To be fair, when I know Union workers doing the same job as me are being paid nearly twice as much with medical benefits, sick time, regular raises, proper safety equipment, regulated working hours etc. It's kind of hard not to feel a bit exploited by comparison.

Meanwhile, how many non-union software developers do you know who don't have medical benefits or sick time? It's the nature of the occupation rather than the presence of a union that determines those things in the long term.

And if you go and unionize workers in an industry where the workers can't command that kind of premium, the next thing that happens is the company goes out of business or moves its operations to Mexico or similar, and then how are the unionized workers doing on the unemployment line?

I wasn't a software developer, I was a machinist manufacturing things that can't easily be offshored or exported, so that wasn't so much a concern.

The disparity between unionized and non-unionized workers in that industry is pretty high. You've got unionized workers starting at $35/h and upwards beyond $50/hour, with included benefits. I've seen non-unionized jobs advertised for as low as $14/h to start with the cap being $25-maybe $30 if you're lucky, without the benefits. The unionized job will also typically be limited to 40h/week.

There was no limit on the amount of hours I would have to work. I would regularly be expected to work 50-60 hour weeks, if I got sick, I kept working, if I hurt myself, I kept working, the level of work would always be beyond what the number of staff employed were physically capable of doing.

The way I see it, a lot of people fought over the decades so workers could have a reasonable standard of living while not having to endure ridiculous conditions. Unions were at the fore in the fight for this.

Businesses have shown time and time again that they're willing to pay as little for as much labour as possible. When it comes down to it, while workers are replaceable to an extent, they are what brings a business profit and to most businesses, they're valued among the least worthwhile of its assets. Unions force businesses to care about employees and though, I know this isn't really a crowd who can relate, but if you don't own a business and you are employed by someone, then unions have your best interests in mind.

They're probably some of the very few entities in this world that do.

It sounds like you were working in one of the industries where the employer was in a consolidated market, so they could absorb the cost of the union without becoming uncompetitive.

That can in theory benefit the union workers, but it comes at the expense of the company's customers, which at scale are ultimately the workers again.

It's also generally not a stable equilibrium, because monopolies are bad and everybody hates them. At some point the government gets around to smacking them with the righteous hammer of antitrust, or the Japanese start making decent cars and disrupt the US auto conglomerates, the internet comes around and destroys your broadcast radio payola system, and then it all turns to rust.

> Businesses have shown time and time again that they're willing to pay as little for as much labour as possible.

Well yes of course. That's what they're supposed to do, so they can charge lower prices and get more customers.

And then what you're supposed to do as an employee is to take the job you like the most based on working conditions and compensation etc. So a company can offer you $25,000/year for 60 hour weeks and no benefits, but if some other company is offering $35,000/year for 60 hour weeks and no benefits then you take that, until the first company starts offering 40 hour weeks and paid sick leave.

A company's ability to underpay people is limited by the willingness of somebody to work for that amount of money. No is a powerful word.

This is also why you get rid of the need for so much of this with a UBI. Because it allows people say no, which requires employers to make better offers.

> the next thing that happens is the company goes out of business

As long as the company pays its owners more than their lowest-paid employees, it can afford to pay their employees more, without going out of business.

There's plenty of profitable firms that can't just pack up and move to Mexico.

> As long as the company pays its owners more than their lowest-paid employees, it can afford to pay their employees more, without going out of business.

If the CEO makes a million dollars a year in a company with 100,000 empoyees, wiping out that entire salary would add less than $0.01/hour to each of the employees' wages. Also, then you would not have a CEO, which you might actually need sometimes.

The CEO is rarely the owner of a company big enough to require unionization. When they are, their primary remuneration is rarely in wages.

You're basically arguing that if a company pays a CEO what good CEOs get paid then they could pay their workers more instead. But that doesn't work, because you have to pay a CEO what good CEOs get paid if you want a good CEO.

The shareholders can't just hire a random janitor at a janitor's salary to be the CEO and expect to not lose more money to unqualified decisionmaking than they would've had to pay a real CEO.

Likewise, they can't just make zero profits forever, because otherwise they couldn't raise capital. If they're a new company they need that investment in order to buy land and build the factory etc. If they're an existing company then they still need that, or the shareholders would sell their shares and the only buyer would be a corporate raider who wants to tear down the factory for scrap and sell the land to a condo developer.

Salaries and profits are relative to the market average. Unless the company is paying its executives more than the average company, or making more profits than the average company, they don't really have a surplus they can give to the workers without becoming uncompetitive.

Not exactly. Its owners could always pack up and work elsewhere. Or in the case of capital, invest elsewhere. You have to beat the alternative option.

