage the discussion.
I do blame myself for not articulating my point to you, but since you even seem unsure of what I was trying to convey, you'd think you'd ask questions to try and understand instead of just starting to push your own off-topic agenda down my throat.
But I understand how emotionally wrapped up people get in this which prompts them to throw all rational behaviour out the window. I'll forgive you.
I do though, have a great distaste for jacksassery, so you and your faux forgiveness can take a hike. That's yet another rhetorical technique, yet again used poorly.
Either way, deep down, the discussion really doesn't have anything to do with unions at all. I'm not sure if you simply failed to grasp my comment and thought that attacking my character instead of doing the normal human thing of asking for clarification would lead to helping you understand, or if you are simply a troll and did not care about the subject at all and were just looking for someone to take out your aggressions on.
Either way, HN is not the place for that type of behaviour. I'm not sure what you are getting all emotional about if it is not unions, but whatever it is, it is clearly present and causing you to loose sight of thoughtful and meaningful discussion. Dial that back and maybe we can gain something from this exchange. Something tells me that I'll get another several paragraphs of ad hominems instead, sadly.
Perhaps most here find your points tired and emotionally fueled which is why they choose instead not to engage?
The funny part is that if you're genuinely curious about the topic, you can do some introductory research yourself. The information you seek is a single Google search away. To demonstrate:
And literally the first option in the search I linked ("walmart unfair wages") will lead you straight to the answer.
Did you actually read my comment? Because it seems like you didn't read my comment.
We know that Walmart forces employees to work off the clock. They've settled multiple class-action lawsuits about this. This of course, goes by a name. It's called wage theft. Even before the theft, we know that Walmart pays their employee literally poverty wages. This is evident this time a year, when you go to a Walmart and see a barrel sitting out front marked for food donations for Walmart employees. On top of that, Walmart is essentially government subsidized, because they encourage their employees to sign up for welfare as part of their on-boarding process.[0]
So now of course, why would anyone put up with this? Quite simply, there's no other choice. Yeah, these people are unskilled and left far behind in the economy, but that doesn't mean that someone with a full time job should live in poverty. This doesn't mean that a multibillion dollar multinational megacorp, should be getting 6 billion dollars a year in taxpayer payroll subsidies.
[0] http://www.forbes.com/sites/clareoconnor/2014/04/15/report-w...
If Walmart employees can't support themselves and wind up taking advantage of charity - either privately or through the state - isn't this also the system working as intended? Systems are in place to help low income individuals. These are low income individuals. It strikes me as strange moral reasoning to say the low market price of unskilled labor is Walmart's fault.
It strikes me as particularly strange moral reasoning to charge the use of welfare in this case to Walmart's account and call it a subsidy. That would only make sense to me if the people earning that wage would do better if Walmart wasn't there. I don't think that's the case, though. Unskilled labor doesn't pay that well whether you're flipping burgers, delivering pizzas, stocking shelves, or waiting tables. It's not the fault of the companies offering those jobs - it's just what that sort of labor is worth.
But Walmart should just pay them more, everyone deserves a living wage? I don't think I agree. I think there is room in the economy for second incomes, for student jobs, for seasonal work. Not everyone is a single head of household, and if you don't have the skills to be one, often you just - don't move out. We have no shortage of help - private charities that do vocational training, societal safety nets to keep things from getting too bad, most people get by with help from friends and family until they can make it on their own. I think there's nothing wrong with that.
One of the things I would be concerned with is insisting that Walmart pay its employees more. That will surely come in the form of raising prices, and the very low prices at Walmart are a boon to low income folks - both those who work at Walmart and those who don't. I am skeptical that making Walmart less efficient will help the communities it's in, compared with the social safety nets and private charity - generally provided by the better off. Forcing Walmart to pay higher wages strikes me as taking from the poor to give to the poor.
