"Any kind of group activity requires organization. But as soon as one starts to organize one creates a division within the movement between the organized and the organizers, between ordinary members and officials. The latter quickly acquire knowledge and expertise that set them apart and give them power over ordinary members. The officials begin to derive personal satisfaction from their place in the organization and seek ways of consolidating it. They acquire an interest in the continued prosperity of the organization. For ordinary trade unionists, their union is just one interest in which they have a small stake. But for the paid officials the union is their employer. Preserving the organization becomes more important than helping it achieve its goals. As radical action may bring government repression, the apparatchiks moderate."
There have always been unions that organized in a manner that avoids this situation. (The CNT, the IWW, the Zapatistas (1990s) and, more.) In fact, this act of holding on to power has always been one of the major Anarchist critiques of Marxism. And, Anarchists were very present in the unions of the early 1900s.
One of Capitalism's and Authoritative Communism's finest achievements has been burying the history of unions. They've done it so well that many current unions are unaware of alternative power structures.
It's unfortunate because there is so much to love about Anarchism.
Democracies are ugly, inefficient, buggy, and bloated. Most people don't get what they want, but they agree to form a union because they know that they'll get more than if they were ruled by an autocrat. Democracies are pragmatic.
However, some people naturally want to push their vision onto others. And, there are constant forces at play to do so.
I think the democracies that work best have some common culture. They seem to work better because the core differences are more tightly clustered.
Media owners will similarly run false stories, exaggerate and blow out of proportion any instances of union corruption whilst simultaneously downplaying and ignoring vastly worse instances of corruption by the owners and managers.
I used to know a guy who worked for a trade union who was bemoaning its demise. In 1997 when Labour came to power in the UK for the first time in nearly 20 years, they strengthened employment laws so well, the need for trade union was perceived as lesser by much of the membership. This meant the trade union struggled to survive.
It's interesting to me that the campaigns they fought on and won around employment rights, was perhaps at the detriment at overall income inequality.
We now have zero-hour contracts (utterly horrific for those at the lower end of the skills spectrum), and CEOs earning many hundreds of times the lowest paid in their workforces.
Brexit was caused by income inequality for the most part. The perception by many is that immigration was causing a drag down on wages, but all the data suggests in fact immigration is net benefit to a population, and its the top rising away faster at the top and under-investment in public services that's actually the cause of the country's ills. Fixing this is a big thing, and whoever does it is likely to be long remembered.
In recent weeks, the leader of the Labour Party who is being roundly criticised for ineffectiveness (amongst other things) by those both inside and outside the party had his first bit of good press in some time: he suggested a wage cap inside companies linked to the lowest paid member of staff.
If you set this to say 50x gearing a company that is only paying its cleaners £10,000/year can only pay it's CEO £500,000. If the CEO feels he deserves £4m/year, he'd have to raise cleaners' salaries to £80,000/year - about 4 times the national average wage.
The hope is this will push down CEO wages reducing the race at the top of the pile, but also raise the lower wages a little, thereby improving quality of life for lower-skilled workers. Cleaners get £15,000, CEO gets £750,000. And so on. Net result: income inequality is reduced.
But how do you do that in a free market economy? His answer is surprisingly simple: government contracts that go out to tender should have this as a stipulation in order for the contract to be awarded.
If you are a train operator, eduction or health care provider, etc. and you're only paying your staff minimum wage (£6.70/hour for those aged 25 and over), you don't get the contract if your Chief Exec is earning more than the equivalent of £335/hour (a little shy of £700k/year).
There are a lot of firms who do nothing but government contracts whose CEOs are paid a considerable amount more than this.
Some will argue that this will lead to a situation where these firms can't hire "the best", or that they'll game it by making remuneration more geared to shares/dividends instead of salary/bonuses, but I think that's unlikely to bear out in reality: there is a steady queue of capable people more than willing to work for £335/hour running service companies.
Brilliantly, it even defeats one of the big scares going on at the moment around Brexit reactions and the touted UK/US trade deal being discussed: there is worry that US healthcare companies might start bidding and getting contracts for parts of the NHS.