What is going to stop wherever they pack up to go to from organizing in a similar manner? Does the factory that the employees work in also disappear if the owners pack up and leave? Why would things be any different for the owners, under new ownership?

Plenty of profitable businesses can afford to pay employees more. The fact that they are profitable is testament to it. They choose not to, because their employees don't have enough leverage in the employee-employer relationship. Unions change that.

> What is going to stop wherever they pack up to go to from organizing in a similar manner?

The fact that not unionizing was how they got the work to begin with. If they tried to do the same thing there, the company wouldn't have any reason not to move back, which the workers in the new place obviously don't want.

Do you genuinely think if FAANG software engineers were to unionize, those companies would out of business with their huge cash reserves, or move to Mexico or outsource to Bangladesh?

Half of those companies are monopolies or close enough. But they also already provide very generous compensation, so what would you expect a union to negotiate for?

You would also run the risk in that case not that they outsource to Bangladesh but that they outsource to Europe, if the union started demanding things they didn't want to give. Or just let the union walk out and hire different workers.

That's the other reason unions don't really work outside of monopolies. If the company needs 100,000 workers and only 200,000 workers with that skillset exist in the world and the other 100,000 work for a competitor, you need the workers you already have. If the company needs 10,000 workers and a million workers with that skillset exist in the world, they can let you walk and hire other people. And in this case it's a real monopoly, not the soft stuff like Google and Facebook have -- Google doesn't have a lot of competition for search, but a random engineer from Facebook or Apple or Microsoft could still do most of the work they need to do, and vice versa.

> But they also already provide very generous compensation, so what would you expect a union to negotiate for?

That assumes everything that is of consideration is already priced into compensation, which is not. Wasn’t it several years ago one of them had its workers a walkout against sexual harassment, forced arbitration, manager retaliation etc?

> You would also run the risk in that case not that they outsource to Bangladesh but that they outsource to Europe

They would be in for a nasty surprise as Europe is more unionized that US.

> Or just let the union walk out and hire different workers

That assumes software engineers are fungible, which is not as much as it appears (at least there is a high cost to “funge” them en masse). Going to your manager with a competitor’s job offer is not an uncommon way to get a raise or promotion.

> That assumes everything that is of consideration is already priced into compensation, which is not. Wasn’t it several years ago one of them had its workers a walkout against sexual harassment, forced arbitration, manager retaliation etc?

That doesn't mean it's not priced in. Companies with conditions like that still need to attract employees somehow. When they get a reputation like that they either have to fix it or provide more of something else to compensate for it. Markets don't require unions to function.

> They would be in for a nasty surprise as Europe is more unionized that US.

That's why they don't do it now. If there were more unions in the US, that's no longer a relative disadvantage for the company, which then is a problem for the US workers who just lost their advantage and thereby their jobs.

> That assumes software engineers are fungible, which is not as much as it appears (at least there is a high cost to “funge” them en masse). Going to your manager with a competitor’s job offer is not an uncommon way to get a raise or promotion.

Replacing software engineers isn't free. There is a transition cost. But the transition cost isn't infinite, and it acts as a hard cap on what the union could get out of the company. And from it you immediately have to extract all the overhead costs the company has to incur in dealing with the union to begin with. Which are often difficult to predict ahead of time, so companies may choose to cut their losses immediately rather than risk even higher costs later.

That's not my assumption, as I explicitly stated. I wanted to show the possibility of a union-favorable explanation of the OPs premise.

In case you are curious about my actual assumption; I think there are a lot of externalities that are not priced-in in the contract, which will naturally favor the more organized side, which happens to be capital than labor most of the time. I don't know if exploitation is necessarily the right adjective for every case, but I believe there is a large potential for asymmetry in untracked disutility an individual can get out a transaction with their employer.

Huh? If you aren't assuming that then how does this fall out:

"Then it could also mean that there hasn't been any working combination of capital and labor that didn't depend on labor being exploited."

Is it not your assumption because of the so-called weasel words "could mean"??

No, because they already rejected the premise that came before "Then"

He says “assume industries where unions have gained strongholds have ended up as failed industries” (paraphrasing). Then he says this implies that no model of industry has succeeded without labor exploitation. That doesn’t follow strictly from the original premise so it must have an implicit assumption built in which is that non-union labor is exploitative.

Maybe I’m being stupid but I don’t see how else this works out. Can you expand to help me understand what I’m missing?

I could have been clearer, you are right. I was trying to engage in a thought experiment. In union = failure axiom, there can be contradicting explanations as to why. My OP implied “unions make things fail” (and I assumed due to commonly assumes reasons like inefficiency), I construed the idea that “unions might be exposing a dependence on exploitation”. I don’t necessarily ascribe truth value to either premise, just wanted to expand the possibility of explanations. I wasn’t clear on that, apologies for the confusion.