On the contrary - the folks I know who work at Walmart are content with the situation and doing ok. They know they could go get a vocational degree or something and make better money as a welder or something. They don't want to. It's an odd job between stages of life, not a career, and good enough for the moment. If there are enough people like this to run a whole business that hugely benefits the poor by offering goods at low prices, isn't that system on the whole a good thing?
Alternatively, we keep it as is and more and more people's labor goes to zero (eg. driverless cars). One way or another, the wealth needs to flow to the people or there will be unrest. With unrest, people may elect someone with radical changes in mind and then you really won't like your situation (eg. a fascist government like Russia where the top guy simply takes your stuff on behalf of the people - but the people never actually see a dime of it). A little course correction here to balance things out will go a long way to keeping the social fabric together.
So it seems possible to give each worker an extra $100/month. But now you have to sell this to the shareholders, which may include institutional investors managing retirement accounts. Good luck figuring out that mess.
Having a job and being stuck on charity is not the system working as designed. A system working as designed wouldn't need charity at all, and certainly would be needed for those that are working and are still indigent.
I really find it odd that you think paying more would be "taking from the poor to give to the poor". Walmart and the Walton family are extremely profitable and wealthy. They can easily absorb the the cost with negligible real impact. They could even start by not paying a stock dividend.
The question isn't about some teenager. It's about the person that isn't. It's about the person working two or three jobs. You can't say that Walmart benefits the poor when they famously pay just enough to shop only there.
I suggest you get out of your bubble, because the people I know that work at Walmart, Dollar General (do you even know that store?) are heads of households. These people are screwed. Not just by Walmart but by the entire economy.
That's a rather aggressive and insulting way to attempt to make your point.
Disclosure -- I am married to Dove. We live in 80219 [0]. Median income here is a little under half of the state average. More than a third of the adult population has less than high school education; less than one third has ever been to college.
In the last four years, in addition to our nuclear family, we've had the following live in our house:
- a fresh college graduate, working as a tutor in the public schools
- teen parents and their infant; the mom worked at WalMart and the dad at another grocery store
- my divorced sister and her elementary-aged son; she worked part time as a substitute paraprofessional in special ed classrooms
- my sister who was doing just fine on her own until her building was bought out from under her, and couldn't find an affordable place where she was able to practice her religion (can't find roommates who keep kosher; here she has room to set up her own mini-kitchen.)
My parents live one zip code over, in a slightly less poor but still very poor area. My mom works at WalMart; my dad is disabled; they also have two adult children and two non-relatives living with them, including one who prefers the pronoun "they" and one who goes by the nickname "Hobo Joe".
Why am I saying all of this? Because this is the "bubble" we live in. And when well-meaning people look in from the outside and say "minimum wage should be a living wage" and "people shouldn't be able to be partially government-subsidized and partially earning a wage", I think they don't realize what that approach actually entails. It basically guarantees my mom would be unemployed and 100% on government benefits, because nobody is going to hire a 66 year old woman who spent 30 years out of the workforce raising children. It means that people like "Hobo Joe" can't get an entry-level job and are therefore going to live their entire lives on government benefits, instead of slowly becoming more independent. Yes, these people are screwed by the economy -- but trying to make entry-level employers like WalMart pay more makes them even more screwed.
You don't help people climb the ladder by kicking out the bottom rung. You help them by making the transition from unemployed to entry level as smooth as possible, by making it so that a person can make a partial transition where they have a mix of both, and by eliminating "cliffs" that they have to jump over in order to improve their situation.
Seriously, do you think that's how it happens? Is that bluster, naivety, or what?
"He sonny, do you want to eat dirt or accept our below healthy subsistence wages?" seems closer to how it goes. People don't work for low wages because they can't bargain, they work for low wages because the alternative is for them not to work and the government won't mandate a Living Wage.
It's not fair because people who have less resources, from birth usually, are in a far worse bargaining position and usually don't have the occasion to negotiate their wages. The only chance they have to create leverage is to unionise and force the company to decide whether to waste 20% of their workforce and do a massive employment and training drive (or suffer a strike, or ...) or to accede to paying a, for example, inflation matching wage increase.