Critics are worried that these companies are outright profiteering enterprises, evidenced, they say, by the state of US healthcare. This would either stall them from bidding/winning, or promote this policy across the Atlantic into those companies.
And if the remuneration balance does move to shares and dividends, I think that the Left will have won a major goal: they can promise low income taxes and raise taxes on dividends, knowing that this will be popular with very, very large parts of the population. Meanwhile, it'll redistribute wealth and normalise income distribution, all without having to scare the middle classes who mostly end up net winners.
Will it ever happen? Probably not with Mr Corbyn at the helm (his poll ratings are very poor and stagnating even long after last Summer's dramas), however he had party support from all factions, and across the benches. I can see it gaining traction before the next General Election.
Will it happen in the US? Well, if you elect a billionaire who appoints billionaires to his cabinet to perpetuate a system that made them billionaires, it's unlikely they'll nix it. But who knows - it could work.
Now then a CEO might want to outsource those jobs as well, so the company would officially only employ the highest income people.
Either that or split the company up based on earning bands, and have the CEO be the CEO of each company, so even though they could only get paid 500k for the company with the cleaners, they would also be paid 1m for the company with the office admins, and more for each other company in the bucket.
There are ways to work around whatever limitations will be created.
In the context of sports, this manifests as using procedural methods to run out the clock or interrupt play by complaining that a foul has taken place, or causing a foul because the penalty (letting the other team have a shot at the goal or having a player sent off temporarily) is an acceptable price to pay for interrupting the momentum and scoring ability of the other team. All sports teams want to preserve their options under the rules, but some teams seem to rely more on leveraging the rules than on superior performance onthe field. This may be pleasing to their hardcore fans, but when all the action is on the sidelines I feel it's a sign of the team going into decline.
I feel the same way about business. If a firm's corporate identity is built on clever legal and accounting tricks and PR rather than the provision of a valuable product or service by people who enjoy their jobs, then it's likely a shitty firm. Unfortunately there are quite a lot of shitty firms, and their cumulative effect on the economy as a whole is cancerous.
Maybe it's naive to think its as simple as being slightly more verbose: "Salary tied to lowest paid employee or contractor"
Also cleaning and administration services wouldn't be contractors, but services bought from another company. So that wouldn't count either.
If you close all reasonable loopholes and make your intent clear when you write the law, a judge (at least here in the US, I know the UK has a slightly different system) is not going to say "Oh, that's undefined behavior, you get a free pass."
He or she is going to say "That's undefined behavior, but you're trying to circumvent what was clearly the intent of the law. Bring yourself into compliance or face further penalties."
For all the places that I've worked, the cleaners have always been part of another company, one that was contracted to provide cleaning services. There's also firms and contractors that provide bookkeeping services for small businesses. I'm sure a lot of other administrative tasks could be outsourced as well.
Having these services provided by other companies would raise the minimum salary in a company quite a lot.
The other thing companies do is set up plenty of shell/thin corporations around the world, assign the IP rights to those in minimal tax countries, and then charge massive internal fees so that all the rest of the organisation barely makes a profit. This sort of thing seems to be the same level of loop-hole as setting up multiple companies so that the CxO's can get paid more.
Of course that's forgetting that most of the CxO pay is actually in stock and options, and not so much is in cash, so I don't know how much a law capping CEO pay would do. Some notable CEO's have actually taken just $1 of actual cash for payment (because legally they have to be paid something to receive company perks).
All it takes to end this practice is for the tax authorities to take a dim view of it.
Starbucks and Google were both caught by this and although they didn't pay a fine as large as they should have done, with a nod and a wink, they did end up paying more.
The economic system is nowhere near as immutable to change as certain people would like you to believe.
The swift reaction by BlackRock to the government simply making noises in particular was noteworthy:
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/15/blackrock-d...
It's not so easy to apply to a law written in terms of concepts like "two employees of the same company", because "company" is itself something that only exists as a legal construct and "employee" already has a specific legal meaning that's significantly different from its common-sense one.
