Google and Apple are competing on selling phones, Google and Facebook are competing on selling ads, yet all sit on billions of dollars of cash. I don't see their workers being able to "extract" more from their companies?
Only "close enough" is required, not perfection. Sure, a union could negotiate a 1% raise without destroying most companies, but then they'd eat that amount in union dues and time value of doing paperwork etc. Meanwhile if they demand a 30% raise, that's more than the companies in a lot of industries could absorb.
> Google and Apple are competing on selling phones, Google and Facebook are competing on selling ads, yet all sit on billions of dollars of cash. I don't see their workers being able to "extract" more from their companies?
Are you not familiar with the level of compensation paid by these employers?
They are also hardly exemplars of competitive markets. Think restaurants or farmers.
Yet in 2013 they found the necessity in colluding in no-poach wage suppression.
> but then they'd eat that amount in union dues and time value of doing paperwork etc
Finland has several software engineer unions. They still seem to be rather competitive both nationally and internationally.
You find it unusual that companies in less competitive markets would collude? They're the only ones who can, because otherwise there are too many entities to coordinate. Yet another disadvantage of uncompetitive markets.
> Finland has several software engineer unions. They still seem to be rather competitive both nationally and internationally.
Finland has unions all over. They also have a different culture and different labor regulations. They're also not the first country that comes to mind as a place to hire software engineers.
I agree that it was simply easier to coordinate as a function of low number of agents in the game. But I doubt the convenience of it was the motivating factor.
> They're also not the first country that comes to mind as a place to hire software engineers.
They don’t come to mind for anything, because they are a very small country. Yet they have the ICT giant Nokia (which is not just the phones). Still with high unionization. In fact, after Nokia sold its mobile division to Microsoft, there has been an influx of ICT companies to Finland to capture the newly unemployed talent.
I take your point regarding culture and other contextual variables, but there is hardly an macroeconomic reality that makes unions unworkable as you generalized.
Well of course the motivation was to suppress wages so they could make more money. All companies have that incentive. Which is why that's illegal independent of unions -- it's an antitrust violation.
> I take your point regarding culture and other contextual variables, but there is hardly an macroeconomic reality that makes unions unworkable as you generalized.
Let's put it a different way though: Do union software engineers in Finland get paid more or less than non-union software engineers in San Francisco?
Because it's possible for a union to make its workers globally competitive by accepting lower wages to offset the cost of dealing with the union, but that's obviously not what we're after, right?
Meanwhile, again, introducing a monopoly increases the money that can be extracted from customers by labor but also by capital. So if you introduce a monopoly and it raises prices by $0.01 or $100 or whatever amount, and you're very lucky and labor gets 90% of the increase and capital only 10%, then on average workers have lost 10% of that amount. Because you still pay 100% of the price increase and then get less than 100% of it back.
There are also taxes, which make it even worse -- you get paid $1 more, the government takes 25%, you go to buy the thing that costs $1 more (so capital is getting 0% of the money) but then you owe 8% of the $1 in sales tax, and you've now lost a third of the money you used to have to Uncle Sam so they can give it to Bank of America and Halliburton.
What happens when you don't increase labor rates, but keep increasing prices anyways? Maybe this is less about increasing prices and more about capital needing to decrease their share.
Sounds like a good argument for universal basic income
This is not an argument in favor of monopolies, however, because unions can extract more from a monopoly but so can capitalists, and it all comes at the expense of the consumer, which is also you. It's better to make $2 and spend $2 than to make $3 and then have to spend $4 just to get the same stuff.