Wikipedia's background is weak, but Northern Securities Co. v. United States in 1903 [1], one of the first major anti-trust prosecutions, was equally novel by the fact that the US government was choosing to prosecute it at all.
The Sherman Anti-Trust Act (1890) had been on the books for better than a decade. Under a unified government, applicability is rarely as much of a question as enforcement.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Securities_Co._v._U...
It's surprising how often we had cause to (although maybe we're both borderline).
For example in clothes manufacturer, which contracts out the making of its clothes to a company in another country. Would the people employed by that other company be counted?
It's very interesting you point this out. Does the UK have minimum wage now?
I've always pointed this out in discussion with americans about minimum wage. Here in Norway, we don't have it, yet income equality is still very good. Why? Because it is the unions jobs to set a minimum wage per industry. They know best which minimum wage can be sustained within a given business.
I think that's why the unions are still relatively strong here: they have a meaningful job to accomplish. And I get the sense that the unions are very productive in their salary negotiations. They know that they have to strike a balance between getting their members decent salaries, and having the business be sustainable so they keep their job.
In Norway David Cameron's "we're all in this together" phrase makes sense in a way that it plainly doesn't in my 'home' country, the UK. Home in quotes because I have now been in Norway for 31 years, slightly more than half my life.
Only insects have that sort of thought process. "I may die but the hive will overflow!"
This has a partial transcript of his presentation at Oxford Uni
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-17/daniel-hannan-right...
That said, the Prime Minister has said consistently since coming to power and discussing Brexit negotiations that immigration - and specifically free movement - is a key criteria to their stance. They wish to end it, as much as possible.
During the campaign, Farage's alternative Leave campaign made this the central issue for many of the numerous debates that were had, including a rather sickening photo on the back of a lorry.
When you go into many communities and discuss Brexit - as I did both before and after the vote - the main driver was immigration, specifically in the context of Calais and middle eastern refugees. It doesn't matter that this has nothing to do with EU membership, it was perceived all through the Summer as EU members losing control and us being "at risk".
In the days after the result, there was a recorded rise in hate crime, my local Polish centre being attacked, people being shouted at in the streets. I even had one colleague who is Scottish but has a more olive tone to his skin than most Brits being told to "fuck off home" the day after the vote by a passing van driver.
The fact that immigration was being used like this was a major part of the debate for me. I work with many EU nationals, many of whom were concerned about how the debate was structured, and shortly after felt threatened.
So, we - those who campaigned for Remain - predicted that immigration was going to be the central issue, it became the central issue, attempts to diffuse it by correcting blatant lies about the effects of immigration were not picked up by many, arguments to enflame people did get traction, and after the vote immigration has become a central tension point in both our society and our negotiating position.
It's fair to say, immigration was a major - if not the essential - factor in most people's minds when voting.
What's interesting is how that breaks down. Lord Ashcroft's polling puts immigration further down the list, but then he was sampling people in more affluent cities that were broadly Remain, because more people live there. In fact when you get out into the sticks, it's way higher, especially in lower income homes.
You voted the way you did for the reasons you did. However the main driver of at least one Leave campaign - and to some extent both - was immigration, and all the discussions are now framed in that context for that reason.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_vote_in_favour_o...
"This article shows empirically how trade union membership and income inequality are mutually related in twelve countries over more than 100 years. While past research has shown that high income inequality occurs alongside low trade union membership, we show that past income inequality actually increases trade union membership with a time lag, as trade unions recruit more members after inequality has been high. But we also show that strengthened trade unions then fight inequality, thereby destroying what helped them to recruit new members in the past. As trade union density decreases, inequality increases and eventually re-incentivises workers to join unions again. By showing this empirically, we reconceptualise the relationship between inequality and union density as a prey and predator model, where predators eat prey – unions destroy inequality, but thereby also destroy their own basis for survival. By empirically showing that trade union density and social inequality influence each other in this way over long periods, this article contributes to a dynamic approach on how social problems and social movements interact."
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/kykl.12128/full